Chapter IX: Part II: I (2)

She carried the asparagus into the dining-room. Once again, as she opened the door, she felt uncomfortable. How should she have thought of knocking first? She had never had to knock at any except bedroom doors since she had been in service. Whenever she happened to go into a room everything would be just as nice and what you’d expect as possible: Mr. Cumfrit at the head of the table, taking a sip of claret, Mrs. Cumfrit on his right hand, quietly eating her toast. ‘I’ve done a good stroke of business to-day,’ Mr. Cumfrit would be saying. ‘I’m so glad, George dear,’ Mrs. Cumfrit would be answering. Things like that would be going on in the room, things you’d expect. Or, in the drawing-room, Mr. Cumfrit would be one side of the fire, Mrs. Cumfrit the other, reading out bits of the evening paper to each other. ‘Seems to me this wretched Government doesn’t know what it wants,’ Mr. Cumfrit would be saying. ‘It does seem so, doesn’t it, George dear,’ Mrs. Cumfrit would be answering, quiet and ladylike.

But this....

Impossible for Mrs. Mitcham not to start and draw back when she opened the door. She all but scattered the lovely asparagus over the carpet. She wasn’t used--and her mistress, too--she couldn’t have believed----

‘Come in, come in, Mrs. Mitcham,’ the young gentleman called out gaily, picking up his napkin which had fallen on to the floor. ‘We’re married, you know. It’s all right. You signed the certificate yourself.’

Mrs. Mitcham smiled nervously. The sauce-boat rattled in its dish as she handed it to her mistress. She wasn’t used to this sort of thing.

IV

That evening, sentimentally, they went to <i>The Immortal Hour</i>. In this very place, only two months back, they had been sitting apart hardly aware of each other, hardly more than looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

‘Do you remember the night I first moved up next to you?’ Christopher whispered.

‘Don’t I,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, Catherine--isn’t it wonderful to think we’re married!’ he whispered.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience, still sparse and still ferocious.

She was in bliss again. He loved her so. He had been so utterly charming in Hertford Street, boyishly delighted with everything, filling the dull little flat with youth, and all that youth trails with it of clouds of glory--laughter, happiness, radiant confidence. Amazing to have this there after George, after the quiet years since George.

By the evening she was tired, horribly tired, and knew she looked like a ghost; but she didn’t mind as long as it was dark and he couldn’t see her silly white face and smudged, haggard eyes. There was only one interval, and her hat would hide her then. <i>The Immortal Hour</i> was such a nice dark opera: pitch dark for ages in the first act,--so restful, so soothing.

She went sound asleep, her head against his arm. He didn’t know she was asleep, and was thinking all the time of how they were both thinking and feeling the same things exactly, he and she who owed each other to the for-ever-to-be-adored <i>Immortal Hour</i>.

‘Darling, darling,’ he murmured, stooping and trying to kiss her at the darkest moment. This bliss of unity with the perfect love, this end of loneliness, this enveloping joy....

She slept profoundly.

However, she woke when the curtain went down before the second part of the act, and those of the audience who were new to it clapped in spite of the music going on, and those who weren’t new indignantly hissed at them, and sat up and pulled her hat straight. It was the same funny little extinguishing hat she used to wear at the beginning; he had specially asked her to put it on.

‘Yes, we must be proper now,’ said Christopher, smiling at her.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the outraged audience.

How familiar it all was; how happy they were. She was glad he didn’t know she had been asleep. It was awful to have gone to sleep on such an occasion, but then she was so appallingly tired. Never in her life had she been tired like this. Ah, here was the love scene beginning ... she wouldn’t go to sleep now....

Her hand slid into his; his shut tight over it; they sat close, close, thrilled by memories, by all that the music meant to them; and in the most beautiful part Catherine felt her thrills grow fainter and fade away and go out, and again her head drooped against his shoulder and again she went sound asleep.

‘Oh, I love you, love you,’ whispered Christopher, putting his arm round her, sure her drooping head was the gesture of abandonment to irresistible emotion.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience.

Afterwards he wanted to take her somewhere to supper.

‘Supper?’ echoed Catherine faintly, who was dying with fatigue.

‘Yes. We must celebrate--drink the health of our home-coming,’ said Christopher, drawing her hand through his arm and proudly walking her off to a taxi. His wife. Marvellous. No more slipping away in the crowd and escaping him now, thank you. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can dance. I shall blow up if I don’t let off steam somehow.’

‘Dance?’ echoed Catherine again, still more faintly, as she was swept up into the taxi.

‘Do you realise we’ve never danced together once yet?’

‘But we can’t go anywhere like that in these clothes.’

That was true. He hadn’t thought of that. Well then, they would dress properly the next night and go and dance and dance.

Catherine sat back in the seat. Dance? She hadn’t danced for years, not since before her marriage with George--never since.

She told Christopher this, and he only laughed and said it was high time she did dance; he adored dancing; he longed to dance with her; they would often go.

