Lover's Leap (9 page)

Of course they haven't attacked me openly, such women are too crafty for that. Even old Martha would know instinctively that this would only rouse Rose to my defence. But quietly, cunning, they have set her against me: by
the faintest, slyest suggestions of disapproval and derision they have made her ashamed of me without knowing it. I hate the old woman with her square, dour, earthenware face. When she opens the door to me she stands there, filling the doorway, as if blocking my way and I can feel the reluctance with which she stands aside to let me pass. And I hate Jennifer's white plaster face, her cold, hard efficiency, her intolerance and resentment of my presence which she disguises behind a veil of masculine familiarity.

Yes, it is they who are to blame. But if I said so to Rose, she wouldn't believe it. She would laugh at me. What can I do? If I try to hold her it will only irritate her into breaking away more definitely. My best chance of keeping her, I know, would be to release her; but I daren't. I am like the drowning man who, in spite of himself, struggles desperately and hampers his rescuer, though he knows that his only hope lies in ceasing to struggle. But perhaps I am wrong: perhaps this feeling that she is slipping from me is nothing but fancy, born of my devotion to her. If only it were? But what of that day, two months ago, when we were going to Barrowhurst again and she suddenly refused to go?

I must stop thinking. If I don't control my mind it goes on spinning endless theories, arguments, deductions until I go half mad with bewilderment and misery. The difficulty is that not to think requires more of an effort than to think. I will take up a book, any book, and force myself to read, to tire myself out and so escape, if possible, the horrors of a sleepless night.

Next day. I hoped there might be a letter from her this morning, though it was hardly to be expected. But the post brought me nothing and I waited till midday, hoping she might ring me up. Then I gave in and rang her up. I had made up my mind not to ask for any explanation if she volunteered none, and I made a desperate
attempt to sound cheerful. I believe I succeeded: fortunately she did not know that the hand that held the receiver trembled so violently that I almost dropped it. Her voice came to me, bored and indifferent:

‘O, is that you, Philip? Good morning.'

‘Good morning. I only rang up to know if you were all right.'

‘O perfectly, thanks.'

‘That's good. I was afraid you might be unwell. When are we meeting again?'

‘Well … ! We shall meet at the Ethertons' to-morrow night, shan't we?'

‘You're not free to-day? Won't you come and have tea?'

‘I've rather a lot to do to-day, Philip.'

‘You couldn't look in for a quick tea? Or, if you preferred, I could meet you somewhere.'

‘Why, is there something special …?'

‘Nothing whatever, my dear.' I tried to sound light-hearted. ‘A pardonable desire to see you, that's all. But if you really can't manage it …' I broke off. I couldn't keep up the pretence of unconcern.

There was a long pause, a pause horribly filled, for me, by her reluctance. Then her voice, toneless, level, came to me again. ‘You'd better come here. Come for a late tea at five.'

Thank God! Thank God! ‘You're sure you can fit it in? I don't want to … to …'

‘It's all right. I'll manage it somehow.' How cold her voice sounded. ‘Good-bye. Five o'clock.' I found myself suddenly cut off.

What could it be? Had I offended her in some way? But I knew I hadn't. How I wished now, in spite of the pain it would have caused me, that I had refrained from asking to see her. It would have been wiser. But the wisest thing, it seems, is always the most difficult, the most contrary to nature. Besides, if I imitate her and withdraw on
my side, as she is doing on hers, won't she accept my withdrawal and allow us to drift completely apart? Isn't that the way estrangements always come about? One withdraws, and the other, his pride wounded, withdraws too, and so the gulf opens with double speed. The thought freezes me to the heart. Am I losing her, then? Is this the beginning of a complete separation? O God! O God! How shall I bear it? Surely when one loves as deeply as I do, his love cannot but evoke love or at least kindness in the beloved, I don't mean in the form of conscious gratitude but inevitably as fire calls fire from what it touches? It must be so. But it is my heart that says so, not my reason. My reason tells me that it is not necessarily so; but I can't, no I can't believe my reason. The voice of reason is lost in the clamour of my overburdened heart. My heart, every impulse of body and mind, urges me against withdrawing myself, holding myself back from her. I have no pride, none at least in my feelings towards Rose. Shall I then obey my heart and abase myself, throw myself abjectly on her mercy? She is not cruel by nature. Surely when she sees what I am suffering she will pity me. I claim nothing more than that all should be as it was last summer when we were so happy together, before this indefinable difference came between us. It came imperceptibly, like a ghost whose presence was not at first seen but only felt as a vague unease, and then, one day, the day when she suddenly cancelled our second expedition to Barrowhurst, I saw it, a shadowy, threatening shape which as the weeks passed took on substance, materialized horribly into this shapeless power which is driving us apart.

