The Relentless City

One hot August afternoon a small company of bees were pollen-cleaning at Haworth, talking over, that is to say, the events of the last few months – London's little adventures and ironies. With the exception of Bertie, who was in Scotland with his wife, the party was much the same as that which had sat there just a year ago, before the departure of him and Sybil Massington to America. In fact, the only other change was that the latter was Mrs. Massington no longer. But, just as before, she sat in an extremely comfortable chair on the lawn, with Charlie by her side, and Ginger, his hat over his face, lying on the grass in front of them. As before, also, he was employed in editing the history of the world, and making parenthetical prophecies for the future.

'Oh, we are certainly getting on,' he was saying, 'and the last year, I am happy to inform you, shows great progress. The Palmerization of England is perhaps the most significant sign of the times. England, in fact, consists of men, women and Palmers, chiefly the latter. If you want to go by trains anywhere, the money you pay for your ticket goes into the pockets of Palmers. If you want – '

'You shouldn't complain, then,' interrupted Sybil.

'I don't; I like it. At least, I like most of it. But not all. I went down to Molesworth the other day. There were gangs of navvies busy on the construction of the line. That I don't mind; it was remote from the house.'

'But until Mr. Palmer bought it, you were all remote from the house, too,' said Sybil. 'You none of you ever went near it.'

'Quite true. Reverberating throbs shook the air where they were blasting the tunnel. That also I don't mind, but on the lawn, in the glades, in the garden, they were sinking bore-holes to find the extent and direction of the new coalfield.'

'Have they found coal?' asked Charlie.

'Yes; they found it in the tunnel. They found it also on the Wyfold estate, between which and the tunnel lie the house and gardens. Therefore, I suppose, in a year's time the whole place will be a colliery. I don't like that.'

'I didn't think Amelie would do that,' said Sybil. 'Nor did Bertie. I remember talking to him about it. He said he thought that his wish would have influence with her. One can't blame her, any more than one blames a truffle-hound for finding truffles. It is in the blood, that scent and search for wealth. Of course, the borings are only exploratory, but what is the point of exploring if you do not mean to utilize what you find?'

'I thought she was so fond of Molesworth,' said Sybil.

'She was at first, but she has taken an extraordinary dislike to it. She – ' and he stopped.

There was silence a moment.

'But they haven't quarrelled?' asked Sybil at length.

'Oh dear no. They are staying about together in Scotland now. But something has happened. What has happened, I suppose she knows. Bertie doesn't.'

'Since when was this?' asked Charlie.

'About six weeks ago, towards the middle of July – and quite suddenly. Bertie says she had been lunching with her father one day, to talk over the railway matters, and when she came back she was quite a different person. Quite polite, you understand, quite courteous and considerate, but as far away as the Antipodes.'

Sybil got out of her chair with a sudden quick movement.

'Mrs. Emsworth,' she said.

'But there was nothing to know,' said Ginger. 'There were no revelations possible, because there was nothing to reveal.'

'Mrs. Emsworth,' said Sybil again emphatically. 'I remember seeing her about that time, and she told me that Amelie had been to call on her. She said she had been rather prim, rather priggish, and in that connection made remarks about the refining influence of married life. I asked what she meant, and she said that Bertie had cut her, dropped her. She was rather incisive over it, and tried to laugh about it. But she didn't like it, all the same. I can recommend her remarks about Puritans to the attention of – of Puritans.'

Ginger sat up.

'Amelie's an awfully good sort,' he said – 'and so is Bertie. But to dine with them as I did just before they went North was like dining with a piece of ice at one end of the table, and a lump of snow at the other. Now, what has happened? I reconstruct this: that Mrs. Emsworth, being annoyed with Bertie, told Amelie what friends they had been. There's a working hypothesis, anyhow.'

'But platonically,' said Charlie.

'Bertie's Platonism was – was Aristotelian in its intensity,' said Ginger. 'He once wrote a letter to her, I believe, which might have been open to misconstruction.'

'And she told Amelie about it, do you think?' asked Sybil.

'That occurs to one. There's Judy taking her Sunday walk. It's just like last year. She is coming here, and she shall give us advice.'

