The Heat of the Day (16 page)

much, insupportable inside those sheltered heads. Also in this room they had reached the climax of their elation at showing nothing--hearing their dresses rustle, fearlessly intercepting flashes from their bracelets, rings, and from the brooches nested on their bosoms in the lace, they had looked about them at the lights, flowers, figures of gentlemen, flower-painted cups on the silver tray. Victory of society--but not followed, for the victors, by peace--for remaining waiting in here for them had been those un-finishable hours in which they could only reflect again. And though seated together, hems of their skirts touching, each one of the ladies had not ceased in herself to reflect alone; their however candid and clear looks in each others' eyes were interchanged warnings; their conversation was a twinkling surface over their deep silence. Virtually they were never to speak at all--unless to the little bird lying big with death on the path, the child being comforted out of the nightmare without waking, the leaf plucked still quivering from the felled tree. The crossbars of the shutters stood out against the panels horizontally black, the one iron note in the room. She put down the heavy lamp again on a table. That was that--or, could there still be something more? That her own life should be a chapter missing from this book need not mean that the story was at an end--at a pause it was, but perhaps a pause for the turning-point? There was still to be seen what came of Cousin Francis's egotistic creative boldness with regard to the future, of his requisitioning for that purpose of Roderick. A man of faith has always a son somewhere. For her part, she never would agree that Roderick had been victimised: he had been fitted into a destiny; better, it seemed to her, than freedom in nothing. She set herself to amuse herself in a different key, by wondering what this room might say to Roderick's wife. For marriage--so far so inconceivable in the case of Roderick that she had not bestirred herself to envisage her daughter-in-law--could not but be somewhere in the directive, as Roderick chose to read it, from Cousin Francis. It was usual in this house to bring home a wife: if that had not yet occurred to him, it would. Born but not till now thought of, that future creature came into being mistily,--in fact, since Stella having no daughter could not conjure up youthfulness other than her own, the daughter-in-law curled forming like ectoplasm out of Stella's flank. Unmistakably, however, from the bride's fluid anatomy stood out eyes--unspent and fearless. Daylight, nothing but afternoon in here for the newcomer: out there, a summery river flowing towards the windows. The room would be to be marvelled at, nothing more than that. Of how much, of what, or by whom, the entering smiling newcomer had been disembarrassed she never would know--the fatal connection between the past and future having been broken before her time. It had been Stella, her generation, who had broken the link--what else could this be but its broken edges that she felt grating inside her soul? Yes, this for the bride would be a room to be first marvelled at, then changed. Required to mean what they had not, old things would be pushed into a new position; those which could not comply, which could not be made to pick up the theme of the new song, would go. For instance, here, hung in a corner so far out of day or lamplight's reach that Stella, to see, had to strike a match, was _one__ picture to banish. Evidently, it had been torn from a magazine of years ago; it had been stuck crooked into an alien frame--a liner going down in a blaze of all lights on, decks and port-holes shining, one half already plunged in the black ocean, the other reared up against the sky. "_Nearer my God to Thee: The Titanic, 1912__." The significance of this drawingroom picture of Cousin Nettie's would never be known. Stella woke next morning not knowing where she was, or when. Her place in time had been lost. A certainly new day penetrated the curtains, but which day? Her watch told her the hour, but then so did instinct--what she was forced to grope for, as though for her identity, was the day of the week, the month of the year, the year. Supine, she tried to read something into the pattern of the light-yellowed curtains. Yesterday no postman had come; there had been no sign of a newspaper; ash dust had once more settled on the knobs of the wireless. She began counting back on her fingers to the last date certain, that of her leaving London, then stopped short: she remembered another morning of waking only to Robert's face. Were these deep sleeps of hers periodic trances, her spirit's passing into another season? Were they the birth-sleeps, each time, of some profound change? That would be to be proved: she got up and drew the curtains--this morning no swans were on the river. This was a day of October size, of unearthly disas-sociation from everything. Her appointment to meet the steward, to go on with their business, was for eleven o'clock--after breakfast therefore she crossed the gravel sweep, stepped over the parapet and made her way down the steep unshorn slope to the river. A first breath of frost had crisped and tufted the grass; here by the sunny water's edge she stood, hands in pockets, overcoat collar up, blinking and looking into the current; then she turned and began to walk up the valley. Yes, October for a few days more--how long this autumn had felt; the season might have been staying for her decision. In the valley there was something decisive about the narrowing of this path so many feet must have trodden without a swerve. Here where she paused and stood, between the sun-shafted beech trees, it was as though the answer had already provided itself and did not matter. This was the peace of the moment in which one sees the world for a moment innocent of oneself. One cannot remain away: while she looked up at sun-pierced triumphant golden fans of leaves it began again to be she who saw them. Still, though, this was the early morning of a unique day: the very day in which--who knew?