Fraternity

CHAPTER XXXIX
THE DUEL

Bianca did not see her husband after their return together from the Round Pond. She dined out that evening, and in the morning avoided any interview. When Hilary’s luggage was brought down and the cab summoned, she slipped up to take shelter in her room. Presently the sound of his footsteps coming along the passage stopped outside her door. He tapped. She did not answer.

Good-bye would be a mockery! Let him go with the words unsaid! And as though the thought had found its way through the closed door, she heard his footsteps recede again. She saw him presently go out to the cab with his head bent down, saw him stoop and pat Miranda. Hot tears sprang into her eyes. She heard the cab-wheels roll away.

The heart is like the face of an Eastern woman – warm and glowing, behind swathe on swathe of fabric. At each fresh touch from the fingers of Life, some new corner, some hidden curve or angle, comes into view, to be seen last of all perhaps never to be seen by the one who owns them.

When the cab had driven away there came into Bianca’s heart a sense of the irreparable, and, mysteriously entwined with that arid ache, a sort of bitter pity: What would happen to this wretched girl now that he was gone? Would she go completely to the bad – till she became one of those poor creatures like the figure in “The Shadow,” who stood beneath lampposts in the streets? Out of this speculation, which was bitter as the taste of aloes, there came to her a craving for some palliative, some sweetness, some expression of that instinct of fellow-feeling deep in each human breast, however disharmonic. But even with that craving was mingled the itch to justify herself, and prove that she could rise above jealousy.

She made her way to the little model’s lodging.

A child admitted her into the bleak passage that served for hall. The strange medley of emotions passing through Bianca’s breast while she stood outside the girl’s door did not show in her face, which wore its customary restrained, half-mocking look.

The little model’s voice faintly said: “Come in.”

The room was in disorder, as though soon to be deserted. A closed and corded trunk stood in the centre of the floor; the bed, stripped of clothing, lay disclosed in all the barrenness of discoloured ticking. The china utensils of the washstand were turned head downwards. Beside that washstand the little model, with her hat on – the hat with the purplish-pink roses and the little peacock’s feather-stood in the struck, shrinking attitude of one who, coming forward in the expectation of a kiss, has received a blow.

“You are leaving here, then?” Bianca said quietly.

“Yes,” the girl murmured.

“Don’t you like this part? Is it too far from your work?”

Again the little model whispered: “Yes.”

Bianca’s eyes travelled slowly over the blue beflowered walls and rust-red doors; through the dusty closeness of this dismantled room a rank scent of musk and violets rose, as though a cheap essence had been scattered as libation. A small empty scent-bottle stood on the shabby looking-glass.

“Have you found new lodgings?”

The little model edged closer to the window. A stealthy watchfulness was creeping into her shrinking, dazed face.

She shook her head.

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

Obeying a sudden impulse to see more clearly, Bianca lifted her veil. “I came to tell you,” she said, “that I shall always be ready to help you.”

The girl did not answer, but suddenly through her black lashes she stole a look upward at her visitor. ‘Can you,’ it seemed to say, ‘you – help me? Oh no; I think not!’ And, as though she had been stung by that glance, Bianca said with deadly slowness:

“It is my business, of course, entirely, now that Mr. Dallison has gone abroad.”

The little model received this saying with a quivering jerk. It might have been an arrow transfixing her white throat. For a moment she seemed almost about to fall, but, gripping the window-sill, held herself erect. Her eyes, like an animal’s in pain, darted here, there, everywhere, then rested on her visitor’s breast, quite motionless. This stare, which seemed to see nothing, but to be doing, as it were, some fateful calculation, was uncanny. Colour came gradually back into her lips and eyes and cheeks; she seemed to have succeeded in her calculation, to be reviving from that stab.

And suddenly Bianca understood. This was the meaning of the packed trunk, the dismantled room. He was going to take her, after all!

In the turmoil of this discovery two words alone escaped her:

“I see!”

