WHILE IT WAS STILL dark, the Christmas bells began to ring. Kit closed The Thirty-nine Steps, which he had been reading since four, welcoming the sound, as he would have welcomed factory hooters or the screech of a tram. They were like small nail-holes piercing the wall of his private darkness with evidence of an external world. A little later he heard Janet leaving the house on her way to church. He dressed himself, and walked through the streets in the grey creeping light, on pavements that rang like iron under the delusive down of a white frost. He felt bitterly cold, and no increase of pace would warm him. The faces of the people he met looked pinched and withered; everything that moved seemed to be moving with feverish noise and speed.
He got in just before Janet, kissed her at the breakfast table, and gave her his present, a dress clip which she had chosen when he had asked her what she would like. She gave him a pigskin wallet, stamped with his initials. He admired it and thanked her for it with so much animation and charm that she glowed almost into warmth; he observed, curiously, that one part of him felt an overkeyed pleasure in their friendliness, like the bonhomie one feels in the middle stages of drink, while another part of him was thinking that he would never be able to look at the wallet without being reminded of wizened faces and freezing streets. They each had letters from relatives, and read aloud to one another items of family news.
Janet’s mother was driving over to lunch. She and Janet got on badly. She had belonged to a rackety set in the post-war years, and Janet’s character had been partly formed on violent reaction from her. Since then she had mellowed, but still thought Janet a prig. This morning, for the first time, Janet admitted aloud that she wished her mother had decided to spend Christmas elsewhere. Kit was cheerfully sympathetic about it, and promised to get back as early as possible from the hospital to break up the tête-à-tête. They talked on, sitting at the table, for half an hour. Kit clung to the conversation, as sick men will cling to a chance visitor whose gossip distracts them from the fear of death. At the end of the half-hour, the talk fell flat all in a moment, like an effervescence ceasing; they were left looking at each other awkwardly, and presently Janet made an artificial excuse and went away. The fact that Kit had eaten nothing at all had escaped her notice, because of their chattering and the scattered letters and cards.
Kit was left alone in the dining room. He got up and stared out of the window, waiting for the telephone bell to ring. His mind pushed at it, like the mind of some one in haste pushing at a slow train. In a minute it would ring and he would answer it, and it would be Christie to wish him a happy Christmas. He would ask what she had meant by her letter, and it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding, or some mood that she had had and would almost have forgotten. He could go on pretending this for some time, he thought; and at once turned away from it revolted, as the talk and laughter with Janet had revolted him in the end. But his mind was still stretched for the telephone; he found he could not relax it. He wished it would ring for some complicated emergency which would not allow him for several hours to use his brain for anything else. But he knew that if it did, he would come back to himself with the same disgust as before.
He understood that this would go on till he had done something with his solitude, cleaned it and made it endurable to live in. He tried; but the effort ached in him, like the effort to focus one’s eyes on some fine object when vision is blurred with alcohol or drugs. For a moment, he could see causes and effects, relate this thing to other things; shake off the terrible feeling of uniqueness, of the universe spinning like the spokes of a wheel round the axis of his pain. He would hold it off for a moment, look at it distantly. Then it would come back again.
The maid came in to clear the table; he took up his letters and cards and Janet’s present and tidied them out of her way. Time moved in curious jerks; five minutes would seem like half an hour, then half an hour would be gone as if the hands of the clock had jumped it. Once he heard Janet’s feet in the hall, and sat down, lest she should come in, with a magazine which was lying about open in his hand. Suddenly he remembered the District Hospital, and that he was overdue.
As soon as he got inside the doors, hilarity and welcome teemed round him, insistent and unremitting, like a swarm of flies. Christmas had got under way earlier here than anywhere else. It had started at one or two in the morning, when night nurses had whispered and giggled with housemen doing their final round, and furtive toasts had been drunk behind the ward-kitchen doors. The crescendo, at half-past eleven when Kit arrived, had got nearly to the top of its curve. The residents’ common room sucked him in as noisily as a vacuum cleaner, providing drink and rude stories hot from the source. He thought, when he had finished his first whiskey-and-soda, that it must have been given him nearly neat, and amid shouts of protest refused a second round. At last he escaped, leaving a limerick trailing off into the distance behind him. Then it was the Sisters’ turn.
