The Heat of the Day (12 page)

Robert had been so living, this former face had not shown itself till tonight--now, she was penetrated not only by as it were first awareness of Victor's death but by worse, by the knowledge of his having been corrupted before death by undoings and denials of all love. She had had it in her to have been an honest woman and borne more children; she had been capable of more virtue than the succeeding years had left her able to show. Her young marriage had not been an experiment; it is the young who cannot afford to experiment--everything is at stake. The time of her marriage had been a time after war; her own desire to find herself in some embrace from life had been universal, at work in the world, the time, whose creature she was. For a deception, she could no more blame the world than one can blame any fellow-sufferer: in these last twenty of its and her own years she had to watch in it what she felt in her--a clear-sightedly helpless progress towards disaster. The fateful course of her fatalistic century seemed more and more her own: together had she and it arrived at the testing extremities of their noonday. Neither had lived before.... The reappearance of Harrison with the glass of milk reminded her that her own extremity was in this being bargained for. The situation was such-and-such, as he indeed said. To make room for the glass on the little table beside her, he had to shift Mrs. Kelway's parcel--"Neat little affair, your kitchen," he remarked absently, meanwhile stooping to read the three-times-written address. She volunteered: "Yes, that is for a nephew of Robert's. His grandmother, I mean to say Robert's mother, wants it posted from here, from London, tomorrow, Sunday. She says we have post offices which keep open." "It's amazing what these old women know." "Yes." "Would you like me to take charge of this?" "Post it?--oh, thank you; that _would__ be one thing less. But it is really important: you won't forget it?" "Practically everything is important," replied Harrison, going to put the parcel beside his hat. Stepping between or over the smaller furniture, he made her think of that first day at the funeral, when she had turned to see him so far behind her stepping over the graves. "_You__ must have had a mother?" she said suddenly, looking at him over the glass of milk. He seemed nonplussed but gratified. "More or less." "Oh?--who was she?" He thought. "She was a South African." "What became of her?" "She cleared out." "Were you sorry?" "I was in Sydney." "What were you doing there?--you're not an Australian, are you?" "That would be a long story," said Harrison, sitting down with the evident intention of not telling it. "Milk all right?" he said ardently, eyes upon her. "Perfectly: why?" she said. "Did you put anything in it?" "Oh, I say--come!" "By the way, _did__ you get those papers back?" "Which?" "Those papers of yours that got locked up with Cousin Francis's things. You told me they were important." "Oh, those. Oh, yes; that was all fixed up." "Yes, I imagine you knew it would be--if, indeed, there ever were any papers? You wanted to get to know me for quite a different reason." Harrison took this well. "Look, let's," he winningly said, "just say I was killing two birds with the same stone. Though, I wouldn't want you to take me up wrong in one way; I had quite a genuine feeling for old Frankie. I might not, I admit, have crashed that party just for that reason: I've got too much to do." Stella now put down the empty milk glass, brought a mirror out and dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief. "Odd," she said, "that I should have turned up in two different stories. Didn't you think that odd?" "Yes, it did rather strike me as a coincidence. But it's amazing how often that sort of thing does happen." "Must be convenient, too." "But then as against that, there's so often a catch in things. One has got to allow for that. The trouble can be, how to allow enough--in this case, what's thrown me out was your turning out to be _you__." "I was bound to be someone." "Ha-ha, yes. But you didn't have to be someone to that extent. You had, of course, originally come in under the regulation check-up--woman or money?