They were enough. The girl’s face at once lost all trace of its look of desperate calculation, brightened, became guilty, and from guilty sullen.

The antagonism of all the long past months was now declared between these two – Bianca’s pride could no longer conceal, the girl’s submissiveness no longer obscure it. They stood like duellists, one on each side of the trunk – that common, brown-Japanned, tin trunk, corded with rope. Bianca looked at it.

“You,” she said, “and he? Ha, ha; ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!”

Against that cruel laughter – more poignant than a hundred homilies on caste, a thousand scornful words – the little model literally could not stand; she sat down in the low chair where she had evidently been sitting to watch the street. But as a taste of blood will infuriate a hound, so her own laughter seemed to bereave Bianca of all restraint.

“What do you imagine he’s taking you for, girl? Only out of pity! It’s not exactly the emotion to live on in exile. In exile – but that you do not understand!”

The little model staggered to her feet again. Her face had grown painfully red.

“He wants me!” she said.

“Wants you? As he wants his dinner. And when he’s eaten it – what then? No, of course he’ll never abandon you; his conscience is too tender. But you’ll be round his neck – like this!” Bianca raised her arms, looped, and dragged them slowly down, as a mermaid’s arms drag at a drowning sailor.

The little model stammered: “I’ll do what he tells me! I’ll do what he tells me!”

Bianca stood silent, looking at the girl, whose heaving breast and little peacock’s feather, whose small round hands twisting in front of her, and scent about her clothes, all seemed an offence.

“And do you suppose that he’ll tell you what he wants? Do you imagine he’ll have the necessary brutality to get rid of you? He’ll think himself bound to keep you till you leave him, as I suppose you will some day!”

The girl dropped her hands. “I’ll never leave him – never!” she cried out passionately.

“Then Heaven help him!” said Bianca.

The little model’s eyes seemed to lose all pupil, like two chicory flowers that have no dark centres. Through them, all that she was feeling struggled to find an outlet; but, too deep for words, those feelings would not pass her lips, utterly unused to express emotion. She could only stammer:

“I’m not – I’m not – I will – ” and press her hands again to her breast.

Bianca’s lip curled.

“I see; you imagine yourself capable of sacrifice. Well, you have your chance. Take it!” She pointed to the corded trunk. “Now’s your time; you have only to disappear!”

The little model shrank back against the windowsill. “He wants me!” she muttered. “I know he wants me.”

Bianca bit her lips till the blood came.

“Your idea of sacrifice,” she said, “is perfect! If you went now, in a month’s time he’d never think of you again.”

The girl gulped. There was something so pitiful in the movements of her hands that Bianca turned away. She stood for several seconds staring at the door, then, turning round again, said:

“Well?”

But the girl’s whole face had changed. All tear-stained, indeed, she had already masked it with a sort of immovable stolidity.

Bianca went swiftly up to the trunk.

“You shall!” she said. “Take that thing and go.”

The little model did not move.

“So you won’t?”

The girl trembled violently all over. She moistened her lips, tried to speak, failed, again moistened them, and this time murmured; “I’ll only – I’ll only – if he tells me!”

“So you still imagine he will tell you!”

The little model merely repeated: “I won’t – won’t do anything without he tells me!”

Bianca laughed. “Why, it’s like a dog!” she said.

But the girl had turned abruptly to the window. Her lips were parted. She was shrinking, fluttering, trembling at what she saw. She was indeed like a spaniel dog who sees her master coming. Bianca had no need of being told that Hilary was outside. She went into the passage and opened the front door.

He was coming up the steps, his face worn like that of a man in fever, and at the sight of his wife he stood quite still, looking into her face.

Without the quiver of an eyelid, without the faintest trace of emotion, or the slightest sign that she knew him to be there, Bianca passed and slowly walked away.

