Saint's Progress
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And, painfully, for his leg was hurting him, he walked away.
Leila was only too well aware of a truth that feelings are no less real, poignant, and important to those outside morality’s ring fence than to those within. Her feelings were, indeed, probably even more real and poignant, just as a wild fruit’s flavour is sharper than that of the tame product. Opinion – she knew – would say, that having wilfully chosen a position outside morality she had not half the case for brokenheartedness she would have had if Fort had been her husband: Opinion – she knew – would say she had no claim on him, and the sooner an illegal tie was broken, the better! But she felt fully as wretched as if she had been married. She had not wanted to be outside morality; never in her life wanted to be that. She was like those who by confession shed their sins and start again with a clear conscience. She never meant to sin, only to love, and when she was in love, nothing else mattered for the moment. But, though a gambler, she had always so far paid up. Only, this time the stakes were the heaviest a woman can put down. It was her last throw; and she knew it. So long as a woman believed in her attraction, there was hope, even when the curtain fell on a love-affair! But for Leila the lamp of belief had suddenly gone out, and when this next curtain dropped she felt that she must sit in the dark until old age made her indifferent. And between forty-four and real old age a gulf is fixed. This was the first time a man had tired of her. Why! he had been tired before he began, or so she felt. In one swift moment as of a drowning person, she saw again all the passages of their companionship, knew with certainty that it had never been a genuine flame. Shame ran, consuming, in her veins. She buried her face in the cushions. This girl had possessed his real heart all the time. With a laugh she thought: ‘I put my money on the wrong horse; I ought to have backed Edward. I could have turned that poor monk’s head. If only I had never seen Jimmy again; if I had torn his letter up, I could have made poor Edward love me!’ Ifs! What folly! Things happened as they must!
And, starting up, she began to roam the little room. Without Jimmy she would be wretched, with him she would be wretched too! ‘I can’t bear to see his face,’ she thought; ‘and I can’t live here without him! It’s really funny!’ The thought of her hospital filled her with loathing. To go there day after day with this despair eating at her heart – she simply could not. She went over her resources. She had more money than she thought; Jimmy had given her a Christmas present of five hundred pounds. She had wanted to tear up the cheque, or force him to take it back; but the realities of the previous five years had prevailed with her, and she had banked it. She was glad now. She had not to consider money. Her mind sought to escape in the past. She thought of her first husband, Ronny Fane; of their mosquito-curtained rooms in that ghastly Madras heat. Poor Ronny! What a pale, cynical young ghost started up under that name. She thought of Lynch, his horsey, matter-of-fact solidity. She had loved them both – for a time. She thought of the veldt, of Constantia, and the loom of Table Mountain under the stars; and the first sight of Jimmy, his straight look, the curve of his crisp head, the kind, fighting-schoolboy frankness of his face. Even now, after all those months of their companionship, that long-ago evening at grape harvest, when she sang to him under the scented creepers, was the memory of him most charged with real feeling. That one evening at any rate he had longed for her, eleven: years ago, when she was in her prime. She could have held her own then; Noel would have come in vain. To think that this girl had still fifteen years before she would be even in her prime. Fifteen years of witchery; and then another ten before she was on the shelf. Why! if Noel married Jimmy, he would be an old man doting on her still, by the time she had reached this fatal age of forty-four: She felt as if she must scream, and; stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth, turned out the light. Darkness cooled her, a little. She pulled aside the curtains, and let in the moon light. Jimmy and that girl were out in it some where, seeking each other, if not in body, then in thought. And soon, somehow, somewhere, they would come together – come together because Fate meant them to! Fate which had given her young cousin a likeness to herself; placed her, too, in just such a hopeless position as appealed to Jimmy, and gave him a chance against younger men. She saw it with bitter surety. Good gamblers cut their losses! Yes, and proud women did not keep unwilling lovers! If she had even an outside chance, she would trail her pride, drag it through the mud, through thorns! But she had not. And she clenched her fist, and struck out at the night, as though at the face of that Fate which one could never reach – impalpable, remorseless, surrounding Fate with its faint mocking smile, devoid of all human warmth. Nothing could set back the clock, and give her what this girl had. Time had “done her in,” as it “did in” every woman, one by one. And she saw herself going down the years, powdering a little more, painting a little more, touching up her hair, till it was all artifice, holding on by every little device – and all, to what end? To see his face get colder and colder, hear his voice more and more constrained to gentleness; and know that underneath, aversion was growing with the thought ‘You are keeping me from life, and love!’ till one evening, in sheer nerve-break, she would say or do some fearful thing, and he would come no more. ‘No, Jimmy!’ she thought; ‘find her, and stay with her. You’re not worth all that!’ And puffing to the curtains, as though with that gesture she could shut out her creeping fate, she turned up the light and sat down at her writing table. She stayed some minutes motionless, her chin resting on her hands, the dark silk fallen down from her arms. A little mirror, framed in curiously carved ivory, picked up by her in an Indian bazaar twenty-five years ago, hung on a level with her face and gave that face back to her. ‘I’m not ugly,’ she thought passionately, ‘I’m not. I still have some looks left. If only that girl hadn’t come. And it was all my doing. Oh, what made me write to both of them, Edward and Jimmy?’ She turned the mirror aside, and took up a pen.