‘Oh, Christopher,’ said Catherine, sliding close up to him, ‘the best thing of all will be being alone together at home, you and I, in your precious evenings. Won’t we go there now? Do we really want supper?’

‘Tired, darling?’ he asked, instantly anxious, stooping to look under her hat.

‘Oh no--not a bit. Not in the least. Really not,’ said Catherine quickly. ‘But--our first evening--it’s so lovely at home----’

He hung out of the window and redirected the driver. ‘Yes. Of course,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘That’s far and away the best of all----’

And they began to whisper.

Next day he went back to work. When he left at ten o’clock Catherine was still in bed.

‘Do you mind my not being at breakfast?’ she had asked him when Mrs. Mitcham very gingerly beat, or, more accurately, delicately patted the gong.

Mrs. Mitcham had had some moments of painful indecision before doing anything with the gong. It was altogether a most awkward morning for her. She had never yet been placed in such a position. Husband and wife, of course, and all that--she knew all that; but still it did feel awkward, and she had a queer reluctance to rousing them--almost as if they were dangerous, as well as embarrassing, to have loose about the flat. Yet it was breakfast time. Orders were for nine sharp. She did finally get herself to the gong and timidly tapped it, divided between duty and her odd reluctance to see her mistress and the young gentleman come out of that room, to have to face them....

‘Stay there, my darling love,’ said Christopher, smoothing the pillows and tucking Catherine up as tenderly as if she were a baby. ‘I’ll bring you your breakfast.’

‘I--never do get up to breakfast,’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation, smiling at him as he bent over her--she, who had not once during the whole of George’s time missed being down on the stroke of half-past eight to pour out his coffee for him and kiss him good-bye on the door-mat. ‘Good-bye, little woman,’ George used to say, waving to her before the lift engulfed him. In those days good husbands of good wives frequently called them little women.

Here now was her chance. She would establish a custom that might save her. And if she never had got up to breakfast it wouldn’t worry Christopher that she never did, and he wouldn’t, frowning with concerned perplexity, ask her searching questions as to being not well. So, by sleeping on into the mornings after he had gone to work, she might catch up with rest and dodge those horrid furrows exhaustion was dragging down her face.

So the habit was started, and Mrs. Mitcham learnt not to expect to see her till lunch-time. Sometimes she even slept later, and once or twice stayed in bed all day, not getting up till just in time to dress for dinner. This, however, only happened during the first two or three weeks. As time went on Mrs. Mitcham began to be able to count on her mistress’s having her bath at twelve o’clock and being ready by one.

Mrs. Mitcham was all for her resting and taking care of herself, for she was much attached to Catherine, but she couldn’t help feeling--she didn’t permit herself to think it, but she couldn’t help feeling--that there was something unbecoming in this turning of day into night. There was plenty of night, Mrs. Mitcham thought, for those who chose to take it, but of course if----

Mrs. Mitcham, folding up her mistress’s garments, shook her head. And the garments too--she shook her head at them. Such things had not hitherto been part of Mrs. Cumfrit’s outfit. Good things she had had, as good of their kind as one would wish to see,--lawn, silk, fine embroideries,--but never what Mrs. Mitcham called flimsies. These were flimsy, and not only flimsy but transparent. Every time Mrs. Mitcham saw them she was shocked afresh. She couldn’t get used to them. Mrs. Cumfrit--she corrected herself, and said Mrs. Monckton--had gone out and bought them the first afternoon of her return from the Isle of Wight; and she so careful about coals, and turning the electric light out. There were six nightgowns that you could pull through a wedding-ring, they went so into nothing. Chiffon nightgowns. Different colours. Pink, lemon-colour, and so on; and all of them you could see through as plain as daylight. It was a mercy, thought Mrs. Mitcham, that it was dark at night. She, who prided herself on Catherine and had always thought her the ideal of what a lady should be, was much perturbed by these nightgowns. And the bathroom too--such a litter there now of scented dusting powder, and scented crystals, and flagons of coloured liquid that smelt good but improper, thought Mrs. Mitcham, furtively sniffing; what would poor Mr. Cumfrit say to his bathroom now, he who had never had a thing in it but a big sponge and a piece of Pears’ soap?

It was after the visit of the Fanshawes that Mrs. Mitcham first found a lip-stick on Catherine’s dressing-table. She was immensely upset. No lady she had had to do with had ever had such a thing on her dressing-table. Powder was different, because one needed powder sometimes for other things besides one’s face, and also one powdered babies, and they, poor lambs, couldn’t be suspected of wanting to appear different from what God had made them. But a lip-stick! Red stuff. What actresses put on, and those who were no better than they should be. Her mistress and a lip-stick--what would Miss Virginia say?

