The two girls in the camp beds were stirring, awakened by the church bells. Tossing off their blankets they climbed in at the staircase window and scampered up to get their bathing things. It was the moment in the whole day which they liked best, for they could generally count upon getting the pool to themselves.
“And after breakfast,” said Solange, as she tied on her cap, “directly after breakfast, I must get after my poor father, or he’ll slip away without giving me an opportunity. This is probably the turning point of my life. The field-marshal’s baton is going to be taken out of the knapsack.”
“How is your spot?” asked Marianne.
Solange looked carefully in the glass and said that perhaps it was not going to come to anything after all. And then she began to arrange her cap at a more becoming angle.
“You needn’t bother to do that,” Marianne told her. “There won’t be anybody else in the pool.”
“Oh, but there is. I saw somebody going out as we passed the staircase window.”
“Oh, bother! Never mind. It’s probably only Mr. Usher.”
Quite so, thought Solange, as she gave a last tug to her cap. And since Mr. Usher was the most important person in the house one might as well look as decent as possible. Anyone but Marianne would have guessed as much from all this cap-tugging.
It was Ford Usher. He was swimming up and down with a sullen energy and even before breakfast he had the air of a man who is putting in time because his business is at a standstill. His furious strokes sent ripples up on to the grass and the rose petals which had fallen in the night went sailing about like little boats. But his greeting to the girls was amiable enough and he offered to blow up the rubber horse for them. It was a long time since any man staying in the house had been equal to that job.
“Won’t it give you pneumonia?” asked Marianne, as she watched him puffing.
Ford shook his head, not wishing to waste breath on an answer.
“Could it give a person pneumonia?” asked Solange in surprise.
“Some doctor who was staying here once said it could,” answered Marianne. “So grandmamma said that the under-gardener had better always do it.”
Ford took the horse away from his lips in order that he might comment on this. But in time he caught the glint in Marianne’s eye, and saw that no comment was needed. Instead, he said pleasantly:
“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.”
Solange and Marianne, who had not heard this witticism since they left the nursery, both dived to the bottom of the lake in mirthful embarrassment.
“Nice kids,” thought Ford.
The head of Solange bobbed up again and she asked him abruptly if he knew Dr. Eckhardt of Freiburg.
“Why, yes,” said Ford, in some surprise. “He came up to the Guthrie last time he was in London. Do you know him?”
“No. But I want to. I want to go and work under him. Because he’s the best toxicologist in the world.”
“He is,” agreed Ford. “But what do you know about it?”
“Nothing,” said Solange hastily.
She dived again, but Marianne, who was floating and listening, explained:
“She wants to be a toxicologist. But she’s got no money.”
Ford was even more surprised. Seeing her dressed in Marianne’s clothes, and knowing her to be the daughter of Sir Adrian Upward, he had imagined that she must be rich. When she came up again he looked at her with greater interest.
“There are ways and means, you know,” he said.
She had them all at her fingers’ ends; the endowments, and the travelling scholarships, but they were for people with degrees. She had no certificates. For the most part she was self-taught, though she had seized on every opportunity that came her way. But without a degree in science she could not even work at the Guthrie Institute.
“I don’t know about that,” said Ford. “Come up one day and see my department, won’t you? And we could talk it over, perhaps.”
Solange grew pink with pleasure and hoped that Marianne would think it was all because she was going to get a close view of culex pseudopictus.
They sat for a long time on the steps of the diving scaffold. Ford was interested and amused, and as he talked he thought how nice it would be to get back to the Guthrie Institute. For so many weeks it had been spoilt for him, ever since Laura came in one day, and peered at his test tubes, he had worked with one eye on the door. Just as, long ago, he used to sit in his attic at Hampstead with his books in front of him and listen for her foot on the stairs. He would think of her, and then try not to think of her, until body and soul were locked together in a kind of desperate inertia, and his mind began to run upon violent remedies. He could not possibly go on like this. He must put an end to it. He had come to put an end to it, but whenever he tried to bring this necessity before her she would begin to talk about Bechstrader.