CHAPTER XL
FINISH OF THE COMEDY

Those who may have seen Hilary driving towards the little model’s lodgings saw one who, by a fixed red spot on either cheek, and the over-compression of his quivering lips, betrayed the presence of that animality which underlies even the most cultivated men.

After eighteen hours of the purgatory of indecision, he had not so much decided to pay that promised visit on which hung the future of two lives, as allowed himself to be borne towards the girl.

There was no one in the passage to see him after he had passed Bianca in the doorway, but it was with a face darkened by the peculiar stabbing look of wounded egoism that he entered the little model’s room.

The sight of it coming so closely on the struggle she had just been through was too much for the girl’s self-control.

Instead of going up to him, she sat down on the corded trunk and began to sob. It was the sobbing of a child whose school-treat has been cancelled, of a girl whose ball-dress has not come home in time. It only irritated Hilary, whose nerves had already borne all they could bear. He stood literally trembling, as though each one of these common little sobs were a blow falling on the drum-skin of his spirit; and through every fibre he took in the features of the dusty, scent-besprinkled room – the brown tin trunk, the dismantled bed, the rust-red doors.

And he realised that she had burned her boats to make it impossible for a man of sensibility to disappoint her!

The little model raised her face and looked at him. What she saw must have been less reassuring even than the first sight had been, for it stopped her sobbing. She rose and turned to the window, evidently trying with handkerchief and powder-puff to repair the ravages caused by her tears; and when she had finished she still stood there with her back to him. Her deep breathing made her young form quiver from her waist up to the little peacock’s feather in her hat; and with each supple movement it seemed offering itself to Hilary.

In the street a barrel-organ had begun to play the very waltz it had played the afternoon when Mr. Stone had been so ill. Those two were neither of them conscious of that tune, too absorbed in their emotions; and yet, quietly, it was bringing something to the girl’s figure like the dowering of scent that the sun brings to a flower. It was bringing the compression back to Hilary’s lips, the flush to his ears and cheeks, as a draught of wind will blow to redness a fire that has been choked. Without knowing it, without sound, inch by inch he moved nearer to her; and as though, for all there was no sign of his advance, she knew of it, she stayed utterly unmoving except for the deep breathing that so stirred the warm youth in her. In that stealthy progress was the history of life and the mystery of sex. Inch by inch he neared her; and she swayed, mesmerising his arms to fold round her thus poised, as if she must fall backward; mesmerising him to forget that there was anything there, anything in all the world, but just her young form waiting for him – nothing but that!

The barrel-organ stopped; the spell had broken! She turned round to him. As a wind obscures with grey wrinkles the still green waters of enchantment into which some mortal has been gazing, so Hilary’s reason suddenly swept across the situation, and showed it once more as it was. Quick to mark every shade that passed across his face, the girl made as though she would again burst into tears; then, since tears had been so useless, she pressed her hand over her eyes.

Hilary looked at that round, not too cleanly hand. He could see her watching him between her fingers. It was uncanny, almost horrible, like the sight of a cat watching a bird; and he stood appalled at the terrible reality of his position, at the sight of his own future with this girl, with her traditions, customs, life, the thousand and one things that he did not know about her, that he would have to live with if he once took her. A minute passed, which seemed eternity, for into it was condensed every force of her long pursuit, her instinctive clutching at something that she felt to be security, her reaching upwards, her twining round him.

Conscious of all this, held back by that vision of his future, yet whipped towards her by his senses, Hilary swayed like a drunken man. And suddenly she sprang at him, wreathed her arms round his neck, and fastened her mouth to his. The touch of her lips was moist and hot. The scent of stale violet powder came from her, warmed by her humanity. It penetrated to Hilary’s heart. He started back in sheer physical revolt.

Thus repulsed, the girl stood rigid, her breast heaving, her eyes unnaturally dilated, her mouth still loosened by the kiss. Snatching from his pocket a roll of notes, Hilary flung them on the bed.

