Chapter NINE: § 1

August came. Newhaven harbour was noisy with cross-Channel traffic, and the Downs Company ’buses were crowded on all journeys with the shifting, summer traffic of the roads. The weather was very hot, and Daniel often came home of an evening limp and weary. It was hard work conducting a crowded ’bus on a hot day, with panting, sweating human beings clambering over him and clamouring at him, and a cloud of dust whirling along continually over the back step, on which he stood jarred and listless through the long hours of the lanes.

He grew so tired and out-of-sorts that on his free days he gave up his regular appearances at Hoddern. By giving a refuge to his father he had only added to his unpopularity with his mother and Chris--they showed him plainly that they thought him disloyal, and sometimes, apart from this, sitting with them at their table, he was pricked with envy. For the first time he became dispirited at the contrast between himself and Chris. There they sat opposite each other, each side of their mother. Both were in uniform and both were their mother’s sons. But Chris’s uniform was a smart summer rig-out of cream-coloured dust-cloth faced with blue, while Dan’s was his old winter uniform of green and shiny serge, patched with leather and smelling of car-oil. And if they wore mufti it was the same contrast--Chris in grey flannels and a fine shirt, looking the gentleman every bit of him except his shoes, whose failure to reach that standard was veiled from Daniel by his ignorance; while Dan’s ordinary suit was even more disreputable-looking than his uniform, because it was older, and had become too tight for him while he was in Sark. Then to crown all, Chris was his mother’s darling, loved and approved by her, while Dan his mother disapproved of and reproached: “You cannot love me, or you would not live with that vagabond man who deserted me.”

So on those hot August Wednesday and Sunday afternoons he no longer trekked up the Lewes road, but sat with Thomas Helier on the beach, watching the peacock sea grow pink against the sky--or sometimes he had what his landlady called “a good lay down” on the sofa in her sitting-room. Mrs. Gain had by this time given him the freedom of her house, including the sitting-room with its tapestried suite, central table, and permanently half-drawn blind. She was proud that he should use it, feeling sure that it was “better than anything he was accustomed to,” and certainly nothing quite like it had existed in any of Dan’s various homes--the George, Moie Fano, the Pêche à Agneau, or Bullockdean parsonage.

One particular Wednesday afternoon Tom Sheather had taken out the baby, and Dan lay asleep on the little hard green sofa, lulled by the drone of a bee under the blind. He looked particularly helpless and childish, huddled there in his shirt sleeves, his hair rubbed out of its sleekness by the tapestried cushion, his cheeks flushed by his sleep. Mrs. Gain hesitated in a tender moment before she woke him, holding out his coat for him to put on.

“Wa’r is it?” he mumbled drowsily.

“A lady to see you, Mr. Sheather. I thought I’d better bring you your coat.”

“Where?”

“I put her into the kitchen while I went to rouse you.”

“Who is she?”

“I think she said her name was Munk.”

Dan sat up, blinking and terribly awake. His thought was--“I won’t see Belle. I won’t have her in here. I’ve kept away from her for six months and I won’t have her spoil it all by coming. Show her out.” His words actually were: “Please show her in.”

In came Belle, carrying the spoils of her morning’s shopping in Newhaven. She wore a dress of flowered voile, tumbled with the heat, and under her big straw hat her hair showed yellow as straw.

“Hullo, Belle!” said Daniel awkwardly. “How nice of you to call! I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Hullo, Daniel!” said Belle languidly, and began to cry.

The bee droned on under the blind.

§ 2

For nearly a minute Dan stood and gazed at her. At first he thought that he must be still asleep and dreaming--this was like so many of his dreams--Belle standing before him in her tumbled loveliness, tormenting his heart with her sorrow and his love. Then he discovered that he was trembling all over.

“Belle--what is it?... what’s happened?”

“You know,” sobbed Belle. “You know.”

“I don’t know. I only guess ... a dunnamany things. Belle, sit down and tell me all about it.”

She sank down on one of the tapestried armchairs, and he sat down on the sofa, purposely setting the width of the little centre table between them. The aspidistra in the middle of it partly hid her from him, screening her bowed head and dipping hat with its streaky leaves, disguising the heaving movements of her shoulders. If he had seen her without this barrier, he would have taken her in his arms.

“What is it, dear Belle. Tell me ... is it Ernley?”

“Yes--yes. Oh, Dan, I must talk to somebody about him ... and you know something already--you must ... that time you came to supper and Ernley telephoned.”

“You thought he was speaking to a girl.”

“Thought?... I knew. He’s had a girl for months. He’s been going out with that Pearl Jenner--the one he took up with when I was engaged to you. Oh, I thought that when I’d married him it would all be settled and happy, as I wanted it to be. I thought I need never be anxious or jealous any more. But now ... now....”

Her voice choked away in sobs.

“Why do you tell me all this?” asked Dan stiffly. The yearning and agitation of his heart made him seek desperately a manner that was cold.

“Why? Because you loved me once--you love me a little bit still--and you ran away from me in my hour of need, because you were frightened.”

“Belle!”

“Well, didn’t you?”

His face was scarlet. His coming to Newhaven had always seemed to him as much a renunciation as a refuge, and he was shocked to find that Belle saw it with so different eyes.

“I--I left Bullockdean,” he stammered--“I left Bullockdean because I was so miserable. It hurt me to see you and Ernley quarrelling and suspecting each other like that, and I’d no idea as you liked having me by.”

“‘No idea!’ You’re a fool, Daniel. Can’t you imagine what a difference it made, having someone that cared?... even though we never talked about it. You took fright that evening and cleared out--or else heaven knows the comfort you might have been.”

Though he felt at the back of his mind that, in spite of all she said, he had been right, Daniel still wore the colour of shame. It seemed a terrible thing to have deserted Belle--and yet, God knew.... He tried to make amends.

