Love

XX

They stood looking at each other. Kate went away down the passage. Emptiness was round them, pierced by the baby’s cries through the shut door of the nursery. Catherine didn’t shrink at all, and let Christopher look at her as much as he liked, for she had done with everything now except truth.

‘Catherine——’ he began, in the afraid and bewildered voice of a child fumbling in the dark.

‘Yes, Chris?’

She made no attempt to go close to him, he made no attempt to go close to her; and it was strange to Catherine, who couldn’t continually as yet remember the difference in herself, to be alone with Christopher after separation, and not instantly be gathered to his heart.

But his face made her remember; in it she could see her own as clearly as if she were in front of a glass.

‘I had no idea—no idea——’ he stammered.

‘That I could look like this?’

‘That you’ve suffered so horribly, that you loved her so terribly——’

And he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and he couldn’t, because this simply wasn’t Catherine.

‘But it isn’t that only,’ she said,—and hesitated for an instant.

For an instant her heart failed her. Why tell him? After all, all she had done was for love of him; for a greedy, clutching love it was true, made up chiefly of vanity and possessiveness and fear, but still love. Why not forget the whole thing, and let him think she had grown old in a week from grief?

Creditable and touching explanation. And so nearly true, too, for if passion had begun the ruin, grief had completed it, and the night and day of that birth and death, of the agony of Stephen and her own long-drawn-out torment, had put the finishing touches of age beyond her age on a face and hair left defenceless to lines and greyness without Maria Rome’s massage and careful dyes, and anyhow twice as worn and grey as they had been before she began the exhausting processes of Dr. Sanguesa.

But she put this aside. She had had enough of nearly truth and the wretched business of taking him in. How could she go on doing him such wrongs? She had done him the greatest of wrongs marrying him, of that she was certain, but at least she would leave off making fools of them both. Rotten, rotten way of living. Let him see her as she was; and if his love—how natural that would be at his age, how inevitable—came to an end, she would set him free.

For in those remarkable hours that followed Virginia’s death, when it seemed to Catherine as if she had suddenly opened the door out of a dark passage and gone into a great light room, she saw for the first time quite plainly; and what she saw in that strange new clearness, that merciless, yet somehow curiously comforting, clearness, was that love has to learn to let go, that love if it is real always does let go, makes no claims, sets free, is content to love without being loved—and that nothing was worth while, nothing at all in the tiny moment called life except being good. Simply being good. And though people might argue as to what precisely being good meant, they knew in their hearts just as she knew in her heart; and though the young might laugh at this conviction as so much sodden sentiment, they would, each one of them who was worth anything, end by thinking exactly that. Impossible to live as she had lived the last week close up to death and not see this. For four extraordinary days she had sat in its very presence, watching by the side of its peace. She knew now. Life was a flicker; the briefest thing, blown out before one was able to turn round. There was no time in it, no time in the infinitely precious instant, for anything except just goodness.

So she said, intent on simple truth, ‘I did deeply love Virginia, and I have suffered, but I looked very nearly like this before.’

And Christopher, who hadn’t lived these days close up to death, and hadn’t seen and recognised what she so clearly did, and wasn’t feeling any of this, was shocked out of his bewilderment by such blasphemy, and took a quick, almost menacing step forward, as if to silence the ghost daring to profane his lovely memory.

‘You didn’t look like it—you didn’t!’ he cried. ‘You were my Catherine. You weren’t this—this——’

He stopped, and stared close into her face. ‘What has become of you?’ he asked, bewildered again, a dreadful sense of loss cold on his heart. ‘Oh, Catherine—what have you done to yourself?’

‘Why, that’s just it,’ she said, the faintest shadow of a smile trembling a moment in her eyes. ‘I haven’t done anything to myself.’

‘But your hair—your lovely hair——’

He made agonised motions with his hands.

‘It’s all gone grey because of—of what you’ve been through, you poor, poor little thing——’

And again he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and again he couldn’t.

‘No, it wasn’t that made it go grey,’ she said. ‘It was grey before, only I used to have it dyed.’

He stared at her, entirely bewildered. Catherine looking like this, and saying these things. Why did she say them? Why was she so anxious to make out that all this had nothing to do with Virginia’s death? Was it some strange idea of sparing him the pain of being sorry for her? Or was she so terribly smitten that she was no longer accountable for what she said? If this was it, then all the more closely should he fold her to his heart and shield and comfort her, and what a damned scoundrel he was not to. But he couldn’t. Not yet. Not that minute. Perhaps presently, when he had got more used....