--in getting the lay-out of this whole affair. And in view of whom you are most often around _with, I__ of course had often seen you around. Frankly, after the showings of the check-up, I wrote you off, crossed out '_cherchez la femme__' and switched to money. I'd made the switch, I may tell you, some weeks before we buried the old boy. In fact, I had made that switch long enough ago to have found that there wasn't anything along _that__ line, either. No, I appeared to be up against sheer kink." "What kink?" "There I'd thought you might help me." "Why should you want to know _why__ a thing is done? You, I mean--you in your line of business? The 'what' and 'how' I can see; but where does the 'why' come in?" "Early on," said Harrison keenly, "quite near the start. There's a stage where it can be useful to get your 'why.' The 'why' may just tip the likely up to the certain. Not to speak of the fact that I have known cases where the 'why' and 'how' interlock--if a chap's doing what he does for a particular reason, he's likely to do what he does in a particular way. In this case we have a chap, and a nice chap, selling his country. Now a nice chap's not likely to do that for no reason--" "Why would you, for instance?" "That would rather depend." He reflected, lighting a cigarette. "Anyhow, I am not such a nice chap. But mind you, I've been speaking of ancient history, of last May, around that time of the funeral. _Then__, I was still rather beating about the bush: having eliminated women and money, the psychological angle looked like my only hope. Frankly, at that time it _was__ my object to meet you, date up, have a drink or two, chat..." "As indeed we did." "As we did do during the summer--and see whether you might not throw some light on him. Once at ease, the majority of women are far from cagey on the subject of any chap they're keen on; and they've no idea what's important in what they say. So therefore, that was my first idea." "Did it not work?" "Point was, that it ceased to matter whether it worked or not. Things, as they can do, took an unforeseen turn. Go right out on one thing, I've often found, and immediately something else opens up. I should say that this was a case of that. I more or less stumbled on to something that gave me all _I__ wanted, as to our friend: conclusive. That was, therefore, that. I cannot say I was sorry to scrap psychology." "The 'why' is no longer the question?" He made a pat little gesture of wiping out. "Unless, of course," he added, "you feel that's over to you?" Stella moved; she switched on one more bar of the electric fire. She checked or attempted to hide a shiver by wrapping her arms closely across her breast: having reflected a moment in this attitude, she asked: "Then, if you had not contrived to meet me when you did, it would not still have been necessary for you to meet me now?" "Actually," he had to admit, "not." "What a pity, then." "What a pity?" "Why, that we ever did meet." He deliberated. "I would not call it that; though there have been times when I've called it the very hell." "_You__ have called it that?" In her chair an image of amazement pivoted round to face him. For a moment Harrison eyed the image--its sculpted erectness, breastplate of arms, eyes from which the pupils stood out as though painted. Then, pressing down his palms on the arms of _his__ chair, he propelled himself out of it; to stand up harshly. No more, for him, those insidious pink springy depths--he repudiated the pretty dream of the room: no longer a person to be becalmed or side-tracked, he comprehended Stella in his outsider's glance at the lit-up or shadowy trifles round him. They might not be hers, but she had, still, employed them. He burst right out of the picture.--"Yes, it has been the hell for me: what do you suppose?" She had her own kind of violence. "You did not have to! You did not have to dog me--to gnaw and nibble round the edge of my summer, to loom and gloom! It has been detestable, because it has been unnatural, ever since last May. You forced that meeting: now you complain that it had, after all, no point. It is nothing to you that I've been annoyed for nothing? Now you come round and waste my time by telling me I waste yours. That's your affair. You did not have to--ever." "The not having to, but the all the same having to--that's what _has__ been the hell!" "There was no compulsion." This time, _he__ stared. "Then what do you think there was? You've never calculated, or you would know. Know what it feels like when anything slips up. Haywire. _I__ calculate--that's my life. It's not what I've done I've liked--it's all one to me what I do--it's doing it; that's what has been the thing. You can't have any idea how you've split that up. _Tour__ summer--what about mine? Month after month of charging up, ticking over, getting no place--stuck. I'm not made for that sort of thing; I've got no time for it." "You've got no time for me, then." "I said I'd got no time for _this__." "But a woman takes time. I could take twice the time you've got." "In that case I should be twice the man." "That would still be nothing to me." "You have never tried. It's funny, you don't listen to what I say, yet in spite of that I can feel us getting to know each other. You and I are not so unlike--yes, it's funny." "Why? Below one level, everybody's horribly alike. You succeed in making a spy of me." Harrison jibbed, or else winced. He touched his tie, made a jerky involuntary movement of the head. She thought, prudery--but it could have passed for feeling. What had she said? It did not seem to her worse, more excruciating, than anything else he had forced her to say so far, yet here he was all at once behaving with