The Fanshawes, who were the immediate cause of the buying of the lip-stick, came to tea the second Sunday after the end of the honeymoon,--Ned, his mother and sister. They had been extraordinarily taken aback by Catherine’s appearance. The flat rang with their exclamations and laments. Catherine, who had been looking sixteen when they last saw her, Catherine the bright-eyed, the quick of movement, Catherine with her lovely skin and unruffled brow--they couldn’t get over it.

Christopher had gone for a walk in the Park after lunch, straining at his leash, angry at being kept in London this beautiful afternoon because the Fanshawes insisted on coming and thrusting their inquisitive noses where they weren’t wanted, and he hadn’t got back when they arrived, so that Catherine had them to herself at first.

‘Damn those women,’ he had remarked when, after persistent telephoning and letters and impassioned inquiries as to what had happened to her and when they might come and see her, Catherine had felt she had better face it and wrote and told them she was married and asked them to tea that Sunday to meet her husband. And when he heard that it wasn’t only women but Ned too, he damned him particularly, on the ground that he had a silly nose and wore a fur rug up to his chin; and, expressing extreme disgust at being kept in on his and Catherine’s only real afternoon by a blighter like that, he went off for a quick turn in the Park, promising faithfully to be back in time.

He wasn’t; and the Fanshawes got there first, and the flat was echoing with exclamations when he opened the door.

Catherine was sitting on the sofa, wedged between the two female Fanshawes, whose arms encircled her and whose free hands stroked her, and that worm Ned was looking on from his, Christopher’s, special chair.

‘I’ve had influenza--that’s why,’ Catherine was lying as he came in.

‘But fancy not telling us you were married! Fancy not telling us a word!’

‘Of course it’s what we’ve been dying to have happen for ages--isn’t it, Ned?’

‘You sweet little thing, we’re so delighted--aren’t we, Ned?’

‘Do tell us all about it. Isn’t he off his head with happiness? How pleased Virginia must be----’

‘So nice for her to have a father again----’

‘Are they devoted to each other?’

‘Have you been down to Chickover with him yet?’

‘We’re simply aching to see him----’

And there in the doorway he stood.

‘Here <i>is</i> Christopher,’ said Catherine, flushing and half getting up.

They all turned their heads. For a moment nobody spoke. He advanced on them with outstretched hand, doing his best to smile broadly, to be the welcoming host.

<i>That</i> young man. That <i>boy</i>. The boy they had found with Catherine one day, who had rushed out the minute they came in, and Catherine had laughed when they asked who on earth he was, and said all she knew about him was that he was certainly mad. <i>That</i> fellow. The youth who had glared through the window of the car and almost shook his fist....

The Fanshawes couldn’t speak. They couldn’t move either. They were stunned.

V

At Chickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London--they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted--the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.

Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt,--leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.

Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.

None came.

Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.

Nothing happened. Just silence.

At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’--and began to look worried, and write letters herself.

Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain--the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.

At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’

‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.

‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.

Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.

‘Yes, Stephen--what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.

‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmed by the thought of the blow about to be delivered--and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.

He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.

This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.

‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her....

‘Oh, Stephen’--Virginia was thoroughly frightened--‘mother?’

‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’

Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.

‘She is dead,’ said Virginia, in a voice so toneless that it sounded indifferent.

‘How much better,’ thought Stephen, ‘for everybody as well as herself if she were.’

Aloud he said, his face buried in Virginia’s bosom. ‘No. She is not dead. Quite the contrary. She is remarrying.’

And as Virginia said nothing, for her breath was taken away by these blows and counter-blows, he went on: ‘Darling, I would have spared you if I could. I have tried to spare you. I have tried all these days to find some way of keeping it from you. Indeed, indeed I have tried----’

‘But, Stephen--why? Why shouldn’t mother marry again?’ asked Virginia, with the irritability natural to people who have been frightened without cause, but so unusual in her that Stephen could only account for it by her physical condition. ‘I think it very strange of her not to tell me, but why shouldn’t she remarry? Now there’ll be somebody to take care of her. I’m glad.’

‘Darling----’

He pressed his face still closer to her bosom. He wished he could hide it there for ever.

‘But I do think,’ said Virginia, reaction against her mother setting in now she knew she wasn’t dead, as it had set in the day she saw her trotting safe and sound up the avenue when she had been torn by fears of an accident, ‘I do think she might have told me. I do think that.’

Her voice had tears in it. She strangled them, and held herself up very straight, offering no real hospitality to Stephen’s head. She was deeply wounded.

‘Ah, but there are some things one doesn’t tell,’ said Stephen.

He was miserable. He would have given at least half Chickover to be able to spare her.

‘Remarrying isn’t one of them,’ she said; and for the first time he caught a glimpse of another Virginia, a Virginia who perhaps, ten years ahead, might argue.

He raised his head from her bosom and looked at her again.

‘I know what I am talking about, my child,’ he said. ‘This remarrying is. She is marrying the young man with whom she motored up to London. You saw him yourself. Perhaps you will now agree that there are some things one does not willingly tell one’s daughter.’

