Return I Dare Not Read online

  “He … he needs me …” she said faintly.

  He had said he was desperate. And he looked desperate. He wanted something very badly. She had known that even before this flame was lit between them. And her thoughts went back to a night some months ago when he had taken the author’s call at a successful première. His face, in that blaze of light, had looked so pale beside the faces of the actors in their make-up. For a moment she had not recognised him. And he had taken the leading lady’s arm and patted it while he said the right, charming, modest things. But all the time she had felt as if it was a ventriloquist’s doll speaking out of that stiff green face. A scene of desperation had been before her even then, in spite of the glamour, the applause, and in spite of Mrs. Chappell in the stage box. She had felt so sorry for him, without knowing why, that she had mentioned it to Gibbie when they got home. And Gibbie had said, very seriously, that he would rather row in the galleys than be a playwright any day. But Gibbie had not understood. It was not, it could not be, anything to do with Hugo’s profession.

  Gibbie was saying:

  “You don’t love me. You don’t love me any more.”

  “Oh, but I do. Indeed I do. Can’t you understand? Please, please don’t be so unhappy. I won’t … oh plague! We must go down. Just look at the time!”

  10. Dinner.

  Again the great bell in the stables was tolling out the hour. Since its last ringing the light had changed and faded. The sky had paled to a placid aquamarine. Late blackbirds whistled on the lawns, and in the borders all the flowers glowed in the waning light like little lamps. A first star trembled over Chawton beacon. It was the most beautiful hour of the day, but it was, at Syranwood, a time for being indoors and eating.

  As Philomena and Gibbie came downstairs they saw all the house party streaming across the hall into the dining-room, for Geraldine never waited a minute for anybody. She led the way, swathed in several wedding veils. Three weeks before she had discovered that she had nothing to wear in the evenings, so she had unearthed these white elephants from her wardrobe, cut holes in them for her head and arms, and slung them on. A string of emeralds dangled and caught in the uppermost, and her hair was still a little damp from bathing.

  After her came Aggie and, clutching at Aggie’s elbow, Hugo.

  Then a spare, grizzled figure walked out by itself: Sir Alexander Le Fanu. He walked with his head bent down, so that Gibbie and Philomena had a good view of the bald patch on the top of it, worn smooth and shiny by the constant friction of a lawyer’s wig.

  Laura swam out next, in a white dress so marvellously cut that she might have been poured into it. Airy draperies floated behind her and some of them dragged on the floor so that Ford, who followed close behind, had to do a war dance not to tread on them. The top of his head was not, by any means, bald and, with his broad shoulders and long arms, he looked rather like a dancing bear; while Corny, who trotted after him, might have been his little keeper. But he was the reason of the white dress, as Philomena, looking down in dismay at her own skirts, immediately realised. And yet Laura was asking them all to believe that Ford had come to meet Bechstrader. Philomena sniffed. She had never pretended to tolerate these goings on. An acknowledged love affair was one thing, but these vague appropriations were quite another. She had always said that Alec ought not to put up with it, and Gibbie had said so too. It was the man’s business to keep his wife in order.

  And then, since everyone of importance had crossed the hall, she joined the procession, leaving Gibbie to follow with Adrian and the two girls.

  For the dramatic meeting between father and daughter had taken place in the drawing-room, while everyone was drinking cocktails. And it had gone off unexpectedly well, owing to the elegance of Marianne’s best frock, a stiff yellow moiré with a big bow, like a bustle, at the back. Adrian, who had never seen his daughter so well dressed before, was as impressed as they had meant him to be. She was, indeed, extremely pretty; far more striking than the stalwart Marianne. She knew how to move, and she made her entrance demurely. In the five minutes before dinner she played her cards to perfection. Supported by her friend she managed to seem at home and unself-conscious in these somewhat formidable surroundings. The two girls, though not exactly of the party, absorbed in their music and other youthful pursuits yet added both charm and grace to the group. People made much of them, and their aloofness gave them distinction amid the sophisticated intimacy of their elders. Adrian watched them and drew a deep sigh of relief. At least the disgrace which he had feared, when he saw her in a bathing suit, was to be spared him. She knew how to behave. She was not going to show him up, or be too savage a reminder of his home, and the week-end need not necessarily be spoilt. He was conscious of an enormous relief.

