Short Stories 1927-1956 (76 page)

For some minutes Mrs Millington had been sitting, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on the open window, as if she were positively gloating on the intense stillness of the garden and its celestial canopy – like some moulting bird too far gone to chirp or stir, and peering out of the bars of its familiar cage at the vision of unattainable
freedom
beyond them, or even at a freedom now become impracticable,
tarnished
and stale. The slightly sallow cheek no longer owed any artificial green to the reflected sunlight; the dark eyes resembled motionless pools in some mountain valley on a starless night, wherein the reflections of the preceding centuries have left nothing but opacity and eclipse.

‘I haven’t,’ she said at length, ‘been really able to follow a good deal of that last part, William – about the ceiling and the rain-stains and the moon. After you woke up, I mean. Do you mean that what you saw in the dream was caused by a sort of distortion of the actual pattern in the ceiling? In that case surely you must have seen it – perhaps in the few moments before you fell asleep. And yet you say that, after all, the pattern wasn’t really like that at all. It was merely a blur. Besides, no mere rain-stain, surely, could resemble so closely a child, a tree
and
a tomb? Can’t it have been mere fancy, William, do you think – such as one so often, and without any such intention, re-creates in one’s memory?’

‘I am sorry, my dear, for telling it all so badly. But I do mean that the
rain-stain
by
moon
light resembled that. My explanation, right or wrong, is pretty much what you have suggested – that I must have seen, without
definitely
observing, the stain on the ceiling before going to sleep; that this caused the dream; and that it was the dream that imposed the design or pattern – at least to some extent – upon it. It was merely a mixture of states of mind, the dreaming and the half-dreaming and the awakening. When, then, as I say, Louis’s elegant parlour-maid tapped at my door with my tea, and —’

As if the word itself had actually summoned her, Mrs Millington’s own parlour-maid at this moment herself opened the door and came in to take the tea-things away. Mr Millington watched her until the door was shut again.

‘What a marvellous crop of hair that girl has,’ he remarked. ‘You don’t often see red hair nowadays: or not, at any rate, that sort of golden bronze tint. Mark my words, you won’t keep
her
for very long … I wish
nonetheless
she wouldn’t interrupt. But there, my dear, I mustn’t bore you any longer – not for more than one more minute, anyhow; as it is for that I have
been waiting. As I was saying, the moment I awoke, I turned my head to look for my dream-cartouche, and the actual disfiguring rain-stain in the morning light no more resembled it than the face I am now turning towards you resembles what it was like, say, about thirty years ago, when you were a little girl with pigtails and aged ten. In those days I was not such a very bad-looking young man, though you might not think it now. And there’s the rub.’

The vigilant and constricted expression that had steadily deepened on Mrs Millington’s face during this long and wearisome recital, after lifting a little, had intensified again.

‘Oh, William,’ she broke out, ‘if only you wouldn’t keep straying off in what you have to tell me. What “
rub
”?
I don’t know what you mean. I’m dreadfully tired, dreadfully stupid, nervy, worked up. It’s this heaviness in the air. Though now, it seems, the storm is not going to break after all. It’s less dark. I dread thunder – am a coward in any crisis. And yet I wish – I wish almost anything. If only it would clear! Oh, everything! – the air! To breathe again! One’s very soul. How you can have managed to keep all this out of your talk at lunch just passes my comprehension. You merely said the trains had gone wrong. Not a word about any dream. Nothing. And even now you haven’t finished.
What
“rub”?’

‘For one reason, you precious, silly, troubled, patient thing, it was
because
everything I have been telling you concerns solely you and me. I sat as mum as a Grampus at breakfast that next morning, except to congratulate Louis on making his guests so comfortable – and an unexpected guest at that. I don’t imagine that
he
would be very patient with dreams. Not at least with other people’s. Not even with his own, perhaps – for very long
together
. He’s so restless, so self-centred, so precarious. I came to the
conclusion
, my dear, the moment I was in my cab again, that he and I don’t match. I’m sluggish oil;
he’s
water and – unstable. Let’s drop him out; and the dream too into the bargain. I believe even, as a matter of fact, that deep in your own heart, you share my prejudice.

‘However, the “rub” is this. Somehow that silly and meaningless
cartouche
took me back to when I was about twenty. It was in part a memory, you see; and it was concerned in part with a tree very much like my dream-tree, but not with anything in the nature of a chest or tomb – except perhaps in its general shape. My actual memory of those far-away days is of a tree; late dusk; autumn; a plain damp backless wooden bench. And two anguished people sitting on it.’