‘You dyed it?’ he repeated stupidly.

‘Yes. Or rather Maria Rome did.’

‘Maria Rome?’

‘Oh, what does it matter. It makes me sick to think of that old nonsense. She’s a place in London where they do up women who’ve begun not to keep. She did me up wonderfully, and at first it very nearly looked real. But it was such a business, and I was so frightened always, living like that on the brink of its not being a success, and you suddenly seeing me. I’m sick, sick just remembering it—now.’

And she laid her hand on his arm, looking up at him with Catherine’s eyes, Catherine’s beautiful, fatigued eyes.

They were the same,—beautiful as he had always known them, and fatigued as he had always known them; but how strange to see them in that little yellow face. Her eyes; all that was left of his Catherine. Yes, and the voice, the same gentle voice, except that it had a new note of—was it sensibleness? Sensibleness! Catherine sensible? She had been everything in the world but that,—obstinate, weak, unaccountable, irrelevant, determined, impulsive, clinging, passionate, adorable, his own sweet love, but never sensible.

‘Doesn’t it seem too incredibly little and mean, that sort of lying, any sort of lying, when this has happened,’ she said, her hand still on his arm, her eyes very earnestly looking up into his. ‘So extraordinarily not worth while. And you mustn’t think I’m out of my mind from shock, Chris,’ she went on, for it was plain from his expression that that was what he did think, ‘because I’m not. On the contrary—for the first time I’m in it.’

And as he stared at her, and thought that if this was what she was like when she was in her mind then how much better and happier for them both if she had stayed out of it, the baby on the other side of the door was taken out of its bath, and that which had been cries became yells.

‘For God’s sake let’s go somewhere where there isn’t this infernal squalling,’ exclaimed Christopher, with a movement so sudden and exasperated that it shook her hand off his arm.

‘Yes, let us,’ she said, moving away down the passage ahead of him; and more plainly than ever, when they got to the big windows on the stairs and she turned the bend of them before him, he could see how yellow she was, and what a quantity of grey, giving it that terrible grizzled look, there was in her hair.

Yellow; grizzled; what had she done, what had they done to her, to ruin her like this, to take his Catherine from him and give him this instead? It was awful. He was robbed. His world of happiness was smashing to bits. And he felt such a brute, the lowest of low brutes, not to be able to love her the same as before, now when she so much must need love, when she had been having what he could well imagine was a simply hellish time.

Virginia again, he thought, with a bitterness that shocked him himself. That girl, even in death spoiling things. For even if it was true what Catherine insisted on telling him about dyes and doings-up, she never would have thought it necessary to tell him, to make a clean breast, if it hadn’t been for Virginia’s death. No; if it hadn’t been for that she would have gone on as before, doing whatever it was she did to herself, the results of which anyhow were that he and she were happy. God, how he hated clean breasts, and the turning over of some imaginary new leaf. Whenever anything happened out of the ordinary, anything that pulled women up short and made them do what they called think, they started wrecking—wrecking everything for themselves and for the people who had been loving them happily and contentedly, by their urge for the two arch-destroyers of love, those damned clean breasts and those even more damned new leaves.

He followed her like an angry, frightened child. How could he know what she knew? How could he see what she saw? He was where he had always been, while she had gone on definitely into something else. And there were no words she could have explained in. If she had tried, all she could have found to say, with perplexed brows, would have been, ‘But I know.’

She took him into the garden. They passed her bedroom door on the way, and he knew it was hers for it was half open, and the room hadn’t been done yet, and the little slippers he had kissed a hundred times were lying kicked off on the carpet, the slippers that had belonged to the real Catherine—or rather, as this one was now insisting, to the artificial Catherine, but anyhow to his Catherine.

For a moment he was afraid she would take him in there. Ice seemed to slide down his spine at the thought. But she walked past it as if it had nothing to do with either of them, and then he was offended.

Out in the garden it was easier to breathe. He couldn’t, in that public place, with the chance of a gardener appearing at any moment, take her in his arms, so he didn’t feel quite such a scoundrel for not doing it; and walking by her side and not looking at her, but just listening to her voice, he felt less lost; for the voice was the voice of Catherine, and as long as he didn’t look at her he could believe she was still there. It was like, in the night, hearing the blessed reassurance of one’s mother talking, when one was little, and frightened, and alone.

