Return I Dare Not Page 14

  “No, Gibbie. Wait. I want to talk.”

  “Philomena … I can’t talk any more … about it … to-night.”

  “I’m terribly unhappy.”

  “I don’t see why you should be.”

  “I don’t believe I can go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “… go with him … go away with him.”

  “Oh? So you mean to go away with him? I was wondering what your plans were.”

  His voice, in spite of every effort, sounded bitter, and Philomena looked startled.

  “Are you … angry again?”

  “You must give me time to get used to the idea.”

  “Probably you won’t have to get used to it. Probably I shan’t be able to go.”

  “What?”

  “A lot of chance I have, tied hand and foot!”

  “Who is tying you?”

  “Oh, not you. It’s nothing to do with you.”

  She did not mean to insult him. She was thinking of her practical difficulties which would remain however compliant Gibbie might be. But her words sounded contemptuous and to him they were a turning point. He felt a new, cool anger which was far more formidable than the first explosive recoil.

  “I’m going to bed now,” he announced.

  “Do you realise that Ada has given notice?”

  Gibbie clutched his head and stared at her.

  “What on earth has that to do …”

  She explained and he advised her sombrely to let Ada rip. But that just showed how far he was from understanding.

  “You’ve never understood me.”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve never really loved me.”

  “That’s a good thing perhaps, if it’s true.”

  “I’m nothing to you really.”

  She burst into sobs and said something inarticulate about Julian Rivaz, a name which he could not bear to hear in such a dispute.

  “Philomena! Don’t!”

  “I think he was the only person you’ve ever come near loving. If you’d cared for me half as much as you cared for him, I should have been a happier woman. In your heart you’re always thinking of him and always missing him, and always arguing things out with him. And as he was killed when you were twenty you’ve stayed twenty ever since. If you could only get back to that time, and before, when you were at school, I believe you wouldn’t mind if I were dead. If you could wake up one morning and find you’d dreamt it all, and that you’d never married me and never had the children, you wouldn’t feel the faintest pang of regret. You play at being a good husband, and a good father, and a hard-working publisher, but your heart isn’t in it and you don’t ever really believe in it …”

  Gibbie went into his dressing-room and shut the door on her. It was impossible to argue, for there was so much truth in what she had said. It was just like her to hurl it at him after pretending to admire him for fifteen years. He sat down on his bed and finished doing his accounts. The routine of maturity, which he had so zealously imposed upon himself, had almost become second nature. The Good Man does accounts, takes out Life Policies, and knows where he stands, especially when he has incurred the responsibility of a wife and family. And Gibbie, who hated money, who yearned for the contemplative life, sat balancing his day’s expenditure like a practical business man, unaware that very few business men would have worried so much about the halfpennies.

  His heart was not in it, and his real life had been at a standstill for many years. Ever since the death of Julian he had been marking time, feverishly active, but stationary. He had lost all sense of going on, of development, so that at times it seemed as though Julian, crumbling in a French cemetery, was still more alive than he.

  Philomena had been right. He had loved her and the children, with a conscientious and whole-hearted energy, but there was no emotion behind it so strong as that which carried him backward to Julian and the past. His boyhood had been too happy. It had been an Idyll, a romantic dream, but it had led him nowhere and he had awakened to a drab and uninspired daylight. Yet, when sentimentalists declared in his hearing that schooldays are the happiest, he had always protested, rather from conscience than from conviction.

  His halfpennies balanced, he crept wearily into bed and turned out the light. And the image of Julian bore down upon him from the past, still radiant, still mocking. He saw Julian’s face blaze for a moment against the tingling darkness, so real and so near that he was almost comforted. For this bright ghost still kept him company. He could evoke it in a moment. His memory at least had never failed him, and he never had to ask himself how Julian really looked. He had forgotten nothing.

  Julian had been a very beautiful boy. At school his beauty had been a recognised and somewhat ambiguous joke. Many people had worshipped him and he took it all as a matter of course. Another face swam up from the dusty corridors of time, a pale and long-nosed face, the studious features of poor Pickup, who had been accused of standing on a hassock in chapel in order to get a better view of Julian reading the lessons. And behind him blinked the enigmatic Hilliard, who talked in his sleep, and was once heard to mutter:

  “Don’t let’s talk about Blenkinsup any more. Let’s talk about Rivaz.”

  Julian, in the face of these ardours, had been cold, caustic and quenching. He was a disappointment, as the more sentimental of his followers very soon discovered. But once, when Gibbie saved a House match, he had made a demonstration. He put an arm round Gibbie’s shoulders and they walked half the length of the playing field in that posture. Gibbie still felt a little faint when he thought of that blissful climax. Oh, but Philomena had been quite right!

  Yet she could know nothing, no woman could ever know, the strength of those early passions. He had spoken of them sometimes and she had laughed. Or else she had been slightly resentful. She could never understand the idealism of such a relationship or the world in which it could exist; and when he tried to convey it to her, with its turbulence, crude energy, and cheerful grossness, she had always shrugged her shoulders and said that boys were disgusting little creatures, far more sentimental than girls and so incredibly coarse.