He rose from his chair, yawned, shuddered, and drawing up another next to his wife’s, sat down beside her and laid both his long bony hands over hers and her sewing.

‘I want you,’ he said, ‘to listen very carefully to what I am going to tell
you, and then to declare quite frankly if it will make the least difference to us. It cannot but alter your ideas of me, what you think of me, what you believed of me. But it’s all far away, remote, boxed up in the past; it
was
– well, until yesterday – all but forgotten – put out of mind, I mean. There never yet was any real opportunity of its being forgiven; and it’s not for me – not for myself – to forgive it now.’

His wife had managed to withdraw her left hand from beneath his own, the other remained a prisoner. She was breathing so rapidly that she could hardly articulate clearly.

‘I haven’t the least notion,’ she said, ‘what you are going to tell me.
Whatever
it is, it could not make any difference now. It is, you say, far away; and you were young; and, and human – like the rest of us, young
and
old. What
are
we, when all is said? Like bits of elastic, that can stretch so far, but no farther. Then we snap. Nor could it make any difference to what some day,
some
day … Oh, William, please let me go now
.
My head is racking; I can hardly see out of my eyes. All you can mean is that this tree of your dream, of your waking and of the past, and those two woeful young people on the wooden seat – why, both, as such, must have rotted away by this time – all you can mean is that men, women, all of us, just because we are human, cannot for ever be fixed in anything, cannot remain absolutely steadfast and unchanged. The failure, the broken hopes, the futile yet lovely
romanticalness
are in our very natures; and we have, if we are foolish and impetuous, and give away the heart without counting the cost – we have to pay the price, whatever that may be or mean. You were going to tell me about some old love affair, weren’t you? I can see her – sweeter, simpler, more impulsive, better-natured far, far than I have ever been, could be; and I suppose,
circumstances
, something you weren’t responsible for, something perhaps you
were
responsible for – well, came in between. Perhaps you even treated her with atrocious unkindness? Well, what then? What we want, what we
desire
, changes, fades out, William. We cannot help ourselves – not even when we have attained it. Most of us. But the heart itself doesn’t change; only its wants. And if it’s that, I don’t wish, I don’t want you to tell me any more. I can see by your face – your hands are cold – that I have guessed right.’

She suddenly fell silent, staring at him in the faintly lightening gloom of the open window. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? Very strange? If that hadn’t happened, if you two had never parted, we ourselves would never have met? We should never even have met.’

The Picture

The Picture
*

Lucia drew back overtly at last from the shelter and shadow of the crimson black-lined curtain. Its folds screened an upper window – a shallow bow in shape. From out of its small panes she had been watching her husband. In this last strange year, the first of her married life, she had learned many things about him. She had learned that his loyalty and tenderness, his
unwearying
secret consideration for her, were not merely due to the funny little fact that simply could not be denied – that he was years and years older than she was; but also because he was wholly himself and – well, loved her. As she loved him? That question, as she had stood, one hand gently resting on the curtain, her dark eyes fixed, had again crept like some predatory little animal into her thoughts. Could it possibly be as much? … This dreadful question of age. He seemed to be so much less apprehensive of his leaving her than was she of his going. Besides …

The rounded lids above her unusually dark eyes echoed, as it were, the curve of cheek and chin. Her other hand lay on her breast. The sun shone hot on the flawed eighteenth-century glass of the white-framed window. This room of her husband’s was like a little hothouse in the sunshine of early afternoon; and presently she would draw the black-lined crimson curtains again to keep it cool for his coming back.

Another thing she had learned was, that, to him, habit of spirit, mind and body resembled the serene sky of a St Martin’s summer. Then why – instead of quietly busying himself with trowel or spud – was he merely standing looking down on a bed crammed with Sweet Williams in full bloom? Palest pink, auricular-eye, scarlet, blood-red, deepest crimson – his favourite flower.

‘Second childhood, my dear,’ he had remarked more than once, as they had stood there admiring them together. ‘I might as well be five again, in a holland pinafore, and my mother … Hundreds of years ago.’