“MY DEAR JIMMY,” she wrote: “It will be better for us both if you take a holiday from here. Don’t come again till I write for you. I’m sorry I made you so much disturbance to-night. Have a good time, and a good rest; and don’t worry. Your – ”
So far she had written when a tear dropped on the page, and she had to tear it up and begin again. This time she wrote to the end – “Your Leila.” ‘I must post it now,’ she thought, ‘or he may not get it before to-morrow evening. I couldn’t go through with this again.’ She hurried out with it and slipped it in a pillar box. The night smelled of flowers; and, hastening back, she lay down, and stayed awake for hours, tossing, and staring at the dark.
XIII
1
Leila had pluck, but little patience. Her one thought was to get away and she at once began settling up her affairs and getting a permit to return to South Africa. The excitements of purchase and preparation were as good an anodyne as she could have taken. The perils of the sea were at full just then, and the prospect of danger gave her a sort of pleasure. ‘If I go down,’ she thought, ‘all the better; brisk, instead of long and dreary.’ But when she had the permit and her cabin was booked, the irrevocability of her step came to her with full force. Should she see him again or no? Her boat started in three days, and she must decide. If in compunction he were to be affectionate, she knew she would never keep to her decision, and then the horror would begin again, till again she was forced to this same action. She let the hours go and go till the very day before, when the ache to see him and the dread of it had become so unbearable that she could not keep quiet. Late that afternoon – everything, to the last label, ready – she went out, still undecided. An itch to turn the dagger in her wound, to know what had become of Noel, took her to Edward’s house. Almost unconsciously she had put on her prettiest frock, and spent an hour before the glass. A feverishness of soul, more than of body, which had hung about her ever since that night, gave her colour. She looked her prettiest; and she bought a gardenia at a shop in Baker Street and fastened it in her dress. Reaching the old Square, she was astonished to see a board up with the words: “To let,” though the house still looked inhabited. She rang, and was shown into the drawing-room. She had only twice been in this house before; and for some reason, perhaps because of her own unhappiness, the old, rather shabby room struck her as pathetic, as if inhabited by the past. ‘I wonder what his wife was like,’ she thought: And then she saw, hanging against a strip of black velvet on the wall, that faded colour sketch of the slender young woman leaning forward, with her hands crossed in her lap. The colouring was lavender and old ivory, with faint touches of rose. The eyes, so living, were a little like Gratian’s; the whole face delicate, eager, good. ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘he must have loved you very much. To say good-bye must have been hard.’ She was still standing before it when Pierson came in.
“That’s a dear face, Edward. I’ve come to say good-bye. I’m leaving for South Africa to-morrow.” And, as her hand touched his, she thought: ‘I must have been mad to think I could ever have made him love me.’
“Are you – are you leaving him?”
Leila nodded:
“That’s very brave, and wonderful.”
“Oh! no. Needs must when the devil drives – that’s all. I don’t give up happiness of my own accord. That’s not within a hundred miles of the truth. What I shall become, I don’t know, but nothing better, you may be sure. I give up because I can’t keep, and you know why. Where is Noel?”
“Down at the sea, with George and Gratian.”
