Chapter VI

Anne felt that she was going to be very ill. She hardly dared to hope for the simplification of death, but when she thought of the interminable business life was going to be, filled up by her conscientious will with objects and tasks about which she had neither instinct nor inspiration, she hoped that the illness might be rather a long one. The doctor called it a touch of fever; and it lasted forty-eight hours. At the end of it Anne was aware that Toby had been indispensable to her, and that she wished he would go away. She looked back on her hours of exaltation at St. Sabina as an incredible oasis. Like the uplifted disciples before her, she had come down from the Mount of Transfiguration, to find an epileptic rolling on the ground. It was perhaps a little hard to compare Toby’s shrewd and familiar presence to that of an epileptic, but the contrast between her lonely spiritual ecstasy and Toby’s companionship undermined Anne’s sense of justice. She had never had to take Toby before with the seriousness which a single companionship involves. He was easy to amuse, and he asked very little of Anne, but he interrupted a process that was going on in her mind. Anne didn’t know what the process was. She had never been analytical, and the last thing that would have occurred to her—since everything had gone off so well—was that the process which she wished to be alone for was the breaking of her heart. She knew that she wasn’t just the same as usual, she had lost her mastery of material things. She no longer arranged life faultlessly. She shrank from giving orders or making efforts. She caught herself reading a sentence in a book over and over again without the slightest idea of what it was about, and often when she began to sew on a button, or alter the ribbon on a dress, she would forget what she was doing, and sit idle with her hands in her lap. Sometimes even while she was crossing the room to fetch something, she would stop bewildered, as if someone had cut short the purpose in her brain. She said once to Toby that the effects of Roman fever lasted a long time. She did not consciously think of Norman, only she was surprised when she thought of anything else, surprised and interrupted; and sometimes when Toby interrupted her, she got a little cross. Toby was very patient with Anne’s moments of irritation. He knew what it was like to be presented with the person he didn’t want instead of the person he did. Constantly in the early years of Anne’s married life she had urged upon Toby agreeable feminine substitutes for herself. She thought it would be so nice for Toby to marry one of her friends, and Toby had known moments when he was glad that bachelors are allowed a reputation for crustiness.

Of course Anne wasn’t nearly as cross as she felt, but then neither had Toby been, when Toby had said, “Oh, damn it, Anne, I _won’t_ take that girl out in the punt!” He hadn’t meant any more than Anne did when she said, “Don’t you think it’s too hot to do any sight-seeing to-day?” Anne wouldn’t have called it sight-seeing if she hadn’t been cross.

Toby stayed at a large expensive hotel nearly opposite Anne’s, and brought a noiseless easy car to her door regularly every morning at ten o’clock. She had only to get into it and say what she wanted to see, or where she wanted to go. He never let her get tired. He punctuated everything they did with carefully prepared meals. Toby shared Anne’s fondness for poking about catacombs and was willing to spend even longer hours over excavations in the Forum. He preferred Pagan Rome to Early Christian because he said it wasn’t so mopped up by the Popes. But as Anne had a tenderness for cloisters—covered with creepers and lizards—where you could hear at noon-day cracked bells wandering—and watch the solid shadows slip over the sharp sunshine, Toby made a point of producing cloisters. He even accompanied Anne to the Daily Benediction of the Blue Nuns. Toby was frankly Protestant. The only religion he had was a repudiation of superstition and an emphatic desire to keep Anne from getting mixed up with it. Nothing would have induced Anne to join the Blue Nuns; quite apart from the fact that she was nearly as Protestant as Toby, she had all the tastes and deep-seated habits of a mondaine. She was a spiritual and unselfish mondaine, but not to change her stockings every evening and wash her hands in hot water several times a day would have shocked her very much. Anne had no desire to be a siren, but she wanted to look nice, and have her hair shining and her hands well manicured. Religion is a passion, and it was a passion that Anne hadn’t got; but Toby was in love with her, so that all her whims were as serious to him as passions, and though Anne saw how nervous he was about her, she very unfairly said nothing to relieve his mind. He would kneel by her side in the dim lit chapel, while two by two the Blue Nuns swept in from their hidden cloisters, bowed low before the Altar, separated and vanished behind the screen which divided them from the rest of the church. His heart beat with an indignant protest, as their thin soft voices, so empty of vitality, quavered out their meek petitions. He wanted to put a stop to their antiquated existence, to their dignified azure garments that were like a glimpse of Roman skies, to the treachery of their delicate ritual, which hid from other women the iron rule of their defrauded lives. But if he felt indignant with the Nuns, it was as nothing compared to the indignation he felt with Norman for exposing Anne to their influence.

