Chapter 3: X (2)

Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. ‘It is the business of my life,’ she gave him in return, ‘to keep this gate shut.’ I felt as if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode off without a word. We were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the moonlight...

Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, ‘I shall wait for the Chicheles there, and come back with them.’ I remember reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.

She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it. We were all perfect, but Somers’s lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six. His lip trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who saw.

Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don’t know. Anna Chichele’s unfinished sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth. Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the General waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in twelve.

‘Have you seen it--long?’ Prepared as I was her directness was demoralizing.

‘It isn’t a mortal disease.’

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake--’

‘Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.’

She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them pitifully. ‘Couldn’t you do ANYthing?’

I looked at her, and she said at once, ‘No, of course you couldn’t.’

For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting. ‘I am afraid it will have to be faced,’ I said.

‘What will happen?’ Anna cried. ‘Oh, what will happen?’

‘Why not the usual thing?’ Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at a reminder. ‘The ambiguous attachment of the country,’ I went on, limping but courageous, ‘half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely nowhere, and finally perishes as the man’s life enriches itself--the thing we have seen so often.’

‘Whatever Judy is capable of it won’t be the usual thing. You know that.’

I had to confess in silence that I did.

‘It flashed at me--the difference in her--in Bombay.’ She pressed her lips together and then went on unsteadily. ‘In her eyes, her voice. She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the way up I wondered and worried. But I never thought--’ She stopped; her voice simply shook itself into silence. I called a servant.

‘I am going to give you a good stiff peg,’ I said. I apologize for the ‘peg,’ but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.

‘Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don’t know whether she tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She dared not look at him. And the little conversation that they had--you would have laughed--it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs. Harbottle!’

‘You do well to be angry, naturally,’ I said; ‘but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna.’

‘Angry?’ Oh, I am SICK. The misery of it! The terror of it! If it were anybody but Judy! Can’t you imagine the passion of a temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms. And he will go--to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it? Who can prevent it?’

‘There is you,’ I said.

Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. ‘I think you ought to say, “There are you.” I--what can I do? Do you realize that it’s JUDY? My friend--my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident--by a misfortune? With it all I ADORE Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I have always loved her, and--it’s damnable, but I don’t know whether, whatever happened, I wouldn’t go on loving her.’

‘Finish your peg,’ I said. She was sobbing.

‘Where I blame myself most,’ she went on, ‘is for not seeing in him all that makes him mature to her--that makes her forget the absurd difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely as I know she does, as the contemporary of her soul if not of her body. I saw none of that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I thought him just a charming boy, clever, too, of course, with nice instincts and well plucked; we were always proud of that, with his delicate physique. Just a boy! I haven’t yet stopped thinking how different he looks without his curls. And I thought she would be just kind and gracious and delightful to him because he was my son.’

‘There, of course,’ I said, ‘is the only chance.’

‘Where--what?’

‘He is your son.’

‘Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know I don’t think I could?’

‘Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon her and grow before her out of your silence, and if you can manage it, your confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to hold her in that. I can’t somehow imagine her failing you. Otherwise--’

Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid admission.

‘Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything--everything. Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And do you know if the thing were less impossible, less grotesque, I should not be so much afraid? I mean that the ABSOLUTE indefensibility of it might bring her a recklessness and a momentum which might--’

‘Send her over the verge,’ I said. ‘Well, go home and ask her to dinner.’

There was a good deal more to say, of course, than I have thought proper to put down here, but before Anna went I saw that she was keyed up to the heroic part. This was none the less to her credit because it was the only part, the dictation of a sense of expediency that despaired while it dictated. The noble thing was her capacity to take it, and, amid all that warred in her, to carry it out on the brave high lines of her inspiration. It seemed a literal inspiration, so perfectly calculated that it was hard not to think sometimes, when one saw them together, that Anna had been lulled into a simple resumption of the old relation. Then from the least thing possible--the lift of an eyelid--it flashed upon one that between these two every moment was dramatic, and one took up the word with a curious sense of detachment and futility, but with one’s heart beating like a trip-hammer with the mad excitement of it. The acute thing was the splendid sincerity of Judy Harbottle’s response. For days she was profoundly on her guard, then suddenly she seemed to become practically, vividly aware of what I must go on calling the great chance, and passionately to fling herself upon it. It was the strangest cooperation without a word or a sign to show it conscious--a playing together for stakes that could not be admitted, a thing to hang upon breathless. It was there between them--the tenable ground of what they were to each other: they occupied it with almost an equal eye upon the tide that threatened, while I from my mainland tower also made an anguished calculation of the chances. I think in spite of the menace, they found real beatitudes; so keenly did they set about the business that it brought them moments finer than any they could count in the years that were behind them, the flat and colourless years that were gone. Once or twice the wild idea even visited me that it was, after all, the projection of his mother in Somers that had so seized Judy Harbottle, and that the original was all that was needed to help the happy process of detachment. Somers himself at the time was a good deal away on escort duty: they had a clear field.