Oh yes, that was all very well, but it could not surely explain his present dejected attitude? Or similar far-away ponderings, meditations, usually ending when challenged with an unintended sigh and a prolonged smile – a smile somehow not the less inscrutable because it was so loving. Why should loving anybody ever leave
any
human heart sorrowful? Whereas – pent-up, hot, and reviling herself beyond words, realizing her own
miserable
jealousy – it now often left her not only sorrowful but almost faint with doubt and remorse?

With one sweep of her arm she drew the curtain across the window, and
turned, completely concealed by it, towards the portrait again. She knew by rote every inch of it. She was letter-perfect. Harriet, his first love, his first wife. A second string of course
need
not play the less sweetly because there was once a first. It is itself to blame if it jar its own music. She had married, realizing perfectly well that in every human soul there is room for two, for three or four, perhaps, and that no beloved image in a heart of any depth and fidelity can ever wholly oust, or be ousted, by another.

She knew too that for weeks past she had consistently ignored what had rapidly become a sort of idiotic and even frightening obsession. Age cannot but live a good deal in the past, and especially perhaps in the company of a long-gone childhood. She didn’t mind, in the least, complete hours stolen from her in tender remembrances of that kind; so far-away and enduring too. But couldn’t he,
shouldn’t
he have seen that this portrait – with its never-ceasing share of a life beyond the grave – was all wrong? And for all three of them?

It was mean, odious, idiotic, and yes – why deny it – an almost insane speculation, to let anything like that fester and corrupt in her mind. And yet in her present nerve-racked unfamiliar condition she could no more rid herself of this mental misery than one can immediately cure any bodily ill. She had tried – bitterly, intensely – and had failed. Day by day to continue to enter this room, whether vacant or with her husband there, quietly reading or writing in his chair, and that smiling painted phantom on the wall
continually
surveying the scene which she had been compelled to abandon had become an impossible burden. Merely to discover somehow, without any direct question – impossible thought! – without any sinuous probings even, exactly how she stood, and how
she
stood! This at last had seemed to have become a sheer necessity. She couldn’t bear the suspense. If – in her present condition it could not be satisfied – well, how live on? Like this?

Once a busy spectre begins to frequent the mind, you never – she had
discovered
this long ago – you never know even yourself what devils it may not at length invite in.

Her husband’s thinning face, those tranquil grey-blue eyes, that had yet recently shown so many marks of weariness, what were they concealing? What
could
they be concealing – except thoughts, remembrances, and
perhaps
even gnawing regrets which she could not possibly share? How was it possible to bring him to realize what was corroding away in her every vestige of her peace of mind? It was as if she had discovered a viper curled up in her work-basket. The answer to that question had stolen upon her only a day or two before.

Awakened suddenly and silently in the small hours as if a cold lean hand had gently shaken her by the shoulder, the vile device seemed to have sprung up in her sleeping mind like Jonah’s gourd. This bold and too-large portrait
had scarcely ever been even so much as referred to between them. Why should it have been? It portrayed, not the Harriet who six years ago had died and left him, but the Harriet of at least twenty years before that. Very fair, yet not beautiful, at least not beautiful to most unheeding eyes. A young face, and yet a face full of the past, a face out of some old
extravagant
romantic story, a face unaware of what just one glimpse of it might bestow, a face which if it were once beloved – no matter what might happen – could not be ever really unbeloved: not deep within; and never forgotten. Forgotten! Why at this moment, as if in the mere fact that it was refusing to look at her, it was an irresistible, an unendurable reminder of her own miserable trick.

Hating herself, as might a reptile engaged in devouring its own tail, she had stolen down from her bedroom in the small hours and had lit one of the candles here, on her husband’s writing table. Not even the angel Gabriel could have persuaded him to burn electric light. Perhaps she had been not quite awake. And certainly a nightmare mind can manage things the day mind would retch at. However that might be, with an infinite disgust, she had at last mounted a chair and, with the utmost caution and skill, first by igniting, then by extinguishing the tiny flame, burned through about
two-thirds
of the thickness of the cord behind the picture by which it was
suspended
from the wall. Even the rotation of the earth may affect at last a hanging picture. So may a mere draught, the jar of traffic, passing footsteps and the slow secret incessant tug of the force of gravitation. Its fate might then prove suspended by a thread. Its downfall could be only a question of days. And then, surely, surely, he would be bound to betray himself. She would at last
know.