“Why, look, here’s Mr. Anderson!” … “Happy Christmas, Mr. Anderson! I was wondering where you’d got to.” … “Oh, there you are, Mr. Anderson! Now, now, you can’t go rushing past Bassett Ward like that. Why, you haven’t seen the decorations. Yes, they really are, aren’t they? My staff nurse is wonderful with them, she went to a School of Art. Don’t you rather love the little gnomes? Oh, you mustn’t run away before you’ve had some sherry; it’s all ready in my sitting room (I’m called away for a few minutes, Nurse; you might make sure the diabetic dinners have come.)” All the Sisters had been given chocolates, fortunately for Kit, whom more drinks on an empty stomach would soon have made uncertain on his feet. He ate all he could lay hands on, and with curiosity and surprise watched himself being socially agreeable: the scene seemed to be streaming past him, thin and bright and two-dimensional, like a strip of lantern slides.
In Collis Ward he was carving the turkey, and so ranked as the guest of honour. He was furnished with a tall red paper cap, and, following honoured ritual, kissed Sister under the mistletoe in the middle of the ward. Sister was fat and rosy, and quaked all over with mirth as she squeaked and pretended to struggle in his arms. Her clean apron crackled and she smelt of carbolic and Bourjois powder. When she emerged with her cap over her ear, the women in their beds all down the ward clapped and cheered. They thought Kit just lovely, and said so at intervals for the rest of the day.
When he went out afterwards into the passage, he saw the little pink nurse with black curly hair whom he had remembered the day before. She was standing just outside the linen room. Over the door an extra, unofficial sprig of mistletoe had been hung. When Kit caught her eye she smiled, dropped her dark curly lashes, and went into the linen room, leaving the door ajar.
A minute and a half later, the large outer doors of the ward opened and closed with a wide swing. In the linen room, the curly-haired nurse stood with her cap in her hand, dazedly patting her hair. Well! she thought; and for some time no more coherent thought occurred to her. Then she rearranged herself, and spent the next few hours looking forward to the delightful moment when she could tell her best friend.
Kit went round to his favourite Sister, a comfortable elderly Scotswoman, and asked for a cup of black coffee. She made it for him herself, double strength, and left him alone in her room to drink it.
In the afternoon, Janet’s mother thought him most amusing, and congratulated Janet on him in private when she was putting on her things.
Boxing Day brought in the usual acute abdominal case, and the usual case of cerebral haemorrhage; but there was still a great deal of it left. It dragged on its broken-backed length, bringing to the healthy a dim repletion, nemesis to the dyspeptic; to family house parties a misanthropy from which they fled in carloads to the pantomime; to the bereaved, the guilty and the fearful a cage of leaden inactivity in which their private skeletons had dancing room.
After lunch, in duty spurred by desperation, Kit asked Janet whether she would like him to drive her up to town for a film or a show. She turned round from her thank-you letters and declined absently. It meant getting to bed so late, the drive back in the dark through crowded roads would be so long and cold; all the plays she particularly wanted to see were taken off for the holiday; she always preferred a matinée, in any case. She began to write again, but found that the question had broken her train of thought. It occurred to her that Kit had made quite an effort yesterday, had gone out of his way to be pleasant at breakfast, and (in the intervals of odd silences when he lost the thread of the conversation entirely) had been most helpful, even if rather in a silly way, with her mother in the afternoon. It would be wrong, she thought, to let this fall to the ground. Besides, if she did (though she put it somewhat less bluntly to herself) it would impair her sense of injury when she needed it next. She, too, was finding Boxing Day an uncomfortable forcing house for thought. A forgotten idea revived in her mind. She looked up.
“I’ve just remembered, Kit there is something on this evening that I really should like to see. And it would be a much shorter drive than going to town. The Brimpton Abbey Christmas Play. They were advertising it in Paxton when I was doing my Christmas shopping, and I made a note of the … What is the matter, Kit? That was the Frasers’ telephone, not ours.”
“Nothing.” Kit stared at the book on his knee. “I doubt if you’d care for it. It’s a semi-amateur thing. I don’t suppose it would be much good.”
