what was bound to happen had happened. olifant the galahad, out for grails, as triona, and indeed as olivia had pictured him, had lost his head, poured out a flow of mad words, and flung his arm about her and kissed her passionately. she had been caught, had half-surrendered; released, she had put hands to a tumultuous bosom and staggered away from him. and there had followed a scene enacted for the twenty-billionth time on the world’s stage. she had grown weak and strong by turns. at last she had said: “if you love me, go now and let me think it over and all that it means.”
and he had gone, passion yielding to his courteous consideration of her, and she was left alone in the drawing-room, staring through the open french windows at the may garden.
since her return from the south of france, she had felt the thing coming. in october, as soon as myra had returned from her holiday, fear had driven her from medlow. the hunger in the man’s eyes proclaimed an impossible situation. the guest and host position she had changed after the first few weeks. brother and sister and herself kept house together—on the face of it a sensible and economical arrangement. mr. trivett and mr. fenmarch, once more financial advisers, commended it with enthusiasm. the summer had passed happily enough. the modus vivendi with the sections of medlow society respectively symbolized by landsdowne house and blair park had arranged itself automatically. she found conferred upon her the freedom of each. the essential snobbery of english life is a myth kept alive by our enemies. it is true that the squire and the linen-draper do not ask each other and their families to dinner. their social worlds are apart. they don’t want to ask each other to dinner. they would never dream of asking each other to dinner, one no more than the other; they respect each other too mightily. but a dweller in both worlds, such as olivia, trivett-ed and gale-d though she was on the one side, yet on the other, the wife of the famous alexis triona and the friend of the olifants, folks whose genealogy was lost somewhere in a pictish bonfire of archives, can wander up and down the whole social gamut at her good pleasure. besides she herself does not mix the incompatible. a mere question of the art of life, which olivia, with her london experiences found easy of resolution. so, in the mild and mellow way on which medlow prided itself, she had danced and tennis-ed and picnic-ed the summer through. on the blair park side—she wondered laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—blaise olifant and his sister accompanied her in the gentle festivities. each day had brought its petty golden dust—the futile church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the whist-drive of which old john freke, the linen-draper father of lydia, had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint shrewsbury, on shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in medlow—a thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use matthew arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. everything had gone well until october. then she had taken prudent flight with myra to the france and italy which she had never seen—and there she had stayed till the beginning of may.
it was mrs. woolcombe who insisted on her return to medlow. where else should she return after her wanderings but to her own home? at first everything was just as it used to be. then, on a trivial cause—an insult offered her by an italian in venice which she had laughingly recounted—the passion of blaise olifant had suddenly flamed forth.
she was frightened, shaken. he had given her the thrill, which, in her early relations with him she had half contemptuously deemed impossible. she found herself free from sense of outrage. she bore him no resentment. indeed she had responded to his kiss. she was not quite sure, within herself, whether she would not respond again. the communicated thrill completed her original conception of him as the very perfect gentle knight. for after all, knights without red-blood in their veins might be gentle, but scarcely perfect.
if she were free, she would marry him out of hand, without further question. he had always dwelt in a tender spot of her heart. now he had slipped into one more warm, smouldering with strange fires. but she was not free. she stood at once at the parting of the roads. she must go back to a wandering or lonely life, or she must defy conventions.
she went out into the ivy-walled garden, and walked up the central path, between the beds of wallflowers and forget-me-nots and the standard roses just bursting into leaf. what could she do? once she had laughed scornfully at the idea of love playing any part in her life. she had not reckoned with her youth. and now she stared aghast at the vista of lonely and loveless years.
presently blaise olifant came from his study and advanced to meet her.
he said: “can you speak to me now?”
“yes—now,” she answered.
“i’ve behaved like any blackguard. you must forgive me, if you can. the italian cad who made me see red was not very much worse than myself.”
there was a smile in her dark eyes as she looked up at him.
“there’s all the difference in the world. i disliked the italian very much.” she touched his sleeve. “you are forgiven, my dear friend. it’s all my fault. i oughtn’t to have come back.”
“you’re the most wonderful of women,” said he.
the most wonderful of women made a little wry movement of her lips.
“it’s all a might-be and a can’t-be,” she said in a low voice.
“do you suppose, my dear, i don’t know that? if it could be, do you think i should regret losing my self-control?”
she said. “if it’s any consolation to you—perhaps i lost mine too. we’re both human. perhaps a woman is even more so than a man. that’s why i went away in october—things were getting impossible——”
“good god!” he exclaimed, “i thought you were bored to death!”
a little laugh could not be restrained. the blindness of man to psychological phenomena is ever a subject for woman’s sweet or bitter mirth. but it was not in his heart to respond.
“then you do care for me a little?”
“i shouldn’t be standing here with you now, if i didn’t. i shouldn’t have made the mistake of coming back, if i hadn’t wanted to see you.”