I can not tell exactly when--between Mrs. Harbottle and myself--it became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will be imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was hardly ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always there, and out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap and pass, without shape or face. It might slip between two sentences, or it might remain, a dogging shadow, for an hour. Or a week would go by while, with a strong hand, she held it out of sight altogether and talked of Anna--always of Anna. Her eyes shone with the things she told me then: she seemed to keep herself under the influence of them as if they had the power of narcotics. At the end of a time like this she turned to me in the door as she was going and stood silent, as if she could neither go nor stay. I had been able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she had seemed preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed. She sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day seemed to sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the door, I looked up with sudden prescience of a crisis.

‘Don’t jump,’ she said, ‘it was only to tell you that I have persuaded Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the first of April. Don’t touch me.’ I suppose I made a movement towards her. Certainly I wanted to throw my arms about her; with the instinct, I suppose, to steady her in her great resolution.

‘At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had some trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think--I have succeeded. You might mention it to Anna.’

‘Haven’t you?’ sprang past my lips.

‘I can’t. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and--I can’t take an oath to go. But I mean to.’

‘There is nothing to be said,’ I brought out, feeling indeed that there was not. ‘But I congratulate you, Judy.’

‘No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no doubt!’

She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster. The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she did not immediately go.

‘It will beat itself away, I suppose, like the rest of the unreasonable pain of the world,’ she said at last; and that, of course, brought me to her side. ‘Things will go back to their proportions. This,’ she touched an open rose, ‘will claim its beauty again. And life will become--perhaps--what it was before.’ Still I found nothing to say, I could only put my arm in hers and walk with her to the edge of the veranda where the syce was holding her horse. She stroked the animal’s neck. ‘Everything in me answered him,’ she informed me, with the grave intelligence of a patient who relates a symptom past. As she took the reins she turned to me again. ‘His spirit came to mine like a homing bird,’ she said, and in her smile even the pale reflection of happiness was sweet and stirring. It left me hanging in imagination over the source and the stream, a little blessed in the mere understanding.

Too much blessed for confidence, or any safe feeling that the source was bound. Rather I saw it leaping over every obstacle, flashing to its destiny. As I drove to the Club next day I decided that I would not tell Anna Chichele of Colonel Harbottle’s projected furlough. If to Judy telling her would be like taking an oath that they would go, to me it would at least be like assuming sponsorship for their intention. That would be heavy indeed. From the first of April--we were then in March. Anna would hear it soon enough from the General, would see it soon enough, almost, in the ‘Gazette’, when it would have passed into irrecoverable fact. So I went by her with locked lips, kept out of the way of those eyes of the mother that asked and asked, and would have seen clear to any depth, any hiding-place of knowledge like that. As I pulled up at the Club I saw Colonel Harbottle talking concernedly to the wife of our Second-in-Command, and was reminded that I had not heard for some days how Major Watkins was going on. So I, too, approached Mrs. Watkins in her victoria to ask. Robert Harbottle kindly forestalled her reply. ‘Hard luck, isn’t it? Watkins has been ordered home at once. Just settled into their new house, too--last of the kit came up from Calcutta yesterday, didn’t it, Mrs. Watkins? But it’s sound to go--Peshawur is the worst hole in Asia to shake off dysentery in.’

We agreed upon this and discussed the sale-list of her new furniture that Mrs. Watkins would have to send round the station, and considered the chances of a trooper--to the Watkinses with two children and not a penny but his pay it did make it easier not to have to go by a liner--and Colonel Harbottle and I were halfway to the reading-room before the significance of Major Watkins’s sick-leave flashed upon me.

‘But this,’ I cried, ‘will make a difference to your plans. You won’t--’

‘Be able to ask for that furlough Judy wants. Rather not. I’m afraid she’s disappointed--she was tremendously set on going--but it doesn’t matter tuppence to me.’

I sought out Mrs. Harbottle, at the end of the room. She looked radiant; she sat on the edge of the table and swung a light-hearted heel. She was talking to people who in themselves were a witness to high spirits, Captain the Hon. Freddy Gisborne, Mrs. Flamboys.

At sight of me her face clouded, fell suddenly into the old weary lines. It made me feel somehow a little sick; I went back to my cart and drove home.

For more than a week I did not see her except when I met her riding with Somers Chichele along the peach-bordered road that leads to the Wazir-Bagh. The trees were all in blossom and made a picture that might well catch dreaming hearts into a beatitude that would correspond. The air was full of spring and the scent of violets, those wonderful Peshawur violets that grow in great clumps, tall and double. Gracious clouds came and trailed across the frontier barrier; blue as an idyll it rose about us; the city smiled in her gardens.