“Oh, I think so. There was a whole column about it last year in the Paxton Times. I believe they put them on quite beautifully. You remember, I went with Mrs. Cleaver to see their Summer School do The Tempest, and told you how good it was. Such a dear little boy was Ariel. I’m sure I should enjoy it.”
Kit continued to gaze at his book. A three-word phrase of print fixed itself across his eyes and repeated itself, like a cracked gramophone record, again and again.
After a pause Janet said, looking in front of her, “Unless, of course, you prefer not to see a semi-religious play. There are one or two more performances, later in the week. I can go by myself.” It occurred to her, as she spoke, that Timmie would go with her.
Kit got up. “No,” he said, “it would interest me. We shall need dinner fairly early; their shows start at a quarter to eight, I believe.”
“As early as that? It will mean dinner at half-past six. I thought it was later.”
Kit saw her hesitation. There was a feeling of suffocation in his throat. He walked to the window, found himself drumming on the pane, and pushed his hand back in his pocket.
“We’ll have dinner at the Crown in Paxton,” he said. “May as well do the thing in comfort. We’d better start at a quarter to six, I should think. I’ve got one or two things I’ll have to see to now.” He went out of the room.
Down in the consulting room, unconscious of its icy coldness (the heating had been turned off for the holiday) he sat looking at the top of his desk, knowing that if he went back, even now, it would require only the slightest effort to make Janet change her mind. He found himself dully hating her because she had taken the decision from him and then, at that last instant, tossed it back to him again when his defences were down. Nothing on earth would have made him plan this for himself. It affronted his whole habit of living, his pride, the instinct for avoiding self-torment which was the difficult growth of years, his common sense. They hammered at him, warning and protesting. All through the dark early morning he had been ruling lines in his life, tearing up records, writing finis. It was the second lot of wreckage he had had to clear away; it should, he had proved to himself with monotonous logic again and again, be easier than the first. It was not. Into the edifice that had crashed this time he had been building, little by little and unaware, the dearest stuff of his first love.
Why was he going? He could not take refuge, when he saw her, in cynicism or self-pity or a sense of injury. His mind had already thrown off these drugs, as the healthy stomach rejects a poison. His image of Christie, which they might have dulled or distorted in his defence, burned before him agonizing in its truth. Nothing was to be had from the sight of her but many new kinds of pain and a renewal of the old. Notwithstanding all this, he knew that if Janet came into the room now to tell him she would rather not go after all, neither that nor anything else would stop him.
He put on his coat and went out again, no longer in search of thought but of escape. There were lights in McKinnon’s house as he passed, he rang, hoping for an hour’s wrangling over Russia, or whatever McKinnon happened to be feeling strongly about to-day. But McKinnon had his mother and sister from Manchester spending Christmas with him, and was assuming, dutifully, the incongruous character of a jolly young man. They welcomed Kit with enthusiasm, but he felt like sand in machinery and, after the shortest civil interval, drifted out into the streets again. He went home, had tea with Janet, and sat reading, or appearing to read, till it was time to change.
Janet, he saw, had taken pains with her appearance. It was some time since they had been out in the evening together. She had on a new dress of dark red watered silk, with a clear fluent line which emphasized her perfect carriage. Her beauty, like an insult flung at him in the street, pointed past failure and compensation lost. He admired the dress, and listened while she told him where she had found the design and her difficulties in getting it copied. She glanced at him with approval, the same kind of approval she had given to her coat and her other correct accessories.
Dinner at the Crown—a Christmas specialty—seemed the longest and most enormous meal with which he had ever been confronted. He ate it because he knew that if he did not Janet would ask about his health. On the way out he saw a thin grizzled cripple selling matches on the kerb. All his inward shame and self-hatred concentrated themselves in the thought that he had been forcing down, out of mere convention, unwanted food the cost of which would have kept this beggar for a week. He gave the man ten shillings when Janet was looking the other way.
There were a great many cars parked round the Abbey, and a bus disgorged its contents as they drove up. It occurred to Kit for the first time that all the seats might be taken, and, now that the moment had come, sent up a silent prayer that they would. But only the cheaper seats were gone; there were, the box-office girl cheerfully assured him, several seven-and-six-pennies left. Would he like them in Row C at the side, or Row B in the centre gangway?