“mistake?” he sighed and turned a step away. “yes. i suppose it was. i should have been frank with mary and shewn her that it was impossible—for me.”
“it would be best for me to go to-morrow,” said olivia.
“where?”
“london. a hotel. any old branch.” she smiled. “i must settle down somewhere sooner or later. the sooner the better.”
“that’s monstrous,” he declared with a flash in his eyes. “to turn you out of your home—i should feel a scoundrel.”
“i don’t see how we can go on living together, carrying on as usual, as though nothing had happened.”
for a few moments they walked up the gravelled path in silence, both bareheaded in the mild may sunshine.
“listen,” he said, coming to a pause. “i’m a man who has learned self-control in three hard schools—my scotch father’s, science, war. if i swear to you, on my honour, that nothing that has passed between us to-day shall ever be revived by me in look or word or act—will you stay with us, and give me your—your friendship—your companionship—your presence in the house? it was an aching desert all the time you were away.”
she walked on a pace or two, after a hopeless sigh. could she never drive into this unworldly head the fact that women were not sexless angels? how could their eyes forever meet in the glance of a polite couple discussing the weather across a tea-table? she could not resist a shaft of mockery.
“for all of your philosopher father and science and war—i wonder, my dear blaise, how much you really know of life?”
he halted and put a hand on her slim shoulder.
“i love you so much my dear,” said he, “that i should be content to hang crucified before you, so that my eyes could rest upon you till i died.”
he turned and strode fast away. she followed him crying “blaise! blaise!” he half turned with an arresting arm—and even at that moment she was touched by the pathos of the other empty sleeve——
“no, don’t—please.”
she ran hard and facing him blocked his way.
“but what of me? what of my feelings while i saw you hanging crucified?”
that point of view had not occurred to him. he looked at her embarrassed. his scottish veracity asserted itself.
“when a man’s mad in love,” said he, “he can’t think of everything.”
she took his arm and led him up the gravelled path again.
“don’t you see, dear, how impossible it all is?”
“yes. i suppose so. it must be one thing or the other. and all that is good and true and honourable makes it the other.”
tears came at the hopelessness of it. she seized his hand in both of hers.
“what you said just now is a thing no woman could forget to the day of her death.”
she kissed the hand and let it drop, stirred to the inmost. what was she, ineffectual failure, to command the love of such a man? he stood for a while looking into the vacancy of the pale blue sky over the ivy-clad wall. before her eyes garden and house and wall and sky were blotted out; and only the one tall figure existed in the scene. her heart beat. it was a moment of peril, and the moment seemed like an hour.
at last he turned and looked at her with his grave smile. she put her hand on her heart not knowing whether to cry or laugh at the relaxation of tension.
“you stay here with mary,” he said gently. “i’ll go away for a change—a holiday. i need one. there’s an old uncle of mine in scotland. i’ve neglected him and his salmon-fishing shamefully for years. how i can fish with one arm, heaven only knows. i’ve learned to do most things. it’ll be a new experience. as a matter of fact, i should have gone last month, if the temptation to wait for you hadn’t been so strong. it’s up in the wilds of inverness——”
she made feeble protest. it was she who drove him out of his home. far better for her to cut herself adrift from medlow. but he prevailed. he would go. in the meantime things might right themselves.
he departed the following morning, leaving olivia to a new sense of loneliness and unrest. she lived constantly in the tense moment, catching her breath at the significance of its possibilities. unbidden and hateful the question recurred: if positions had been reversed; if blaise had been the lost husband and alexis the lover, would alexis have let her go? certainly not alexis. and yet deep down in her heart she was grateful that she had come scathless through the moment.
the little round of country gaieties went on and caught her up in its mild gyrations. mrs. woolcombe deplored her brother’s absence. he had been looking forward to the social life with olivia, especially the tennis parties. it was wonderful how he had overcome the handicap of his one arm; the effectual service he had perfected, tossing up the ball with his racket and smiting it at the dead point of ascent. it had all been due to olivia’s encouragement the previous summer; for till then he had not played for years. but he had been sadly overworked. when a man cannot sleep and rises up in the morning with a band of iron round his head, it is obvious that he needs a change. it was the best thing for blaise, undoubtedly; but it must be dull for olivia. so spake mary woolcombe, unaware of kisses and tense moments.
olivia said to myra: “this is an idle, meaningless life. we’ll go back to london and settle down.”
“will life mean much more when you get there?” asked myra.
“i can do something.”
“what?”
“how do i know? why are you so irritating, myra?”
“it isn’t me,” said myra.
“what is it, then?”
“a woman wants a man to look after,” said myra in her unimpassioned way. “if she can’t get a man she wants a woman. i’ve got you, so i’m not irritated. you haven’t got either, so you are.”
olivia flushed angrily and swerved round in her chair before the mirror on her toilet-table—myra was drying her hair—as she had dried it from days before olivia could remember.