He was looking at her in wonder; and the pained, puzzled expression on his face angered her.
“I see the house is to let. Who’d have thought a child like that could root up two fossils like us? Never mind, Edward, there’s the same blood in us. We’ll keep our ends up in our own ways. Where are you going?”
“They’ll give me a chaplaincy in the East, I think.”
For a wild moment Leila thought: ‘Shall I offer to go with him – the two lost dogs together?’
“What would have happened, Edward, if you had proposed to me that May week, when we were – a little bit in love? Which would it have been, worst for, you or me?”
“You wouldn’t have taken me, Leila.”
“Oh, one never knows. But you’d never have been a priest then, and you’d never have become a saint.”
“Don’t use that silly word. If you knew – ”
“I do; I can see that you’ve been half burned alive; half burned and half buried! Well, you have your reward, whatever it is, and I mine. Good-bye, Edward!” She took his hand. “You might give me your blessing; I want it.”
Pierson put his other hand on her shoulder and, bending forward, kissed her forehead.
The tears rushed up in Leila’s eyes. “Ah me!” she said, “it’s a sad world!” And wiping the quivering off her lips with the back of her gloved hand, she went quickly past him to the door. She looked back from there. He had not stirred, but his lips were moving. ‘He’s praying for me!’ she thought. ‘How funny!’
2
The moment she was outside, she forgot him; the dreadful ache for Fort seemed to have been whipped up within her, as if that figure of lifelong repression had infuriated the love of life and pleasure in her. She must and would see Jimmy again, if she had to wait and seek for him all night! It was nearly seven, he would surely have finished at the War Office; he might be at his Club or at his rooms. She made for the latter.
The little street near Buckingham Gate, where no wag had chalked “Peace” on the doors for nearly a year now, had an arid look after a hot day’s sun. The hair-dresser’s shop below his rooms was still open, and the private door ajar: ‘I won’t ring,’ she thought; ‘I’ll go straight up.’ While she was mounting the two flights of stairs, she stopped twice, breathless, from a pain in her side. She often had that pain now, as if the longing in her heart strained it physically. On the modest landing at the top, outside his rooms, she waited, leaning against the wall, which was covered with a red paper. A window at the back was open and the confused sound of singing came in – a chorus “Vive-la, vive-la, vive-la ve. Vive la compagnie.” So it came to her. ‘O God!’ she thought: ‘Let him be in, let him be nice to me. It’s the last time.’ And, sick from anxiety, she opened the door. He was in – lying on a wicker-couch against the wall in the far corner, with his arms crossed behind his head, and a pipe in his mouth; his eyes were closed, and he neither moved, nor opened them, perhaps supposing her to be the servant. Noiseless as a cat, Leila crossed the room till she stood above him. And waiting for him to come out of that defiant lethargy, she took her fill of his thin, bony face, healthy and hollow at the same time. With teeth clenched on the pipe it had a look of hard resistance, as of a man with his head back, his arms pinioned to his sides, stiffened against some creature, clinging and climbing and trying to drag him down. The pipe was alive, and dribbled smoke; and his leg, the injured one, wriggled restlessly, as if worrying him; but the rest of him was as utterly and obstinately still as though he were asleep. His hair grew thick and crisp, not a thread of grey in it, the teeth which held the pipe glinted white and strong. His face was young; so much younger than hers. Why did she love it – the face of a man who couldn’t love her? For a second she felt as if she could seize the cushion which had slipped down off the couch, and smother him as he lay there, refusing, so it seemed to her, to come to consciousness. Love despised! Humiliation! She nearly turned and stole away. Then through the door, left open, behind her, the sound of that chorus: “Vive-la, vive-la, vive-la ve!” came in and jolted her nerves unbearably. Tearing the gardenia from her breast, she flung it on to his upturned face.
“Jimmy!”
Fort struggled up, and stared at her. His face was comic from bewilderment, and she broke into a little nervous laugh.
“You weren’t dreaming of me, dear Jimmy, that’s certain. In what garden were you wandering?”
“Leila! You! How – how jolly!”
“How – how jolly! I wanted to see you, so I came. And I have seen you, as you are, when you aren’t with me. I shall remember it; it was good for me – awfully good for me.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Far, far away, my dear. Put my gardenia in, your buttonhole. Stop, I’ll pin it in. Have you had a good rest all this week? Do you like my dress? It’s new. You wouldn’t have noticed it, would you?”