--something might intervene to save her. She was at the foot of the most advancing promontory of the Mount Morris woods, at the point where, borne forward on inside rock, they most nearly approached the river. A rapture of strength could be felt in the rising tree trunks rooted gripping the slope, and in the stretch of the boughs; and there travelled through the layered, lit, shaded, thinning and crossing foliage, and was deflected downward on to the laurels, a breathless glory. In the hush the dead could be imagined returning from all the wars; and, turning the eyes from arch to arch of boughs, from ray to ray of light, one knew some expectant sense to be tuned in to an unfinished symphony of love. The seeming of this to be forever was astonishing--until a leaf fell slowly, veering towards her eyes as though she had brought time with her into the wood. There cannot be a moment in which nothing happens. She heard or imagined she heard a call from the house behind her, and turned to walk back towards it. Ahead of her and above she at once saw Donovan standing on the parapet up there, making gestures, unhearably shouting into the air between him and her. She sent back a gesture of not hearing, feeling her heart beat as she quickened her step: he steadied himself again on the parapet before shaping both hands into a megaphone. Vowels rolled down the valley; the elder, taller Donovan girl stepped up and stood beside her father. "... Egypt!" "Wait, I--" "Montgomery's through!" "Montgomery?" "A terrible victory!" Sun blinded her from above the roof of the house as she stumbled up the slope, pulling at grass tufts, stopping to shade her eyes. She panted: "A victory in a day?" "It's the war turning." "How did you hear?" "It's all through the country.--Come up with you, ma'am." Donovan reached out to her; their handclasp settled into a grip then a pull upward from him. He had got her alongside him on the coping the better to transfix her with impatient prophetic eyes. "I would give much," he said, "to have a hat to bare my head with: the day's famous." "It's a beautiful day, in any event," said Hannah, temperately, speaking for the first time. On Donovan there came down the loneliness of a man among women. "Mr. Morris should have lived to see this," he said. Donovan had the doom of seeing this day alone: wherever the dead may be, they are gone. Standing to attention between Stella and Hannah he was a rocky profile, gnawing at the distance with his eyes, seeing an Egyptian rolling apocalyptic battle at the end of the valley. His lips moved silently till he declared aloud: "We bred a very fast general. Didn't I say to you he'd be a fast general? Hasn't he got them on the run?" Stella began to feel giddy on the parapet. She said: "But, all at once?" Donovan turned and said: "He has broken through." Hannah so far had stood with her forehead raised in docile imitation of her father. After his last words she seemed to search the view and the morning, but to find their shining calmness as unchanged as her own. The oblation to victory being taken by her to be now ended, she stepped down quietly from the parapet and began to wander towards the house. Perhaps unwilling to leave the sunshine for the chilly shadow of Mount Morris, or just hoping her father might call her back to declare that, for whatever reason, this was a holiday, she looked back once, her face a moon in daylight between divided hair. Hannah was beautiful--a year older, yet somehow further back, than her sister Mary. This was Stella's first full view of her in daylight: she stayed below stairs over her cooking, or was to be heard calling her poultry in a low, wary voice, shy while a stranger was in the house. Now, to find herself standing on this open sweep in front of the mansion seemed to amaze her: she was a flower only out today. Childish for sixteen years, she wore the gravity of her race; something was added to her beauty by her apartness from what was going on; her mountain-blue eyes had inherited the colour of trouble but not the story. Having not a thought that was not her own, she had not any thought; she was a young girl already upon her unmenaced way to Heaven. Her roughened hands hung folded loosely over her apron. Stella, also making for the house, became becalmed in the orbit of Hannah's gaze. She smiled at the girl, but there was nothing--most of all at this moment nothing--to be said. Whenever in the future that Mount Morris mirage of utter victory came back to her, she was to see Hannah standing there in the sunshine, indifferent as a wand.