Virginia stared at him a moment, her eyes very wide open. Then, without speaking a word, she got up off his knee and walked over to a window and stood at it with her back to him.

How strange of her, he thought. What a strange way of meeting trouble--to go away from him like that, to turn from the love that longed to help her.

He didn’t know what to do or say next. He sat watching her in the utmost perplexity. His Virginia, getting up off his knee, withdrawing herself from his loving arms----

‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I can imagine there may be such things. But I don’t think’--she turned and faced him--‘this is one of them.’

He got on to his feet and went towards her, his arms outstretched.

‘My darling, my wounded darling,’ he cried, all understanding and pitifulness, ‘you are generous and young----’

‘So is Mr. Monckton,’ was her unexpected answer.

Really it was like a blow in the face. It stopped him short. It <i>must</i> be her condition. But all that day the attitude continued, the strange, almost defiant attitude, and Stephen could only go into his study and pray that her heart might be softened, and her eyes opened to see things as they truly were.

Such a grave misfortune--she did not of course know how grave, how terrible it was--the first in their married life, and to take it this way, hardening her heart against the sympathy and understanding he and his mother offered her in such boundless measure, and persisting, with an obstinacy he wouldn’t have dreamed her capable of, in upholding what her mother had done! True she said very little, but that little was all obstinate. She was quite unlike her usual self to his mother, too, whose one thought was to comfort, and would not admit that there was anything to be comforted about. And when that night he got into bed, and drew her to his heart in the exquisite contact of the body that had always till then soothed every trouble of the spirit, and she came apparently willingly, and clung to him, and was his own dear wife as he thought, and, happily sure of this, he whispered that he hoped she had remembered to pray for her poor mother, it was a grievous shock to feel her shrink away from him and hear her say she hadn’t--not more than usual, not more than her childhood’s ‘God bless my mummy,’ and most grievous to have her ask him, just as if they weren’t in bed but downstairs conversing in their clothes, just as if they weren’t in the sacred place and at the sacred moment never yet profaned by talk of anything but love, why he really thought it so dreadful for her mother to marry again.

‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry some one young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly--he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.

And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying some one young enough to be your daughter?’

Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.

VI

Stephen was completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.

Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.

On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed--crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.

Yet how many legs did Stephen not know he really had to stand on. Everybody, except children like Virginia, inexperienced and new, would agree that the difference between the two cases was such that one was accepted as natural and the other with derision. But Virginia said there was no difference--he had an uneasy feeling that Christ might have said so too--and declared that if her mother’s marrying some one so much younger was terrible, then her marrying Stephen was terrible; more terrible, because there were actually eight years greater difference in their case.

All this she said that first tragic night in bed, and inquired, when she had finished, what was to be done about it.

He was wax. Not immediately; not for some black weeks of agonising separation, of days spent avoiding each other, of nights spent with their backs turned; but inevitably, before her stubbornness, he melted. She had too many of the necessities of his life in her hands. To be out of harmony with Virginia was worse, far worse--he shuddered as he admitted it, but there it was--than being out of harmony with God.

And Virginia, though she kept up her stout exterior and went doggedly through these painful days of April and May--the estrangement lasted all that time--was most wretchedly unhappy. What was she to make of all this? In her heart she was as much shocked as Stephen. But how could she not stand up for and defend her mother? How could she deny her own blood? Deeply she resented having to defend her mother; it shattered the foundations of the whole of her childhood’s faith. Was there ever anything more miserable, she thought, than to love some one and be horrified at them at the same time? She who ought to have been putting up her feet and resting more diligently than ever--‘The fifth month, dear child,’ Mrs. Colquhoun anxiously reminded her, ‘we are in the fifth month now, you know, and have to be most careful’--walked ceaselessly instead in the garden, up and down, up and down, in all those paths where she was least likely to be found by her mother-in-law, trying her hardest to see clear, to think right, groping round for some way to get back to Stephen while at the same time not deserting her mother, to get back to his arms, to his heart, to the unclouded love without which she felt she couldn’t live.

‘You know, Virginia dearest,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun at last, whose only wish was to console and be confided in, and who was much upset by this marked and morbid avoidance, ‘<i>you</i> have nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘Has anybody?’ Virginia asked, stopping short in the middle of the path she had been waylaid in, and looking her mother-in-law squarely in the eyes.

‘That wretched, wretched mother of hers,’ groaned Mrs. Colquhoun to Stephen, describing this little scene to him and how uncomfortable and hurt she had been by the poor child’s want of frankness. ‘What misery she has brought on us all.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Stephen, looking up wearily from the sermon he was trying to write--his head, his heart, every part of him seemed to ache--‘we must countenance her.’

‘Countenance? Countenance her? Do you mean behave as if we approved of her?’