“I’d never have gone if I’d thought for a moment you wanted me to stay. But you never showed me ... you never seemed to want me about. If I’d known I’d have stayed. Is it too late? Can’t I help at all now?”

She stood up and with a desponding sweep of her arm pulled off her hat and dropped it on the table.

“I dunno. You can’t come back. Maybe I was wrong in blaming you. But I was mad this morning. Just as I came away he got a post-card from her. It said ‘Tivoli Palace entrance at 2.30. P.’--and he had told me he was going to Eastbourne about the new furniture.”

“You read his post-card?”

“Of course I did. Don’t be a prig, Daniel. Who wouldn’t read a post-card addressed to her husband?”

“Well, it seems to me she couldn’t have meant any harm, or she wouldn’t have sent a post-card.”

“That shows how little you know. She does that sort of thing to humiliate me--to show her power. She knows that I know. She made him bring her around the other day in the side-car of his motor-bike. God! I could scratch her face.”

She had come round the table and stood with her arms akimbo, looking down on Daniel. She was big and glowing and angry. She made him think of peonies and sunflowers. He longed to have the aspidistra once more between them, but instead she stood between him and it, hiding its desiccated respectability with her big opulent body. The sunshine poured over her flowered gown, but her head was in the shadow of the drawn blind.

“O God, what I’ve endured all these months! I can’t bear it any longer. It’s--worse--worse than before we married. I ought never to have married him. I ought to have married you, though you are such a dummy. You wouldn’t have made me unhappy like this.”

Belle Munk, the mother of Jill and Peter, the friend of Thomas Helier, was gone, and in her place stood the old Belle Shackford--who ran after men, who scratched women’s faces. As he gazed up into her restless, tragic eyes, her marriage seemed to have ended, to have dropped from her. She and Ernley were what they had been before it--jealous, quarrelling lovers, he running after Pearl Jenner, she turning to Daniel Sheather. He saw his past coming back to him in all its sorrow and joy and power. He felt it beating in his heart, and his eyes were dim with its gathering tears. Half-blind and silly, he sprang to his feet, and threw his arms about her, feeling once more the thrill of her glorious size and strength. She trembled, yielded, and as her flushed, angry mouth met his, the rent in the years was knit up, and another home and another woman no longer stood between this and their last embrace. Indeed the kiss with which he kissed her now was their parting kiss of three and a half years ago, still uniting them in its pain and sweetness. They had never drawn apart. Through all the years their lips had been together, even when she lived in his memory as a shadow on glass.

There was a knock at the door, and they separated. The aspidistra stood once more between them when Mrs. Gain came in.

“I was wondering if the lady ud like a cup of tea, Mr. Sheather. The kettle’s just boiling, and it’s nearly four o’clock.”

“No, thank you very much,” said Belle, coughing a little. “I must be getting back now.”

“I shouldn’t be a minute getting it.”

“No, thank you. I must catch the four-thirty train.”

She put on her hat, picked up her parcels and walked to the door. On the threshold she remembered herself, and turned round and shook hands with Daniel as he stood gaping at her.

§ 3

For days afterwards Daniel was shaken by this interview. It bewildered him. He did not know what to make of it, either on Belle’s side or his own. He was terrified to think that his old passion for her had revived, though, now that he no longer held her in his arms, it did not appear quite as it used in the old days. It was more physical, less romantic and adoring--marriage had changed his attitude somehow. Though that kiss had seemed in unbroken continuity with the past, his love for her was not. It was no longer so very much more than his kiss. It no longer filled his eyes, satisfying and blinding him. Moreover, he had no illusions about her love for him. It seemed to him quite plain that she had sought him out only to avenge herself on Ernley. She was desperately jealous, as she had always been. She had married to give herself security, and marriage had failed her. So she had turned to Daniel to show herself, and perhaps Ernley, that she did not care, and that where she was betrayed she could betray also.

The more he thought it over, the more he felt that most likely she had no real grounds for jealousy. Ernley was only flirting, fooling around, and if she did not goad him too much would probably soon get over his infatuation. Three years ago Pearl Jenner had been only a blind and a consolation; probably she was still no more. Ernley was disappointed in his marriage too, and was trying to alter its conditions. He had certainly succeeded in diverting Belle’s attention from her children to her husband, but beyond that the matter had not prospered. She was not the woman to be roused by such means--Ernley was a fool; and he was not the man to be shaped by such handling--Belle was a fool too.

This was sometimes Dan’s view of the situation--at others he was lost, groping in his love for Belle, overcome with horror at the idea of having deserted her in her hour of need. He vowed that he would stand at her service now, and waited day after day to see if she would claim him. But two weeks passed and nothing happened. She neither wrote nor came. Her visit on that hot August afternoon began to appear more and more in the light of a caprice--the result of a sudden goading. She had repented, and was ashamed. He told himself that he ought to be ashamed too. She did not belong to him--she belonged to his best friend, whom she had taken for better, for worse, not knowing how much better or how much worse it would be.

Marriage was a queer thing, thought Daniel during those days. There seemed so many different kinds of marriage, and you never knew which kind yours was going to be. He had married without love, out of pity only, and the force of circumstances, and yet his year of marriage was (he already knew) his life’s eternal treasure. Ernley and Belle had married out of a passionate and romantic love, which had plucked them up by the roots and flung them together like trees in a hurricane. And look at them now--tossed and distressed, united and yet disunited, lovers and enemies.... Look at his father and mother too. His father had loved his mother, and had wooed her in the teeth of difficulty, while his mother had faced the anger of her kinsfolk to marry the stranger. To-day they lived apart, and yet content, his mother’s love given to her son, his father’s to the sea. They had forgotten their wooing and their love and the blue and golden days of the isles....