  And yet he trembled a little, wondering what else she had in store for him. If she could manage to be as unexpected as this there was no knowing what weapons she might have in reserve. But they might come to an understanding. And in any case he must, for the time being, make a show of pride and pleasure, or else be made to look supremely foolish.

  Presently she came across and greeted him with agreeable composure.

  “I survive,” Adrian told her. “You will be glad to know that I survive. What … what …”

  He made the vague, cultured little gesture of a man seeking the right word. Solange waited, smiling expectantly. He never made those passes in the air at home. There he always knew exactly what to say.

  “What are you up to?” he pronounced at last.

  “Guess,” said Solange darkly.

  All the others had gone into the hall and he courteously made way for her. She swept out, the stiff skirts and the bustle bow giving her the wherewithal to sweep. Adrian felt a genuine spasm of pride and said to Philomena, as they took their seats:

  “I find that I have a daughter.”

  To which Philomena, who had not yet forgiven him for his attempted desertion at Basingstoke, felt inclined to reply:

  “High time too.”

  They were both aggrieved at the arrangement of the dinner table, and Adrian, who had not been prepared for it, felt the slight most keenly. It was natural that Hugo, who was so much in the fashion, should sit between Geraldine and Aggie. But there was no reason why Ford Usher should be sitting on Geraldine’s left, for his conversation, despite the efforts of Laura, was non-existent. And it was a mystery why Corny should be so much thought of. Plenty of other people were quite as amusing, yet he never got poked away among the young girls and the husbands as Adrian now was.

  At the more desirable end of the table an immediate spate of chatter broke out. Hugo was rapidly and nervously earning his right to be there. For as yet he was still on trial and he knew it; so that he must sing for his supper with an extra flourish of bravura, stimulated by the sense of being judged by new, and unusually stringent standards. The mass produced, synthetic geniality of a theatrical garden party would not pass muster here. Aggie, Laura, Geraldine and Corny were all listening to him and they were savage critics if not good ones. Unlike his colleagues in the Acorn, they did not devote nine-tenths of their energy to their profession so that they were able to take their pleasures strenuously. It was his new ambition to be a worker and yet to be able to hold his own, socially, with those who were not. He did not belong to them, and it would be foolish to pretend that he did, but the points of difference must be brought out with a subtle and engaging skill. He might not be too flippant, or too serious, nor might he tell stories, like a professional entertainer. What they liked, what they required, was that he should distil a fine essence of amusement for them out of any topic that came up.

  If he had not been so tired, and so inwardly depressed, he would have been more sure that he could do it. At times he was inclined to envy Ford, whose inarticulate mutterings were only heard by Laura, and, if passed on by her to the general company, were first given point and translated into intelligible English. But he drank a good deal of champagne and hoped that he was holding his
own. They were attentive enough, and he was an adept at window-dressing. He believed that he was getting through. Had they demanded even better he might have supplied it. But they were none of them worth that; no people in the world were worth it. He thought that he had gauged pretty accurately the demand that any one of them might make, and it was some time before he remembered that two of the party were still unconquered. He had meant to observe Marianne, or Solange, during dinner, and make up his mind what was going on inside their funny little heads. They had not smiled at him, as they ought, and he must find out why.

  The thought of this small problem revived his flagging spirits. He leaned round Aggie to have a look at Marianne and was rewarded by catching a glance from Philomena. Automatically he gave a slight nod, as the sickening memory of his recent folly returned to him. But he must not think of that now, or it would spoil his dinner. These things sometimes settled themselves. And what was Marianne doing, chattering so volubly to Gibbie? It was not what he had expected, especially in a young woman who, even four years ago, had impressed him with her taciturnity. Straining his ears he thought he could catch the words culex pseudopictus. She was pouring out some long and dramatic story so that Gibbie could scarcely get in a word edgeways. Culex pseudopictus! Aggie interrupted and reclaimed his attention before he had time to build up any theory about it.