‘I do, mother. I have been thinking it over very seriously. Virginia’s health, and with her health her child’s health, is at stake. She----’ his voice faltered, for he was most miserable--‘she weeps at night. She--she weeps when she thinks I am asleep. If I try to console her it--it becomes heartbreaking.’

He turned his face away and bent over the manuscript. Tears had come out of his own eyes, and were wetting his face. Impossible for any one to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies....

‘Wretched, wretched woman,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again, more bitterly than ever, for she saw her son’s tears.

‘Yes. But we must think of Virginia.’

‘Has she been writing to her mother?’

‘I am sure she has not. She would do nothing without my knowledge.’

He dug the nib of his pen into the blotting-paper.

‘My wife is the soul of loyalty and straightness----’ he began, but his voice quivering uncontrollably at the mention of her dear qualities, he broke off.

‘Yes indeed, Stephen. Indeed I know it. She is the dearest child. Only at these times a woman isn’t quite herself, and Virginia, I can see, has got into a curious morbid state----’

‘I should leave her alone, mother,’ interrupted Stephen, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his face.

Mrs. Colquhoun was hurt. All her affection and sympathy being thrown back, as it were, at her,--told straight by her son, to whose welfare she had devoted the whole of her life, that she was taking the wrong line with Virginia. As though she didn’t know better than he could what was the right line to take with some one in Virginia’s condition!

‘I think I was wrong about those letters,’ he said, continuing to jab his pen into the blotting-paper. ‘I ought to have let her have them.’

‘I don’t at all agree with you. We did what we thought right, and more than that no mortal can be expected to do.’

‘No doubt. But we were mistaken, perhaps, as to what was right.’

‘Nonsense, Stephen. The child is only nineteen. She has to be protected from the influence of that woman. You caught the woman out yourself in the most scandalous, the most disgraceful immorality, and now you propose to countenance her and her--well, really there is only one word for him--her paramour.’

‘They are married. They have expiated their sin.’

‘Her late paramour, then.’

‘For Virginia’s sake they must be countenanced.’

‘How?’ asked Mrs. Colquhoun, greatly exasperated. Here was her son every bit as morbid as her daughter-in-law, and with no excuse of being in any particular month.

‘I am going to ask Virginia to write and invite them to pay us a visit.’

‘Here?’

‘Where else?’

‘I shall go away.’

‘As you please.’

‘Stephen----’

‘Yes, mother?’

But without waiting to hear what she was going to say he went on: ‘I have mismanaged this whole business. I have adopted a line with Virginia which cannot be continued, for it makes her unhappy and ill. Except for that night they spent together, which has now been expiated, what is there after all in their marriage different from Virginia’s and mine?’

‘Stephen!’

‘The sexes are reversed; the ages are the same--or rather the balance is on her side. She is eight years nearer his age than I am to Virginia’s.’

‘Stephen!’

‘It’s a mere prejudice, in any case.’

‘Stephen!’

‘My darling Virginia, so much closer to simple truth than I am,--so much closer, indeed, to God--sees no difference.’

‘She says so to you, does she? I wager she does see a difference in her heart, then. She is only standing up for that woman from some warped idea of duty--standing up for her against her own husband, against the father of her child.’

He made a gesture of weariness. He had suffered much. None but himself knew what his nights had been.

‘I love Virginia,’ he said, as if to himself.

Mrs. Colquhoun stood staring at him. He did not look at her, but sat at his table with bowed head. She had never before seen him like this, broken down, his standards gone, giving in, winking at sin, prepared, as he himself put it, to countenance it.

‘Stephen----’ she began.

He got up. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll go to Virginia now and put things straight.’

‘You really intend to have those shocking people here and whitewash them?’

He looked at her a moment in silence, bringing his attention back to what she was saying.

‘You talk as if they were outbuildings, mother,’ he said, with a faint, wretched smile.

‘Outbuildings! Sepulchres,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun. ‘Abodes of corruption. And nothing you can do in the way of whitening them will hide--will hide----’

She was becoming hysterical; in her life she had never been that. Words were failing her; in her life they had never done that. She must grip on to herself, she must shut her mouth tight. It frightened her, the behaviour of her hitherto absolutely reliable body.

Her son went out of the room and left her standing there.

VII

It was the very morning after this that Stephen was late for breakfast for the first time for years, and Virginia got down before him and found a postcard in her mother’s handwriting among the letters, with a picture on it of some place in the Isle of Wight and these words: <i>You have helped me to happiness. Catherine Monckton.</i>

She stared at it puzzled. She was still more puzzled when, turning it over again and looking at the address, she saw it was for Stephen, not for her.

Stephen had helped her mother to happiness? It would be just like him, of course--their reconciliation the night before had been utter and wonderful--but how? What had he had to do with it? He who only now, only yesterday, had come round to not disapproving any longer of the marriage?

She was still holding the postcard in her hand, vainly trying to make head or tail of it, when he came in.

‘It seems,’ she said, going to meet him with the quick steps and the radiant smile of love that is very proud, ‘that I still don’t know all your goodness, dear husband.’

