A red cigar-end, like an errant firefly, was bobbing round the far side of the lake and he made after it hopefully, only to track down Gibbie, who was scarcely worth pursuit unless it might be for information about the book trade.
“Good-night, Gibbie!”
Gibbie growled a civil reply and hurried off into the house. He told himself that Corny was more like a black beetle than it was possible for any man to be—dark, shiny, hollow and ubiquitous. Nobody was safe with Corny in the house. He was the sort of person who might almost be found hiding under the bed.
Bechstrader’s gong was still booming in the library, but in the drawing-room all the lamps had been turned out. Gibbie mixed himself a drink and stood for a moment at the garden door before going up. He heard the stable clock strike one, and thought:
“It doesn’t feel as late as this.”
His cigar prevented him from smelling the earth and the ghosts of last year’s flowers, which haunted the sleeping thickets. His trouble stood round him like a stiff tent, holding off the influence of the night and all possibility of quietude. He shook himself and finished his drink. It was time to go up. Sooner or later he would have to do it and perhaps she might be asleep.
She was not. He heard her calling as soon as he went into his dressing-room. For she had been waiting for him, lying alone in her big bed, and she wanted to re-open the whole, wretched business. But he could not face it. He had done his best for one day. Talk about it any more he could not. Any more discussion would only make him angry again. So he pretended not to hear her gentle summons.
“Gibbie!”
He wound up his watch and took out his studs.
“Gibbie!”
He sat down on the edge of his bed and began to do his accounts for the day, writing in a little note book all that he had spent, working backwards to the paper which he had bought that morning at Baker Street Station.
| Tip to Porter at Basingstoke. | 1/6 | |
| ,, ,, ,, ,, | 1/– | |
| Railway fares … |
“Gibbie!”
She would go on like that all night. He got up heavily and opened the door into her room.
“What is it, Philomena?”
“Why didn’t you come in and say good-night to me?”
“I thought you might be asleep.”
“Didn’t you hear me calling?”
He said nothing to that, for a moment, and then, bidding her good-night, he turned back towards his room.
“No, Gibbie. Wait. I want to talk.”
“Philomena … I can’t talk any more … about it … to-night.”
“I’m terribly unhappy.”
“I don’t see why you should be.”
“I don’t believe I can go.”
“Go? Where?”
“… go with him … go away with him.”
“Oh? So you mean to go away with him? I was wondering what your plans were.”
His voice, in spite of every effort, sounded bitter, and Philomena looked startled.
“Are you … angry again?”
“You must give me time to get used to the idea.”
“Probably you won’t have to get used to it. Probably I shan’t be able to go.”
“What?”
“A lot of chance I have, tied hand and foot!”
“Who is tying you?”
“Oh, not you. It’s nothing to do with you.”
She did not mean to insult him. She was thinking of her practical difficulties which would remain however compliant Gibbie might be. But her words sounded contemptuous and to him they were a turning point. He felt a new, cool anger which was far more formidable than the first explosive recoil.
“I’m going to bed now,” he announced.
“Do you realise that Ada has given notice?”
Gibbie clutched his head and stared at her.
“What on earth has that to do …”
She explained and he advised her sombrely to let Ada rip. But that just showed how far he was from understanding.
“You’ve never understood me.”
“No.”
“And you’ve never really loved me.”
“That’s a good thing perhaps, if it’s true.”
“I’m nothing to you really.”
She burst into sobs and said something inarticulate about Julian Rivaz, a name which he could not bear to hear in such a dispute.
“Philomena! Don’t!”
“I think he was the only person you’ve ever come near loving. If you’d cared for me half as much as you cared for him, I should have been a happier woman. In your heart you’re always thinking of him and always missing him, and always arguing things out with him. And as he was killed when you were twenty you’ve stayed twenty ever since. If you could only get back to that time, and before, when you were at school, I believe you wouldn’t mind if I were dead. If you could wake up one morning and find you’d dreamt it all, and that you’d never married me and never had the children, you wouldn’t feel the faintest pang of regret. You play at being a good husband, and a good father, and a hard-working publisher, but your heart isn’t in it and you don’t ever really believe in it …”
Gibbie went into his dressing-room and shut the door on her. It was impossible to argue, for there was so much truth in what she had said. It was just like her to hurl it at him after pretending to admire him for fifteen years. He sat down on his bed and finished doing his accounts. The routine of maturity, which he had so zealously imposed upon himself, had almost become second nature. The Good Man does accounts, takes out Life Policies, and knows where he stands, especially when he has incurred the responsibility of a wife and family. And Gibbie, who hated money, who yearned for the contemplative life, sat balancing his day’s expenditure like a practical business man, unaware that very few business men would have worried so much about the halfpennies.
His heart was not in it, and his real life had been at a standstill for many years. Ever since the death of Julian he had been marking time, feverishly active, but stationary. He had lost all sense of going on, of development, so that at times it seemed as though Julian, crumbling in a French cemetery, was still more alive than he.
Philomena had been right. He had loved her and the children, with a conscientious and whole-hearted energy, but there was no emotion behind it so strong as that which carried him backward to Julian and the past. His boyhood had been too happy. It had been an Idyll, a romantic dream, but it had led him nowhere and he had awakened to a drab and uninspired daylight. Yet, when sentimentalists declared in his hearing that schooldays are the happiest, he had always protested, rather from conscience than from conviction.
His halfpennies balanced, he crept wearily into bed and turned out the light. And the image of Julian bore down upon him from the past, still radiant, still mocking. He saw Julian’s face blaze for a moment against the tingling darkness, so real and so near that he was almost comforted. For this bright ghost still kept him company. He could evoke it in a moment. His memory at least had never failed him, and he never had to ask himself how Julian really looked. He had forgotten nothing.