Chapter 10

"WE MUST be running late," the passengers had been saying from time to time, uncertainly glancing at one another as though the feeling of lateness might be subjective, then at the blinded windows of the carriage. "Whereabouts would we be now?--how far are we along?" Now and then somebody in a corner prised at a blind's edge, put an eye to the crack--but it was useless; Midland canals and hedges were long gone from view; not a hill or tower showed through the drape of night; every main-line landmark was blotted out. Only a loud catastrophic roar told them, even, when they were in a tunnel. But by now speed had begun to slacken; from the sound of the train, more and more often constricted deep in cuttings between and under walls, they _must__ be entering London: no other city's built-up density could be so strongly felt. Now, with what felt like the timidity of an intruder, the train crept, jarred nervily, came to halts with steam up--allowing traffic over the metal bridges and shunting on wastes of lines to be heard. Passengers who had not yet reached down their bags from the racks now shot up and did so: Stella was among them. The fatigue of the long day's journey had, while it numbed her body into a trance, reduced her mind to one single thought: she was fixed upon what she meant to say. Her hope that Robert would come to meet her had become the hope that she might speak soon. Euston. All the way down the train doors burst open while the inky ribbon of platform still slipped by. Nobody could wait for the train to stop; everybody was hurling themselves on London as though they, too, must act upon some inhuman resolution before it died down. She, now it came to the point, was to be the last to leave the carriage; she stopped to stare at herself, as though for the last time, in the mirror panel over the seat. Picking up her suitcase, stepping out on to the platform, she looked from left to right, then began to walk along the flank of the train. The few blued lights of the station just showed the vaultings up into gloom; toppling trolleys cut through the people heaving, thrusting, tripping, peering. Recognition of anybody by anybody else seemed hopeless--those hoping to be met, hoping to be claimed, thrust hats back and turned up faces drowningly. Arrival of shades in Hades, the new dead scanned dubiously by the older, she thought that she could have thought; but she felt nothing--till her heart missed a beat, her being filled like an empty lock: with a shock of love she saw Robert's tall turning head. The whole return of sensation made her suitcase, of whose heaviness she had been unconscious, tear suddenly at her arm-muscles: she put it down.--"_Robert__!" This was to be like Donovan trying to make the victory news heard. Robert, still stock still, posted under a light, went on writing off, glance by glance, the faces surging towards him, his _égaré__ disassociation from other people never more marked. She dived for her suitcase to lug it forward: when again she looked he was gone from where he had been. Despair made her press her lips. Then, before she knew, under her elbow was his hand. "What a needle in a bundle of hay," he said. The suitcase dropped beside them: he held her by the lapels of her coat, looking unbelievingly at his thumbs on the pattern of the tweed. "_Where__ have you been, Stella!" "Anyway, here I am." "Yes, now--but time can be frightful.--Come on, come along--let's get out of this!" He steered her out towards the arches; the main stream was heading another way. "Why this way?" "Why?--because I have got a car." "Where from?" "Where cars come from." "I never thought," she said. "But I must say it's wonderful--a car." "There's just one snag--Ernestine's in it." "_Ernestine__!--Robert, good heavens, why?" "She thought she would pop up," said Robert vaguely. "Business or something, I think she said. She rang up this afternoon from Harrods, saying this would be a surprise for me; and was it.... Yes, I _know__, darling, but I lost my head: when she rang I was just at the height of the middle of something else. She said she was stopping up overnight, and what was _I__ doing with myself this evening? I said unfortunately I had got to meet somebody at a station. 'Dear me,' she said, 'I didn't know anybody was as helpless as that _these__ days, unless it is anybody important.' I couldn't think of anything but the truth. 'In that case,' she said, 'I might as well come along; we can have our chat on the way. I don't in the least mind meeting Mrs. Rodney, as I've already met her.'... Yes, I do know, darling, but there it was--either Ernestine now or Ernestine later on. And all we do _now__ is, drop her back at her friend's." "But she'll have to have dinner with us, won't she?" "No, we've gone into that: she's had an early bite. She is, you know, independent if not tactful.