  “Even if you weren’t immoral yourselves,” she complained, “you seem to have done nothing but make jokes about it. Everything you say only makes me more determined to send Martin to Bedales.”

  Women, thought Gibbie, as he creaked and turned in his bed, can never know anything about men, since their first care is to enslave those qualities which they cannot comprehend. They fill the world with shows and shadows and their tactics are those of the trident and the net. What chance has the bright armed gladiator against this ancient, Protean enemy? Had the Good Man ever triumphed in a battle with his wife? Was there written on the pages of history any Socratic argument which might have silenced Xantippe?

  “Perhaps he beat her,” thought Gibbie, hopefully.

  But he feared not. The Good Man rules by moral force alone, and if he has not got any moral force he complains to nobody but his Creator.

  Philomena, in her own bed on the other side of the door, listened to the creak of his springs and wondered why he did not go to sleep. She wished that she had not broken out in that way about Julian. It was silly. Perhaps Ada would stay until August to oblige. But it would not be easy to arrange and Geraldine had been so discouraging. How will you manage? She had thought that she was managing so cleverly. At dinner she had been quite sure of success. But now that she was faced with all the obstacles it hardly seemed worth while, especially since Gibbie was so restive. It had been a great pity to mention Julian, just then, and she would not have done it if she had not lost her temper. She had thought all those things for years, but she had never actually said them. They were a grievance, she knew that: they were all part of her contention that she had married the wrong man too young. But if Gibbie were now to begin upon a long course of asking himself whether he had ever really loved her, she had only herself to blame, for she had put the idea into his head. One should never s
ay those things. It was like opening a door without knowing where it led. Perhaps she had better abandon the whole scheme before they got themselves into worse difficulties. It was very hard on her, and poor Hugo would be broken-hearted. She only hoped that the children would realise some day what sacrifices she had made for them, or conversely that they would never know, because the world, surely, was growing saner and their lives might be different. She did not know what to do about Ada. She wished she could get to sleep. Gibbie’s springs creaked again and she turned on the reading lamp by her bed as she petulantly searched for an aspirin.

  Gibbie saw the narrow crack of light under her door, and realised that she too was awake and restless. He tried to picture her thoughts in that amorphous thing which she called her mind, and he felt suddenly a great longing to go to her, to lose himself, to hide from his bitter meditations. She could offer him the refuge of her woman’s world. For real life, the male life which he had lived as a boy becomes with manhood too vast and bleak a thing. Humanity cannot survive without some subterfuge, some shelter from the winds that scourge it. If women were like men, he reflected, if they were not enervating and consoling, the whole race would be liable to perish from too much spiritual exposure. Only the epicene require candour between the sexes. That is why the Elizabethans, and indeed all the poets of the more virile ages of the world, were so much taken up by the idea of woman’s falseness, her ‘jestings and protestings, crossed words and oaths.’ Really they liked false women. They needed them. They could not have endured anything else. They wanted some respite from the intolerable burden of their manhood.

  Yet it was her falseness which kept him from her. Their conversation before dinner came back to him and he grew certain that she had set a trap for him. She thought him a fool. It’s nothing to do with you. She did not even trouble to hide her contempt for him. His resentment stood firm against her and in the flood of doubt and misery which was sweeping him away, he began to cling to that resentment, to brace himself against its stability. He resisted the impulse to go to her, and presently he turned on his own light, meaning to read himself to sleep. But he had not got further than three pages when a terrific bumping and thumping broke upon his ear. An extraordinary noise was going on somewhere in the house. At first he thought it was a slight earthquake, but the sound came nearer, as if someone was throwing something violently downstairs. Philomena was tapping at his door. She put her head in.

  “Gibbie? Are you awake? What is that noise?”

  He sat up in bed and suggested that it was the servants.

  “Do you realise the time? It’s nearly three o’clock. Somebody is throwing something downstairs. I believe it’s a burglar.”

  “No burglar would make a noise like that.”

  “Oh Gibbie! Do go and see.”

  “You always think it’s a burglar and it never is.”

  A still louder crash was too much for his curiosity. He climbed out of bed and put on his dressing gown.

  “I’ll just look out on the landing and see if everything is all right,” he said.

  Philomena came to the door of her bedroom and stood there listening while he hurried down towards the bumping.

  14. Night and Day.

  A lady, dressed for a journey even to her gloves, was kicking a very large dressing case down the shallow polished stairs. At his exclamation she turned round and glared up at him. It was Aggie.

  “What am I doing?” she echoed. “What do I look as if I’m doing? I’m getting out of this house.”

  “But …”

  “And I’m dragging my own box downstairs because nobody answers the bell. I’ve rung it twenty or thirty times. Either it’s out of order or else my maid is drunk. I had to pack the thing myself.”

  “But Aggie …”

  “Don’t mop and mow like that, Gibbie. Carry it down for me.”

  “But Aggie, there’s no train.”

  “No. I don’t suppose there is. I must have a car.”

  “Everybody is asleep.”

  “Then they must wake up.”