  Marianne, as a matter of fact, was talking so much because she was sorry for Gibbie. The poor man was plainly in trouble and his eyes besought her to take the burden of conversation off his shoulders until he should have collected a few of his straying faculties. So she racked her brains for something to say and began, at random, to retail all that she had learned from Solange about the importance of Ford’s discovery. As the soup and the fish were served she described, in great detail, the first expedition to Yeshenku.

  Gibbie was dumbly grateful to her and took in nothing that she said. But with the entrée he grew clear-headed enough to ask:

  “Where is this place … Yeshenku … what country is it in?”

  “I don’t know what it’s in. It’s an island in the Caspian Sea. And nobody gets malaria there. Because the mosquitoes don’t carry it. Because they don’t catch it from the people so the people don’t catch it from them. You see?”

  “Not quite. Which starts not catching it first?”

  “Why, you see, when you get bitten by an anopheline, a malaria-carrying mosquito, you get a parasite from it. And then you go giving the parasite to another mosquito. And the mosquito gives it to another person. And that’s the way it goes on. The parasite is a cell called a sporozoit, in the salivary gland of the first mosquito that bites you. And in your blood it changes to a schizont. And that turns into a merocyte, and that turns into hundreds of merozoits, and makes you ill at the same time. That’s why the fever recurs, whenever there’s a fresh batch of merozoits poisoning your blood. And they turn into sexual forms, microgametes and macrogametes. But nothing happens to them when they’re inside you. Only, when another mosquito bites you, they get into its stomach and breed oocysts, which split up into sporoblasts, and they turn into sporozoits and get into the salivary glands again. You see?”

  “I see. And how big is a sporoblast?”

  “That I don’t know,” said Marianne regretfully. “I shall have to ask Solange. I shouldn’t think they can be very large if there are hundreds of them in one mosquito.”

  “Go on. Tell me some more.”

  If she would only keep on like this for a little longer he would have time to pull himself together. He could never be grateful enough to Geraldine for putting him next to Marianne in this crisis, for any of the others might have seen that he was not listening. And if he was to get through the week-end he must try to shelve the issue between himself and Philomena. She had no right to give him such a jolt when they were staying away. She ought to have waited until they got home. There could be no violent hurry, no real reason for bringing it all up at a moment when they both needed to be in good spirits. This lover of hers, this nameless villain, was hardly likely to turn up at Syranwood. She must have spoken on an impulse and on another impulse she might, just possibly, take it all back.

  “And when he got there he found that the whole island was simply crawling with mosquitoes,” Marianne was saying. “In fact, they’d none of them been so bitten in their lives.”

  “Well may they call it Yeshenku,” muttered Gibbie.

  “What?”

  “I was merely quoting. You’ve heard of the old lady who said, ‘Well may they call it Stonehenge, for I’ve never been so bitten in my life’?”

  Marianne pondered for some time before she said that she did not see the point.

  “There is none,” Gibbie assured her. “It’s a middle-aged joke, and merely silly. Go on. Who were bitten besides Ford?”

  “Mr. MacDonald and Captain Rankin. But they didn’t get malaria, though many of the mosquitoes were anophelines. But they had something else, a very slight fever, not unlike malaria, but much less serious and confined to one attack. And when they took specimens of their blood they found they’d got quite a new parasite, and it killed the malaria sporonts, because they tried. It was like a kind of inoculation really. But for months they could not make out where it came from until they noticed one of the mosquitoes that were biting them. They’d thought it was a culex and hadn’t bothered. But it wasn’t. It was a new species. Culex pseudopictus.”

