65 Short Stories (141 page)

Carruthers wrung his hands. And on a sudden an idea came to him that filled him with a painful exaltation; he put it away from him, but it returned; it would not let him be. He must save her, he had loved her too much and too long to let her sink, sink as she was sinking; a passion of self-sacrifice welled up in him. Notwithstanding everything, though his love now was dead and he felt for her an almost physical repulsion, he would marry her. He laughed mirthlessly. What would his life be? He couldn’t help that He didn’t matter. It was the only thing to do. He felt wonderfully uplifted, and yet very humble, for he was awed at the thoughts of the heights which the divine spirit of man could reach.

His ship was to sail on Saturday and on Thursday when the guests who had been dining left them, he said:

‘I hope we’re going to be alone tomorrow’

‘As a matter of fact I’ve asked some Egyptians who spend the summer here. She’s a sister of the ex-Khedive and very intelligent. I’m sure you’ll like her.’

‘Well, it’s my last evening. Couldn’t we spend it alone?’

She gave him a glance. There was a faint amusement in her eyes, but his were grave.

‘If you like. I can put them off’

‘Then do.’

He was to start early in the morning and his luggage was packed. Betty had told him not to dress, but he had answered that he preferred to. For the last time they sat down to dinner facing one another. The dining-room, with its shaded lights, was bare and formal, but the summer night flooding in through the great open windows gave it a sober richness. It had the effect of the private refectory in a convent to which a royal lady had retired in order to devote the remainder of her life to a piety not too austere. They had their coffee on the terrace. Carruthers drank a couple of liqueurs. He was feeling very nervous.

‘Betty, my dear, I’ve got something I want to say to you,’ he began. ‘Have you? I wouldn’t say it if I were you.’

She answered gently. She remained perfectly calm, watching him shrewdly, but with the glimmer of a smile in her blue eyes.

‘I must.’

She shrugged her shoulders and was silent. He was conscious that his voice trembled a little and he was angry with himself

‘You know I’ve been madly in love with you for many years. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to marry me. But, after all, things change and people change too, don’t they? We’re neither of us so young as we were. Won’t you marry me now, Betty?’

She gave him the smile that had always been such an attractive thing in her; it was so kindly, so frank, and still, still so wonderfully innocent.

‘You’re very sweet, Humphrey. It’s awfully nice of you to ask me again. I can’t tell you how touched I am. But you know, I’m a creature of habit, I’ve got in the habit of saying no to you now, and I can’t change it.’

‘Why not?’

There was something aggressive in his tone, something almost ominous, that made her give him a quick look. Her face blanched with sudden anger, but she immediately controlled herself

‘Because I don’t want to,’ she smiled.

‘Are you going to marry anyone else?’

‘I? No. Of course not.’

For a moment she seemed to draw herself up as though a wave of ancestral pride swept through her and then she began to laugh. But whether she laughed at the thought that had passed through her mind or because something in Humphreys proposal had amused her none but she could have told.

‘Betty. I implore you to marry me.’

‘Never.’

‘You can’t go on living this life.’

He put into his voice all the anguish of his heart and his face was drawn and tortured. She smiled affectionately.

‘Why not? Don’t be such a donkey. You know I adore you, Humphrey, but you are rather an old woman.’

‘Betty. Betty.’

Did she not see that it was for her sake that he wanted it? It was not love that made him speak, but human pity and shame. She got up.

‘Don’t be tiresome, Humphrey. You’d better go to bed, you know you have to be up with the lark. I shan’t see you in the morning. Good-bye and God bless you. It’s been wonderful having you here.’

She kissed him on both cheeks.

Next morning, early, for he had to be on board at eight, when Carruthers stepped out of the front door he found Albert waiting for him in the car. He wore a singlet, duck trousers, and a beret basque. Carruthers’ luggage was in the back. He turned to the butler.

‘Put my bags beside the chauffeur,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit behind.’

Albert made no remark. Carruthers got in and they drove off. When they arrived at the harbour, porters ran up. Albert got out of the car. Carruthers looked down at him from his greater height.

‘You need not see me on board. I can manage perfectly well by myself Here’s a tip for you.’

He gave him a five-pound note. Albert flushed. He was taken aback, he would have liked to refuse it, but did not know how to and the servility of years asserted itself Perhaps he did not know what he said.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Carruthers gave him a curt nod and walked away. He had forced Betty’s lover to call him ‘sir’. It was as though he had struck her a blow across that smiling mouth of hers and flung in her face an opprobrious word. It filled him with a bitter satisfaction.

He shrugged his shoulders and I could see that even this small triumph now seemed vain. For a little while we were silent. There was nothing for me to say. Then he began again.

‘I dare say you think it’s very strange that I should tell you all this. I don’t care. You know, I feel as if nothing mattered any more. I feel as if decency no longer existed in the world. Heaven knows, I’m not jealous. You can’t be jealous unless you love and my love is dead. It was killed in a flash. After all those years. I can’t think of her now without horror. What destroys me, what makes me so frightfully unhappy is to think of her unspeakable degradation.’

So it has been said that it was not jealousy that caused Othello to kill Desdemona, but an agony that the creature that he believed angelic should be proved impure and worthless. What broke his noble heart was that virtue should so fall.

‘I thought there was no one like her. I admired her so much. I admired her courage and her frankness, her intelligence and her love of beauty. She’s just a sham and she’s never been anything else.’

‘I wonder if that’s true. Do you think any of us are all of a piece? Do you know what strikes me? I should have said that Albert was only the instrument, her toll to the solid earth, so to speak; that left her soul at liberty to range the empyrean. Perhaps the mere fact that he was so far below her gave her a sense of freedom in her relations with him that she would have lacked with a man of her own class. The spirit is very strange, it never soars so high as when the body has wallowed for a period in the gutter.’