“I should have noticed. I think it’s charming.
“Jimmy, I believe that nothing – nothing will ever shake your chivalry.”
“Chivalry? I have none.”
“I am going to shut the door, do you mind?” But he went to the door himself, shut it, and came back to her. Leila looked up at him.
“Jimmy, if ever you loved me a little bit, be nice to me today. And if I say things – if I’m bitter – don’t mind; don’t notice it. Promise!”
“I promise.”
She took off her hat and sat leaning against him on the couch, so that she could not see his face. And with his arm round her, she let herself go, deep into the waters of illusion; down-down, trying to forget there was a surface to which she must return; like a little girl she played that game of make-believe. ‘He loves me-he loves me – he loves me!’ To lose herself like that for, just an hour, only an hour; she felt that she would give the rest of the time vouchsafed to her; give it all and willingly. Her hand clasped his against her heart, she turned her face backward, up to his, closing her eyes so as still not to see his face; the scent of the gardenia in his coat hurt her, so sweet and strong it was.
3
When with her hat on she stood ready to go, it was getting dark. She had come out of her dream now, was playing at make-believe no more. And she stood with a stony smile, in the half-dark, looking between her lashes at the mortified expression on his unconscious face.
“Poor Jimmy!” she said; “I’m not going to keep you from dinner any longer. No, don’t come with me. I’m going alone; and don’t light up, for heaven’s sake.”
She put her hand on the lapel of his coat. “That flower’s gone brown at the edges. Throw it away; I can’t bear faded flowers. Nor can you. Get yourself a fresh one tomorrow.”
She pulled the flower from his buttonhole and, crushing it in her hand, held her face up.
“Well, kiss me once more; it won’t hurt you.”
For one moment her lips clung to his with all their might. She wrenched them away, felt for the handle blindly, opened the door, and, shutting it in his face, went slowly, swaying a little, down the stairs. She trailed a gloved hand along the wall, as if its solidity could help her. At the last half-landing, where a curtain hung, dividing off back premises, she stopped and listened. There wasn’t a sound. ‘If I stand here behind this curtain,’ she thought, ‘I shall see him again.’ She slipped behind the curtain, close drawn but for a little chink. It was so dark there that she could not see her own hand. She heard the door open, and his slow footsteps coming down the stairs. His feet, knees, whole figure came into sight, his face just a dim blur. He passed, smoking a cigarette. She crammed her hand against her mouth to stop herself from speaking and the crushed gardenia filled her nostrils with its cold, fragrant velvet. He was gone, the door below was shut. A wild, half-stupid longing came on her to go up again, wait till he came in, throw herself upon him, tell him she was going, beg him to keep her with him. Ah! and he would! He would look at her with that haggard pity she could not bear, and say, “Of course, Leila, of course.” No! By God, no! “I am going quietly home,” she muttered; “just quietly home! Come along, be brave; don’t be a fool! Come along!” And she went down into the street: At the entrance to the Park she saw him, fifty yards in front, dawdling along. And, as if she had been his shadow lengthened out to that far distance, she moved behind him. Slowly, always at that distance, she followed him under the plane-trees, along the Park railings, past St. James’s Palace, into Pall Mall. He went up some steps, and vanished into his Club. It was the end. She looked up at the building; a monstrous granite tomb, all dark. An emptied cab was just moving from the door. She got in. “Camelot Mansions, St. John’s Wood.” And braced against the cushions, panting, and clenching her hands, she thought: ‘Well, I’ve seen him again. Hard crust’s better than no bread. Oh, God! All finished – not a crumb, not a crumb! Vive-la, vive-la, vive-la ve. Vive-la compagnie!’