“We must be going,” said Marianne, “because the people will be coming out of church, and they take the footpath past this pool to get to the village. It’s the quickest way and everybody uses it for early Service. Grandmamma doesn’t like us to be bathing too blatantly on Sunday.”
Ford climbed reluctantly on to the bank and betook himself into the house. While he was shaving he watched, from his window, a long line of people climb over a stile and go streaming in single file on a path across an uncut hayfield. This communal life of the countryside was a new thing to him, for he had spent his time either in towns or in outlandish places where he encamped as a stranger. He had no roots anywhere. Presently he saw Lady Geraldine coming across the lawn and reflected that she had just been kneeling at the altar on a perfect equality with the yokels in the field. Yet they would touch their hats to her once they were out of church and both gestures were traditional rather than reasonable. And he felt that Laura’s position was immensely strengthened by this mysterious background of tradition. He ought never to have come to Syranwood. He should have sought her out in London and forced the issue there, where they were upon common ground. In London he would have known what to say to her. But in this place she could always escape him by suddenly identifying herself with all those rooted conventions and assumptions of a rural community, and he would find himself, as he irritably put it, up against the whole bag of tricks.
That he had once prevailed was of little significance, for then she had been, not at Syranwood, but on Hampstead Heath. Otherwise it could never have happened, and it seemed to him sometimes as if her whole policy, in bringing him down to the country, was to make him understand this. If he were to stay much longer he would begin to doubt if it had happened at all. His memory of that final episode had always been curiously uncertain. No clear picture came back to him, only the knowledge that he had been quite mad about her and that his passion had ended in a delirium from which he had emerged unsatisfied. Perhaps they were both too young and inexperienced, and he had been in too much of a hurry, afraid that she might escape him. He remembered his desire and he supposed that he had got what he wanted, but the achievement had eluded him.
But she must know. She must remember. And with that memory in her mind she must either hate him or want him back. Unless, and this suspicion occasionally crossed his mind, she simply wanted to punish him for a humiliation which she had never forgiven. In which case he was playing into her hands, writhing and plunging like a hooked fish while she mocked him with gentle advice. A violent spasm of rage shook him. His hands trembled and he cut his chin, which bled profusely.
“I can’t even shave in this damned place,” he thought. “In monsoons, yes. I’m O.K. in a monsoon. Take more than a monsoon to start me hacking myself about. But here! I shall cut my throat next if I’m not careful. Now I’ve made a mess of the towel. Oh well, serve ’em right.”
When he had staunched the cut and changed his collar he went back to his post of observation by the window. Laura was on the lawn now, talking to Mrs. Comstock, the Rector’s wife. They carried Prayer Books in their hands and their faces were devoutly pensive. He could hardly believe his eyes. Though he was himself an agnostic, he had a puzzled respect for believers, especially if they were women. She had been taking the Sacrament, and only the God to whom she knelt could know what to make of it. But perhaps she was not as wicked as she seemed. Perhaps she did not mean to be so cruel. Even if she loved him as much as she said she did, there might still be some excuse for her ambiguities. For, after all, he was asking a great deal. She would have to give up ‘all this’ for him and his £500 a year. Her courage might well fail her, as his did when he seriously thought about it. £500 a year was probably not enough, and he would not have blamed her for saying so. But that was the one thing which she could never be induced to say.
Presently she looked up and caught sight of him at his window. And her smile, as she waved to him, was friendliness itself. He could not keep away from her. He went down meekly to join her and they strolled about the garden, stopping to look at the withered, untidy mass that had been night stocks the evening before. His pain and bewilderment made his face look a little more wooden than usual, but only his mother would have noticed it.
Laura still held her Prayer Book, but he averted his eyes from it, as if it was a talisman which she was using against him. And it was. For he could not ask her if she remembered Hampstead Heath while she brandished it in his face. So he listened in dumb rebellion while she talked about the little old chapel on the downs which was to be restored with the money collected for the Ullmer War Memorial, and of the windows to Julian and Charles which her mother was giving, and how she would like to show him the designs. She was very gentle, and very much wrapped up, for the moment, in her family. All through the languors of a fully choral Celebration she had been pondering upon their mournful case and she wanted to make him understand that it was as hard for her as it was for him.