But why should I torture myself? She will explain what happened last night when we meet this afternoon at her flat. It will all be perfectly simple, perfectly reasonable. This nightmare against which I fight helplessly is the product of nothing but my restless imagination. And yet …

When I arrived at her flat at five o'clock she was not in, nor, thank God, was Jennifer. It was a cold afternoon and the chill of her absence and my overwrought emotions made me feel colder still and I sat crouched over the fire, my longing for her arrival balanced by my dread of it. Mind and feelings had tired themselves out. I no longer thought and theorized, no longer felt anything but a flat, bleak misery. Would she fail to come, as she had failed last night, I asked myself. But the stimulus of that question roused no answer in my dumb and empty heart, as when in a deserted church a man pulls out stops and plays chords on an organ whose bellows are empty. I was so sunk in my apathy that I did not hear the front door open and shut, and it was only when she opened the sitting-room door that I knew she had arrived.

I turned my head. I felt suddenly guilty and ashamed, ashamed of having bothered her to let me see her when she had been obviously unwilling. I rose to my feet. Our eyes met: in hers was the same unfriendliness that I had heard in her voice on the telephone this morning.

‘I'm afraid I'm a little late,' she said shortly. ‘I'll just get rid of my hat and coat.'

She crossed the room to the door of her bedroom, her eyes turned from me, and vanished. I sank back into my chair. The other door opened and Martha came in with the tea-tray: her face was fixed and unresponsive as a face of baked clay, as if she had divined Rose's mood and was acting in sympathy with it. To hide my misery I took up the poker and began to poke the fire. Martha set the tea-table with her usual leisurely efficiency and went out as Rose came in by the other door.

She came to the tea-table and without a word began to pour out tea. I took my cup in silence and handed her the bread and butter. I tried hard to think of something to say, some commonplace phrase that would not sound too obvious, too hollow; but the silence froze my lips. Rose
too, I believe, was fighting against her mood, but it was too strong for her. She was angry with me, almost hated me, it seemed. Why? Probably because she felt me silently urging her to explain her defection of last night. Perhaps too she was angry with herself, divided against herself, one half of her assuring her that in common decency she must explain, the other half stubbornly refusing. I stirred my tea but did not taste it: I felt that I would choke if I tried to take a sip. When I raised my eyes I saw that she was looking at me. Her face had softened.

‘Phil, you're eating nothing,' she said.

Her voice and the change in her face affected me even more than her former coldness. I felt a sudden rush of tears sting my eyes. With an effort I swallowed them down.

‘I oughtn't to have come, Rose,' I said.

‘But I asked you to.'

‘Yes, but only because I worried you. But I was so …'

‘So what, Phil?'

‘So upset about last night.'

She turned away her eyes: she seemed to be struggling with herself. ‘I'm … I'm really very sorry,' she said at last, ‘but I couldn't possibly manage it. Something, something at the last minute stopped me.'

‘It was someone else?' I whispered, shamefaced, stung by a sudden agonizing suspicion.

‘No, no one else. I simply …'

She made a sudden helpless gesture of the hands as if abandoning the attempt to explain. ‘I just couldn't manage it. Don't ask me why; I can't explain.'

Silence fell between us again. I felt that we had reached a hopeless deadlock and with an effort I rose to my feet. I longed to throw myself on her mercy, but that, I felt, would be to force myself on her still more.