  “But Aggie, what’s the matter? Why do you want to hurry off in the middle of the night?”

  Aggie told him furiously that Syranwood was intolerable. She could not stay there an instant longer. Her bed was like a sack of potatoes and faced north, whereas anybody who cared about her must know that she could only sleep facing east. She thought that she had got hernia trying to push it round. The bell was a mile off, by the door, so that if she had had a heart attack in the middle of the night she would have had to die in her bed. She shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have another baby, and it was very bad for her to be upset. So she was going.

  At this point the staircase, which had been but dimly lighted, sprang into a yellow glare, for somebody overhead had turned on the chandelier in the hall. Softly padding feet were heard and presently Lady Geraldine appeared, wrapped in the same red shawl which she had worn at the bathing pool, and wearing on her head an antique mob cap, nodding with rose-coloured ribbons. She looked infinitely older and more wizened than she had seemed by daylight.

  “What is the matter with you, Aggie?” she asked severely.

  Aggie explained and when she got to her probable condition, Geraldine said:

  “Fiddle.”

  Aggie began to cry.

  “You can go if you like,” said Geraldine. “But I won’t have my servants roused. You must carry your own bag into Basingstoke.”

  “It’s not a bag,” sobbed Aggie.

  She began a tirade in which her own health, the mattresses of Syranwood and Laura’s morals were the main themes. Also she said that it was very unkind of Geraldine to ask all the boors and popinjays in London to meet her.

  “They seem to think they’ve come here for a rest cure.”

  Geraldine laughed.

  “Take her bag up to her room for her, Gibbie.”

  “It’s not a bag …”

  “And come with me, Aggie. I’ll give you a cachet fièvre.”

  “I’ve had a whole boxful of cachets fièvres.”

  “Then I’d better give you an emetic, I should think. Come along.”

  After a little dosing, Aggie consented to go back to her own room, though she said, before they parted:

  “I shall never feel quite the same towards you again, Geraldine. You’ve been very cruel …”

  “Not at all. I sympathise …”

  “No you don’t. You said fiddle. It was unforgivable….”

  “Well, I’m sorry. But it is fiddle, and you know it.”

  “You don’t know how unhappy I am. You’ve had such a different life, Geraldine.”

  “Indeed, it’s not my fault. I asked that Jug man down here especially because I was told you liked him. I can’t help it if he’s a disappointment.”

  “You’ve had your life,” persisted Aggie sulkily.

  She took off her hat and gloves and threw them on the floor. While Geraldine picked them up and put them away she got into a pair of lace pyjamas.

  “Decorative but scratchy,” commented Geraldine, looking at them. “I should get into something more comfortable if I were you. It’s half past three.”

  Her tone suggested that half past three was a final hour and Aggie began to cry again, sobbing out an incoherent story about such a touching man and a railway communication cord.

  “He’s probably spending the night in the cells, poor boy. How tragic life is, Geraldine.”

  “Aggie!”

  Geraldine’s voice was so peremptory that Aggie stopped crying.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t put up your umbrella before it rains. It’s waste of time. Look in the glass.”

  “I’m hideous. I’ve been crying.”

  “No you’re not. Crying never makes you hideous, or you wouldn’t do it. Look in the glass. There’s no need for all this panic.”

  Aggie turned round and looked at herself in the long glass of the wardrobe, a little cautiously at first, but with ren
ewed composure.

  “The light is very dim,” she said doubtfully.

  “You can look at yourself in the dressing-table glass if you like.”

  Aggie turned her fair head this way and that, stretched her long neck and smiled. All the admiration which had been poured out before her, for nearly thirty years, had given an uncanny rarity and glamour to her loveliness. She was not merely a beautiful woman. Philomena and Laura were that. She was a unique woman. There were plenty of Philomenas and Lauras. But there was only one Aggie. When people looked at her, when she looked at herself in the glass, it was this silvery aura of legend that they saw.

  “But some day, you know,” she said, growing pinched again. “Some day …”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ve always said that.”

  “Poor Aggie.”

  “If you say Poor Aggie again … I’ll burn your house down.”

  Yet Geraldine, as she pattered off to her own room again, was really very sorry for poor Aggie. These first, dreadful premonitions were the worst. Nothing afterwards was quite so hard to bear. It must still be only in the middle of the night, when the ticking clocks become audible, that panic stretched out its icy paw and touched her. To-morrow, next week, some new enthusiasm would lend her wings and she would escape from time’s pursuit. But not for ever. The terror would come back, the clocks would tick louder and the pauses in the night would seem longer. She would not grow old easily: she was too vain, too spoilt, had lived too long upon the lotus food of adulation. When the last time came she would meet it without fortitude; she would clutch and struggle and become a bore.

  For Geraldine it had all been easier. As the wife of Otho she had acquired great practice in endurance and the stoicism of a slave. She had known from the first that the world is a hard place and with great skill she made the best of it. Her farewells to youth had been made with serenity and grace, unmarred by any impulsive returns. But they had not been made without suffering. Even now she could never make up her mind which had given her most pain, the first love or the last: the first when she had demanded so much or the last when she had expected so little.