They called to her, but to hurry Judy when she was taking her exercise was an impossible task. However, she arrived at last, and the case was laid before her. She heard in silence, and turned to Ginger.

'Do you mind interfering?' she asked.

'No, I like it. What, then?'

'Write to Bertie. Tell him that Amelie called on Mrs. Emsworth that day.'

'Dear oracle,' observed Sybil.

Judy put down her sunshade, for here under the trees the shade was deep and the air cool.

'I hate seeing two excellent people making such a mess of their lives,' she said. 'They are both proud, they are both reticent, and neither will speak unless the other speaks first. I have a great belief in having things out. If only Amelie would pull Bertie's hair or scratch his face, and say "What are you behaving like sour milk for?" or if only he would do that to her, something must happen. But they go 011 freezing and freezing – every day the ice gets thicker. Soon it will be frozen into a solid block. That is why I advise Ginger to throw a stone at it; so to speak, without delay.'

'I don't know that Bertie will thank me,' said Ginger. 'I don't think he takes the same pleasure in being interfered with as I take in interfering.'

'Probably not. But no situation can be worse than that which at present exists. I remember I was there when she told Bertie that she had given orders to make half a dozen boring-holes for coal in the park. She announced it in the same tone as she might have announced that she had given orders for the carriage to be round at half-past two. And Bertie hardly looked up from his book, and merely said: "The diamond drill is generally used, I believe, in making bore-holes."'

'That is Bertie at his worst,' said Ginger.

'It seemed to me tolerably bad. I looked at Amelie to see how she took it. Her face was like frozen marble. But as she turned away her lip quivered a moment. It made me feel ill. Then soon afterwards I looked at Bertie. He was not reading, but staring straight in front of him. He looked as if his face was made of wood. So I say: "Stir them up at any price."'

Ginger sighed heavily.

'Vanity of vanities,' he said. 'A year ago Bertie thought that nothing would be intolerable if he had money. We most of us think the same until we have got it. Then we find that nothing, on the whole, matters less. That one sees in America. We are supposed to take our pleasures sadly. But in America they take them seriously as well. All the gold of the Indies cannot make a man gay. And all the Palmerization that is going on does not add one jot to anybody's happiness.'

'I hate it,' said Judy suddenly. 'I look on America as some awful cuttlefish. Its tentacles are reaching over the world. It grips hold of some place, and no power on earth can detach those suckers. You cannot see it coming, because it clouds the whole of the atmosphere with the thick opacity of its juice, wealth. Thus, before you know, it is there, and you are powerless. It has come to England. It laid hold first on the newline from Liverpool to Southampton. That is spreading in all directions. It is in London in every sense of the word. What woman was the central figure there this year? The Queen? Not at all. Mrs. Palmer at Seaton House. It laid hold of Worcestershire. The huge new coalfield on the Wyfold estate is theirs. Molesworth is to be a coalfield. Then there is your admirer, Sybil. Half the theatres in London belong to Mr. Bilton. And the worst of it is that, from all practical points of view, America is our benefactor. Theatres are better ventilated and better lighted. Coal will be cheaper; one will get about the country more expeditiously. Only very soon it will not be our country. That is the only drawback, and it is a purely sentimental one.'

Sybil shivered slightly.

'Charlie,' she said, 'I look upon you as my life-preserver. A tentacle touched – just touched me. The juice of wealth, as Judy says, had prevented my seeing what was coming. But one night you were ill, do you remember?' She smiled at him, the complete smile of happiness.

'Life-preserver?' said he. 'And what were you?'

Judy turned to Ginger.

'These slight connubialities are rather embarrassing,' she said. 'Will you walk with me while I finish my exercise for the day?'

Sybil laughed.

'Don't go just yet, Judy,' she said. 'Charlie and I will send you away when we want to be alone.'

Judy rose with some dignity.

'My self-respect cannot quite stand that,' she said. 'Come, Ginger. You shall walk back with me to the house, and I will hold the pen when you write to Bertie.'

'I shall put that in the postscript,' he said. 'The vials of wrath shall descend on both of us.'