the defencelessness of a stricken person. She had gone too far, too far; what she had said had had the effect, even, of driving him from her physically. He walked away, broke away, to one of the windows. He stood by the window headed into the curtain like an animal blindly wanting to get out of a room. She recrossed her feet on the stool, leaned further back, closed her eyes, in the attitude of a woman so tired out as no longer to be responsible for anything. "What's happened?" she finally lightly asked. He mumbled: "Think it's begun to rain." "Oh? See." Harrison parted the curtains with his thumb and edged between them; they swung into place behind him. The window embrasure was deep; nothing showed there was a person in there at all: it occurred to Stella that any night anybody could have stood hidden in there, listening. She heard him run the blind up, throw up the sash as far as it would go: an outdoor breath swelled the curtains, sifting round them damply into the room. She raised her head to listen, but heard no rain--heard nothing: the silence could not have been more complete if Harrison had walked straight on out of the window. She got up and went after him through the curtains. Rain was to be seen glinting in the light she let through behind her: behind the fine fall was the sighing darkness. "Mind," he said sharply, "careful! Either come through or go back." She stayed where she was, letting go the curtains, glad to be walled away by them from that haunted room. Assuaging blankness out of the open window began to enter her through the eyes. The embrasure felt like a balcony; one stood projected, high up, into the unseen unsounding sentient world of rain. Nothing more than an intimation was in the dark air; the fall's softness vicariously was to be felt on the roofs around, in the streets below. Only by the smell of refreshed stone was one to know that this rain fell on a city. The night was neither warm nor cold; it belonged to no season; it was a night of rain. Since how long--how long had it been raining? An hour ago, perhaps, what had been being said had become not necessary; the rasping wordy battle might have been quieted before now. London itself gave out the feeling of having been alleviated for some time; nothing went on out there but that lulling fall and that sighing silence, under the breast of which late-night traffic only gave out a stifled deeper sigh. The total dark of the city became tonight as unprecautionary, natural, as that of rocks, woods and hills on which elsewhere rain fell. The peace-fulness of this outcome of the late evening's tense massed warlike clouds was the one thing astonishing: now in effect the war became as unmeaning as the quarrel; two persons speechlessly at a window became as anonymous as the city they overlooked. These two, though fated to speak again, could be felt to be depersonalised speakers in a drama which should best of all have remained as silent as it essentially was. The darkness by force of being so long looked into resolved itself into particles, some lighter; air and solids just lifted apart; roof-lines took on an uncertain form. But inside here, in the embrasure, between the window-frame and the curtains, both persons still stayed blotted out: it was at an unestablishable distance from Stella that Harrison said, "Yes, I should say this had settled in wet." She got the impression he had put his hand outdoors, that that had been the act which had made him speak. "Not much good," he continued, "waiting for this to stop." "Have you far to go?" "Depends where I go to next." "Where exactly do you live? I have no idea." "There are always two or three places where I can turn in." "But for instance, where do you keep your razor?" "I have two or three razors," he said in an absent tone. That, of course, was the core of their absolute inhumanity together. His concentration on her was made more oppressive by his failure to have or let her give him any possible place in the human scene. By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character "impossible"--each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met. His civilian clothes, though one could be remotely conscious of alternation in suit or shirt or tie, _seemed__ to vary much less than Robert's uniform; the uninterestingly right state of what he wore seemed less to argue care--brushing, pressing, changes of linen--than a physical going into abeyance, just as he was, with everything he had on him, between appearances. "Appearance," in the sense used for a ghost or actor, had, indeed, been each of these times the word. Coming out of that vacuum, the reiterated unrelated story of his desire could but be unmeaning. Just now, for an instant, for the first time, in the darkness in which she could not even remember the colour of his coat, he had been for the first time palpably _someone__ near her: a being--continuous, secretive, dense, weighty, locked in himself and face to face, beside