Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (326 page)

PART V
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CHAPTER I
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IN the intervals of running from hotel to hotel — for Robert Grimshaw had taken it for granted that Ellida was right, and that Katya had gone either to the old hotel where she had stayed with Mrs. Van Husum, and where they knew she had left the heavier part of her belongings — Robert Grimshaw looked in to tell Pauline that he hadn’t yet been able to fix things up with Katya Lascarides, but that he was certainly going to do so, and would fetch her along that afternoon. In himself he felt some doubt of how he was going to find Katya. At the Norfolk Street hotel he had heard that she had called in for two or three minutes the night before in order to change her clothes — he remembered that she was wearing her light grey dress and a linen sun- hat — and that then she had gone out, saying that she was going to a patient’s, and might or might not come back.

“This afternoon,” he repeated, “I’ll bring her along.”

Pauline looked at his face attentively.

“Don’t you know where she is?” she said incredulously, and then she added, as if with a sudden desolation: “Have you quarrelled as much as all that?”

“How did you know I don’t know where she is?” Grimshaw answered swiftly. “She hasn’t been attacking you?”

Her little hands fell slowly open at her sides; then she rested one of them upon the white cloth that was just being laid for lunch.

The horn of an automobile sounded rather gently outside, and the wheels of a butcher’s cart rattled past.

“Oh, Robert,” she said suddenly, “it wasn’t about me you quarrelled? Don’t you understand she’s here in the house now? That was Sir William Wells who just left.”

“Sh
e hasn’t
been attacking you?” Grimshaw persisted.

“Oh, she wouldn’t, you know,” Pauline answered. “She isn’t that sort. It’s you she would attack if she attacked anybody.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “It was about you we quarrelled — about you and Dudley, about the household: it occupies too much of my attention. She wants me altogether.”

“Then what’s she here for?” Pauline said.

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw said. “Perhaps because she’s sorry for you.”

“Sorry for me!” Pauline said, “because I care.... But then she... Oh, where do we stand?”

“What has she done?” Robert Grimshaw said. “What does she say?”

“About you?” Pauline said.

“No, no — about the case?”

“Oh,” Pauline said,” she says that if we can only find out who it was rang up that number it would be quite likely that we could cure him.”

Grimshaw suddenly sat down.

“That means...” he said, and then he stopped.

Pauline said: “What? 1 couldn’t bear to cause her any unhappiness.”

“Oh,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “is that the way to talk in our day and — and — and outclass? We don’t take things like that.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said painfully, “how are we taking this?” Then she added: “And in any case Katya isn’t of our day. or our class.”

She came near, and stood over him, looking down.

“Robert.” she said gravely, “who is of our day and our class? Are you? Or am 1? Why are your hands shaking like that, or why did I just now call you ‘my dear’ ? We’ve got to face the fact that I called you ‘my dear.’ Then, don’t you see, you can’t be of our day and our class. And as for me, wasn’t it really because Dudley wasn’t faithful to me that I’ve let myself slide near you? I haven’t made a scandal or any outcry about Dudley Leicester. That’s our day and that’s our class. But look at all the difference it’s made in our personal relations! Look at the misery of it all! That’s it. We can make a day and a class and rules for them, but we can’t keep any of the rules except just the gross ones like not making scandals.”

“Then, what Katya’s here for,” Robert Grimshaw said, “is to cure Dudley. She’s a most wonderful sense, and she knows that the only way to have me altogether is to cure him.”

“Oh, don’t put it as low down as that,” Pauline said. “Just a little time ago you said that it was because she was sorry for me.”

“Yes, yes,” Grimshaw answered eagerly; “that’s it; that’s the motive. But it doesn’t hinder the result from being that, when Dudley’s cured, we all fly as far apart as the poles.”

“Ah,” she said slowly, and she looked at him with the straight, remorseless glance and spoke with the little, cold expressionless voice that made him think of her for the rest of his life as if she were the unpitying angel that barred for our first parents the return into Eden, “you see that at least! That is where we all are — flying as far apart as the poles.”

Grimshaw suddenly extended both his hands in a gesture of mute agony, but she drew back both her own.

“That again,” she said, “is our day and our class. And that’s the best that’s to be said for us. We haven’t learned wisdom: we’ve only learned how to behave. We cannot avoid tragedies.”

She paused and repeated with a deeper note of passion than he had ever heard her allow herself:

“Tragedies! Yes, in our day and in outclass we don’t allow ourselves easy things like daggers and poison-bowls. It’s all more difficult. It’s all more difficult because it goes on and goes on. We think we’ve made it easier because we’ve slackened old ties. You’re in and out of the house all day long, and I can go around with you everywhere. But just because we’ve slackened the old ties, just because marriage is a weaker thing than it used to be — in our day and in our class” — she repeated the words with deep bitterness and looked unflinchingly into his eyes—” we’ve strengthened so immensely the other kind of ties. If you’d been married to Miss Lascarides you’d probably not have been faithful to her. As it is, just because your honour’s involved you find yourself tied to her as no monk ever was by his vow.”

