Chapter IV

Norman knew that he would have to agree to whatever she asked, but he wished that she had asked him anything else. What Anne had asked him was very simple, and very like Anne, because she did not see what its simplicity involved. She asked him to spend his last evening quietly at home with her.

Everything had been packed. Anne always arranged journeys as she arranged tea-parties, flawlessly and without flurry. In the morning at eight o’clock the cab would come and she would call for Nina and start for the Continent from Victoria. Their luggage was registered in advance. The house was in perfect order. Each of the servants knew exactly what to do, and how to look after their master, until their mistress returned. The cook, who knew the truth and could not put up with it, was going to leave, but not until a new cook could be found.

There was nothing left for Anne and Norman to discuss—nothing, that is to say, which they could discuss. They would simply have to sit for three hours looking at each other, with ten years of unruffled unity stretched out behind them, and ahead of them that paltry and ineffectual word, good-bye.

Norman was unable to imagine what Anne expected to gain from this duration of discomfort; it seemed to him that a hasty word on the mat in the hall with a merciful cab standing at the door ready to break up the last of their difficulties would have been far the happiest plan for both of them. He was painfully aware that for the last few weeks he had been behaving very badly to Anne. He was so overwhelmed with the knowledge of what she was doing for him that he couldn’t even be civil to her. His pride was a raw and irritable wound, the very sight of her filled him with a cold antagonism. She ought not to have done so much. She ought not to have made things so easy—nor to have confronted his passion for another woman with such indomitable cheerfulness. He wouldn’t have minded if she had really been happy, but he knew his Anne. Martyrs—the best martyrs—take their stakes as Anne took hers; before the Celestial Vision has had time to let them off the worst of their pangs. Anne was as cheerful as possible, but she was growing old under his eyes.

Toby had once said of her, “Anne has all the dignity in the world, but she hasn’t an ounce of assurance. She’ll never fight back. She’ll be a girl to the end of her life, with none of the weapons of a woman.”

It was Anne’s being so wonderful about Nina that Norman couldn’t stand. He had not been able to catch her out even in a momentary unfairness. She could so easily have made the girl look like a fool; but she had done just the opposite; she had covered all of the girl’s little follies with her careful tenderness. It is hard for any man to love one woman to distraction and to find it necessary to be grateful to another. It is hardest of all on a man whose pride is the height of his consciousness, so that a thousand times a day a hated generosity flicks it on the raw. The only moments in which Norman had been able to speak to Anne without cruelty were in the presence of the girl herself. Nina felt so reprieved from disaster, so full of the return of happiness and alive with a hundred companionable ardours, that she broke down without an effort the constraint of her older companions. They were able to laugh and be glad with her, and to exchange glances full of sympathy over her possible and impossible plans. But this last evening there wasn’t to be any Nina, they were to carry the weight of their years alone.

The dinner was a success; it was short and perfect. Anne had dressed herself beautifully for it in a vague, shadowy green dress, extraordinarily becoming to her delicate colouring and the golden brown of her hair. The servants were in the room and they talked quite easily about Rome, airing their common memories with friendliness and laughter. Norman could see that Anne was a little nervous; she had a colour, which she rarely had, and her laughter was readier than her wit.

“You really want to do nothing?” he asked her when the parlour maid had left them upstairs again, in the twilight, with the coffee tray between them. “You wouldn’t care to come out with me and see a show?”

Anne shook her head. That was the last thing she wanted. Her hand trembled as she put the sugar in his coffee.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, “what I should like is to stay quietly here.”

Norman minded more even than he had supposed he would mind. He was as sensitive as an æolian harp to emotion, and what he wanted to avoid was being anywhere near an emotion which could impress him uncomfortably. Already he began to see Anne not as the person who spoilt (temporarily) the delight of his love making, but as the person whose life he had ruined. He had not wanted to see her like this, but he had always known that some day he would have to realise what he had done to her.