The two strolled away out of the shadow of the trees into the yellow flood of sunshine that hung over the lawn. The air was very windless, and the flower-beds below the house basked in full summer luxuriance of colour. Far away in a misty hollow the town of Winchester sunned itself under a blue haze of heat, and languid, dim-sounding church bells clanged distantly. Sybil turned towards her husband.

'A year ago – just a year ago,' she said, 'we sat here like this. I always remember that day as a day of pause before I started on adventures. Oh, Charlie, on what tiny things life and happiness depend! Just as a bullet may pass within an inch of your head, and not touch you, when another inch would have killed you, so the smallest incident may turn the whole course of things. For, do you know, if I had not been in Mrs. Emsworth's room when Mr. Bilton came in, I believe I should have married him.'

'Well, then you see that had just got to happen,' said Charlie, smiling at her.

'I suppose so. Do you know I am very happy to-day.'

'Why particularly?'

'Ah, one never knows the reason for happiness. If one knows the reason, one is only pleased. Ah! there is the train coming out of the cutting. What was it we settled it said?'

'You thought "Utility"; I thought "Brutalité." They sound very much alike.'

There was a pause; the train rumbled itself away into the distance, and its diminuendo grew overscored again with the sounds of summer.

'I met Mr. Bilton again the other night,' said Sybil. 'He wished me every happiness. I felt rather inclined to send the wish back, like Bertie with Mrs. Emsworth's wedding-present. He didn't please me, somehow. I don't trust him. Charlie, he is extraordinarily like you.'

'Many thanks.'

'You old darling! Do you know, I believe it was that which made me first – first cast a favourable eye on him.'

'And what made you firmly remove that favourable eye?'

'I have told you. Then I came back to England and found you ill, and I embarked on a career of most futile diplomacy. I wanted to win you back to life, you see, without permitting or harbouring any sentiment. You proposed to die because you were bored. That seemed to me feeble, futile.'

Charlie laughed.

'It was rather. But under the same circumstances I should do the same again.'

'Ah, the same circumstances can't occur.'

He turned to her with the love-light shining brightly in his eyes.

'Let us "lean and love it over again,"' he said. 'How did it happen? What change came to you? Tell me.'

'And to you?'

'There never came a change to me. I have always loved you.'

'It was your illness first of all,' she said, 'and that made me want to help. I am very practical; the futility of your dying seemed to me so stupid. And as my handiwork, the attachment of you to life, grew, I got rather proud of it. It was like taking a plant that was lying all draggled in the mud and training it upright.'

She paused a moment.

'That grew,' she went on, 'till one night you were taken suddenly ill at Davos. I came up to see you, do you remember? And at that moment – this is the only way I can explain it – I began to become a woman. So that, if you or I could owe each other anything, dear, the debt I owe you is infinitely greater than what you owe me. I gave you perhaps a few years of life, you gave me life itself and love.'

She bent her head, took up his hand where it lay on the arm of her chair, and kissed it.

'Ah, not that, Sybil,' said he.

'Yes, just that,' she answered.

The letter which the joint wits of Judy and Ginger concocted that afternoon went northwards, and reached its destination next morning. It told Bertie merely the fact that on the day on which Amelie had lunched with her father she had been to see Mrs. Emsworth afterwards, and suggested that it would be worth while finding out, if possible, what took place there. Of late the estrangement between him and Amelie, though it had in no ways healed, had been, since they were staying in other houses, where there was less opportunity for intimacy and thus less sense of its absence, less intolerably and constantly present to his consciousness. Every now and then, as on the occasion when she told him that they were going to bore for coal, there had been bitter and stinging moments, but such were rare, and their intercourse, which was rare also, was distinguished by cool if not frigid courtesy.