--Stella, you love me?" "Why?" "Then nothing matters." Through a mizzle of rain Robert had been vaguely turning his torch on the number-plates of a short line of cars parked secretively under a sweating wall. Animated thumping upon a window at this point brought the search to a close: a chauffeur threw away a cigarette, jumped to attention, smartly opened the car upon a peal of laughter. "Well," shouted Ernestine, bundling round invisibly inside there like a ferret, "better late than never!--How-d'you-do, Mrs. Rodney: you must be dead!" "Not quite. How nice to see you again." " 'See' is good!--And how was the Emerald Isle? Beef steak? Plenty of eggs and bacon?" "I'm sorry my train was so late." "Yes, of all ways to spend an evening in London!" said Robert. "Still, this was Ernie's choice." "Never mind," said Ernestine, "blood is thicker than water. And I snatched the chance to relax, which I rarely can. Tomorrow I shall have quite a morning; I am due at Headquarters at nine sharp. We're organising a regional check over." "Oh yes, I see." "Over _there__, I suppose, no one realised a war was on?" "On the contrary, we thought there had been a victory." "We really don't seem to be doing too badly," admitted Ernestine modestly. The car, having moved off, was nosing some secret route to the Euston Road--Robert sat facing the other two on a let-down seat; there were moments when his silhouette could just be seen. He had tucked the mock-fur rug over Stella's knees, what was left of it over some outlying part of Ernestine--who, with a hoot, observed that the age of chivalry was not dead. "It is new to see Robert putting himself about," she added, "though I can't say I think a car of this size necessary--for all we know, just this extra amount of petrol might have made all the difference to Montgomery; though of course it's too late to think of that if you have really taken it for the evening. It's Mrs. Rodney I'm sorry for; I should think she must be feeling somewhat overpowered--I know _I__ should be if I were her. I always think it kinder not to let people feel one has put oneself out for them. But Robert's in some ways unlike me." "_What__ did you say?" said Robert, turning round with a start. "I said you were in some ways unlike me. Shouldn't you agree with me, Mrs. Rodney? They say an outsider sees still more.--Where are we now, Robert?" "I have no idea." "The man understands we are going to Earl's Court?... Very well, if you _did__ tell him, you told him; but how was I to know? You seemed so fussed at the station.... I should have expected you to know your way about London like a cat." "Why?" "I should have thought under the circumstances that would be essential," said Ernestine in a low, significant tone. "However..." Reminded of something, she snapped her bag open to check its contents by touch, which was done convulsively. Stella, who had for some time been leaning back with her eyes closed, at last said: "I hope you have not lost anything?" "_I__ hope so, I'm sure!--Dear me, I thought you had gone to sleep!" "One might have thought so," agreed her brother, whose undetected hand lightly lay on the rug over Stella's knee. "In fact, one would hardly know she was in the car.--I suppose you are thinking," he said to Stella, "are you?" "I suppose I must be." "I'm practically certain it must be _somewhere__," went on Ernestine. "Oh how helpful it would be if one could only see! I remember putting it in this morning, and I have not let my handbag out of my hand since. This is the worst of having so many irons in the fire.--_Ah__: here we are! I thought so!--What were we saying, Robert?" "Nothing particular. Or, you may care to ask Stella what she's thinking?" Robert's manner to Ernestine was always less insolent than his words; it had, rather, a sort of provocative un-indifference, as though there were always something he could not leave alone. It was evident--as during that afternoon at Holme Dene--that he must trail his coat, and that he felt for his elder sister a fondness which, having some element of perversity, was ineradicable. Bizarre as it might seem, Stella understood that this evening he would not really gladly have forfeited this drive, if for no other reason than that it meant gearing down. Ernestine provided a valuable outlet for his tiresomeness--a quality either damned up or circumvented in his relation with Stella. She, for her part, found herself wondering how far, and even in what direction, frustrated tiresomeness could go. All at once she felt towards Ernestine the sort of attraction jealousy can create--to the point of wondering what would happen if she were to try slipping her arm through Robert's sister's. She wondered how Ernestine's arm would feel. She wildly contemplated, even, a conversation with Ernestine about Robert before it was too late--could there be found a vocabulary for anything so scandalising, so impossible? Ernestine, having snapped her bag shut again, tested both clasps. "That," she remarked, "ought to be a lesson to me to not worry!