“We’ll go up to the chapel this afternoon,” she said. “It’s a lovely walk.”
Ford jerked his head despairingly and said that a lovely walk would be of no use to him.
“Ford! You’re not making it easy …”
“I didn’t come down here to go walks. I came to talk to you. I must know what you want to do.”
“Dear Ford, I’ve told you. I can’t do what you want.”
“Why not?”
She looked down regretfully at her Prayer Book.
“Because of Alec,” she murmured.
“You don’t love him.”
“He’s my husband.”
Ford picked a rose and began savagely to tear the petals off. The gesture annoyed her and she took it away from him, saying:
“Don’t.”
“What do you mean? He’s your husband. If you mean the vows you made in church, well, you’ve broken them already. You promised to love him and you don’t. You did it against your will. You told me so yourself. Even church people don’t call that a marriage. Is it religion that’s worrying you?”
With a Prayer Book in her hand she could easily have said that it was. But it was not true. The discipline of her church had never troubled her and she always felt that God understood if nobody else did.
“No,” she said. “It’s something deeper than that.”
“There’s always one thing that I want to say to you,” pursued Ford, looking anywhere but at the Prayer Book, “but I don’t know how to say it. You’ll be angry. It’s this. Doesn’t it make any difference that you … that you belonged to me first?”
“Don’t, Ford. Don’t speak of that.”
“But I must. It makes all the difference. You oughtn’t to have married him. You ought to have married me. And now it’s all cleared up between us you can set it right. You can leave him and come to me and I’ll marry you as soon as you’re free. He’ll divorce you, I suppose? Only there is this. We’d have to live on £500 a year. Is it that that you can’t face? Do you think £500 a year enough?”
She did not answer because they had reached the flagged path under the house and she could see Corny’s head bobbing behind the curtain of a first-floor room. Probably there were others watching them. And she thought that Corny might have heard the last sentence about £500 a year. With a small pressure on Ford’s arm she enjoined caution.
“I suppose,” she said, speaking to Corny’s curtain, “that £500 wouldn’t be enough to go to Yeshenku again. How soon do you want to go?”
“As soon as possible,” said Ford, with a scowl up at the window. “We’re held up till we can get more specimens.”
“Because of the zygotes you can’t trace? But where ought they to be, Ford? I mean, where did you expect to find them?”
“In the midgut,” said Ford.
“Of the mosquito?”
“Naturally,” said Ford. “If it was our own midguts we wouldn’t have to go and look for them in Yeshenku.”
Corny, sure that this conversation might be openly overheard, poked his head out of the window and wished them a good-morning. He said that Aggie had a temperature.
“In the walls of the stomach,” particularised Ford.
“But you find sporonts in the salivary glands?”
“Never in a mosquito we’ve infected ourselves.”
“Very odd. But they must pass it on somehow. Perhaps it comes out in a second generation. In their eggs or something.”
“Oh, that’s impossible …” began Ford. “At least … it’s so unlikely that we’ve never considered it.”
“But why shouldn’t it?”
He stood still and pondered.
“Because it never happens with any form of the malaria parasite. Anophelines …”
“But this isn’t a malaria parasite. You said that in many ways its history differs …”
“I know. And that’s why we haven’t sufficiently … have you got a telephone?”
It seemed as if she was never going to get him away from the house again.
“I’d like to get on to Macdonald, my assistant at the Guthrie. We dissected some specimens yesterday and he mayn’t have thrown away the carcasses. It’s just possible. It’s worth looking. He’ll be there. He lives at the Guthrie.”
“Telephone after breakfast,” suggested Laura.
“But I ought to get on to him at once. He may throw away those carcasses.”
“And if he hasn’t?”