Anne wasn’t thinking of anything of the kind herself. She was thinking with a grave satisfaction of all the carefully chosen and beautiful pieces of furniture in the room. They had very beautiful things. A Chinese screen, a lacquered chest, a fine old Davenport. Toby had given them the Davenport as a wedding present, but most of the other things Anne had picked up for herself; the charming Sheraton chairs, light as bubbles and strong as steel, the delicate chintzes and hangings, a fine square of Gobelin tapestry, the tiny picture in the alcove which wasn’t a Van Dyck but might very easily pass for one—the little clear French water-colour of a fountain at Versailles—they were all her slow and careful selection. They counted for some of the happiest hours of her married life. She let her eyes linger on them one by one. This was what she had wanted the evening for—to see them all there together perfectly, with the centre of them in the midst—the point towards which they had all been drawn.

She wanted to remember Norman, not savage and antagonistic, as he had been all these dreadful weeks (she had so well understood why!) but gentle as she thought he must be this last evening—as she saw (in spite of his embarrassed silence) that he was.

“All these things, Anne,” he said at last, following the movement of her eyes, “we haven’t talked over yet what we’re to do with them, have we?”

“We haven’t needed to,” Anne replied peacefully, “because I knew that you’d let me have them, and you knew that I’d let you have them, so it wasn’t necessary to bother. Besides, I thought I’d explain what I felt about them to-night.”

“They’re all yours, there isn’t any question about their all being yours,” Norman said firmly, “they’re as much your own as if you’d set to work and made them!”

“If they’re mine,” said Anne eagerly, “I can do what I like with them, can’t I? What I want is to have them always just where they are. You see I got each of them _for_ that. It would hurt me horribly to sort and choose, to remember that your father gave you the gate-legged table, and my mother the big Viennese dressing table upstairs; but to keep them where I wanted them—_all_ of them—just like this—with you and Nina to enjoy them—that wouldn’t hurt me at all! It’s just the way I want them to be.”

“But my dear girl,” said Norman, “half of them are your wedding presents. How can you face the people who gave them to you? And how could we stand everyone knowing we’d swallowed them all down?”

“They weren’t given to me conditionally,” Anne replied, “they’re my very own, and as to what people think—what do people matter? We aren’t going by what anybody thinks. Please let me have my way about it, Norman, because it means so very much to me—more than anyone else can understand. If I can have made your home beautiful and leave it—just like this—with you, I shan’t feel as if I had altogether failed—there’ll be, you see, something to show for it. Of course you and Nina can change it as much as you like—but the beautiful things will be _here_—that’s all I want, just to have collected and arranged for you—a few beautiful things.”

She hadn’t meant to touch him, but she had touched him to the quick. He remembered with a painful vividness how she had looked the night he brought her home from their wedding journey. She had been very quiet and he had wondered a little remorsefully if he had tired or bored her on their long journey from the sea. And then she had one of her rare moments of expression, she had flung her arms round his neck and pressed her lips to his, and to his astonishment and alarm he had found that she was crying. When he implored her to tell him why, she had murmured, “Because I’m too happy.” They were the only tears he had ever seen Anne shed.

The light was growing dim, but it still shone a little on Anne’s beautiful hair. Her hair was her one great beauty, and when it was undone it fell to her knees. The colour changed from brown to dusky gold, but even when her hair looked its darkest, it always had a shining quality.

Anne sat very still in the lingering light, with her head bent, waiting for his answer.

“You’ve never failed me,” Norman said at last in a low moved voice, “you don’t need to leave anything to show me that—but you love beautiful things, Anne, and I can’t bear to think of you without them.”

“That’s the only way I shan’t be without them,” Anne explained. “I should hate to think of this house with great ugly gaps.”

“But you’ll have another house,” Norman urged with his foolish wisdom, “and another life, Anne—and perhaps——” but the words failed him. They seemed to drop away from him in her utter silence as if they had fallen over the edge of space.

“Oh no,” she said after a long pause, “no, Norman, I think I should always like this house to be as it is.”

He couldn’t say any more. She was not only going to leave him but she had refused all that he offered her, not angrily or with contempt, but with an unalterable steadiness. He hadn’t, she explained, got more than he and Nina would want. Fortunately Anne had two hundred a year of her own. It was exactly the kind of income that she liked. For the journey abroad with Nina she would have to spend more, of course; but she had saved quite a lot of money, so that didn’t matter at all. All her people were well off, and she could do as she wished without robbing anybody. It was all very easy to manage and there was nothing disagreeable about it.