--What, you expect me to offer Mrs. Rodney a penny for her thoughts? I should hope not, indeed. May nobody think in peace? They say it is most restful of all to make the mind a complete blank, but as _I__ know, that is easier said than done. In any case, ask no questions and you'll get told no lies.--Don't you, Mrs. Rodney, find that to be a golden rule?" Robert, by suddenly letting his hand fall off the rug, seemed to leave Stella alone to answer. The car braked smoothly and pulled up: opening her eyes she met the lights red against it. It was at such a moment, she recollected, that many prisoners had made the escape leap: she went so far as to attempt to look, calculatingly, through the misted safety glass beside her. The impression of being in a wood gave place to one of phan-tasmogoric architecture improbable in London. "I'm certain," she lightly exclaimed aloud, "we have never been wherever _this__ is before!--No, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Gibb, I am not like that: anything I did want to know I should ask, always. If I am told lies, I expect I am none the wiser. You would really feel, would you, that I ask for them? I've no idea how many I may have been told." "When?--why?--who by?" said Robert. "Never, I hope, by me." Ernestine rapped out: "There you go again! _Was__ Mrs. Rodney saying so for a moment? I suppose, Robert, you are not the only person in the world?" The lights changed; the car moved forward. Robert self-centredly lighted a cigarette, then said: "No, I suppose not." "Goodness me," cried Ernestine, turning to Robert's friend, "I'm afraid _I__ could not take the idea so calmly! Be told a lie?--I would sooner a spider walking down my back, or even a rat dead under the boards, or defective drains! I should be sorry for anybody trying to lie to _me__. This may be due to our upbringing, but I can't say I'm sorry. I was brought up to be sensitive on that subject, and I must say I am. So was Robert brought up; we all were--I imagine few families spoke the truth more. I am still extremely particular with my sister's children; and as for my own boy, I notice he colours up if he even has to prevaricate. Our father always used to look at us straight in the eye--Robert will remember. A fib, we knew, would have quite broken his heart. As for our mother, she of course is practically able to read thoughts. No, as children we should have never dreamed of attempting to hide anything." "We never should have succeeded," Robert said. "We should have been ashamed to try." "What," asked Stella abruptly, "were you truthful about?" "That depended," said Ernestine, somewhat taxed. "We may not have been talkative as a family--" "Under the circumstances," said Robert, "could we have been anything but the opposite? We were consumed by a silent envy of liars--and, if you ask me, Ernie, so are you still. Just look at the way you resent them: its neurotic." Ernestine could but laugh. "That really is good!" she said. "However, do by all means let us change the subject--whoever began it?" "You did." "No, I don't think anyone did," said Stella. "It was _plus fort que nous__; it was in the air." "Possibly you, Stella, brought it back from Ireland on you, like a cold or 'flu?... Oh, all right, then, perhaps not. In that case you must mean this is a haunted car." "Hired cars of this type could some pretty curious tales unfold, I shouldn't wonder," said Ernestine. "The fact is that nobody up to any good would dream of taking one, these days, if I may be allowed to say so. Still, Robert, you and I don't so often have the chance of a talk, and if we have dwelled a little on old times I'm sure Mrs. Rodney will excuse us." She next gave her whole attention to the window on her side. "Hi!" she suddenly cried, "_that__ looks to me suspiciously like Gloucester Road station! If so, does the man know where to go now?" Evidently he did. A minute or two later they had deposited Ernestine at the foot of the steps of her friend's house, watched her make successful use of her latchkey, and driven off again. Robert, getting back into the car after the goodnight, settled into what had been Ernestine's place. The atmosphere of the cushioned darkness, however, was still uncertain; the change down from three to two persons being hardly ever simple. Across Ernestine the lovers had spoken to one another with a sort of edgy directness not used before; they had nearly burlesqued themselves--yes, looking back at the drive, it was Ernestine who in her own way had been irreproachable. Now, no other vocabulary, least of all that of silence, at once offered itself. Stella asked: "Who's she staying with?" "Oh, a friend left over from the last war. They were V. A. D.'s together. She has never had time to know people for no reason." "Yes, I could imagine most of her friends would be friends of circumstance." "That couldn't," he said, "ever be true of us?" Stella continued: "Now she's indoors she'll be able to go through everything in that handbag properly. Considering everything, she showed great self-control. Didn't