‘What is it, my own wife?’ he asked, gazing at her upturned face with the glad content of the readmitted into paradise.

‘Why, look----’ And she gave him the postcard.

He turned a deep red. She took that for modesty, and laughed with pride in him. What he could have done and why he had done it she didn’t know, but she loved him with a positively burning faith.

Stephen, reading the words on the postcard, deduced that the marriage, which he had supposed had taken place a month or six weeks before, had in fact only just done so, for he believed no lasting happiness could be the lot of the ex-Mrs. Cumfrit, and gave her and her unfortunate victim two or three days of it at most before remorse and disillusionment set in. They were evidently at the very beginning of their two or three days when the card was written. He had had no wish at all, he knew, to help his mother-in-law to happiness. Expiation only was what he had had in mind. That expiation should be a happiness-giving process had not occurred to him as possible. And here was Virginia, praising and blessing him; here was this young unsullied spirit once more making him, by her belief and pride in his goodness, feel ashamed of himself. Also, how awkward it was. Why could not Mrs. Cumfrit have announced she was now Monckton in an ordinary manner, without dragging him into it?

‘Let us, my darling,’ he said, not knowing what to say and fervently wishing he really had done something to deserve the look of proud adoration on Virginia’s face, ‘have breakfast. Otherwise it will be cold. And I am as hungry as a----’ he was going to say hunter, but it sounded too unclerical, so he said rector instead; and they both laughed, being in the mood, that happy morning, when one laughs at anything.

She brought his coffee round to him, and stood behind his chair laying her cheek on his head. ‘You’ve got to confess, you know,’ she said, ‘however much you want to hide your light under a bushel. What did you do, Stephen darling, and why have we been so miserable all this time about mother’s marrying, when it was really you who----?’

‘I’ll confess to you, my love, that I did enjoin marriage.’

‘You did? Then why----?’

‘Virginia, love, you trust your husband?’

‘Oh, Stephen--so <i>absolutely</i>!’ she cried, putting her arms round his neck.

‘Then if I ask you not to question me further on this matter?’ he said, stroking the hand round his neck and looking up at the face so near his own.

‘Oh Stephen--ask me something harder than that. I do so long to show what I would do for you. I do so long to be more like you----’

‘My darling, God forbid,’ said Stephen very earnestly.

‘Oh Stephen----’ was all Virginia could say to a modesty, a humility so profound. She had married not only a lover but a saint.

Her cup was full. To be asked by Stephen not to question him ... she went about as dumb as a mouse. To be asked by Stephen to believe in him ... she went about bursting with belief. And she was so happy, restored to her husband after the black separation, that she didn’t even any longer mind the idea of Christopher as a stepfather; and her happiness spilt over into the letter she wrote her mother asking them both to Chickover; and it was such a warm letter that Catherine, accustomed in her relations with Virginia to provide all the warmth, was as much puzzled as Virginia had been on reading the postcard to Stephen.

That Virginia, who rarely showed warmth, should show it now was really very puzzling. But, being at the moment in the first astonishment at the joy of falling in love, Catherine had no time for anything or any one but Christopher, and didn’t think about Virginia’s letter for long. She scribbled a little note--‘<i>Thank you, darling, for your letter. We shall love to come some day</i>’--and forgot her. Nor did she remember her again, or think of Chickover and Stephen and all that strange dim life, till the Fanshawes’ visit.

On that visit almost everything the Fanshawes said seemed to produce a climax. Their innocent questions were all, except one, very difficult to answer, and their comments could mostly only be met by silence. The one question that wasn’t difficult was, ‘Have you been to Chickover with him yet?’--for the warm, forgotten invitation came back to Catherine’s mind at these words; and though at the moment the Fanshawes hadn’t given her time to answer, afterwards, before they left, when all the naturalness and glow had gone out of their visit and everybody was elaborately making conversation, she announced that Virginia had written urging them to go down as soon as possible and stay a long while, and that they thought of soon going.

At this Christopher had made a face at her, indicative of his amazement, for it was the first he had heard of any such invitation or visit; and Mrs. Fanshawe asked, ‘Have Virginia and Mr. Monckton already met?’--a little timidly, for by this time she too felt that any question was likely to turn out to be a bombshell.

‘Oh yes,’ said Catherine, reddening again, a vision of that meeting flashing before her eyes--the Chickover drawing-room, herself coming in ready to start for London and finding three figures in it, figures stiff and silent as three hostile pokers.

Upon which the Fanshawes decided that there were things and people in life they couldn’t understand, and gave up trying to. But their bosoms were benevolent, and the only criticism they permitted themselves was that Virginia, whom they didn’t know, must be a little unusual.

VIII

But what was to be done about Chickover?