He hesitated, holding up the queue; remembering the smallness of the theatre. They would be almost under the stage. It had not occurred to him before that Christie might see him. Expedients for getting away, all of them impossible, raced through his mind. Janet’s voice, politely impatient, cut across them. “The second row, don’t you think? The others are much too far along.” He pulled himself together and took the tickets.
Janet admired the theatre; the Summer School performance had been in the open air. Kit, staring at the curtain, said, “Yes, it’s supposed to be the third best private theatre in England.”
“How do you know?” asked Janet curiously.
“Know? Oh, I don’t. I suppose I heard some one say so.
The orchestra played a verse of In Dulce Jubilo, and the curtain rose.
The first scene had a formalized, but weirdly effective, backcloth of peaks and clouds. Kit recognized the touch of Rollo, and accorded it a surprised respect. On the right of the stage, where the clouds were lighter and pierced with gleams, St. Michael was standing, white and gold and glittering, leaning on his spear. So Rollo got some one, thought Kit, his tenseness broken by a faint amusement; Rollo would. St. Michael was tall, wore a fair wig which his dark eyes belied, and had a beautiful resonant voice whose rhythms soothed Kit for a moment into calm. He spoke a blank-verse prologue, about the eternal conflict of good and evil and the single combat to come. When he ended, lifting his spear, a distant roll of thunder answered from the left.
Some one behind Kit whispered, “Satan’s coming.”
Kit stiffened where he sat. Among all that he had thought of and dreaded, he had forgotten this.
Lucifer entered, in black armour, lit with green.
Strong make-up, stylized as if for ballet, reduced the face under the visor to a mask. No human traits remained. Kit found himself sane enough to perceive this obvious fact, but not sane enough to remember it. He could feel hatred streaming out of him and battering at the shadowed upslanting eyes, the artificially lengthened mouth. Michael broke into speech again, an exhortation or a challenge; Kit did not listen to the words, but again the calm and lovely voice, with its bell-like solemnity, for a moment smoothed his mind.
Satan stepped forward, and spoke in soliloquy.
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.”
Kit’s hatred sprang out to meet the voice, and checked for a moment, puzzled by some quality it had, both of familiarity and the unexpected.
The chatterer behind whispered, “Isn’t he good?”
Kit’s hatred shook itself free, and rode his mind. The concentration and gathered emotion of the audience gave it a more than earthly life, like the obsessions of nightmare. He saw, with nightmare’s clear monstrosity, Christie embraced by a grinning devil, smiling childishly into his slit eyes.
Janet tapped his arm. He realized, as he turned, that she must have tapped it several times.
“Kit,” she whispered, “are you feeling well?”
He nodded, and, as she still looked at him, whispered, “Yes, of course.”
Michael and Lucifer were debating, in rhymed dialogue of single lines. While Michael was speaking, vestiges of Kit’s moral command would return. He could feel his jealousy like some parasitic growth, external to him. In another moment he would be able to loosen it and be clean. Then Lucifer would begin, and it would become part of him again. He hated it and himself, but he hated Lucifer more. It was all horribly new to him: he had thought that Janet had drilled him in most kinds of endurance, forgetting this in which he had never been tried. During one moment when Michael was speaking, he saw all this quite coolly.
When the curtain fell and the applause began, his mind was sick and bruised, but silent.
Janet said, “I told you they were good, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted in such a silly way. I thought you looked queer, but it must have been the lighting.”
“Yes, it does that, I’ve noticed before.”
“Have you the programme? We hadn’t time to look at it.”
Kit handed it, and glanced over her shoulder without attention. He had a feeling that something was amiss with it, but could not, for a few minutes, summon up concentration enough to see what it was. His eyes fixed themselves on the word Lucifer, and wearily rested there. At last they travelled on to the name that followed. It was Rollo Baines.
The words about it were: Persons in order of Appearance. St. Michael the Archangel: Lionel Fell.