‘I think I'll go home,' I said, avoiding her eyes. I could not have borne to look at her.

She too rose. I knew she was looking at me, and next
moment I felt her arms round me and her hair against my cheek. She was weeping.

‘Phil,' she said, ‘Phil, I can't help myself. I don't want to make you suffer. You know that, don't you?'

We stood there weeping and clinging together in the middle of the room. O the marvellous consolation of her arms about me, her body against mine. For a few blessed moments, moments which my mind, watching from its dark corner, knew to be delusion, I felt that all my pain was at an end. Then I took hold of her arms and gently released myself. I had remembered that Jennifer might come at any moment.

‘There!' I said. ‘There, I must go!'

I left her standing and went to the door, took hold of the door-handle and then paused. Her sudden outburst of tears and remorse had roused me from my absorption in my own miseries to the realization that she too was miserable.

‘Rose,' I said, ‘would you rather be free?'

She still stood where I had left her, and now she raised her eyes and looked at me, forlorn and puzzled.

‘Free, Phil?'

‘Would you like to break off our engagement?'

She seemed to me at that moment, when I was perhaps losing her for ever, more lovely, more precious than ever before. She did not reply. It seemed that she was lost in a dream, and in that brief pause I felt my heart shrivel into a small, cold stone.

Then she smiled at me. ‘No, no, Phil,' she said, and added with a sad little attempt at levity, ‘it isn't quite as bad as that.' She came towards me and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Yes, you'd better go now,' she said.

I came straight home, and now I am sitting alone and idle in my room. The storm of the last twenty-four hours has spent itself: an empty calm has fallen upon my life.
But it is the calm not of restored happiness but of exhaustion and desolation. I know now that the mysterious trouble which has grown up between us and set us at cross-purposes is not, as I have been trying to persuade myself, a figment of my imagination. It is real, horribly, devastatingly real, and I sit and survey the wreckage about me, the fallen trees, the dashed and broken flowers. But I no longer feel myself the victim of her cruelty. Her outburst of tenderness and grief when I left her just now has shown me that we are both victims, she as much as I. Hew glad I am that I had the strength to offer to set her free. That would show her at least that I am not wholly the selfish, whimpering child that I must often have seemed to her during these last weeks. But what is to become of us now? Will our love by degrees recover its former health, or are we to have only brief unions between long periods of division and bitterness, as this afternoon? That would be unendurable. Even our moments of reunion would be terrible then, an ever-renewed agony of parting. Better nothing than that tragic pittance of love. What am I to do? I can do nothing, it seems, but wait for I don't know what. Perhaps I shall hear from her tomorrow; perhaps there will be a ring at the bell, I shall go down and open the door, and she will be there, eager, happy, her eyes ready for mine without a shadow between. Rapturous, insane, impossible dream. It is strange that the heart can find comfort in fancies that it knows to be incapable of realization.

Next day. Among the letters on my table this morning I found one from her and my heart stood still. I dared not open it and kept it to the last. This is what it said:

‘My dear Phil,—You were right. When you asked me yesterday if I would like to break off our engagement, I ought to have said Yes. But I couldn't. I couldn't bear
at the moment to add to your pain, even though I knew that it would be better for us both to be free. But it was false kindness to try to disguise the truth from you. It was even worse; it was cowardly and selfish of me to shirk what was a duty to you and myself. You spoke of setting me free, but it is you even more than I who must be set free. Don't say you don't want to be free: you do want it in the more important sense that you need it. The fault is all mine: I ought never to have consented to our engagement. But at least I erred through ignorance, not thoughtlessness. I did not know that my inability to give you as much as you gave me would so falsify our relation, nor did I realize that I would find it impossible to accept, much less repay, all you had to give.

‘I would love you if I could, Philip: indeed, I do love you, but not as you love me. I love you as a friend, but this disproportion in our feelings for one another sours my friendship and drives me, in spite of myself, to treat you as no one should submit to be treated. I have become for you a kind of disease, a kind of vice from which you must shake yourself free; and you have innocently become for me the means of displaying my ill nature and behaving in a way untrue to myself.