II
Ten days to wait till the Sunday after. It was only Friday night. He would see her in between, of course, at The Immortal Hour, and might perhaps manage to take her home again, but would he be able in these snippets of time, these snatches, these beginnings interrupted by the curtain going up or the lights going down, to find out from her who and what was Stephen? It was intolerable to have at last come across her and instantly to find oneself up against Stephen.
Dismal were his conjectures as he was rattled home by the taxi so lately made sweet by her presence. Stephen couldn’t be her brother, for nobody made appointments ahead and carried them out so conscientiously with brothers; and he couldn’t be her uncle or her nephew, the only two remaining satisfactory relationships, because she had said he was as old as she was. Who, then, and what was Stephen?
A faint hope flickered for an instant in the darkness of his mind: sometimes uncles were young; sometimes nephews were old. But the thing was too feeble to give warmth, and almost immediately went out. All Stephens should be stoned, he thought. It was what was done with the first one he had ever heard of; pity the practice hadn’t been kept up. How happy he now would have been except for Stephen. How happy, going to see her the next Sunday but one, going really to see her and sit down squarely with her by himself in a quiet room and look at her frontways instead of for ever only sideways, and she without the hat that extinguished such a lot of what anyhow was such a little. He might even, he thought, after a bit, after they had got really natural with each other—and he felt he could be more natural with her, more happily himself than with any one he had ever met—he might even after a bit have sat on the floor at her feet, as near as possible to her little shoes. And then he would have told her all about everything. God, how he wanted to tell somebody all about everything—somebody who understood. There wasn’t anybody really for understanding except a woman. It didn’t need brains to understand; it didn’t need learning, and a grind of education and logic and scientific detachment, and all the confounded rig-out Lewes, who shared his rooms with him, had. Such things were all right as part of a whole, and were more important, he was ready to admit, than any other part of it if one had the whole; but a man starved if that was all—just starved. Life without a woman in it, a woman of one’s own, was intolerable.
His face as he opened the door with his latchkey was gloomy. Lewes would be sitting in there; Lewes with his brains. Brains, brains....
Christopher had no mother or sister, and as long as he could remember seemed to have been by himself with males—uncles who brought him up, clerics who prepared him for school, again uncles with whom he played golf and spent the festivals of the year, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide; and here in his rooms Lewes was waiting, always Lewes, making profound and idiotic comments on everything, and wanting to sit up half the night and reason. Reason! He was sick of reason. He wanted some one he could be romantic with, and sentimental with, and poetic, and—yes, religious with, if he felt like it, without having to feel ashamed. And how extraordinarily he wanted to touch—to touch lovely soft surfaces, to feel, to be warm and close up. He had had enough of this sterile, starved life with Lewes. Three years of it he had had, ever since he left Balliol,—three years of coming back in the evenings and finding Lewes, who hardly ever went out at night, sunk deep in his chair, smoking in the same changeless position, his feet up on the chimney-piece, lean, dry, horribly intelligent; and they would talk and talk, and inquire and inquire, and when they talked of love and women—and of course they sometimes talked of love and women—Lewes would bring out views which Christopher, whose views they used to be too, only he had forgotten that, considered, now that he had come to know Catherine, as so much—the word was his—tripe.
He shut the door as quietly as possible, intending to go straight to bed and avoid Lewes for that evening at least. He had been injudicious enough after the first time he sat next to Catherine and made friends with her to tell Lewes about it when he got back, and to tell him with what he quickly realised was unnecessary warmth; and naturally after that Lewes asked him from time to time how things were developing. Christopher almost immediately left off liking this, and liked it less and less as he liked Catherine more and more; and among many other things he afterwards regretted having told Lewes in the excitement of that first discovery, was that she was the woman one dreams of.
‘No woman is ever the woman one dreams of,’ said Lewes, who was thirty, so knew.
‘You wait till you’ve seen her, old man,’ Christopher said, nettled; though it was just the sort of thing he had freely said himself up to the day before.
‘My dear chap—see her? I?’
Lewes made a fatigued gesture with his pipe. ‘I thought you long ago realised that I’m through with women,’ he said.
‘That’s because you don’t know any,’ said Christopher, who wasn’t liking Lewes at that moment.
Lewes gazed at him with mild surprise. ‘Not know any?’ he repeated.
‘Not intimately. Not any decent ones intimately.’
Lewes continued to gaze.
‘I thought,’ he said presently, with patient mildness, ‘you knew I have a mother and sisters.’
‘Mothers and sisters aren’t women—they’re merely relations,’ said Christopher; and from that time Lewes’s inquiries were less frequent and more gingerly, and mixed with anxiety. He was fond of his friend. He disliked the idea of possibly losing him. He seemed to him to be well on the way to being in love seriously; and love, as he had observed it, was a great sunderer of friendships.
He heard him come in on the Friday night, and he heard him go, so unusually, into his room after that careful shutting of the front door, and he wondered. What was the woman doing to his friend? Making him unhappy already? She had made him more cautious already, and more silent; she had already come down between them like a deadening curtain.
Lewes moved slightly in his chair, and went on with Donne, whom he was reading just then with intelligent appreciation tinged with surprise at the lasting quality of his passion for his wife; but he couldn’t, he found, attend to Donne as whole-heartedly as usual, for he was listening for any sounds from the next room, and his thoughts, even as his eyes read steadily down the page, were going round and round in a circle something like this: Poor Chris. A widow. Got him in her clutches. And what a name. Cumfrit. Good God. Poor Chris....
From the next room there came sounds of walking up and down—careful walkings up and down, as of one desiring not to attract attention and yet impelled to walk—and Lewes’s thoughts went round in their circle faster and more emphatically than ever: Poor Chris. A widow. Cumfrit. Good God....
The worst of it was, he thought, shutting up Donne with a bang and throwing him on the table, that on these occasions friends could only look on. There was nothing to be done whatever, except to watch as helplessly as at a death-bed. And without even, he said to himself, the hope, which sometimes supports such watchers, of a sure and glorious resurrection. His friend had to go through with it, and disappear out of his, Lewes’s, life; for never, he had observed, was any one the same friend exactly afterwards as before, whether the results of the adventure were happy or unhappy. Poor Chris. A widow. Clutches....
The sounds of walking about presently left off. Lewes would have liked to have been able to look in and see for himself that his unfortunate and probably doomed friend was safely asleep, but he couldn’t do that; so he lit his pipe again and reached over for Donne and had another go at him, able to concentrate better, now that the footsteps had left off, but still with a slightly cocked ear.
What was his surprise at breakfast next morning to see Christopher looking happy, and eating eggs and bacon with his usual simple relish. ‘Hullo,’ he couldn’t help saying, ‘you seem rather pleased with life.’
‘I am. It’s raining,’ said Christopher.
‘So it is,’ said Lewes, glancing at the window; and he poured out his coffee in silence, because he was unable to see any connection.
‘I can chuck that beastly golf,’ Christopher explained in a moment, his mouth full.
‘So you can,’ said Lewes, well aware that up to now Christopher had looked forward with almost childish eagerness to his Saturdays.
‘I’ve been out already and sent a telegram to my uncle,’ said Christopher.
‘But I thought on occasions like this,’ said Lewes, ‘when the weather prevented golf, you still went down and played chess with him.’
‘Damn chess,’ said Christopher.
And in Lewes’s head once more began to revolve, Poor Chris. Cumfrit. Clutches....