“I can’t take you!” he almost groaned. “It’s madness! It’s impossible!” And he went out into the passage. He ran down the steps and got into his cab. An immense time seemed to pass before it began to move. It started at last, and Hilary sat back in it, his hands clenched, still as a dead man.

His mortified face was recognised by the landlady, returning from her morning’s visit to the shops. The gentleman looked, she thought, as if he had received bad news! She not unnaturally connected his appearance with her lodger. Tapping on the girl’s door, and receiving no answer, she went in.

The little model was lying on the dismantled bed, pressing her face into the blue and white ticking of the bolster. Her shoulders shook, and a sound of smothered sobbing came from her. The landlady stood staring silently.

Coming of Cornish chapel-going stock, she had never liked this girl, her instinct telling her that she was one for whom life had already been too much. Those for whom life had so early been too much, she knew, were always “ones for pleasure!” Her experience of village life had enabled her to construct the little model’s story – that very simple, very frequent little story. Sometimes, indeed, trouble of that sort was soon over and forgotten; but sometimes, if the young man didn’t do the right thing by her, and the girl’s folk took it hardly, well, then – ! So had run the reasoning of this good woman. Being of the same class, she had looked at her lodger from the first without obliquity of vision.

But seeing her now apparently so overwhelmed, and having something soft and warm down beneath her granitic face and hungry eyes, she touched her on the back.

“Come, now!” she said; “you mustn’t take on! What is it?”

The little model shook off the hand as a passionate child shakes itself free of consolation. “Let me alone!” she muttered.

The landlady drew back. “Has anyone done you a harm?” she said.

The little model shook her head.

Baffled by this dumb grief, the landlady was silent; then, with the stolidity of those whose lives are one long wrestling with fortune, she muttered:

“I don’t like to see anyone cry like that!”

And finding that the girl remained obstinately withdrawn from sight or sympathy, she moved towards the door.

“Well,” she said, with ironical compassion, “if you want me, I’ll be in the kitchen.”

The little model remained lying on her bed. Every now and then she gulped, like a child flung down on the grass apart from its comrades, trying to swallow down its rage, trying to bury in the earth its little black moment of despair. Slowly those gulps grew fewer, feebler, and at last died away. She sat up, sweeping Hilary’s bundle of notes, on which she had been lying, to the floor.

At sight of that bundle she broke out afresh, flinging herself down sideways with her cheek on the wet bolster; and, for some time after her sobs had ceased again, still lay there. At last she rose and dragged herself over to the looking-glass, scrutinising her streaked, discoloured face, the stains in the cheeks, the swollen eyelids, the marks beneath her eyes; and listlessly she tidied herself. Then, sitting down on the brown tin trunk, she picked the bundle of notes off the floor. They gave forth a dry peculiar crackle. Fifteen ten-pound notes – all Hilary’s travelling money. Her eyes opened wider and wider as she counted; and tears, quite suddenly, rolled down on to those thin slips of paper.

Then slowly she undid her dress, and forced them down till they rested, with nothing but her vest between them and the quivering warm flesh which hid her heart.

CHAPTER XLI
THE HOUSE OF HARMONY

At half-past ten that evening Stephen walked up the stone-flagged pathway of his brother’s house.

“Can I see Mrs. Hilary?”

“Mr. Hilary went abroad this morning, sir, and Mrs. Hilary has not yet come in.”

“Will you give her this letter? No, I’ll wait. I suppose I can wait for her in the garden?”

“Oh yes, sit!”

“Very well.”

“I’ll leave the door open, sir, in case you want to come in.”

Stephen walked across to the rustic bench and sat down. He stared gloomily through the dusk at his patent-leather boots, and every now and then he flicked his evening trousers with the letter. Across the dark garden, where the boughs hung soft, unmoved by wind, the light from Mr. Stone’s open window flowed out in a pale river; moths, born of the sudden heat, were fluttering up this river to its source.