She took him through the garden and out by the wicket-gate into the park, where rabbits were scuttling across the dewy grass, leaving dark ribbons along its silver, and the bracken, webbed with morning gossamer, was already turning brown. And all the way she talked, and all the way he listened in silence, his eyes fixed straight in front of him.

She told him everything, from that moment of their honeymoon when, from loving, she had fallen in love, and instantly began to be terrified of looking old, and her desperate, grotesque efforts to stay young for him, and his heart, as he heard her voice talking of that time, went to wax within him, and he had to gaze very steadily at the view ahead lest, turning to throw his arms round Catherine, his sweetheart, his angel love, he should see she wasn’t there, but only a ghost was there with her voice and eyes, and then he mightn’t be able to help bursting out crying.

‘Is this far enough away from the poor baby?’ she asked, stopping at an oak-tree, whose huge exposed roots were worn with the numbers of times she had sat on them in past years during the long, undisturbed summer afternoons of her placid first marriage. ‘You know,’ she added, sitting down on the gnarled roots, ‘he’s the most beautiful little baby, and is going to comfort all poor Stephen’s despair.’

‘But he isn’t going to comfort mine,’ said Christopher, standing with his eyes fixed on the distant view.

She was silent. Then she said, ‘Is it as bad as that, Chris?’

‘No, no,’ he said quickly, his back to her, ‘I didn’t mean that. You’ll get well again, and then we’ll——’

‘I don’t see how I can get well if I’m not ill,’ she said gently.

‘Why do you want to take hope from me?’ he answered.

‘I only don’t want any more lies. I shan’t look different again from what I do now. I shan’t go back, I mean, to what I was. But perhaps presently—when you’ve had time to get over——’

She hesitated, and then went on humbly,—for she was vividly conscious of the wrong she had done him, vividly aware that she ought to have saved him from himself whatever the pressure had been that was brought to bear on her, however great his misery was at the moment,—‘Presently I thought perhaps I might somehow make up for what I’ve done. I thought perhaps I might somehow comfort you——’

She hesitated again. ‘I don’t quite know how, though,’ she said, her voice more and more humble, ‘but I’d try.’ And then she said, almost in a whisper, ‘That is, if you will let me.’

‘Let you!’ he exclaimed, stabbed by her humbleness.

‘Yes. And if it’s no good, Chris, and you’d rather not, then of course I’ll—let you go.’

He turned round quickly. ‘What, in God’s name, do you mean by that?’ he asked.

‘Set you free,’ said Catherine, doing her best to look up at him unflinchingly.

He stared at her. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand. In what way, set me free?’

‘Well, there’s only one way, isn’t there—one way really. I meant, divorce you.’

He stood staring down at her. Catherine talking of divorcing him. Catherine.

‘How can you at your age be tied up, go on being married, to some one like me?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t even decent. And besides—in that flat together—you might think I—I expected——’

She broke off with a gesture of helplessness, while he still stared at her.

‘I haven’t an idea how we could manage all the—the details,’ she said, bowing her head, for she felt she couldn’t endure his stare. ‘It would hurt so,’ she finished in a whisper.

‘And so you think the solution is to divorce me,’ said Christopher.

‘What else is there to do? You’ve only got to look at me——’

‘Divorce me,’ he said, ‘when we have loved each other so?’

And suddenly he began to shout at her, stamping his foot, while hot tears rushed into his eyes. ‘Oh you little fool, you little fool!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve always been such a little fool——’

‘But look at me,’ she said desperately, throwing back her head and flinging out her arms.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t go on like this!’ he cried, dropping on the ground beside her and burying his face in her lap. Divorce him... condemn him again to that awful loneliness... where he couldn’t hear her voice....

‘Why couldn’t you go on letting me believe?’ he said, his arms tightly clutching her knees while he kept his face buried. ‘Why couldn’t you? As though I cared what you did before! It made us happy, anyhow, and I wish to God you’d go on doing it. But you’ve only got to get away from this infernal place to be as you used to be, and you didn’t always go to that woman, and I fell in love with you just as you were, and why shouldn’t I love you just as you are?’

‘Because I’m old, and you’re not. Because I’ve grown old since we married. Because I was too old to be married to some one so young. And you know I’m old. You see it now. You see it so plainly that you can’t bear to look at me.’