  At this moment Hugo leant forward and looked at her down the table, and she left off talking abruptly. For she had seen the same thing that Adrian noticed when he broke up the rehearsal, the dumb distress, the flash of an almost insane appeal. He caught her eye and seemed to listen anxiously, as though he thought that she might be saying something important. And then, when Aggie touched his elbow, he jerked himself back.

  The truth, which she had half guessed already, broke in upon her mind, and with a new, painful insight, she saw that four years had indeed not changed him. The new person that she had supposed him to become had not ousted the old, but the two were bound together in a gruesome partnership, like convicts on a chain. And the spectacle of his bondage so appalled her that she nearly ran out of the room.

  “But he hates it!” she cried to herself. “He hates and loathes it!”

  A grill dish was bumped gently into her elbow and she was recalled to the necessities of the moment. There was poor Gibbie to be talked to.

  “The only difficulty,” she resumed rapidly, “is that they’ve lost the new parasite. They can’t cultivate it. They infect a mosquito, and it simply disappears.”

  Gibbie’s fixed, attentive smile had grown glassy. He heard not a word. For he too had seen how Hugo looked down the table and had caught that glance exchanged with Philomena. And he too had, in a flash, divined the truth. A thousand confirming circumstances assailed him. Of course, the man was Hugo.

  It was so inevitable that his anger subsided and, with a gloomy precision, he was able to review the facts. He remembered that in past years he had always been a little afraid lest something of this sort should happen. She had been in many ways a wonderful wife. If it had not been for her support he would never have left his old firm and set up for himself. It was she who had managed to make their poverty, during the next three years, more than bearable. She had never worried or complained. She had always been considerate to his friends. She ran his house beautifully and she had borne him three fine children. Often, but perhaps not quite often enough, he had been amazed at his own luck. Especially when the babies were born had he raged against the injustice of an arrangement which demanded so much more from her than from him. He had felt that she would ask in meal or in malt, some ultimate compensation from him and from mankind. And he had inwardly vowed that she should have fair dealing.

  Now the day of reckoning had arrived. She was making her demand. And at least she had been honest about it: or rather, had tried to be honest, for her method of broaching the topic had not been quite fair. It looked very like a tr
ap, but he believed that the guile of it was unconscious. And she had offered to give up her lover. Her happiness, she called it. He must remember that. He ought not to under-rate that offer. She had appealed to him, to his generosity and to his sense of justice.

  What, supposing this were not to be his but an abstract case, what would the Good Man do?

  Philomena seemed to have no doubts about it. She had hinted very plainly that his outraged feelings were mere prejudice, the survival of an uncivilised tradition of ownership. Perhaps she was right. But she was asking much more than that. She was expecting him to wear his horns, not merely with submission but almost with enthusiasm, as a badge of civilisation. To give her up altogether would be an easy fate compared with this. If she had wanted her freedom, he could have understood better. But she did not ask for that. She merely asked for leave to take a lover.

  Such things had, he supposed, been done before. He knew of cases: husbands and wives who lived in amity with openly unfaithful partners. But he had never imagined that they were done in cold blood. It was surely an unforeseen situation, accepted after it had come about. The good man might very well be commended for refusing to divorce a wife whom he still loved, and who was willing to live with him. And how far was his own case parallel to these? He must talk it over with Philomena again.

  Catching her eye, he smiled slightly, and she saw at once that he was not angry any more. It was an immense relief to know that; for, as long as he was not angry, she could do anything with him. She knew what was passing in his mind; his expression of heavy speculation was familiar to her. By some miracle of good luck he had lost himself again in that maze of abstract reasoning which was like a foreign country to her. He was asking himself what the Good Man would do; turning his case into an academic problem to be thrashed out by a couple of earnest undergraduates. Philomena, who had never in her life asked herself what the Good Woman would do, was immensely diverted. So often she had seen him like this, lost and helpless, until she had pity on him and made up his mind by one, swift, unreasonable decision. Soon she would make it up again. She would secure everything. She would have her own way. She would enjoy the pleasures of romance with the right to call herself an excellent wife, the adventures of youth with the settled future of middle age. She would eat her cake and have it.