She looked down at her feet and then again at his eyes, and in her glance there was a cold stream of accusation that appeared incredible, coming from a creature so small, so fragile, and so reserved. Grimshaw stood with his head hanging forward upon his chest: the scene seemed to move with an intolerable slowness, and to him her attitude of detachment was unspeakably sad. It was as if she spoke from a great distance — as if she were a ghost fading away into dimness. He could not again raise his hands towards her: he could utter no endearments: her gesture of abnegation had been too absolute and too determined. With her eyes full upon him she said:

“You do not love Katya Lascarides: you are as cold to her as a stone. You love me, and you have ruined all our lives. But it doesn’t end, it goes on. We fly as far asunder as the poles, and it goes on for good.”

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun to speak, and what she had said was so true, and the sudden revelation of what burned beneath the surface of a creature so small and apparently so cold — the touch of fierce hunger in her voice, of pained resentment in her eyes — these things so overwhelmed Robert Grimshaw that for a long time still he remained silent. Then suddenly he said:

“Yes; by God, it’s true what you say! 1 told Ellida long ago that my business in life was to wait for Katya and to see that you had a good time.” He paused, and then added quickly: “I’ve lived to see you in hell, and I’ve waited for Katya till” — he moved one of his hands in a gesture of despair—” till all the fire’s burned out,” he added suddenly.

“So that now,” she retorted with a little bitter humour, “what you’ve got to do is to give Katya a good time and go on waiting for me.

“Till when?” he said with a sudden hot eagerness.

“Oh,” she said, “till all the ships that ever sailed come home; till all the wild-oats that were ever sown are reaped; till the sun sets in the east and the ice on the poles is all melted away. If you were the only man in all the world, my dear, I would never look at you again.”

Grimshaw looked at the ground and muttered aimlessly:

“What’s to be done? What’s to be done?”

He went on repeating this like a man stupefied beyond the power of speech and thought, until at last it was as if a minute change of light passed across the figure of Pauline Leicester — as if the softness faded out of her face, her colour and her voice, as if, having for that short interval revealed the depths of her being, she had closed in again, finally and irrevocably. So that it was with a sort of ironic and business-like crispness that she said:

“All that’s to be done is the one thing that you’ve got to do.”

“And that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.

“That is to find the man who rang up that number. You’ve got to do that because you know all about these things.”

“I?” Robert Grimshaw said desolately. “Oh yes, I know all about these things.”

“You know,” Pauline continued,” she’s very forcible, your Katya. You should have seen how she spoke to Sir William Wells, until at last he positively roared with fury, and yet she hadn’t said a single word except, in the most respectful manner in the world, ‘Wouldn’t it have been best the very first to discover who the man on the telephone was?’
”

“How did she know about the man on the telephone?” Grimshaw said. “You didn’t. Sir William told me not to tell you.”

“Oh, Sir William!” she said, with the first contempt that he had ever heard in her voice. “He didn’t want anybody to know anything. And when Katya told him that over there they always attempt to cure a shock of that sort by a shock almost exactly similar, he simply roared out: ‘Theories! theories! theories!’ That was his motor that went just now.”

They were both silent for a long time, and then suddenly Robert Grimshaw said: “It was I that rang up 4,259 Mayfair.” Pauline only answered: “Ah!”

And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert Grimshaw remembered the March night that had ever since weighed so heavily on them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat talking to three elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter past eleven he had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute angle of Regent Street.

Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down Park Lane; and so, having taken his breath of air and circumnavigated, as it were, the little island of wealth that those four streets encompass, he would lay himself tranquilly in his white bed, and with Peter on a chair beside his feet, he would fall asleep. But on that night, whilst he walked slowly, his stick behind his back, he had been almost thrown down by Etta Stackpole, who appeared to fall right under his feet, and she was followed by the tall form of Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw recognized as he looked up to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on the occasion of such encounters, with a military precision and an extreme swiftness turned on his heels — having turned indeed so swiftly that his stick, which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and lightly struck Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in a direction the reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought absolutely nothing at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he peeped, as was his wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the passers-by. Just about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated: “That sly cat!” as if he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley Leicester’s enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I must have taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into his mind the thought — the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so furiously upbraided him for — that Dudley Leicester must have been carrying on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married Pauline to that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that Dudley Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast and loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst appearing so open about it.

And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no business of mine,” he said.

He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was utterly unable to sleep.

Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in the blaze of light from above his head — the only dark object, indeed, in a room that was all monastically white — his tongue was so dry that he was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from the hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments of words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment Robert Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the first time by words over which he had no control. In this agony and this prickly sweat the traditions — traditions that are so infectious — of his English public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed contacts in English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile sense of honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no passions; all these habits were gone at this touch of torture. And it was of this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when he had said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a Dago. For Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges, was a man of no experiences at all, since his connection with Katya Lascarides, her refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so out of the ordinary nature of things that he couldn’t make any generalizations from them at all.