she?" "Yes.--But you ignore what I say." "I thought it didn't make sense. I cannot be alone with you all at once; you must let me run on. It is a shock just to be meeting again, perhaps? It was a shock seeing you there at Euston--it's inconceivable that I could have forgotten what you're like, but had I? There was something I hadn't allowed for--you?... love? One can quite forget how love acts." "You don't really like how it acts? You are not happy?" "Lunatic!--But I am thrown out. I had seemed to myself to be coming back with such a clear mind, and you have no idea how I need one." "I knew you'd come back full of some thought. I know you have been all by yourself in that house, but all the same I feel jealous, as though somehow you'd been spending your time with some sort of enemy of mine, or rival. So far the best has been my touching your coat." He put out a hand, to continue to feel and follow the herringbone of the cuff--and that contact, or its suggestion of exclusiveness, like a blind man's experience, made her in turn jealous, or at any rate lonely. "With this," he said, rubbing lightly on the tweed, "I know where I am--your coat's just the same." "You have no enemy anywhere in me!" He said quickly: "Why should you have to say that?" "Why indeed? My darling, who could like to feel less welcome back again than her own coat! Surely either we know each other absolutely or not at all--and how can we possibly wonder which?... You're right in one way in what you said just now: we _are__ friends of circumstance--war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing's said. Or we began as that: that was what we were at the start--but _now__, look how all this ruin's made for our perfectness! You and I are an accident, if you like--outside us neither of us when we are together ever seems to look. How much of the 'you' or the 'me' _is__, even, outside of the 'us'? The smallest, tritest thing I could be told about you by any outside person would sound preposterous to me if / did not know it. So I have no measure.--What were you going to say?" "Nothing--why? I didn't speak." "Then, give me a cigarette." Robert wound down the window in order to drop out the spent match: there came in, damp, the tired physical smell of London. "A car like this," he remarked, "that, as she says, nobody has been up to any good in, at any rate ought to be full of ashtrays: so far, I haven't come on one.--I'd be happier if I could see your face." "We've just as often not seen each other's faces.--Two months ago, now, nearly two months ago, somebody (to give you an example) came to me with a story about you. They said you were passing information to the enemy...." "I _what__?" he said blankly. She repeated the statement, adding: "I did not know what to think." "I don't wonder." But he reconsidered that. "Yes, I _do__ wonder, rather. At you--what an extraordinary woman you are!" "Why, Robert? What would a not extraordinary woman have done?" "Well, I don't know, really--no, I have no idea. What did _you__ do?" "Nothing: that's what I am telling you.--It's not true, is it?" "Two months ago..." he marvelled. "You say, two months ago? There's certainly nothing like thinking a thing over. Or did it simply happen to slip your memory till tonight? No, though; I don't think you mean me to take it you never thought of it twice. In that case, why not just have come and asked me? What would have been wrong with that?--but that was too simple, apparently? _Why__, I suppose one will never know?" She was unable to speak. He went on: "That is what beats me. If it was tact, it's the funniest I've ever come across. Whatever did you think?--that I might take umbrage?" He subsided, for half a minute, into nonplussed reflection, from which he broke out again with: "My God, what a conversation! And you tell me you never meet anybody remarkable--who _was__ this?" "Harrison." "Who's that?--Harrison who?" "No, just Harrison. The man I met at the funeral." "Then the fewer funerals you go to the better, I should say. Of course, yes: I remember you spoke of him, but I thought you said he was such a bore? He sounds far from a bore to me." "But it isn't true, is it?" Robert could be felt turning round slowly, unwinding himself from lethargy, frivolity, forbearance, whatever it had been, to stare at the place where she invisibly was. Incredulity not only shook his voice but removed it to such a distance that he and she might no longer have been in the same car. He spoke, when he began to speak, as a man who, in an emergency more fantastic, more beyond the possibilities of experience, than any man should be asked to meet, casts round him for words