On this particular morning they were leaving the house they had been staying in near Inverness, and were coming South again to visit other friends in the North of England. It was perfectly natural, therefore, that Bertie should travel some part of the way, at any rate, in a smoking-carriage, but, the train being an express, he never omitted to visit her carriage when it stopped, and inquired whether she wanted anything. Once she was thirsty, and he got her some lemonade from the refreshment-room, bought her papers, and opened for her a window which was stiff to move. These little attentions were accepted by her with the same courtesy as that with which they were offered, and he would stand on the platform chatting to her through the window, or seating himself for a few minutes in her carriage, till it was time for him to go back to his own. They lunched together in her carriage, and it was at her suggestion that at the next stopping-place he went back to the other to smoke after lunch. It was then that he opened the letters which had reached him that morning, having in the hurry of departure forgotten to do so, and found Ginger's communication.

At first his impulse was to do nothing whatever, and treat the letter as if it had never been received, and, following the dictation of his laisser aller nature, make no further effort to investigate any possible source of his domestic estrangement. In a way (the freezing process had already gone far) he had got used to his aloofness from his wife; the acuteness of it had got dulled with time, the intolerable had become bearable. He was tired with conjecturing what had happened, and the pride which at first had prevented him straightforwardly going to her and saying 'What have I done?' had become habit. Not having done so before, he could not now, and until she voluntarily told him the matter must remain in silence. Disgust, fastidiousness, and a bitter sense of having been cheated, had at first stood in her way, where pride stood in his, and she, like him, having lost her first opportunity, waited for him to be the first to speak. But as he watched through the window the giddy scudding by of the brown wind-scoured moors, his indifference began to fade, and curiosity (at first it was no more than that) took its place. Having successfully blackmailed him, had Dorothy, in order to emphasize his own weakness, told his wife that which he had already paid so much to keep secret? To have blackmailed him at all was so utterly unlike what he knew of her that he told himself he knew nothing at all, and if this conjecture was right, she became something monstrous, something portentous. He would really very much like to know if she was stupendous enough to do that.

A rather bitter smile crossed his face, and he took out of his despatch-box a small packet containing the two letters for which he had paid so highly, and a copy of the second blackmailing letter, which he had made before he delivered his cheque and the original at Bilton's office in New York. His own letter he read through again, wondering at himself. Those words of wild adoration – even now he felt a faint internal thrill at the recollection of the mood they conjured up again – were written to a woman who had done this. It seemed to him incredible that no inkling of her real nature had ever crossed his mind. It seemed impossible that he could have loved one to whom this was possible. For mere interest in a phenomenon like this he must find out what had passed between her and Amelie. It was impossible to ask Amelie, therefore he would ask her.

He wrote to her that night asking whether he might come and see her as soon as he got to town. Their northern visits were nearly at an end, and he would be passing through in about a week's time. The matter, he added, was one which might be of great importance to him and his future happiness, and no one in the world could help him but her.

The answer he got was thoroughly characteristic – characteristic, that is, of the Dorothy Emsworth whom he knew, thoroughly uncharacteristic of the Dorothy who had blackmailed and then mocked at him by telling his wife what he had paid so heavily for her not to know.

'Charmed to see you' (it ran), 'though you have behaved so very badly. Yes, perhaps I can help you. I don't know. I am rather afraid I made mischief with your wife; but she annoyed me, and I have, as you well know, the temper of Beelzebub. Really, I am very fond of Amelie, but she is not very fond of me. Deeply pathetic, but I shall get over it.

'Yours ever,'D. E.'

'P.S. – Thank you so much for the charming dressing-bag you sent me. I use it constantly. It has your crest and initials on it, so that I am constantly reminded of you. By the way, I shall give it you hot when we meet, so it is only fair you should be warned.'

Bertie read this and re-read it, and for the first time a doubt stood by him, dim and shadowy, but apparent, visible to the senses. This last letter was so like her; it threw into brighter light the unlikeness to her of the affair of the blackmail. Yet there was no other explanation the least plausible.

A week later they were both in London. The Palmers were there also, on the eve of their departure to America – Mrs. Palmer having spent August very pleasantly in about thirty different houses, her husband having spent it very profitably in one. In other words, he had remained the whole month in London, and devoted himself to the consolidation and extension of his English interests. He had been able to go ahead more completely on his own lines, and with his own rapidity, owing to the absence of other directors on their holidays, and, octopus-like, had spread his tentacles far and wide. But now affairs in America demanded his presence, and he was leaving his English business in the hands of Bilton, who appeared to him, the better he knew him, to be extraordinarily efficient. He was almost as rapid, and quite as indefatigable, as Mr. Palmer himself, and had the faculty of being able to absorb himself in one branch of his work from ten to eleven, and to pass without pause into a similar state of absorption over another. Since, then, Seaton House was open, and to open their own house just for a couple of days was unnecessary, Bertie and Amelie took up their quarters there.

