23

On the following day Richard sat sweltering in the afternoon train to Melbourne. The sun beat on the cushions of the railway carriage, which exhaled a suffocating leathery smell. The blue curtains would only remain drawn over the windows if the latter were shut. He was distracted between his intense physical discomforts, mental perplexity, and the empty ache of his heart. He thought over the events of the last few days, and every now and then his mind strayed to anticipate the bath awaiting him at the end of the journey. One of the things which had most surprised him in the whole debacle was the revelation of Jane which it had given him. He had gone to her on his return from the wood. He had imagined that she took life very easily, that the eccentricities and adversities of the family gave her no more than surface annoyance. But her present trouble had reflected in her face all the disappointments and despairs of her married life, the early days on Boongah Station, her daughter’s lack of social sense, Sim’s public and private absurdities, the giving up of Farleigh-Scudamore, Dora’s marriage. All these secret humiliations were echoed in this last blow, to be brought by a malicious triumphant Amy, the news of her son’s disgrace, and that son was the only one of her children with whom she had any real sympathy. Richard felt as if he had struck her.

Sim’s behaviour made another picture in his mind. Clad like a prelate in a scarlet dressing-gown diapered with gold fleur-de-lys, he had come in from his study. His face was redder than usual. He had blinked and said ‘Damn’ several times. He had ascribed all the blame to Amy for interfering.

He had never attached great importance to sexual morality, and considered gentle blood of more consequence than legitimacy.

Then he had stamped off to Amy and released on her the seething hostility of fifty years. This storm had not been entirely without effect, as he had threatened that if Amy called one of her damned family councils, to resolve exactly when, where, and how often Richard and Aïda had ‘committed adultery,’ or that if she told Matthew of her discovery, he would blazon all over Melbourne the scandal of Madeleine des Baux.

It was possible that Amy was intimidated. She would hate it to be known that her grandfather was conceived out of wedlock, whereas Sim did not care who knew it.

Aïda had left immediately. So had Amy. They were driven to the station by Sim and Simon, in different vehicles, and travelled to Melbourne in different compartments of the same train. Richard had seen the traps come back, and Simon had given Sim a guinea as he had won the race. Richard had given up expecting seemly conduct from his father, but he need not have reduced the tragedy of that day to the ridiculous.

That was how things stood at present. What were he and Aïda to do? He would awaken from this conjecture to the heat of the train, and his longing for a bath.

At length the wretched journey came to an end. An hour later Richard, cool and refreshed, sat in an armchair in the Melbourne Club. With the release from physical discomfort, his mental distress was intensified.

Would Amy regard Sim’s threat? She might already have told Matthew of her discovery. It was intolerable that this thing should be noised abroad, that his secret love for Aïda should be made the subject of coarse and silly jests. He knew the sort of thing men would say. Fastidiously he had always ignored remarks of that kind, and now he was to be made the subject of them. His concern with honour, with ‘niceness,’ the correct thing, returned to him with added strength. He felt the need to free himself from some taint.

He would go and see Matthew. That was the only fair thing to do. He rose quickly from the chair. It was a relief to have some course of action.

He took a hansom up to the university. The drive occupied twenty minutes, but by the time he passed Wilson Hall he was still uncertain as to what he should say to Matthew. The cab skirted the low original university building and pulled up before a red brick house in a neat ugly garden.

He asked first for Aïda. She was sitting at a writing-table in the drawing-room, and looked up as he was announced. She stood up but did not come to him. She thought that perhaps he had come to ask her to go away. She was calm and prepared.

In her presence he too had a momentary tranquillity, but it was followed by a more acute distress. He had come concerned with his honour and fair play. Love for the time being had to take a second place.

‘I came to see Matthew,’ he said, ‘but I thought that I had better discover beforehand what you had told him.’

‘I told him nothing. I thought it might not be necessary.’

‘Why “might not”?’

‘I thought—well, it depends on what we are going to do.’

‘What we are going to do?’

‘Yes. On whether you still want me.’ Her voice sank very low.

‘Aïda! I always want you. I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

They stood looking at each other.

‘Shall we go and tell Matthew?’ she said.

‘You mustn’t come. I shall go. Wait here.’

At the door he turned.

‘We must do what he decides,’ he said. ‘It is only fair.’

‘Richard. I was yours before I was his. Why should he decide?’

‘Aïda. It’s no good. We must do what is right. We shouldn’t love each other so much if we didn’t.’

‘Nothing could lessen my love. I’m sure.’

‘You wouldn’t love me so much if I were dishonourable—darling.’

‘Dickie, you always seem to be thinking of the correct thing—even now.’

‘It isn’t correctness—you mustn’t think that. It’s being straightforward. You must believe I love you. You do, don’t you, Aïda?’

‘I do. But I don’t think you love as much as I do.’ She turned aside, puzzled and hurt. He crossed over and took her hand.

‘Aïda. I worship you. I can’t bear you to think I should love you less. “My true love hath my heart, and I have his.” We said that years ago in Spain and it’s still true—truer than ever if anything.’ His voice broke. ‘Ah, do help me to go through with this.’

