Chapter IV

He knew, and if he were to keep on thinking about it—but he was afraid to think. You could go mad, thinking. The moment of his certainty remained in his memory; he knew where to find it if he chose to look that way. But he refused to look. Such things were better forgotten.

He told himself there was nothing in it. Nothing but Nurse Eden’s hysteria and vanity. She wanted you to believe she was wonderful, that she could do things. She didn’t really believe it herself. In her own last moment of honesty she had confessed as much. He was a fool to have been taken in by her.

Meanwhile, three months after his mother’s death, he had married Effie Carroll. Her father, who had held out against the engagement, surrendered suddenly on the day of the wedding, and made his daughter an allowance of fifty pounds a year. He said he didn’t want to profit by her folly, and the fifty pounds were no more than the cost of her keep.

It was horrible to think they should owe their happiness to his mother’s death; but as things had turned out they didn’t owe it; they could have married even if she had lived. And as he had now no motive for wishing her dead, he almost forgot that he had ever wished it.

Not that Hollyer reproached himself; his tendency, when he thought it all over, was to reproach his mother. He had found out something about himself. Before he married he had gone to Dr. Ransome to be overhauled, and Ransome had told him there was nothing much the matter with him; never was. And if the old pessimist said there wasn’t much the matter, you might depend upon it there wasn’t anything at all. Except, Ransome said, molly-coddling; and that wasn’t Hollyer’s fault.

“Whose was it, then?” Hollyer had asked. “My mother’s?”

“No. Your dear mother, Hollyer, had no faults. But she made mistakes, as we all do.”

“You mean, if I’d been allowed to live like other people I’d have been all right?”

“Well—you weren’t a very robust infant; and later on there _was_ a slight risk. Personally, I’d have taken it. You must take some risks. But your mother was afraid. You were all she had. And I daresay she wasn’t sorry to keep you with her.”

“I see.”

He saw it clearly. He had been sacrificed to his mother’s selfishness. Nothing but that had doomed him to his humiliating dependence, his poverty, his intolerable celibacy. He found himself brooding over it, going back and back to it, with a certain gratification, as if it justified him. His mind was appeased by this righteous resentment. When the remembrance of his mother’s beauty and sweetness rushed at him and accused him he turned from it to his brooding.

He had begun to talk, to say things about his mother. Put into spoken words his grievance seemed more real; it acquired validity.

He had felt so safe. His mother couldn’t hear him. She would never know what he thought about her; he would have died rather than let her know. And he had only talked to Effie. Talking to his wife was no worse than thinking to himself. After all he had gone through, he felt he was entitled to that relief.

It was June, a hot, close evening before lamplight; they were sitting together in the drawing-room, Effie in his mother’s chair and he at his piano in the recess on the other side of the fireplace. And there was something that Effie said when he had stopped playing and had turned to her, smiling.

“Wilfrid—are you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy.”

“No, but—really?”

“Really. Absolutely. You make me happy.”

“Do I? I’m so glad. You see, when I married you I was afraid I couldn’t. It was so hard to come after your mother.”

He winced.

“How do you mean? You don’t come ‘after’ her.”

“I mean, after all she was to you. After all she did. Your life with her was so perfect.”

“If it’s any consolation to you, Effie, it wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t?”

“No. Anything but.”

“Oh, Wilfrid!”

He seemed to her to be uttering blasphemy.

“It’s better you should know it. My dear mother didn’t understand me in the least. My whole up-bringing was a ghastly blunder. If I’d been let live a decent life, like any other boy, like any other man, I might have been good for something. But she wouldn’t let me. She pretended there was something the matter with me when there wasn’t, so that she could keep me dependent on her.”

“Wilfrid _dear_, it may have been a blunder and it may have been ghastly—”

“It was.”

“But it was only her love for you.”

“A very selfish sort of love, Effie.”

“Oh _don’t_,” she cried. “Don’t. She’s _dead_, Wilfrid.”

“I’m not likely to forget it.”

“You talk as if you’d forgotten— If the dead knew—”

If the dead knew—

“If they knew,” she said, “how we spoke about them, how we thought—”

If the dead knew—

If his mother had heard him; if she knew what he had been thinking; if she knew that he had wished her dead and that his wish had killed her—

If the dead knew—

“Happily for us and them, they don’t know,” he said.

And he began playing again. He was aware that Effie had risen and was now seated at the writing-table. As he played he had his back to the writing-table and the door.

The book on the piano ledge before him was Mendelssohn’s _Lieder ohne Worte_ open as Effie had left it at Number Nine. He remembered that was the one his mother had loved so much. His fingers fell of their own accord into the prelude, into the melody, pressing out its thick, sweet, deliberate sadness. It wounded him, each note a separate stab, yet he went on, half-voluptuously enjoying the self-inflicted pain, trying to work it up and up into a supreme poignancy of sorrow, of regret.

As he stopped on the closing chord he heard somewhere behind him a thick, sobbing sigh.

“Effie—”

He looked round. But Effie was not there. He could hear her footsteps in the room overhead. She had gone, then, before he had stopped playing, shutting the door without a sound. It must have been his imagination.

He played a few bars, then paused, listening. The sighing had begun again; it was close behind him.

He swung round sharply. There was nobody there. But the door, which had been shut a minute ago, stood wide open. A cold wind blew in, cutting through the hot, stagnant air. He got up and shut the door. The cold wind wrapped him in a belt, a swirl; he stood still in it for a moment, stiff with fear. When he crossed the room to the piano it was as if he moved breast high in deep, cold water.

Somewhere in the secret place of his mind a word struggled to form itself, to be born.

“Mother.”

It came to him with a sense of appalling, supernatural horror. Horror that was there with him in the room like a presence.

“Mother.”

The word had lost its meaning. It stood for nothing but that horror.

He tried to play again, but his fingers, slippery with sweat, dropped from the keyboard.

Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.

Then he saw her.

She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.

The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.

Hollyer stood up and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.

Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.

And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.

Hollyer, rigid, pouring out sweat, still stared at the place where it had stood. His heart-beats came together in a running tremor: it was as if all the blood in his body was gathered into his distended heart, dragging it down to meet his heaving belly.

Then he turned and went headlong towards the door, stumbling and lurching. He threw out his hands to clutch at a support and found himself in Effie’s arms.

“Wilfrid—darling—what is it?”

“Nothing. I’m giddy. I—I think I’m going to be sick.”

He broke from her and dragged himself upstairs and shut himself into his study. That night his old single bed was brought back and made up there. He was afraid to sleep in the room that had been his mother’s.