Kit stared at the page. Nothing would move in him; only a little, silly voice in his head remarked, “Of course, Rollo couldn’t find any one else tall enough.” He stopped himself, just in time, from saying it aloud. His mind had the dead flatness of a substance whose reaction has been neutralized. No new reaction would come.
The first interval was a short one. Before Janet had had time to notice his lack of conversation, the curtain rose again.
This scene was a winter pastoral. Three shepherd boys were sheltering under a snowy bent, while the eldest played to the others on a wooden pipe. As he played, a hidden orchestra took up the air, and to this music Gabriel advanced and stood before them: Florizelle in all her glory, silvered and lilied. In this, her favourite rôle, her Rossetti face and figure still brought murmurs of “Ooh! Isn’t that lovely!” from the back of the theatre. Her voice was too female for the part, and of a cloying sweetness, but it suited the nursery-tale sentiment of the scene.
Afterwards, the youngest shepherd boy encountered the caravan of the Kings, and told them of the vision, and they watched the resting of the star. Kit noticed that the indefatigable Rollo was doubling the part of Balthasar. Through all this Christie had not appeared.
Kit longed to get away before his transient calm was broken by the sight of her. He felt that if he did, he might effect some kind of reconciliation with himself, and gather all that had happened into some memory in whose company he could bear to live. So strong was the impulse that he even thought of saying he felt ill, since Janet had already supposed it. But she was greatly enjoying the play; the expedient seemed mean, as well as hysterical and ridiculous. As he was reflecting on it the curtain rose. He wished at once that he had left under any pretext at all; but it was too late now.
This was the last scene, the finale at the Christmas crib. Florizelle’s Child-Angels were grouped before a gauzy dark veil, spangled with stars, which was slowly drawn aside. Within it Christie was sitting, her head draped with the blue garment of the Madonna, a baby on her knees.
All the tangled conflicts of the last hour were wiped from Kit’s mind. Nothing that happened since he left her was real any longer. There seemed no mockery in this translation, nothing shocking nor unholy. She sat looking at the child, as she had looked at him in the wood, with her tender downward smile. There was nothing false in her face of poise, nothing artificial or even studied. She was herself.
The baby was not, as he had thought for a moment, a property doll, but real. It wriggled in her arm, and gave the beginning of a cry, and she cuddled it into a more comfortable hold so that at once it was quiet, and presently, to the delight of the women in the audience, crowed. Kit looked at her in a timeless moment of revelation, and did not see, till she turned in greeting, the entry of the shepherds and the kings.
She had no lines to say, but her silence seemed to contain her more perfectly than words. A little sigh of pleasure ran through the theatre; Kit felt it pass him, like a light wind. In the background of his own emotion he could see like a stranger her lightness in this instant of the story, the only one she could have filled. As Mater Dolorosa she would have been shallow, pathetic, lost; she was a Christmas Madonna, loving and amazed and unsuspecting of grief. As he watched, one of the smallest and fattest angels, too little to have been rehearsed in what it did, pulled away from an elder child who was holding its hand, and, waddling unsteadily towards her, saved itself from falling by clutching her blue robe in its fists.
The shepherds and the kings had made their gifts. The orchestra began the music of the hymn with which the scene closed. Christie stood up, holding the child in one arm, and raised the other in benediction. As he was thinking that this too was like her, that she seemed to caress rather than to bless the crowd below her, she saw him.
For an instant she was arrested in mid-movement: then her smile lit and warmed with gladness, and her arm, moving a little further, extended deliberately the circle of its gesture beyond the stage. She blessed him, smiling with the anxious love of a mother into his eyes, and the curtain came down.
The sky was dark blue, clear, and powdered with a frosty galaxy, as Kit drove home. Janet was silent beside him; his thoughts were undisturbed. As the schoolmen used to meditate the thorny mystery of the Trinity, he meditated the truth that this, and the Christie whose letter he had in the drawer at home, were both actual, and equal in reality. He did not think about the future, perhaps because the present was enough, perhaps because he knew.
Janet had thoughts of her own. She had seen, for her part, the pattern of motherhood, and her husband’s eyes turned to his symbol in worship. Her heart, for a moment, knew its own bitterness. It was during this hour that a thought of escape, formless as yet and unadmitted, touched her mind for the first time.