She had it all in her face, poor Judy, all the spring softness and more, the morning she came, intensely controlled, to announce her defeat. I was in the drawing-room doing the flowers; I put them down to look at her. The wonderful telegram from Simla arrived--that was the wonderful part--at the same time; I remembered how the red, white, and blue turban of the telegraph peon bobbed up behind her shoulder in the veranda. I signed and laid it on the table; I suppose it seemed hardly likely that anything could be important enough to interfere at the moment with my impression of what love, unbound and victorious, could do with a face I thought I knew. Love sat there careless of the issue, full of delight. Love proclaimed that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all over--she had met him, alas, in too narrow a place--and I marvelled at the paradox with which he softened every curve and underlined every vivid note of personality in token that it had just begun. He sat there in great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance that I could not be sure of seeing her at all...

She went back to the very first of it; she seemed herself intensely interested in the facts; and there is no use in pretending that, while she talked, the moral consideration was at all present with me either; it wasn’t. Her extremity was the thing that absorbed us; she even, in tender thoughtfulness, diagnosed it from its definite beautiful beginning.

‘It was there, in my heart, when I woke one morning, exquisite and strange, the assurance of a gift. How had it come there, while I slept? I assure you when I closed my eyes it did not exist for me... Yes, of course, I had seen him, but only somewhere at dinner... As the day went on it changed--it turned into a clear pool, into a flower. And I--think of my not understanding! I was pleased with it! For a long time, for days, I never dreamed that it could be anything but a little secret joy. Then, suddenly--oh, I had not been perceiving enough!--it was in all my veins, a tide, an efflorescence, a thing of my very life.

‘Then--it was a little late--I understood, and since--

‘I began by hating it--being furious, furious--and afraid, too. Sometimes it was like a low cloud, hovering and travelling always with me, sometimes like a beast of prey that went a little way off and sat looking at me....

‘I have--done my best. But there is nothing to do, to kill, to abolish. How can I say, “I will not let you in,” when it is already there? How can I assume indifference when this thing is imposed upon every moment of my day? And it has grown so sweet--the longing--that--isn’t it strange?--I could more willingly give him up than the desire of him. That seems as impossible to part with as life itself.’

She sat reflective for a moment, and I saw her eyes slowly fill.

Don’t--don’t CRY, Judy,’ I faltered, wanting to horribly, myself.

She smiled them dry.

‘Not now. But I am giving myself, I suppose, to many tears.’

‘God help you,’ I said. What else was there to say?

‘There is no such person,’ she replied, gaily. ‘There is only a blessed devil.’

‘Then you go all the way--to the logical conclusion?’

She hardly hesitated. ‘To the logical conclusion. What poor words!’

‘May I ask--when?’

‘I should like to tell you that quite definitely, and I think I can. The English mail leaves tonight.’

‘And you have arranged to take it?’

‘We have arranged nothing. Do you know’--she smiled as if at the fresh colours of an idyll--‘we have not even come to the admission? There has been between us no word, no vision. Ah, we have gone in bonds, and dumb! Hours we have had, exquisite hours of the spirit, but never a moment of the heart, a moment confessed. It was mine to give--that moment, and he has waited--I know--wondering whether perhaps it would ever come. And today--we are going for a ride today, and I do not think we shall come back.’

‘O Judy,’ I cried, catching at her sleeve, ‘he is only a boy!’

‘There were times when I thought that conclusive. Now the misery of it has gone to sleep; don’t waken it. It pleases me to believe that the years are a convention. I never had any dignity, you know, and I seem to have missed the moral deliverance. I only want--oh, you know what I want. Why don’t you open your telegram?’

I had been folding and fingering the brown envelope as if it had been a scrap of waste paper.

‘It is probably from Mrs. Watkins about the victoria,’ I said, feeling its profound irrelevance. ‘I wired an offer to her in Bombay. However’--and I read the telegram, the little solving telegram from Army Headquarters. I turned my back on her to read it again, and then I replaced it very carefully and put it in my pocket. It was a moment to take hold of with both hands, crying on all one’s gods for steadiness.

‘How white you look!’ said Mrs. Harbottle, with concern. ‘Not bad news?’

‘On the contrary, excellent news. Judy, will you stay to lunch?’

She looked at me, hesitating. ‘Won’t it seem rather a compromise on your part? When you ought to be rousing the city--’

‘I don’t intend to rouse the city,’ I said.

‘I have given you the chance.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, grimly, ‘but the only real favour you can do me is to stay to lunch.’ It was then just on one.

‘I’ll stay,’ she said, ‘if you will promise not to make any sort of effort. I shouldn’t mind, but it would distress you.’

‘I promise absolutely,’ I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and the telegram burned in my pocket.