Richard’s weakness had always roused some protective instinct in Aïda. He had only to appeal to her for any kind of help, to bring this to the surface.

‘Go then,’ she said softly. ‘I will do what you decide. He is in his study, the door under the stairs.’

He found Matthew seated in an armchair near the window. On two low tables on either side of him were piles of foolscap examination papers, the accumulated result of hours of mental strain on the part of Melbourne’s scholastic youth. Those on the right were uncorrected. Matthew read hurriedly through them, scrawled on them, and arranged them, sheep and goats, on the table on his left.

He was surprised to see Richard.

‘Eheu Fugaces!’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you left Bemerton too?’

Richard, labouring under emotion, was put out by Matthew’s facetious schoolboy manners.

‘I have something serious to discuss with you,’ he said.

Matthew signalled him to a chair. Here, against his own background he was extraordinarily true to type. He had the mixture of spurious youthfulness and condescension which characterizes some schoolmasters and professors. He was bland, conceited, patronizing. Richard found it hard to begin in the face of such jaunty confidence. He could not imagine how Matthew would take his news.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that Aïda and I have been intimate friends since childhood.’

Matthew stiffened perceptibly. Richard went on steadily to recount incident after incident of their intercourse, until he reached the moment when Amy discovered them in the wood.

As he spoke Matthew rose and stood with his back to the fireplace, in an unconscious magisterial effort to retain command of the situation. But all his composure had slipped from him. His forehead wrinkled up to his sandy boyish hair, and he stared at Richard with troubled resentful eyes. Now and then he rubbed his knuckles against his teeth with an impatient movement of despair. He had never imagined that such a thing could come into his life. Conjugal infidelity was outside his calculations. He did not know how to act. He was like a boy, the mechanism of whose lovely toy train had become inextricably disordered. Aïda had been only a toy to him. He had been excited by her physical beauty. Her mind he neither knew nor cared for. Any of its delicate expressions which she had unveiled to him had been met with mild reproof, or heavy academic jests.

In the middle of his relentless story, Richard looked up at him. Suddenly, painfully, grotesquely, appropriate, there flashed into his mind a story he had heard of a curate, who, coming home and finding his wife in her lover’s embrace, had gone down-stairs, taken his umbrella, and broken it across his knee. He seemed to have no just anger, no generosity, but only a trivial resentment.

Richard wished he had not remembered that story. Because he was a Montfort, he supposed, he would think of such a story at such a time.

‘What do you think we should do?’ he said at last.

Matthew looked at him.

‘I think you should go away,’ he said bitterly.

‘You won’t have a divorce?’

‘Why should I?’

There was nothing more to be said. Richard bowed and left the room.

Matthew sat down at his desk. He leaned his elbows on it and rubbed his knuckles on his teeth.

‘I love her,’ he said softly, viciously, to himself. ‘I love her.’

When Richard returned to the drawing-room he found Aïda standing at the mantelpiece looking at herself in the mirror above it. She turned to him a face white and drawn with stress of emotion.

‘What did he say?’

‘That I should go away.’

‘Will you?’

‘I must.’

An impulse came over her to taunt him with his lack of force, his feeble submission to convention. Her longing for him was so great that she could see every detail of his physical appearance, and feel every thought of his mind. The impulse passed, and she subsided, almost fainting, into a chair.

‘We shall meet again before you go?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Will you ring me up?’

‘Yes. At the club?’

‘That will be best.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘To Europe. It will have to be far.’

They met for the last time in the Treasury Gardens, a few days before his departure for Europe. For half an hour they sat talking of ordinary things, but each was trying to break through the crust of the commonplace, to penetrate the heart of the other, and leave there some indelible memory, some final absolute word of love.

They felt more together when they did not speak. After a long pause Richard said:

‘They talk of the attraction of opposites. It is nothing to the attraction of those who are alike. I think one’s soul is always putting out feelers, as it were, to meet another soul with which it is completely in accord, or which is its counterpart. If it meets that soul it expands more, becomes greater and finer. If it makes a mistake, comes into contact with the wrong soul or with nothing, the feelers shrink in, the soul shrivels, dies a little.’

‘When you leave me I shall shrivel, and die a little.

‘So shall I.’

For a long time after that they did not speak. They had arrived at complete understanding. It was enough for them to be with each other.

But the time came when they had to leave. They stood up.

‘We will say good-bye here,’ Richard said.

She nodded her head.

‘You have my heart.’

‘You have mine.’

They tried to say good-bye, but choked on the word. She turned from him and walked down an asphalt path between rows of plaster statues and elm trees. She was wearing a dress of white muslin, powdered with little black flowers. As she walked she passed rhythmically through patches of sunlight and shadow made by the evenly planted trees. She was alternately a shining white and a grey figure. At the end of the path she came out of the shadow of the last elm tree into the bright sunlight. She turned, lifted her hand and disappeared round a corner.