at random, realises their futility before uttering them, but does all the same utter them, as the only means of casting them from him again, rejected. "But it can't be true that you're asking me this? If it could have come to that, if you were, would it matter very much what I said--to you, I mean? If you could come to that, nothing would matter, would it? What _do__ you want me to say? There's nothing _to__ say--what _does__ one say in a situation that doesn't make sense? Between you and me this is inconceivable. The whole thing's so completely unreal to me that I can't believe it isn't unreal to you: it must be." "Yes, it is. But it--" "_What__ you're asking isn't the point--it's immaterial, crazy, brainspun, out of a thriller. Am I passing stuff across? No, of course not: how could I be, why should I, what do you take me for? What _do__ you take me for?--I've never asked myself. What do I take you for?--You. As to one thing, we know we could never deceive each other; but _that__ is just that, apparently--where you are concerned?--just that, lovely but only that. Which I didn't realise--how was I to? How well you have acted with me for the last two months--two months, you say? Someone comes to you with a story: with you, the story takes--seeds itself in some crack that you felt between us. Some crack--should I have known it was there? I, you see, simply thought we were happy. Happy?--I hardly thought that, even; I simply thought we were us. You couldn't--no?--just have come and said, 'Listen, because this is what I've been told'?" "You have sometimes said that in one particular issue which might be found, anybody is capable of anything." "Have I? I don't remember," he said, bewildered. "I lost my head. How was I to know what was true?" "How indeed?" said Robert, with frozen irony. "He said it would be dangerous to you to tell you." "What he says, with you, then, cuts a good deal of ice?" By silence she tried to wave that aside. He went on: "Then you acted on the assumption that it was true?" "How could I take any chances, when I love you?" "How peculiar it seems that you should love me." "Oh my darling, for God's sake--this is breaking my heart!" "Am I?" he asked, dully. "Or are you saying so? How do you expect me to know what's true, now? All I can see now is, how well you hide things--you may have been having another lover all this time for all I know; and I'm not sure I wouldn't rather it had only been that. This other thing seems colder, more up against me. This thing locked up inside you, yes; yes, but always secretly being taken out and looked at--and how without going mad am I to let myself imagine at what moments? In the night, how did I not hear it ticking under the pillow like your watch? _That's__ of course quite simple--I am sold to you, sold to you, as you know. So you've always been watching me while we've been together?--that can't have been difficult, considering all I show you. While I've talked, you've been adding up what I say? We have not, then, been really alone together for the last two months. You're two months gone with this." "You did not feel any change." "Something in me, I suppose, must be going blind." "No, no, no. Anything there could ever be to be felt in me you could never not feel. That's _why__ I say--you didn't feel any change." "You keep up the appearance of love so beautifully." She turned away, tried to see through the window, repeating, "This is breaking my heart. Please, Robert, please," she repeated. "Well..." She heard a ghostly hoot of a laugh, uttered by herself very much as though she were making use of something of Ernestine's left behind in the car. "One thing--I owe you an apology." "You what?" said Robert, now more gently, as though humouring a deranged person. "Oh, as to that? Why, yes--if you like, I suppose you do." "I don't think I've known what I've been saying." "I suppose that's possible." "One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it. Nothing _is__ really unthinkable; really you do know that. But the more one thinks, the less there's any outside reality--at least, that's so with a woman: we have no scale." He made no reply. "That's all I can say," she ended up. "How I have shocked you--but how I have shocked myself! Until I heard my own words, and hear you hear them, I really had no idea how not only horrible in itself but insulting to you, to any man, the idea was.... Robert?" "Yes?" "You are still so silent." "I am listening to you." "But say something. You must say something now." "I was only thinking," he said, the liquidity of a smile coming into his voice again for the first time, "you do not seem to have shown any very great patriotic fervour." "No," she assented, hardly taking this in. For her trouble at the moment was physical; she was feeling faint--the hand with which she had pushed her hat back, the hand she was trying to draw across her forehead, shook; and