It was perhaps in part her passionate nature that had made her so
superstitious
. Was
he
?
Strangest of facts, she couldn’t really tell. Not for certain. With a faintly whimsical smile, he would do a dare and walk in bravado under a ladder – paint-pot or no paint-pot. He
preferred
other numbers to 13. At sight of a magpie and solely on his own account he would turn his head, spit, laugh and apologize. Once when she herself, after he had stolen behind her and put his hand over her eyes, had struggled free and had seen, through glass, the exquisite gold thread of the crescent moon tilted very low (the old moon in the new moon’s arms) – when his very aim had been to prevent this – he had seemed really shaken.

He had seized her hands, had kissed her cheek and mouth almost
frenziedly
, saying, ‘There, it must be all right now, mustn’t it? God forbid!’

Well, surely if he was as superstitious even as that, she couldn’t but
surprise
some exclamation, some instinctive disclosure, some dreadful change of face when in its own moment the portrait should crash to the ground! And now, she herself never for an instant ceased to be awaiting that crash.
If she had not come to hate and detest the face it portrayed perhaps? – but it was too late now. Or
was
it too late?

She stole soundlessly to the window again. An age seemed to have passed since she had last looked out. It could have been only a few moments. Her husband was where she had left him. Soon, he would begin his afternoon’s potterings. There was Turner, watering-can in hand, coming towards him. How dreadfully weary, narrowed in, even disconsolate he looked, as if all but worn out by some inward struggle. A shuddering revulsion of feeling came over her. Think of it! Some day she might perhaps be looking back on this from beyond an awful gulf of utter darkness. An evil done, even if it remain undiscovered, is an ineradicable horror, a scar no power in earth or heaven could ever remove.

Well, she was awake
now.
She must do her utmost to undo what she had done, and must chance discovery. Trembling knees and hands, she dragged up a chair, mounted it, and with both arms extended attempted to lift the portrait from the wall. To snap and re-knot the string while it hung there was out of the question. But the frame was heavier even than she had
expected
. The cord refused to unloop itself from its hook. Her heart continued steadily thundering against the cage of her ribs. She tried again, and was compelled to desist. Very gradually she allowed the portrait to slide down the full length of the cord again; but the strain was too great, and even as, with a murderous splintering of glass, it crashed to the floor she heard his step along the corridor outside. In sheer panic she leapt from the chair, stumbled, all but fell, attempted to escape and met him full in the doorway.

‘Why, my dear, my dear! You poor thing, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

Her teeth were chattering, she had begun to hiccough.

‘I tried, I tried,’ she was almost shouting at him. ‘I had been watching you. I was anxious about you. Don’t look. Come away. It was a miserable deception – worse. I can’t bear it.’

‘“Watching me”?’ he repeated. ‘“Couldn’t bear it” – can’t bear what?’ His face had gone a deadly grey, even his lips. ‘Just
that
?
My own dear, loved, loving thing. How can
that
matter?… “Anxious about me”? I should have to have told you soon. But I don’t understand. Why, only a week or two ago I – you know how mere time wears out everybody, and I … And now,’ he added turning towards the wall, ‘
this
horrible thing has happened. It must have startled you to death.’

Still clasping her hand, he stooped over the portrait lying face downwards on the floor, and lifted the end of the severed cord. No attentive eye could have been deceived by that.

‘Why!’ he began meditatingly. ‘How queer! That’s not an ordinary … It’s charred. It’s been …’

Releasing her hand, he turned to look at her. The dark distraught face, fingers clenched, eyes shut, seemed to be as brightly illuminated in the
half-curtained
room as some ridiculous painted clown’s in the limelight of the stage.

‘It was I, me,’ she was saying. ‘I fancied she – you – I. I
must
go now. What did you mean, what did you
mean
by “I should have told you soon”? Not that –
that.
’
She nodded her head towards the fallen portrait.

‘That!’ he exclaimed. ‘You poor precious angel thing. My dear, my dear!
That
!
Why, I hadn’t a notion! It was only – only the letter that came from – that was enclosed with Dr Brown’s. I fancied you had guessed it had – it had not been very favourable. But my own dear; we had both foreseen it, known it, realized it – underneath? Hadn’t we? When one is so old … well, one can’t go on – indefinitely.’ The words ceased. He was gazing at the back of the picture … ‘What a lucky thing,’ he added, smiling up into her face, ‘that we knew all along things weren’t quite right.’