Stephen looked irritably at the figure of Mr. Stone, which could be seen, bowed, and utterly still, beside his desk; so, by lifting the spy-hole thatch, one may see a convict in his cell stand gazing at his work, without movement, numb with solitude.

‘He’s getting awfully broken up,’ thought Stephen. ‘Poor old chap! His ideas are killing him. They’re not human nature, never will be.’ Again he flicked his trousers with the letter, as though that document emphasised the fact. ‘I can’t help being sorry for the sublime old idiot!’

He rose, the better to see his father-in-law’s unconscious figure. It looked as lifeless and as cold as though Mr. Stone had followed some thought below the ground, and left his body standing there to await his return. Its appearance oppressed Stephen.

‘You might set the house on fire,’ he thought; ‘he’d never notice.’

Mr. Stone’s figure moved; the sound of along sigh came out to Stephen in the windless garden. He turned his eyes away, with the sudden feeling that it was not the thing to watch the old chap like this; then, getting up, he went indoors. In his brother’s study he stood turning over the knick-knacks on the writing-table.

‘I warned Hilary that he was burning his fingers,’ he thought.

At the sound of the latch-key he went back to the hall.

However much he had secretly disapproved of her from the beginning, because she had always seemed to him such an uncomfortable and tantalising person, Stephen was impressed that night by the haunting unhappiness of Bianca’s face; as if it had been suddenly disclosed to him that she could not help herself. This was disconcerting, being, in a sense, a disorderly way of seeing things.

“You look tired, B.,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I thought it better to bring this round tonight.”

Bianca glanced at the letter.

“It is to you,” she said. “I don’t wish to read it, thank you.”

Stephen compressed his lips.

“But I wish you to hear it, please,” he said. “I’ll read it out, if you’ll allow me.

“‘CHARING CROSS STATION. “‘DEAR STEVIE,

“‘I told you yesterday morning that I was going abroad alone. Afterwards I changed my mind – I meant to take her. I went to her lodgings for the purpose. I have lived too long amongst sentiments for such a piece of reality as that. Class has saved me; it has triumphed over my most primitive instincts.

“‘I am going alone – back to my sentiments. No slight has been placed on Bianca – but my married life having become a mockery, I shall not return to it. The following address will find me, and I shall ask you presently to send on my household gods.

“‘Please let Bianca know the substance of this letter.

“‘Ever your affectionate brother,

“‘HILARY DALLISON.”’

With a frown Stephen folded up the letter, and restored it to his breast pocket.

‘It’s more bitter than I thought,’ he reflected; ‘and yet he’s done the only possible thing!’

Bianca was leaning her elbow on the mantelpiece with her face turned to the wall. Her silence irritated Stephen, whose loyalty to his brother longed to fend a vent.

“I’m very much relieved, of course,” he said at last. “It would have been fatal.”

She did not move, and Stephen became increasingly aware that this was a most awkward matter to touch on.

“Of course,” he began again. “But, B., I do think you – rather – I mean – ” And again he stopped before her utter silence, her utter immobility. Then, unable to go away without having in some sort expressed his loyalty to Hilary, he tried once more: “Hilary is the kindest man I know. It’s not his fault if he’s out of touch with life – if he’s not fit to deal with things. He’s negative!”

And having thus in a single word, somewhat to his own astonishment, described his brother, he held out his hand.

The hand which Bianca placed in it was feverishly hot. Stephen felt suddenly compunctious.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he stammered, “about the whole thing. I’m awfully sorry for you – ”

Bianca drew back her hand.

With a little shrug Stephen turned away.

‘What are you to do with women like that?’ was his thought, and saying dryly, “Good-night, B.,” he went.

For some time Bianca sat in Hilary’s chair. Then, by the faint glimmer coming through the half-open door, she began to wander round the room, touching the walls, the books, the prints, all the familiar things among which he had lived so many years…

In that dim continual journey she was like a disharmonic spirit traversing the air above where its body lies.