‘Oh, don’t talk such rot,’ he answered angrily.

‘I don’t think it is rot. I don’t put it very well, but the idea’s sound.’

‘Much good it does me. I’m broken and done for. I’m finished.’

‘Oh, nonsense. Why don’t you write a story about it?’

‘I?’

‘You know, that’s the great pull a writer has over other people. When something has made him terribly unhappy, and he’s tortured and miserable, he can put it all into a story and it’s astonishing what a comfort and relief it is.’

‘It would be monstrous. Betty was everything in the world to me. I couldn’t do anything so caddish.’

He paused for a little and I saw him reflect. I saw that notwithstanding the horror that my suggestion caused him he did for one minute look at the situation from the standpoint of the writer. He shook his head.

‘Not for her sake, for mine. After all I have some self-respect. Besides, there’s no story there.’

JANE

♦

I remember very well the occasion on which I first saw Jane Fowler. It is indeed only because the details of the glimpse I had of her then are so clear that I trust my recollection at all, for, looking back, I must confess that I find it hard to believe that it has not played me a fantastic trick. I had lately returned to London from China and was drinking a dish of tea with Mrs Tower. Mrs Tower had been seized with the prevailing passion for decoration; and with the ruthlessness of her sex had sacrificed chairs in which she had comfortably sat for years, tables, cabinets, ornaments on which her eyes had dwelt in peace since she was married, pictures that had been familiar to her for a generation; and delivered herself into the hands of an expert. Nothing remained in her drawing-room with which she had any association, or to which any sentiment was attached; and she had invited me that day to see the fashionable glory in which she now lived. Everything that could be pickled was pickled and what couldn’t be pickled was painted. Nothing matched, but everything harmonized.

‘Do you remember that ridiculous drawing-room suite that I used to have?’ asked Mrs Tower.

The curtains were sumptuous yet severe; the sofa was covered with Italian brocade; the chair on which I sat was in petit point. The room was beautiful, opulent without garishness, and original without affectation; yet to me it lacked something; and while I praised with my lips I asked myself why I so much preferred the rather shabby chintz of the despised suite, the Victorian watercolours that I had known so long, and the ridiculous Dresden china that had adorned the chimney-piece. I wondered what it was that I missed in all these rooms that the decorators were turning out with a profitable industry. Was it heart? But Mrs Tower looked about her happily.

‘Don’t you like my alabaster lamps?’ she said. ‘They give such a soft light.’

‘Personally I have a weakness for a light that you can see by,’ I smiled.

‘It’s so difficult to combine that with a light that you can’t be too much seen by,’ laughed Mrs Tower.

I had no notion what her age was. When I was quite a young man she was a married woman a good deal older than I, but now she treated me as her contemporary. She constantly said that she made no secret of her age, which was forty, and then added with a smile that all women took five years off She never sought to conceal the fact that she dyed her hair (it was a very pretty brown with reddish tints), and she said she did this because hair was hideous while it was going grey; as soon as hers was white she would cease to dye it.

‘Then they’ll say what a young face I have.’

Meanwhile it was painted, though with discretion, and her eyes owed not a little of their vivacity to art. She was a handsome woman, exquisitely gowned, and in the sombre glow of the alabaster lamps did not look a day more than the forty she gave herself

‘It is only at my dressing-table that I can suffer the naked brightness of a thirty-two-candle electric bulb,’ she added with smiling cynicism. ‘There I need it to tell me the first hideous truth and then to enable me to take the necessary steps to correct it.’

We gossiped pleasantly about our common friends and Mrs Tower brought me up to date in the scandal of the day. After roughing it here and there it was very agreeable to sit in a comfortable chair, the fire burning brightly on the hearth, charming tea-things set out on a charming table, and talk with this amusing, attractive woman. She treated me as a prodigal returned from his husks and was disposed to make much of me. She prided herself on her dinnerparties; she took no less trouble to have her guests suitably assorted than to give them excellent food; and there were few persons who did not look upon it as a treat to be bidden to one of them. Now she fixed a date and asked me whom I would like to meet.

‘There’s only one thing I must tell you. If Jane Fowler is still here I shall have to put it off’

‘Who is Jane Fowler?’ I asked.

Mrs Tower gave a rueful smile.

‘Jane Fowler is my cross.’

‘Oh!’

‘Do you remember a photograph that I used to have on the piano before I had my room done, of a woman in a tight dress with tight sleeves and a gold locket, with her hair drawn back from a broad forehead and her ears showing and spectacles on a rather blunt nose? Well, that was Jane Fowler.’

‘You had so many photographs about the room in your unregenerate days,’ I said, vaguely.

‘It makes me shudder to think of them. I’ve made them into a huge brown-paper parcel and hidden them in an attic’

‘Well, who is Jane Fowler?’ I asked again, smiling.

‘She’s my sister-in-law. She was my husband’s sister and she married a manufacturer in the North. She’s been a widow for many years, and she’s very well-to-do.’

‘And why is she your cross?’

‘She’s worthy, she’s dowdy, she’s provincial. She looks twenty years older than I do and she’s quite capable of telling anyone she meets that we were at school together. She has an overwhelming sense of family affection and because I am her only living connexion she’s devoted to me. When she comes to London it never occurs to her that she should stay anywhere but here-she thinks it would hurt my feelings-and she’ll pay me visits of three or four weeks. We sit here and she knits and reads. And sometimes she insists on taking me to dine at Claridge’s and she looks like a funny old charwoman and everyone I particularly don’t want to be seen by is sitting at the next table. When we are driving home she says she loves giving me a little treat. With her own hands she makes me tea-cosies that I am forced to use when she is here and doilies and centrepieces for the dining-room table.’