There were moments in the hush of sacred buildings when he saw Anne’s hands, very white and thin, pressed together, as if she was crushing between them her broken, fluttering heart, when Toby’s curses had all the intensity of prayer.

It was their custom to stroll out after Benediction to watch the sun set over Rome. These were the times when Anne wished most that Toby wasn’t there. She didn’t mind a companion for excavations, and it helped her now that she was so curiously unfit to manage her life, to have her days arranged for her, but she wanted beauty alone. She had to be very careful how she took it. When she sat by the Fountain and looked over the low wall beneath which Rome is spread, she wanted neither to move nor speak, but to bring the shattered edges of her life together in a silent self-absorption.

One evening they found the sky after a thunderstorm divided equally between purple and orange clouds. In front of the splendid fields of colour the air hung like a golden curtain. The swallows dipped and circled in and out of the light, darting like small black arrows from the shadows of the garden into the golden air. Anne was conscious that Toby was challenging her silence, watching her with his kind eyes half sheathed, and trying to take away from her the burden that she wanted to bear alone.

“You have never told me,” she said suddenly, “why you came here, Toby. Surely the end of May isn’t a month for a busy man like you to be out of town?”

Toby lit a cigarette and leaned back in his green armchair as if the world held nothing faster or less comfortable than the slow pacings of a Roman nurse, holding—on a pink satin cushion in front of her—the sleeping heir of an immemorial Roman name. He watched the nurse and her flowing ribbons pass out of sight before he answered Anne, then he said, “But I told you that I hadn’t come for the wedding, didn’t I? I remember your asking me the night I arrived. I felt sure you were ill because otherwise you would have known that it wasn’t particularly likely I should have come for the wedding.”

Anne frowned. “The wedding might have been a reason for making a sacrifice,” she said, “Norman would have liked it.”

“Is the inference, then, that you don’t like having me?” Toby asked. “You rap one over the knuckles rather hard sometimes, Anne!”

“You shouldn’t draw unfair conclusions,” said Anne impatiently; “I only meant that it would have been a perfectly natural thing for you to do. Your coming here without a purpose isn’t!”

“It’s very nice here,” said Toby pensively; “of course it’s rowdy and over-built and shockingly modern, and I don’t like the Monument smashing the Capitol out of the sky. Still it’s Rome—a man might do worse than sit here in the sunset—with you, Anne.”

“If you came here for me,” said Anne, then she stopped; she wanted to be ungracious, but not as ungracious as that.

“Rome and you,” Toby amended.

“I don’t feel as if I were a good companion just now,” Anne persisted. “You see my life needs a—a kind of re-adjustment. I feel as if I were a ruined Temple out for repairs—the scaffoldings are up, and spoil all the shape I had. I daresay when the work is finished I shall get quite a nice shape again, but the process is very ugly, Toby, it seems to me a pity you should be here for it.”

“Do you mean a pity for you or for me?” he asked after a moment’s pause. It was the first time that Anne had admitted any conceivable drawback in her situation, and he was anxious to make her say more about what she felt.

“Well, I don’t know,” Anne said slowly. “I think perhaps—for both of us.”

“I am willing to take the risk for myself,” Toby said. “I don’t mind scaffoldings. You can put up as many as you like—they wouldn’t hide what you were from me—but I think I shall be sorry if you send me away altogether. I daresay you feel I’m in the way, but you might miss me if I went.”

“I’ve got to get used to missing—people,” said Anne sternly.

“Not everybody all at once,” Toby urged very gently, “that’s a beastly notion! Keep what you can. I suppose that’s what I came out for really—to show you that I’m a part of what you can always keep.” “That’s very dear of you, Toby,” said Anne, touched in spite of herself. “I think I knew I could count on you, but not perhaps quite so much as I see now that I can. I always thought it was Norman you cared for most.” “Did you, Anne?” said Toby very softly, “that was rather funny. I didn’t care most for Norman.”

“Never?” asked Anne incredulously.

“Never,” said Toby.

“But,” Anne protested, “Norman, I am sure, thought you did.”

“Did he?” Toby murmured. “I can’t help it if he did, he was mistaken too.”

“But you’ll never fail him; you’ll be good to him always?” she urged, her voice a little unsteady. “It would be too dreadful if he thought you judged him or blamed him. I want to talk to you about them both, but somehow I felt I couldn’t begin before, but your saying you came specially for me makes it easier. You know, Toby, Nina isn’t exactly what you’d call suitable for Norman.”