When she saw herself in the glass in the mornings before dressing, Catherine felt she had better not go. The exclamations of the Fanshawes had confirmed her worst fears, and she knew for certain she was looking worn out. How could she go down there with Christopher, looking worn out? Virginia would notice it at once, and think she wasn’t happy and blame Christopher. Stephen would notice it too, and be sure she wasn’t happy, and triumph. While as for Mrs. Colquhoun----

She put Chickover out of her thoughts, and went and bought a lip-stick. The Fanshawes were giving a dance that night, and had invited them, and Christopher insisted on going. Useless for her to say she couldn’t dance; he said she wouldn’t be able to help herself with him. It appeared that he loved dancing, and only hadn’t danced much before his marriage because, as he explained, he couldn’t stick the fool-girls one met at dances. After all, it wasn’t possible to dance in absolutely stony silence, and what to say to these girls positively beat him. If one could have made love to them, now--Catherine winced--but one couldn’t even do that, because then one would have got tangled up and have to marry them. Marry them! Good God.

Now came this invitation, and he jumped at it, and all she could do was to make the best of herself. So, as a first step, she went out and bought a lip-stick; and such had been the innocence of her life in these matters that she blushed when she asked for one. But she wasn’t pleased with the effect, and, anxiously examining herself before Christopher came in to dinner, was inclined to think it only made her look older and certainly made her look less good.

He, however, noticed nothing, for by this time George’s electric lights had been heavily shaded, and he kissed her with his usual delight at getting back to her, and the stuff all came off, and she wondered what other women did to keep it on, or whether one either had a lip-stick or a lover, but never both.

She didn’t enjoy the dance. He couldn’t make her dance, however much he tried and she tried; and after struggling round the room with her and treading lamentably on each other’s toes, he gave up and let her sit down. But it wasn’t possible for him, hearing that throbbing music, not to dance, and Catherine, looking on at him going round with one girl after the other, all of whom seemed miracles of youth and prettiness, didn’t enjoy herself.

The girls appeared to languish at him. No wonder. He was far the most attractive young man there, she thought with an ache both of pride and pain. She didn’t enjoy herself at all.

The Fanshawes were very kind--almost too kind, as though they were eager to hide the facts of her own situation from her--and kept on bringing up elderly men who weren’t dancing and introducing them. But the elderly men thought the small lady with the wandering eyes and inattentive ears and reddened mouth rather tiresome, and soon melted away; besides, they preferred girls. So that whenever the Fanshawes looked her way they saw her, in spite of their efforts, sitting alone.

At last, after Ned Fanshawe had sat with her a long time, his mother came up with an elderly woman instead of an elderly man, and introduced her, and she did stick. Like Catherine, she appeared to know nobody there. They sat together the rest of the evening.

‘That’s my daughter,’ said the elderly woman, pointing out a very pretty girl dancing at that moment with Christopher. ‘Which is yours?’

No, Catherine didn’t enjoy herself.

For the life of her she couldn’t help being rather quiet in the taxi going home. Christopher had seemed to enjoy himself so much. All those girls....

‘I loved that,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, and then drawing her to him.

‘I thought you said you were bored by girls.’

‘Not if you’re there too. It makes all the difference.’

‘But I wasn’t much good to you.’

‘Why, just to know you were there, with me, in the room, made me happy.’

‘Do I make a good background?’ she asked, trying to sound amused.

He threw away his cigarette and took her in his arms. ‘Darling, were you horribly fed up, sitting there? I tell you what--we’ll get a gramophone, and I’ll teach you to dance. You’ll learn in no time, and then we’ll dance together at these shows every night.’

‘Wouldn’t I be <i>tired</i>,’ said Catherine, making an effort to laugh; and, instead of laughing, crying.

Crying. The worst thing possible for her eyes. She would be a real, unmistakable hag in the morning.

‘Why, what is it, my precious little thing?’ exclaimed Christopher, feeling her face suddenly wet, and greatly surprised and distressed.

‘It’s nothing--I’m just tired,’ she said, hurriedly wiping her eyes and determined no more tears should screw themselves out.

‘I was a selfish idiot not to think how bored you must be,’ he said, anxiously kissing and loving her. ‘I saw you talking to Fanshawe, and thought you looked quite happy----’

‘Oh yes--so I was.’

‘Catherine--little thing----’

He kissed her again and again, and she kissed him back, and managed to laugh.

‘Darling Chris,’ she said, nestling close, ‘I don’t believe I’m any good at dances.’

‘You will be when I’ve taught you. You’ll dance like a little angel. We’ll get a gramophone to-morrow.’

‘Oh no--don’t get a gramophone. Please, Chris darling. I can’t learn to dance. I don’t want to. I’m sure I never could. You must go to dances without me.’

‘Without you! I like that. As though I’d ever go to anything, or budge an inch, without you.’

At this time they had been married five weeks.

There came another letter from Virginia; not quite so warm, because nobody can keep at the same temperature uninterruptedly for weeks, but still continuing to invite.