“Then I must take the first train back …”
As soon as he had finished his business here, he was going to say. He looked quickly and questioningly at Laura, and saw that she was biting her lip. His mind came back, refreshed, to the business in hand. He must settle it or he would never get back to his zygotes. And he walked her briskly away from the house to the bottom of the garden.
“It will be breakfast in five minutes,” he said, “and you haven’t told me what you are going to do.”
“But I have told you, Ford. I can’t come with you. It’s impossible.”
“Because I’m too poor?”
“No. Not that. I’d willingly share poverty with you. But I’ve married Alec. I oughtn’t to have, but it’s done. And I’m bound to … to give him value for his money.”
Ford gave a short laugh.
“That’s good! You give him value for his money. What do you give him, I’d like to know? He looks half starved. Value! He has to work twenty hours a day for you, and a lot of fun he must get in the other four!”
“All successful barristers overwork …”
“You think you give him value? You call yourself a good wife? When you go about complaining that you’re not happy and you oughtn’t to have married him? What kind of a wife do you call yourself? You’re worse than a kept woman. You steal everything. You take everything and give nothing.”
“And when I did … when I did … you threw it back in my face.”
“But I can tell you this. It’s not good enough for me.”
“You shouldn’t have let me go that first time. It was all your fault.”
“Now I’ve got my answer and I know where I am. You just want to keep me hanging round. It’s not good enough. You ask me down here …”
“To meet Walter Bechstrader …”
“And then you come at me with a Prayer Book and a lot of hysterical nonsense about loyalty and friendship being all that matters …”
“So they are.”
“You’re not loyal to him. You’re not loyal to me. He keeps you on velvet, and kills himself to do it, and what do you give him? A privilege that you won’t give to me because you say it’s not worth anything. If it’s worth so little why does he have to pay so much for it? If it’s worth such a lot, you’re lying when you tell me that I have the best you can give. You’re cheating both of us.”
“Because I’ve been cheated,” said Laura in a low voice.
“You?”
She did not know how to explain, or tell him that he was being unfair, and that she really had more desire to do right than he supposed. She had principles but they never seemed to help her. She knew, only too clearly, what she ought to be, but she could never make up her mind what she ought to do. It had been a mistake to marry Alec. As his wife she could never be what she ought. But her conscience rose up against any attempt to right that mistake.
“It’s quite true,” she thought bitterly. “I’m not a good wife to him. I’ll try to do better.”
But how? Well, to begin with, she would dismiss Ford.
“Who’s been cheating you?” he was asking.
“Nobody has. But you see, Ford, I’m not, as you say, a good wife to Alec, because I can’t be. Because he doesn’t call out the … the strength in me that I might have had. But I could have been a good wife to you.”
“Could you? Then …”
“Once. But not now. Don’t you see? That’s the point. I’ve changed. I’ve gone down hill. I think we’ve both changed. You’re harder and more selfish and more worldly than you used to be. You don’t really want the risk of going off with me. And if you lost your post at the Guthrie through it, I think you’d hate me. You want me so much that you’ve worked yourself up into thinking you’d be equal to it, but very soon you’ll be glad that you escaped. You don’t really want me for a wife now. If I had consented to become your mistress again, without leaving Alec, you would have been perfectly happy. We could once have given something better to each other. When we were younger, and had more faith. But not now, after our lives have grown apart for so long. I had so much courage then, and I haven’t got it now. The same thing which made me go to work for your mother might have strengthened me to make our marriage a success, in spite of our being poor, and divided by great differences of temperament. But anything I tried to do for you now would be a sham. It would only end in disaster. I do love you, but not as I did once, and we can’t put back the clock. I think it would be best if we gave each other up, absolutely and for ever. You must go back to your work and try to remember that if you had married me you might never have gone to Yeshenku.”
“Yes I should,” said Ford obstinately. “I’d have married you. And I’d have gone there somehow or other. You’d have backed me up. Then you would. We’d have done it all.”
“Oh Ford … Ford …”
“If you hadn’t married him.”