She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on, knowing and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least it could not be. There was very little about herself that she wanted to tell me; she was there confessed a woman whom joy had overcome; it was understood that we both accepted that situation. But in the details which she asked me to take charge of it was plain that she also kept a watchful eye upon fate--matters of business.

We were in the drawing-room. The little round clock in its Armritsar case marked half-past three. Judy put down her coffee cup and rose to go. As she glanced at the clock the light deepened in her eyes, and I, with her hand in mine, felt like an agent of the Destroyer--for it was half-past three--consumed myself with fear lest the blow had miscarried. Then as we stood, suddenly, the sound of hoofs at a gallop on the drive, and my husband threw himself off at the door and tore through the hall to his room; and in the certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an instant, stood dim and remote.

‘Major Jim seems to be in a hurry,’ said Mrs. Harbottle, lightly. ‘I have always liked your husband. I wonder whether he will say tomorrow that he always liked me.’

‘Dear Judy, I don’t think he will be occupied with you tomorrow.’

‘Oh, surely, just a little, if I go tonight.’

‘You won’t go tonight.’

She looked at me helplessly. I felt as if I were insisting upon her abasement instead of her salvation. ‘I wish--’

‘You’re not going--you’re not! You can’t! Look!’

I pulled it out of my pocket and thrust it at her--the telegram. It came, against every regulation, from my good friend the Deputy Adjutant-General, in Simla, and it read, ‘Row Khurram 12th probably ordered front three hours’ time.’

Her face changed--how my heart leaped to see it change!--and that took command there which will command trampling, even in the women of the camp, at news like this.

‘What luck that Bob couldn’t take his furlough!’ she exclaimed, single-thoughted. ‘But you have known this for hours’--there was even something of the Colonel’s wife, authority, incisiveness. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Ah--I see.’

I stood before her abashed, and that was ridiculous, while she measured me as if I presented in myself the woman I took her to be. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. I had to defend myself. ‘Judy,’ I said, ‘if you weren’t in honour bound to Anna, how could I know that you would be in honour bound to the regiment? There was a train at three.’

‘I beg to assure you that you have overcalculated,’ said Mrs. Harbottle. Her eyes were hard and proud. ‘And I am not sure’--a deep red swept over her face, a man’s blush--‘in the light of this I am not sure that I am not in honour bound to Anna.’

We had reached the veranda, and at her signal her coachman drove quickly up. ‘You have kept me here three hours when there was the whole of Bob’s kit to see to,’ she said, as she flung herself in; ‘you might have thought of that.’

It was a more than usually tedious campaign, and Colonel Robert Harbottle was ambushed and shot in a place where one must believe pure boredom induced him to take his men. The incident was relieved, the newspapers said--and they are seldom so clever in finding relief for such incidents--by the dash and courage shown by Lieutenant Chichele, who, in one of those feats which it has lately been the fashion to criticize, carried the mortally wounded body of his Colonel out of range at conspicuous risk of depriving the Queen of another officer. I helped Judy with her silent packing; she had forgiven me long before that; and she settled almost at once into the flat in Chelsea which has since been credited with so delightful an atmosphere, went back straight into her own world. I have always kept her first letters about it, always shall. For months after, while the expedition still raged after snipers and rifle-thieves, I discussed with Lady Chichele the probable outcome of it all. I have sometimes felt ashamed of leaping as straight as I did with Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation on her ten years’ companionship in arms when I kept her from the three o’clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent pains to strengthen, held against the strain, as long, happily, as the supreme need existed. ‘How right you were!’ she often said. ‘She did, after all, love me best, dear, wonderful Judy!’ Her distress about poor Robert Harbottle was genuine enough, but one could not be surprised at a certain ambiguity; one tear for Robert, so to speak, and two for her boy. It could hardly be, for him, a marriage after his mother’s heart. And she laid down with some emphasis that Somers was brilliantly entitled to all he was likely to get--which was natural, too...

I had been from the beginning so much ‘in it’ that Anna showed me, a year later, though I don’t believe she liked doing it, the letter in part of which Mrs. Harbottle shall finally excuse herself.

‘Somers will give you this,’ I read, ‘and with it take back your son. You will not find, I know, anything grotesque in the charming enthusiasm with which he has offered his life to me; you understand too well, you are too kind. And if you wonder that I can so render up a dear thing which I might keep and would once have taken, think how sweet in the desert is the pool, and how barren was the prospect from Balclutha.’

It was like her to abandon in pride a happiness that asked so much less humiliation; I don’t know why, but it was like her. And of course, when one thought of it, she had consulted all sorts of high expediencies. But I sat silent with remembrance, quieting a pang in my heart, trying not to calculate how much it had cost Judy Harbottle to take her second chance.

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Pool in the Desert, by Sara Jeanette Duncan