XIV
Fort had been lying there about an hour, sleeping and awake, before that visit: He had dreamed a curious and wonderfully emotionalising dream. A long grey line, in a dim light, neither of night nor morning, the whole length of the battle-front in France, charging in short drives, which carried the line a little forward, with just a tiny pause and suck-back; then on again irresistibly, on and on; and at each rush, every voice, his own among them, shouted “Hooray! the English! Hooray! the English!” The sensation of that advancing tide of dim figures in grey light, the throb and roar, the wonderful, rhythmic steady drive of it, no more to be stopped than the waves of an incoming tide, was gloriously fascinating; life was nothing, death nothing. “Hooray, the English!” In that dream, he was his country, he was every one of that long charging line, driving forward in. those great heaving pulsations, irresistible, on and on. Out of the very centre of this intoxicating dream he had been dragged by some street noise, and had closed his eyes again, in the vain hope that he might dream it on to its end. But it came no more; and lighting his pipe, he lay there wondering at its fervid, fantastic realism. Death was nothing, if his country lived and won. In waking hours he never had quite that single-hearted knowledge of himself. And what marvellously real touches got mixed into the fantastic stuff of dreams, as if something were at work to convince the dreamer in spite of himself – “Hooray!” not “Hurrah!” Just common “Hooray!” And “the English,” not the literary “British.” And then the soft flower had struck his forehead, and Leila’s voice cried: “Jimmy!”
When she left him, his thought was just a tired: ‘Well, so it’s begun again!’ What did it matter, since common loyalty and compassion cut him off from what his heart desired; and that desire was absurd, as little likely of attainment as the moon. What did it matter? If it gave her any pleasure to love him, let it go on! Yet, all the time that he was walking across under the plane trees, Noel seemed to walk in front of him, just out of reach, so that he ached with the thought that he would never catch her up, and walk beside her.
Two days later, on reaching his rooms in the evening, he found this letter on ship’s note-paper, with the Plymouth postmark —
“Fare thee well, and if for ever, Then for ever fare thee well”“Leila”He read it with a really horrible feeling, for all the world as if he had been accused of a crime and did not know whether he had committed it or not. And, trying to collect his thoughts, he took a cab and drove to her fiat. It was closed, but her address was given him; a bank in Cape Town. He had received his release. In his remorse and relief, so confusing and so poignant, he heard the driver of the cab asking where he wanted to go now. “Oh, back again!” But before they had gone a mile he corrected the address, in an impulse of which next moment he felt thoroughly ashamed. What he was doing indeed, was as indecent as if he were driving from the funeral of his wife to the boudoir of another woman. When he reached the old Square, and the words “To let” stared him in the face, he felt a curious relief, though it meant that he would not see her whom to see for ten minutes he felt he would give a year of life. Dismissing his cab, he stood debating whether to ring the bell. The sight of a maid’s face at the window decided him. Mr. Pierson was out, and the young ladies were away. He asked for Mrs. Laird’s address, and turned away, almost into the arms of Pierson himself. The greeting was stiff and strange. ‘Does he know that Leila’s gone?’ he thought. ‘If so, he must think me the most awful skunk. And am I? Am I?’ When he reached home, he sat down to write to Leila. But having stared at the paper for an hour and written these three lines —
“MY DEAR LEILA,
“I cannot express to you the feelings with which I received your letter – ”
he tore it up. Nothing would be adequate, nothing would be decent. Let the dead past bury its dead – the dead past which in his heart had never been alive! Why pretend? He had done his best to keep his end up. Why pretend?
PART IV
I
In the boarding-house, whence the Lairds had not yet removed, the old lady who knitted, sat by the fireplace, and light from the setting sun threw her shadow on the wall, moving spidery and grey, over the yellowish distemper, in time to the tune of her needles. She was a very old lady – the oldest lady in the world, Noel thought – and she knitted without stopping, without breathing, so that the girl felt inclined to scream. In the evening when George and Gratian were not in, Noel would often sit watching the needles, brooding over her as yet undecided future. And now and again the old lady would look up above her spectacles; move the corners of her lips ever so slightly, and drop her gaze again. She had pitted herself against Fate; so long as she knitted, the war could not stop – such was the conclusion Noel had come to. This old lady knitted the epic of acquiescence to the tune of her needles; it was she who kept the war going such a thin old lady! ‘If I were to hold her elbows from behind,’ the girl used to think, ‘I believe she’d die. I expect I ought to; then the war would stop. And if the war stopped, there’d be love and life again.’ Then the little silvery tune would click itself once more into her brain, and stop her thinking. In her lap this evening lay a letter from her father.