‘Oh, my God—the stuff, the stuff. I’m your husband, and I’m going to take care of you. Yes, I am, Catherine—for ever and ever. Useless to argue. I can’t live without the sound of your voice. I can’t. And how can you live without me? You couldn’t. You’re the most pitiful little thing——’

‘I’m not. I’m quite sensible. I haven’t been, but I am now.’

‘Oh, damn being sensible! Be what you were before. Good God, Catherine,’ he went on, hiding his face, clutching her knees, ‘do you think a man wants his wife to scrub herself with yellow soap as if she were the kitchen table, and then come all shiny to him and say, “See, I’m the Truth”? And she isn’t the truth. She’s no more the truth shiny than powdered—she’s only appearance, anyway, she’s only a symbol—the symbol of the spirit in her which is what one is really loving the whole time——’

‘What has happened is much more than that,’ she interrupted.

‘Oh yes, yes—I know. Death. You’re going to tell me that all this sort of thing seems rot to you now that you’ve been with death——’

‘So it does. And I’ve finished with it.’

‘Oh Lord—women,’ he groaned, burying his face deeper, as if he could hide from his unhappiness. ‘Do you suppose I haven’t been with death too, and seen it dozens of times? What do you think I was doing in the War? But women can’t take the simplest things naturally—and they can’t take the natural things simply, either. What can be more simple and natural than death? I didn’t throw away my silk handkerchiefs and leave off shaving because my friends died——’

‘Chris,’ she interrupted again, ‘you simply don’t understand. You don’t—know.’

‘I do—I know and understand everything. Why should the ones who didn’t die behave as though they had? Why should you send our happy life together to blazes because Virginia is dead? Isn’t that all the more reason for us who’re still alive to stick firmer than ever to each other? And instead you talk of divorce. Divorce? Because there’s been one tragedy there’s to be another? Catherine, don’t you, won’t you, can’t you see?’

And he lifted his head from her lap and looked at her, tears of anger, and fear, and love driven back on itself burning in his eyes; and he caught her crying.

How long had she been crying? Her face was pitiful, all wet with tears, in its frame of grizzled hair. How long had she been crying quietly up there, while he was raving, and she at intervals said sensible calm things?

At the sight of her wet face the anger and the fear died out of him, and only love was left. She couldn’t do without him. She was a poor, broken-up little thing, for all her big words about divorce and setting free. She was his wife, who couldn’t do without him—a poor, broken-up little thing....

‘I’ve cried so much,’ she said, quickly wiping her eyes, ‘that I believe I’ve got into the habit of it. I’m ashamed. I hate whimpering. But—Virginia——’

He got up on to his knees, and at last put his arms round her. ‘Oh my Catherine,’ he murmured, drawing her head on to his breast and holding it there. ‘Oh my Catherine——’

An immense desire for self-sacrifice, to fling his life at her feet, rushed upon Christopher, a passion of longing to give, give everything and ask nothing in return, to protect, to keep all that could hurt her away from her for ever.

‘Don’t cry,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to be happy. And if you can’t see that we are, I’ll see for you till your own eyes are opened again——’

‘But I do see—every time I look in the glass,’ she answered, instinctively understanding the feeling that was sweeping over him, and shrinking away from exploiting this that was being thrust upon her of the quick, uncounting generosity of youth. How would she be able to make it up to him? She couldn’t, except by loving him with utter selflessness, and then, when he found out for himself how impossible the situation was, setting him free. It was the only thing she could do. Some day he would see himself that it was the only thing.

‘Obstinate, aren’t you,’ he murmured, holding her face close against his breast, for when he was doing that it was hidden, and it hurt him too desperately as yet to look at it, it made him too desperately want to cry himself. Of course presently... when he had got more used....

‘You’ll have to grow out of that,’ he went on, ‘because we can’t both be obstinate, and have deadlocks.’

‘No, no—we won’t have deadlocks,’ said Catherine. ‘We’ll just——’

She was going to say, ‘love each other very much,’ but thought that might sound like making a claim, and stopped.

They were silent for a while, and so motionless that the rabbits began to think they weren’t there after all, and came lolloping up quite close.

Then he said very gently, ‘I’m going to take care of you, Catherine.’

And she said, her voice trembling a little, ‘Are you, Chris? I was thinking that that’s what I’m going to do to you.’

‘All right. We’ll do it to each other, then.’

And they both tried to laugh, but it was a shaky, uncertain laughter, for they were both afraid.

THE END


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