Return to Night (37 page)

“I’m sorry, Mother, I’m afraid it still won’t do. I mean, that’s an old story, isn’t it, one way and another? And it isn’t what you’re really thinking about. We’ll leave it at that, if you want. But my mind’s made up, I’m afraid.”

He looked her in the eyes. The combined effort of exploration and defiance was as racking as some physical ordeal, like holding a weight on the outstretched hands. Just when it seemed about to crack him, she looked down, picked up the work in her lap. and turned it over.

“Very well.” Passing her fingers over the white edging, she said, “I should have known it would be useless. The evil in the world seems always to be stronger than the good. There’s some purpose in it, no doubt. Yes, make your arrangements, Julian. Will you go now, please? Good night.”

“Good night, Mother.” He would have bent to give her the kiss which, even when something was wrong, they had exchanged on every night they had spent under one roof. But she bent over her work, turning away. He crossed the room slowly to the door.

“Julian.”

The door handle had been in his hand when she spoke. As he turned back, he was thinking that if he had made the fraction more of haste which would have taken him into the hall, she would not have called again.

“Yes?” he said.

“Come back. I want to speak to you. Sit down, please.”

“I will in a minute.” He could no more have sat than he could have lain down and slept.

“I said I’d done everything possible to keep you from ruining your own life; but I realize now that it wasn’t strictly true. Facts do influence many people more than principles; I think you’re of that type. At least I owe it to you, I suppose, to try.”

“Yes?” he said again.

“You know I’m not a person who forms strong opinions without some very good reason. I hoped that might be enough for you. Once it would have been; you’ve changed very much lately. To show you I don’t speak simply from prejudice, I want to tell you about a man I once knew who had most of your weaknesses. He had certain gifts, as you have; and he abused them, as you want to do.”

“You mean he was an actor?”

“Yes. He could never have been anything else.”

“Most actors couldn’t, you know.”

“
Will
you be quiet, Julian, and let me speak?”

It was the first sign she had given of snapping control. Curiously, it acted on him in some degree as a sedative. He went over to the armchair on the other side of the fire, and sat down.

“I met this man during the war, when I working in France as a V.A.D. You remember my telling you about the base hospital, the Chateau St. Vaux. I was there at the time. There was a French H.Q. a few miles away, and he was attached there as a liaison officer; he was a Canadian, but with an English commission.”

“French-Canadian?”

“On the mother’s side, I believe. He was almost bilingual. He came to us as a patient, but I didn’t meet him then. He had some slight accident with a motorcycle; minor injuries, but his face was quite badly cut. I was working in a different wing. The sisters used to make jokes about his face being his fortune, and say he was terrified that his looks would be spoiled; that was how I heard he was on the stage. I realize now, of course, that they criticized him to one another because they didn’t want it to be thought they were competing; when they were with him, I’m sure they behaved quite differently, But I was inexperienced for my age (I was twenty-five) and I imagined he must be getting very unsympathetic treatment. Besides, I was interested in another way. At that age I had a number of very stupid ideas; I think the most foolish was the value I set on good looks. That, I’m afraid, was partly my parents’ fault. In most ways they brought me up very strictly; but they were proud of my being considered pretty, and discussed it more than was really wise. When I was twenty, they commissioned a portrait of me, which was shown in the Academy that year.” Seeing him look up, she said, “No, I haven’t it now; I destroyed it, after they died.”

“
Destroyed
it?”

“Please don’t interrupt. What I was saying was that having been allowed to think looks so important in women (I don’t think I ever entered a roomful of people in those days without looking round to be sure that I was the most attractive girl there) I’d developed an even sillier idea that they were equally important in men. Just before the war, I refused a young man whom really I liked a good deal; I think simply on those grounds. I’d decided that if one had a gift of that kind, one had a duty to—Well, I tell you all this simply to show you how foolish my ideas were. However, I was telling you about this man.”

“What was he called?”

“His name was Andre O’Connell. We had a very good plastic surgeon at the hospital, who took trouble with him because he was an actor, and the cut left scarcely any trace. He was discharged without my having seen him; but being I suppose short of amusement—we were a good way from a town—he was continually coming over on one pretext or another, and eventually there was an evening party, at which I met him for the first time.”

She had been talking with her hands in her lap; now she picked up her wool, and began to work with it.

“I realized what the sisters had meant; his looks were—I should say, now, ostentatious. Though he was amusing, I could see at once that he was not much liked by the other men; but I put that down to jealousy. When he left the people he was with and crossed the room to speak to me I was pleased, though I think I regarded it as a right; I was vain, as I say. I thought his manner delightful at first; but shortly after, he suggested playing charades, because several of the men had leg wounds and were out of the dancing. That was what he said; of course what he really wanted was to show off himself. It was typical of him. He chose me first for his own team. I told him I had no talent whatever for that kind of thing; but he insisted on my acting a scene with him.

“And, instead of being helpful, he laughed at me for not having enough animation. I thought him extremely rude, and showed it. He apologized later, and asked me to dance. He danced very well, though rather showily, and we attracted notice, which pleased me, I’m sorry to say.

“After that, he managed to see a good deal of me in the next few weeks. No doubt he interested me partly because he was a type of man I should never have been allowed to meet at home. He had, of course, as I realized, no background whatever. His father and grandfather had run what was called a stock company, and his mother had been a music-hall singer, I believe. He himself was much more ambitious, as he often told me. Just before the war he had been in New York, and had had some offer he considered a good one, but by that time he had made arrangements to enlist. He seemed very little perturbed at missing the chance; he said that his looks would be enough to get him started again, and after that he could shift for himself. He spoke as though that were a quite normal thing to say. I didn’t allow him to see I thought it bad form. He was very self-assured, and one is nervous at that age of seeming old-fashioned. As he was always ready to talk about himself, I said very little about my own family. He had the usual Colonial idea that people of our sort were very arrogant and hidebound, and I was afraid he—I allowed him to influence me in many ways. In the beginning, I had been interested in him because he belonged to a type I had set up in my own mind, but in time—What
is
it, Julian; where are you going?”