The door creaked behind her. A voice said sharply:

“What are you doing in this house?”

Mr. Stone was standing beside the bust of Socrates. Bianca went up to him.

“Father!”

Mr. Stone stared. “It is you! I thought it was a thief! Where is Hilary?”

“Gone away.”

“Alone?”

Bianca bowed her head. “It is very late, Dad,” she whispered.

Mr. Stone’s hand moved as though he would have stroked her.

“The human heart,” he murmured, “is the tomb of many feelings.”

Bianca put her arm round him.

“You must go to bed, Dad,” she said, trying to get him to the door, for in her heart something seemed giving way.

Mr. Stone stumbled; the door swung to; the room was plunged in darkness. A hand, cold as ice, brushed her cheek. With all her force she stiffed a scream.

“I am here,” Mr. Stone said.

His hand, wandering downwards, touched her shoulder, and she seized it with her own burning hand. Thus linked, they groped their way out into the passage towards his room.

“Good-night, dear,” Bianca murmured.

By the light of his now open door Mr. Stone seemed to try and see her face, but she would not show it him. Closing the door gently, she stole upstairs.

Sitting down in her bedroom by the open window, it seemed to her that the room was full of people – her nerves were so unstrung. It was as if walls had not the power this night to exclude human presences. Moving, or motionless, now distinct, then covered suddenly by the thick veil of some material object, they circled round her quiet figure, lying back in the chair with shut eyes. These disharmonic shadows flitting in the room made a stir like the rubbing of dry straw or the hum of bees among clover stalks. When she sat up they vanished, and the sounds became the distant din of homing traffic; but the moment she closed her eyes, her visitors again began to steal round her with that dry, mysterious hum.

She fell asleep presently, and woke with a start. There, in a glimmer of pale light, stood the little model, as in the fatal picture Bianca had painted of her. Her face was powder white, with shadows beneath the eyes. Breath seemed coming through her parted lips, just touched with colour. In her hat lay the tiny peacock’s feather beside the two purplish-pink roses. A scent came from her, too – but faint, as ever was the scent of chicory flower. How long had she been standing there? Bianca started to her feet, and as she rose the vision vanished.

She went towards the spot. There was nothing in that corner but moonlight; the scent she had perceived was merely that of the trees drifting in.

But so vivid had that vision been that she stood at the window, panting for air, passing her hand again and again across her eyes.

Outside, over the dark gardens, the moon hung full and almost golden. Its honey-pale light filtered down on every little shape of tree, and leaf, and sleeping flower. That soft, vibrating radiance seemed to have woven all into one mysterious whole, stilling disharmony, so that each little separate shape had no meaning to itself.

Bianca looked long at the rain of moonlight falling on the earth’s carpet, like a covering shower of blossom which bees have sucked and spilled. Then, below her, out through candescent space, she saw a shadow dart forth along the grass, and to her fright a voice rose, tremulous and clear, seeming to seek enfranchisement beyond the barrier of the dark trees: “My brain is clouded. Great Universe! I cannot write! I can no longer discover to my brothers that they are one. I am not worthy to stay here. Let me pass into You, and die!”

Bianca saw her father’s fragile arms stretch out into the night through the sleeves of his white garment, as though expecting to be received at once into the Universal Brotherhood of the thin air.

There ensued a moment, when, by magic, every little dissonance in all the town seemed blended into a harmony of silence, as it might be the very death of self upon the earth.

Then, breaking that trance, Mr. Stone’s voice rose again, trembling out into the night, as though blown through a reed.

“Brothers!” he said.

Behind the screen of lilac bushes at the gate Bianca saw the dark helmet of a policeman. He stood there staring steadily in the direction of that voice. Raising his lantern, he flashed it into every corner of the garden, searching for those who had been addressed. Satisfied, apparently, that no one was there, he moved it to right and left, lowered it to the level of his breast, and walked slowly on.