Mrs. Emsworth, under Bilton's direction, was to make another American tour this autumn, and was, in fact, in London only for a day or two before she left by the same boat by which the Palmers were also going. She had made an appointment with Bertie for the afternoon of the day after his arrival in London, and since she had warned him that he might expect a hot time, he took with him, in order to equalize the temperature on both sides, the contents of the packet that lived under lock and key in his despatch-box. He had himself no wish to indulge in recrimination; as he had told her, he wanted and entreated her help, but if she was proposing to hurl, so to speak, the returned dressing-bag at his head, the letter seemed to him of the nature of a gun that wanted a great deal of silencing.

She was at home when he arrived, and he was at once shown up into the room he knew so well. The outside blinds were down to keep out the stress of the August heat, and the air was thick with the scent of flowers. Then there came the rustle of a dress on the landing outside, and she entered.

'Are you there, Bertie?' she asked. 'It is so dark one can see nothing.'

She drew up one of the blinds.

'That is better,' she said. 'Now, what do you want?' She gave him no other greeting of hand-shake, but sat down on the sofa opposite the chair where he had been sitting. At the sight of her all his pent-up anger and indignation rushed to the surface; he had not known before how vile what she had done seemed to him.

'What have I done to you that you should treat me like this?' he broke out. 'Once I gave you my heart, myself, all I was, and you laughed at me. Then – oh my God! it is too much.'

She looked at him in blank surprise.

'You got over it,' she said. 'You married somebody else. I think I behaved rather well. If I had chosen I might have made things unpleasant for you. But I am not that sort of woman.'

Bertie heard himself laugh, though he was unconscious of any amusement.

'I paid you a high price, and you cheated me,' he said.

'I paid you again. That was not enough, but you must needs tell her. That is the sort of woman you are.'

Dorothy sat up.

'Either you are mad or I,' she said. 'I think it is you. As I told you, your wife annoyed me. She was prim, priggish, Puritan. I thought it would do her good to know that once you were foolish enough to write me a letter. I wished I had kept it, I remember. I should have liked to have seen her face when I showed it her. I can't bear prigs. But you paying me, and I cheating you? If you will excuse the expression, I wish the devil you would tell me what you mean.'

Bertie leant forward.

'You are inimitable,' he said. 'I never much respected your power as an actress till to-day. But I see I was wrong. You told me you were getting rich. So rich, perhaps, that ten thousand pounds for a forgery, and then five thousand more, escape your memory.'

He got up; the mere statement of what she had done, now that he was face to face with her, infuriated him to a sort of madness of rage.

'If you will excuse the expression, you' devil,' he said.

He came a step nearer, and saw her shrink from him, and look round as if to see where the bell was.

'No, no; I am not going to touch you,' he said. 'You needn't be frightened.'

He took from his pocket the letters, and unfolded them.

'Do you remember this, and this?' he said. 'And this, a copy of the instructions you gave? All that I think I could have forgiven you. But on the top of it, you tell Amelie. By your own confession you tell her that, and anything more, I suppose, that occurred to you. No doubt you told her that you had gratified my passion for you. That is the only thing that can account for the change that came over her from the time she saw you.'

Dorothy's frightened look had passed completely off.

'Give me those, Bertie,' she said quietly. 'Before God, I swear to give you them back. You can trust me. I don't use that name unless I mean it.'

His anger had so transported him that his errand to her had been forgotten. He had come to ask for her help, to learn anyhow, if she would tell him, exactly what she had said to Amelie. But the sight of her had somehow driven him to frenzy, to a pitch of passionate anger which he had not known he was capable of. But her words, the quietness of them, the sobriety with which she spoke, sobered him. There was something, too, in her tone that convinced him. So in silence he handed them all to her.