All these burning, desperate, exasperating weeks Norman had mercifully failed to see Anne at all. She had stood to him for a lock upon a door that divided him from his heart’s desire; and now the lock was broken and the door about to open, and Nina (that intense and vivid figure so fixed upon his heart that it seemed only to beat because of her image) withdrew herself suddenly, and left him alone with Anne.

He saw Anne as she had been when he first wooed her—mysterious, remote, and yet infinitely desirable, with her startled grey eyes meeting and evading his, like some shy creature of the primeval woods who fears man only because he is unknown. He saw her again later, his young wife, in all his first pride in her, stately and quiet, taking his love in silence, her only response her unvarying, deepening gentleness. He saw her the young mistress of his home, a hostess on whom he could rely without a qualm; and clearer still than that and more plainly he saw Anne, his friend, to whom he had brought all his problems and his difficulties, knowing that they would be met by her quiet wisdom and undeviating tenderness.

As he sat there thinking of her and feeling her, as he had not thought of her for years—he heard a sound outside in the street. It was an incredible, silly accident—but someone had started singing the very song he had sung to Anne with all his heart behind the words—the night he had asked her to be his wife. The ravaged desultory voice of the street singer filled the little darkening room with an unendurable pathos.

Norman heard Anne draw a quick shaken breath.

“I need no stars in heaven to guide me,” the voice proclaimed, “I need no sun, no moon to shine, While I have thee, Sweetheart, beside me, While I know that thou art mine.”

Norman would have given anything in the world for a motor ’bus to have run over the street singer, but motor ’buses do not come _à propos_. It made it worse that the voice had once been a very good one. After the first few notes Anne sat quite still, so still that she was like a creature frozen by its own icy will. She had meant this to be a quiet comfortable evening, and she determined to keep it at least quiet to the end.

“For the kingdom of my heart, love,” finished the hidden voice, “Lies within thy loving arms.”

It was almost funny because of course it didn’t. Anne found herself suddenly threatened with a worse thing than tears—that dire laughter—which undermines the senses and sends them scattering into fragments.

But it was Norman who broke, not Anne. He sprang to his feet and crossed the room to her.

“Anne!” he cried, “honestly it’s no good—it’s all a mistake. I can’t go through with it! It’s too late—you’ve been too much to me—we’ve both been too much to each other. Everything has got to go but that!”

His words startled him, and even as he said them, he was aware that they were only what he wanted to say at the moment. They changed nothing, but they gave Anne a chance to change everything.

For a moment she hesitated, and then all her years of being his wife rose up and warned her not to take advantage of anything but his instinct. This was not Norman’s way of making love. He had never said things to her—they came out—the most beautiful, the most touchingly expressed things, at other times. When he wanted her he had not told her that she was anything to him—he had just held out his hands. What he was saying now was from his spirit—from his heart too perhaps, if you mean by a person’s heart the troubled emotions of the moment—but it wasn’t instinct; and no woman can count upon a man’s love unless it is instinctive.

Norman was seeing how much Anne loved him. He wasn’t loving Anne. He was just dreadfully upset and grateful.

“My dear, my dear,” she said tenderly, “it’s quite all right, and I’m glad you’ve said it—felt how much, I mean—we are to each other! But it isn’t what you think. That’s Nina’s, and we couldn’t ever—even for a moment, take it away from her! What I wanted, what I hoped we might have, after all these years, was for us just to feel _glad_ we’d had it, and to part without any bitterness. I don’t want you to be upset, but if we had to be upset first, perhaps that’s better than if it hadn’t come at all. We do feel like that now, don’t we—glad we’ve had it, and without bitterness?”

Norman kneeled beside her and took both her hands and kissed them. He had thought before that it would be easier to get away angrily, but now he knew that it wouldn’t have been easier. All his anger, his exasperation, and his remorse fell away from him and left his heart at peace. He had believed his anger had been against Anne, but he knew now that it had been anger with himself, and even (in queer, unfair, baffled moments) anger against Nina. Now that it was gone he felt curiously light and clear, as if a wind had blown through his heart and carried off all its rubbish and its clouds.

“I am glad,” he whispered, “without bitterness, Anne.”

He was not sure, but he thought that her lips brushed his forehead in the dark.