Julian had been a very beautiful boy. At school his beauty had been a recognised and somewhat ambiguous joke. Many people had worshipped him and he took it all as a matter of course. Another face swam up from the dusty corridors of time, a pale and long-nosed face, the studious features of poor Pickup, who had been accused of standing on a hassock in chapel in order to get a better view of Julian reading the lessons. And behind him blinked the enigmatic Hilliard, who talked in his sleep, and was once heard to mutter:
“Don’t let’s talk about Blenkinsup any more. Let’s talk about Rivaz.”
Julian, in the face of these ardours, had been cold, caustic and quenching. He was a disappointment, as the more sentimental of his followers very soon discovered. But once, when Gibbie saved a House match, he had made a demonstration. He put an arm round Gibbie’s shoulders and they walked half the length of the playing field in that posture. Gibbie still felt a little faint when he thought of that blissful climax. Oh, but Philomena had been quite right!
Yet she could know nothing, no woman could ever know, the strength of those early passions. He had spoken of them sometimes and she had laughed. Or else she had been slightly resentful. She could never understand the idealism of such a relationship or the world in which it could exist; and when he tried to convey it to her, with its turbulence, crude energy, and cheerful grossness, she had always shrugged her shoulders and said that boys were disgusting little creatures, far more sentimental than girls and so incredibly coarse.
“Even if you weren’t immoral yourselves,” she complained, “you seem to have done nothing but make jokes about it. Everything you say only makes me more determined to send Martin to Bedales.”
Women, thought Gibbie, as he creaked and turned in his bed, can never know anything about men, since their first care is to enslave those qualities which they cannot comprehend. They fill the world with shows and shadows and their tactics are those of the trident and the net. What chance has the bright armed gladiator against this ancient, Protean enemy? Had the Good Man ever triumphed in a battle with his wife? Was there written on the pages of history any Socratic argument which might have silenced Xantippe?
“Perhaps he beat her,” thought Gibbie, hopefully.
But he feared not. The Good Man rules by moral force alone, and if he has not got any moral force he complains to nobody but his Creator.
Philomena, in her own bed on the other side of the door, listened to the creak of his springs and wondered why he did not go to sleep. She wished that she had not broken out in that way about Julian. It was silly. Perhaps Ada would stay until August to oblige. But it would not be easy to arrange and Geraldine had been so discouraging. How will you manage? She had thought that she was managing so cleverly. At dinner she had been quite sure of success. But now that she was faced with all the obstacles it hardly seemed worth while, especially since Gibbie was so restive. It had been a great pity to mention Julian, just then, and she would not have done it if she had not lost her temper. She had thought all those things for years, but she had never actually said them. They were a grievance, she knew that: they were all part of her contention that she had married the wrong man too young. But if Gibbie were now to begin upon a long course of asking himself whether he had ever really loved her, she had only herself to blame, for she had put the idea into his head. One should never say those things. It was like opening a door without knowing where it led. Perhaps she had better abandon the whole scheme before they got themselves into worse difficulties. It was very hard on her, and poor Hugo would be broken-hearted. She only hoped that the children would realise some day what sacrifices she had made for them, or conversely that they would never know, because the world, surely, was growing saner and their lives might be different. She did not know what to do about Ada. She wished she could get to sleep. Gibbie’s springs creaked again and she turned on the reading lamp by her bed as she petulantly searched for an aspirin.
Gibbie saw the narrow crack of light under her door, and realised that she too was awake and restless. He tried to picture her thoughts in that amorphous thing which she called her mind, and he felt suddenly a great longing to go to her, to lose himself, to hide from his bitter meditations. She could offer him the refuge of her woman’s world. For real life, the male life which he had lived as a boy becomes with manhood too vast and bleak a thing. Humanity cannot survive without some subterfuge, some shelter from the winds that scourge it. If women were like men, he reflected, if they were not enervating and consoling, the whole race would be liable to perish from too much spiritual exposure. Only the epicene require candour between the sexes. That is why the Elizabethans, and indeed all the poets of the more virile ages of the world, were so much taken up by the idea of woman’s falseness, her ‘jestings and protestings, crossed words and oaths.’ Really they liked false women. They needed them. They could not have endured anything else. They wanted some respite from the intolerable burden of their manhood.
Yet it was her falseness which kept him from her. Their conversation before dinner came back to him and he grew certain that she had set a trap for him. She thought him a fool. It’s nothing to do with you. She did not even trouble to hide her contempt for him. His resentment stood firm against her and in the flood of doubt and misery which was sweeping him away, he began to cling to that resentment, to brace himself against its stability. He resisted the impulse to go to her, and presently he turned on his own light, meaning to read himself to sleep. But he had not got further than three pages when a terrific bumping and thumping broke upon his ear. An extraordinary noise was going on somewhere in the house. At first he thought it was a slight earthquake, but the sound came nearer, as if someone was throwing something violently downstairs. Philomena was tapping at his door. She put her head in.
“Gibbie? Are you awake? What is that noise?”
He sat up in bed and suggested that it was the servants.
“Do you realise the time? It’s nearly three o’clock. Somebody is throwing something downstairs. I believe it’s a burglar.”
“No burglar would make a noise like that.”
“Oh Gibbie! Do go and see.”
“You always think it’s a burglar and it never is.”
A still louder crash was too much for his curiosity. He climbed out of bed and put on his dressing gown.
“I’ll just look out on the landing and see if everything is all right,” he said.
Philomena came to the door of her bedroom and stood there listening while he hurried down towards the bumping.