‘<i>We hope you and Mr. Monckton are soon coming here, dearest mother</i>,’ she wrote in her round, childish handwriting. ‘<i>I have to lie up most of the time now, because I’ve begun the seventh month, and mother says that that is the one to be most careful in, so that if you were to come now we could have some nice quiet talks. Stephen is visiting in the parish, but I think if he were here he would ask me to give you his love.</i>’

How far away it sounded. Another life, dim and misty. Stephen had evidently told her nothing of his monstrous suspicions. Virginia was prepared, dutifully as always, to accept her mother’s new husband. She had disliked him very obviously that day at Chickover, but now she was going to do her duty by him, just as she did her duty by everybody who had a claim on it.

Catherine sighed, holding the letter in her hand. It seemed like the splashing of cool water, a distant, quiet freshness, compared to her fevered, strange, rapturous--but was it really rapturous?--life now.

An ache of longing to see Virginia stole into her heart. One’s children and new husbands--how difficult they were to mix comfortably. Mothers, to be completely satisfactory, must be ready for sacrifice, and more sacrifice, and nothing but sacrifice. They mustn’t want any happiness but happiness through, by, and with their children. They must make no attempt to be individuals, to be separate human beings, but only mothers.

She sat staring at herself in the glass, thinking. When the letter arrived she was at her dressing-table, going through the now long and difficult process of doing her face. Mrs. Mitcham had brought the post in on tiptoe--she always now approached Catherine on tiptoe--laid it on the table, and stolen out again quickly, neither looking to the right hand nor the left, for by this time experience had taught her that if she did look what she saw was likely to be upsetting.

Catherine paused in what she was doing to open the letter, and then sat idly twisting it round her finger. She had been told of a woman in Sackville Street by Kitty Fanshawe who ‘did’ faces, and had gone at once and had hers done, and had been enchanted by the result. No more elementary lip-sticks and powder for her. In this elegant retreat, at the back of the building away from all noise, soothing to the nerves merely to go into, she had lain back in a deep delicious chair, and an exquisite young woman, whose own face was a convincing proof of the excellence of the treatment, did things with creams and oils and soft finger-tips; and when at the end--it was so soothing that Catherine went to sleep--a hand-glass was given her and she was told to look, she couldn’t help an exclamation of pleasure.

Well; this was a miracle. She not only looked ten, fifteen years younger and really, really pretty, but she looked so very fashionable. A little adventurous, perhaps, the last vestiges of the quiet country lady that still had survived the rubbings-off of Christopher all gone, but how--well, how <i>pretty</i>.

The only thing left to do was to go at once and buy a hat worthy of so distinguished a complexion. She went straight to Bond Street, and on the short walk discovered that people looked at her, saw her, instead of her being, as she had lately been, so completely uninteresting that it made her practically invisible.

Both the hat and the treatment were expensive,--the treatment more so, because it didn’t last, and the hat at least for a little while did. Impossible to have the treatment more often than very occasionally, as it cost so much, and she accordingly bought a box containing everything belonging to it except the young woman’s finger-tips, and tried to give it to herself at home.

The results were rather unfortunate. She didn’t look like anybody in the very least good. Mrs. Mitcham was secretly much worried. But she persisted, hoping by practice to become clever at it; and it was while she was in the middle of her daily struggles one morning, that Virginia’s second letter arrived.

What was to be done about Chickover? How could she go there with Christopher? Though he swore he would never go near the accursèd spot again, she knew he would if she asked him to. But how painful, how impossible it would be. Stephen was holding out olive-branches, for of course Virginia would never have invited them without his approval; but Stephen’s olive-branches were unpleasant things, she thought, remembering him as she had seen him last, on the day of his horrible accusations. To have met him last like that, and then find him on the doorstep being the pleasant host to Christopher! And Virginia, kept ignorant of everything except the fact of the marriage, bravely trying to do her duty all round, and Mrs. Colquhoun profoundly hostile and disapproving--why should her beloved Chris be exposed to such ordeals?

No, he shouldn’t be. But how could she go without him? Such were her feelings for Christopher that the thought of being separated from him even for the shortest possible visit was unbearable to her. Yet how not go? Enmeshed though she was in her obsession, the natural longing of her blood to see Virginia again yet tugged at her heart. If she could see Virginia without the others! But that, she knew, was impossible.

Presently, when she had finished dressing, she went into the drawing-room and looked up trains. Suppose she went on a Monday, and came back on the Wednesday in time for dinner? No; she couldn’t endure being away so long from Christopher. One night would be quite enough for Chickover; there would be the whole afternoon and evening to talk in. No; she couldn’t endure that either. What mightn’t happen to him while she was away? The whole time her heart would be in her mouth. Why not do it in a day? Go the first thing, and come back the last thing?

She looked up trains again. Chickover was so very far away; it took hours to get there. But by leaving Waterloo soon after eight in the morning she could be there by twelve, and the last train from there at seven-twenty would get her back by midnight.