“I don’t think I know very much about Nina,” said Toby cautiously, “but I gather you mean she isn’t a lady?”

“In a sense she is,” said Anne, “but not in the accepted sense. She’s much better than a lady. She’s a great dear, and she’s full of life. I don’t think the other matters really, but it makes me very anxious that Norman shouldn’t think it matters.”

“You mean,” said Toby, “his love wouldn’t stand it?”

Anne felt this sentence over very carefully. She was glad of the view before her—it gave her an excuse to look away and answer slowly, while she watched the playing swallows and noticed how closely the distant silver cap of St. Peter’s fitted into the golden air. “Love,” she said consideringly, “can stand anything. You mustn’t underestimate what Norman feels for Nina because of what he once felt for me. What he feels now is better than that. He won’t get tired of Nina, if that’s what you mean, or want anybody else—or even—regret me, but he may feel (in spite of his love for her) very cut off and lonely.”

“Life is a lonely business, Anne,” said Toby, “but people who succeed in winning the woman they want aren’t, I think, the most lonely people in it.”

“People,” said Anne sharply, “what do people matter to me? It is Norman that I want to save—all the pain I can!”

“You have got the maternal instinct very badly, Anne,” said Toby reflectively, “you wouldn’t mind cutting up the universe to make Norman a hors d’œuvre.”

“I know I have,” Anne admitted recklessly, “that’s why he got tired of me, but that isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t help him if I can. In fact it’s my fault if he’s in need of help. I made him over-sensitive with my perpetual precautions. Nina won’t try to save him shocks, partly because she won’t know what will shock him, and partly because she won’t care; but he’ll suffer less, much less, if we’re there—in his life, I mean, and behave as if there was nothing to be shocked at.”

“You know what I think about your remaining in Norman’s life,” said Toby, “because I’ve put my foot in it once already on that subject! As to myself, I suppose I am willing to meet them. I tell you frankly I’d much rather not. But you’ve done your best to make it a decent affair and I won’t fail you about it. I’ll try to keep my end up—a man isn’t worth much socially as a backer, but I’ll do what I can.”

“You might do more than that,” said Anne ungratefully, “you might behave as if there was nothing to back up! I don’t know what you mean by ‘a decent affair.’ There was never any question about ‘decency.’ Both of them behaved perfectly. People can’t help what they feel!”

“I’m not so sure of that, Anne,” said Toby steadily, “if you’re not strong enough to swim you can keep out of the water.”

She turned upon him with her face flushed and her eyes full of tears. “How I hate your being so self-righteous!” she cried. “How can you judge? It’s not your place to judge. It’s your place, if you have a place, to stand by your friends!”

Toby threw away his cigarette and got up. He looked unexpectedly tall to Anne, and she saw that he was very angry. “I don’t quite see,” he said, looking down at her with narrowed eyes, “why I should be forced to accept without judging the principal actions of my friends—especially since I am expected (and indeed have every intention) of backing them after I have judged them.”

“Because we don’t know—we can’t understand—people’s principal actions!” cried Anne. “We haven’t got any standard of comparison, we’ve only got our own hearts—and what use are they as guides to other people’s, since we’re all hopelessly different?”

“The world has a definite standard, nevertheless,” said Toby dryly, “which we have all accepted, and by which I think we should be judged when we violate it.”

“Let the world judge us then—the stupid world,” said Anne, “but not our friends; they should have a separate judgment—we ought to be safer with them—and not pitilessly dealt with!”

“But you’ve just said I mustn’t judge at all,” Toby reminded her.

“You haven’t any mercy!” said Anne bitterly, and if she hadn’t been on the Pincian Hill she would have burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” said Toby in a queer voice, “very sorry you think I have no mercy, Anne. You said just now ‘my place—if I have a place.’ Was that very merciful?”

Anne refused to answer. She had been shocked by her own speech, and yet there was something exhilarating in having been so shocking. She was still trembling with emotion when, after waiting a moment for her answer, Toby turned and walked away.

She was alone now with the dying light. The purple and the orange clouds had become absorbed, and left the sky clear. The air sparkled like a dewdrop. There was no colour anywhere, only the vivid glory of the light. She watched the umbrella pines above the Vatican garden dip into it one by one. The distant dazzling hills grew suddenly dark. The sky became a still, pure azure, and the air grew cold.

Anne nursed her indignation as long as she could. There was not very much of it, and it needed nursing. When she got up to go home, she felt a vigour in her limbs and a new ability to cope with life. Being angry with Toby had done her a great deal of good.