as for her fingers, it was as though they had blundered upon some unknown dead face in the dark. All round was silence, but something drummed in her ears. This was what they called reaction? It seemed unpermissible--it could look like appeal. Had he not full right to be as angry, as disorientated, as shaken in love for her as he was? As for her, should she hope not to suffer that shock to him? How easily she had taken him up to now; indeed what presumptuousness love was!... After a moment or two she wound down the window on her side and drew a deep breath. He heard the breath drawn. "Anything more the matter?" he suddenly said in his most light, rational tone. "I think I'm weak with hunger. I had nothing but sandwiches in the train." "Then I'd imagine that's what it probably is. In a minute or two, I hope, we'll _be__ having dinner." "Oh, shall we, still?" "One might not think so at this rate--what on earth's the man doing? Where does he think he's got us to?" Robert leant forward, slid back the driver's panel and forcibly put a question to that effect, remarking: "We are not just driving round London for the fun of the thing.... Very much not," he said to Stella as he sat back again. "What a conversation to have had before dinner, really; not to speak of at the end of a journey! Even I have had rather a day, too, even as days go. Ernestine would not hear of our stopping to have a drink. Yes, I see it was not a good plan bringing her along: upsetting. We're both a bit light-headed--yes?" "Yes." "Yes, a drink will sober us down." A sort of decorum of being known encompassed their table--they were served dinner late. Themselves in the friendly restaurant, they sat down; by this hour the place was emptying; outside their orbit lights were being put out, away in the distance in the penumbra waiters ghostlily drew off the other cloths. The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the latecomers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp; how she had sat facing down the room to the door flitted through by Mary, the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash--no, it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things. She had thought of Robert, but that was another matter. She had imagined also, how, if he had been there-- --But then, that would all have been different, he interposed. And who had Mary been? And had the business been got through?--had there been time enough? _Had__ the house been as she remembered it, after twenty-one years? Impossible to say, she said, impossible. For in those twenty-one years she had thought about Mount Morris so very seldom--yes, and she supposed by tomorrow morning she would have begun not thinking of it again. It was not her story. Though, as against that, she must not allow herself to forget anything till she had seen Roderick, who must be told so much: his affairs were the main thing, not her sensations--which were, after all, stolen by the way. The place was his future, which was something to have. Robert said; "Yes, that is a thing--yes, he's lucky. I can be reasonable now you're back: I can even see you were right to go.... Me?--oh, everything has been going on much the same. I have not been anywhere; I've been working late. So I don't think I've seen or heard of anybody in particular." "I don't think there is anybody in particular." "Am I selfish," he asked suddenly, "letting that go too far? When I first met you there were so many people--have I been letting or making you isolate yourself, out of my too much wanting that you and I should never be anything but alone?" "Oh, I get on very nicely, I think, Robert," she said, vaguely beginning to pour out coffee. But then she paused in the act, raising her eyes: he and she returned to looking at one another at leisure, with a sort of enchanted familiarity, across the gold-rimmed cups. But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love. Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day--the day was inherent in the nature. Which must have been always true of lovers, if it had taken till now to be seen. The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time, to what is happening. If this has not been always felt--and as to that who is to know?--it has begun to be felt, irrevocably. On from now, every moment, with more and more of what had been "now" behind it, would be going on adding itself to the larger story. Could these two have loved each other better at a better time? At no other would they have been themselves; what had carried their world to its hour was in their bloodstreams. The more imperative the love, the deeper its draft on beings, till it has taken up all that ever went to their making, and according to what it draws on its nature is. In dwelling upon the constant for our reassurance, we forget that the loves in history have been agonisingly modern loves in their day. War at