“If you hadn’t turned back, that time you came for me. Oh Ford … why did you? You weren’t brave enough.”
It was just like her, he reflected, to fix the ultimate blame on to him. And then he was overwhelmed by the knowledge that he was losing her.
“I can’t, Laura. I can’t go. I was wrong to be so angry. I love you. I can’t live without you. If you won’t come with me, can’t you, couldn’t you …”
“No, Ford, no!”
“But if you love me …”
“It wouldn’t be right,” said Laura, through her tears. “We must do what we think is right. You’d better go away at once.”
“I wonder you don’t tell me I ought to stay and make friends with Bechstrader.”
“You certainly ought. But that’s asking rather much, I suppose.”
“A very good stalking horse … your Mister Bechstrader …”
“Don’t be so cruel.”
He could not be just to her. He was suffering too much. And when they got close to the house he turned on his heel and went indoors.
Quite a lot of people had come down and were waiting about for some impulse to go into breakfast. Corny was in the garden, picking off dead heads, a thing he always assiduously did in the country. He knew exactly where Geraldine kept her scissors and gardening gloves, and he had appropriated both so that Hugo, also intent upon doing the right thing in the country, was obliged either to stand and watch him or tear his fingers upon the thorns. Laura lingered beside them to ask if anyone had heard queer noises in the night. They had and Corny knew what it was all about. He had been looking out of his door when Geraldine brought Aggie upstairs again. And he gave them an account which alarmed Hugo, who was once more alertly on duty and braced by a night spent in solitude if not in sleep. Aggie must never be allowed to leave the house without having that play read to her, and if she had departed in the middle of the night he would only have had himself to blame. He must exert himself and atone for yesterday’s shortcomings.
Laura laughed and said that Aggie seldom stayed out a full week-end nowadays. She went upstairs to take off her hat, for she was not one of those who can fling down their headgear in the hall without looking in the glass. That Titian hair of hers took a good deal of time and she had begun to grow it again.
Before going downstairs to breakfast she looked into Alec’s room with some idea of beginning immediately to be a better wife. She found him still dozing, for he had brought down a lot of work and had sat up half the night over it. His early tea was already cold. Laura perched on the bottom of his bed and told him to wake up, whereat he thrust a yellow and wizened face over the sheets to blink at her, and yawned tremendously, showing all the beautiful gold fillings in his back teeth. In some surprise he said that she was up very early.
“I’ve been to church,” she said.
She looked down at her Prayer Book and at Ford’s rose, which she still held in her hand.
“Um, yes.”
He poured himself out a cup of tea and sipped it. Laura had been to church. That meant that his house would very soon be rid of microgametes and macrogametes. Ford would vanish from their lives. He would be dismissed, after a certain amount of melancholy discussion. Laura always went to church at the penultimate stage of these affairs. She was a good woman. Alec was quite sure about that. A good woman but a silly one. Many of his friends had wives who were quite as silly and not good at all. It was silly of her to ask the fella to meet Bechstrader when the fella was in love with her. He stirred his tepid brew and nodded.
Laura suggested ringing for more and hotter tea. It was the sort of thing that a good wife should do.
“Oh it’ll do,” he said. “It’s my own fault if it’s cold. I did wake up when they brought it in, but I went to sleep again.”
She put the rose and Prayer Book on the counterpane and felt the teapot.
“Shall we play a little golf to-day?” she suggested.
Very long ago Alec had told her that golf bored him unless she came too. And so it did, when first they were married. He looked surprised and mumbled something about a foursome that Gibbie had arranged.
“Oh. I see.”
It was uphill work, being a better wife. She picked up her belongings and prepared to go.
“Is that a George Wode?” asked Alec, looking at the rose.
“No. I think it’s a Mabel Jupp.”
She did not quite know what to do with it, for it was still fresh and deserved cherishing, even though Ford had torn off some of its petals. But when she got back to her room she put it in the waste-paper basket. And then, sinking on her knees beside her bed, she buried her face in the quilt.