“Sorry. I’ll get a cigarette. I’m listening.” He opened the tallboy, and, though the box was under his hand, went through movements of searching for it.

“In time, as I say, it was different. Then, one evening, he—he behaved in a way which should have warned me, at once, of the kind of man he really was. Indeed, I think it did; but, shocked and horrified as I was, I made some excuses for him to myself; my own vanity, unfortunately, helped me to make them. However, I told him it was quite impossible for me to meet him again, and that I had no intention whatever of changing my mind. I think you’ll find the cigarette box on the second shelf. You had better bring it with you, when you fidget, it makes it very hard for me to think what I’m saying.”

He came back with the box, and after the cigarette was going, found it was an Egyptian, which he loathed. He continued, however, to smoke it.

“A few days later, I had a letter from him. I should, of course, have returned it unopened. However, I was weak enough to read it. He said in it that he was deeply ashamed of what had happened; that he should have known, and in fact’ had known, that I was not the kind of woman to tolerate it, but that his feeling for me had made him lose his self-control. He—didn’t put it, of course, quite as I do now. … He wrote that he had intended at the time to ask me to marry him—Julian. Don’t you realize your cigarette is touching the chair cover? I can smell it even from here. Do get an ash tray, please.”

He went over to a table at the other end of the room, where one was generally kept.

“He said that when he saw how angry I was, he had been afraid to ask me; but he hoped I would forgive him, and marry him as soon as possible, as life was so uncertain at that time. He sent the letter by a French dispatch rider. That was the kind of thing he did.”

The ash tray was there; silver, and highly polished. It seemed a pity to use it. He put it on the mantelpiece, and remained standing beside it and flicking his ash into the fire.

“I was in a great deal of doubt and unhappiness. I had allowed myself, before all this happened, to become very fond of him; and after this letter, which was—very persuasive, his conduct didn’t make the difference that it should have done, What I thought of far more was how appalled my parents would be. I was afraid even to hint at it in a letter home. My father was in poor health and I knew they worried a good deal about me already, and exaggerated the danger from shellfire and so on, which was really very slight. But on the other hand, Andy said—” She jerked the crochet hook quickly through its loop. “Captain O’Connell said there was a chance of his being moved at any time, perhaps to the line. I never discovered whether that was true.”

She had come to the bottom corner of the bed jacket, and made the turning carefully, pausing while she did so. Julian occupied the time by closing the curtains. Parting the last again, he looked out. It was quite dark outside. He tried, to imagine for a moment that he was there, alone.
Soon,
he thought,
I can get away somewhere. Five minutes, ten; fifteen, surely at the most; it wouldn’t seem very long, if one were sitting with a book. If only,
he thought,
one could leave one’s body in the chair to hear out the rest, dump it there like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and from some dark hiding-place manipulate the strings.
… With a nerve in the back of his head, he sensed that she was about to look up, and came back to the fireplace.

“One heard a great many excuses, after the war, for what wasn’t excusable; that people’s nerves were strained, that one was living in the presence of death, and so on. I always detested it. You have no idea of the depths people reached in that way. Many of them had put up with very little; and, in any case, what is the use of having standards if they break down at the first test? I don’t justify myself, because one can’t justify deceit. I said to myself of course that my parents would understand, and that I would make it up to them in every possible way; but even if that had been so, it would have been no excuse at all for continuing to write to them as if nothing were changed. Letters like that are lies in themselves, even if nothing untruthful is actually said. And there was another thing which I knew in my heart could never have been right. Knowing he was a Roman Catholic, I agreed to be married by a Roman priest. In fact, I did more than agree; he would have been willing for a Protestant wedding (he told me he had lapsed, as they say) but I knew that he would be thought by his own Church to be living in a state of sin. It seemed too much to ask of him. So in the end, it was I who insisted. … You wish to ask me, I expect, why I never told you that I had been married before. You will understand in a moment or two.

“The priest who married us was a military chaplain from a French army rest camp. He was very pleasant and kind, and I think in his way a good man, though he hoped I should become proselytized, I’m afraid. Still, perhaps that was natural. He was killed a few days later, when his detachment went up to the line again. I believe he died very bravely, giving a sacrament or something of the kind. It must have been quite irregular for him to marry a British officer, and I don’t know how he was persuaded to do it. I expect he must have been deceived in some way.

“I forgot to mention that we had both succeeded in getting leave together. I, of course, had told no one at all what I was doing. We spent our honeymoon at a small hotel in Paris.” With careful distinctness, she added, “The Germans had a large gun, which they fired at the town from time to time. One could hear the shell coming from quite a distance; an odd noise, rather like a train. No one paid much attention to it.

“The day before we were due to leave, he went out for a short time, I think to get theater seats for the evening. We had spent the first part of the afternoon—resting, and talking about these plans he was always making for his career after the war. He had been showing me some photographs, and cuttings from Canadian papers about parts he had taken in various touring-companies; I can’t remember what they were, and it’s of no consequence. I had been quite interested in the cuttings, and after he had gone, I took them out again, as we hadn’t had time to go through them all. I knew he kept them separately; had they been with private things, I should, naturally, not have touched anything. One or two were quite long notices, the kind of thing that provincial papers print; gossip and description, rather than criticism as we should understand it here. There was an actress in the company with one of these very obvious and affected stage names; I remember thinking that her real one was probably something very prosaic. Then I came to a paragraph which said that in private life she was Mrs. Andre O’Connell.”