“that’s a liberty, myra, which you oughtn’t to have taken.”
“i dare say, dearie,” replied myra unmoved, “but it’s good for you that somebody now and then should tell you the truth.”
“i want neither man nor woman,” olivia declared. myra gently squared her mistress’s shoulders to the mirror and went on with her task.
“i wonder,” she said.
“i think you’re hateful,” said olivia.
“maybe. but i’ve got common-sense. if you think you’re going to london to stand for parliament or write poetry and get it printed or run a home for incurable camels, you’re mistaken, dear. and you’ll have no truck with women. you’ve never had a woman friend in the world—anyone you’d die for.”
“of course i haven’t,” snapped olivia.
“it’s a man’s woman you are,” continued myra. “you’ve looked after men ever since your dear mother was taken ill. it’s what god meant you to do. it’s all you can do. and you haven’t got a man and that’s what’s making you unhappy.”
olivia sprang from her chair, looking with her long black hair ruffled and frizzed and spreading out around her warm oval face, like an angry sea-nymph on a rock disputed by satyrs.
“i hate men and everything connected with them.”
“you still hate your husband?” asked myra looking at her with cold pale eyes.
“i loathe him. how dare you? haven’t i forbidden you to mention his name?”
“i didn’t mention his name,” said myra. “but if you like, i won’t refer to him again. sit down and let me put on the electric dryer. your hair’s still wringing wet.” she yielded, not with good grace. myra had her at her mercy. dignity counselled instant dismissal of myra from her presence. but the washing and drying of her long thick hair had ever been a problem; so dignity gave way to comfort.
she was furious with myra. we all are with people who confront us with the naked truth about ourselves. that was all she was fit for; all that life had taught her; to look after a man. she stared at the blatant proposition in the grimness of the night-watches. what else, in god’s name, was she capable of doing for an inch advancement of humanity? she had gone forth long ago—so it seemed—from medlow, to open the mysterious mysteries of the world. she had opened them—and all the pearls, good, bad and indifferent, were men. all the ideals; all the colour and music and gorgeous edifices of life; all the world vibration of thought and action and joy of which she had dreamed, every manifold thrill that had run through her being from feet to hair on that first night in london when she had leaned out of her victoria street flat and opened her young soul to the informing spirit of the vast city of mystery—the whole spiritual meaning, nay, the whole material reason for her existence, was resolved into one exquisitely pure, bafflingly translucent in its mystery of shooting flames, utterly elemental crystal of sex. sex, in its supreme purity; but sex all the same.
she was a man’s woman. it was at once a glory and a degradation. myra was right. what woman, in the course of her life, had she cared a scrap for? her mother. her mother was a religion. and men? her chastity revolted. when had she sought to attract men? her conscience was clear. but men had been the terror, the interest, the delight of her life from the moment she had left the cloistral walls of her home. and even before that, on a different plane, had she not, while keeping house for father and brothers, always thought in terms of man?
and now she was doing the same. the emptiness of her prospective life in london appalled her. the mad liar, her husband, an unseizable, unknown entity, of whom she thought with shivering repulsion, was away somewhere, living a strange, unveracious life. the soldier, scholar and gentleman, who loved her, into whose arms, into whose life, she had all but fallen, had fled, saving her from perils. before he returned she must, in decency and honour, take up her solitary abode elsewhere. or else she could terminate his tenancy of “the towers” and carry on an old-maidish life in medlow for evermore. anyway, a useless sexless thing for all eternity.
the second post had brought her some letters, a few bills and receipts, a note from janet philimore with whom she kept up a casual correspondence, and a long untidy screed from lydia. lydia had conceived the idea of visiting medlow. her father, old john freke, whom she had not seen for years, was ailing. what did olivia think of the notion? olivia, sitting in the little ivy-clad summer-house at the end of the garden, thought less of the notion than of the amazing lady. to ask her, an outsider, whether she should come to her father’s bed of sickness! she made up her mind to write: “oh, yes, come at once, but wear the thickest of black veils, so that no one will recognize you.” her mind wandered away from the hypothetical visit—london and lydia again! just where she was when she started. life seemed a hopeless muddle.
“i’m sorry,” said myra’s voice breaking suddenly on her meditations. she looked up and beheld myra more than usually grave and cold. “i’m sorry to disturb you. but i’ve just had a letter. he’s dead.”
olivia, with a shock through all her being, started to her feet.
“dead. my husband?”
“no,” said myra. “mine.”
“oh!” said olivia somewhat breathless—and sank on the bench again. she recovered herself quickly.
“i’m sorry, myra. but after all, it’s a merciful release.”
“god’s mercies are inscrutable,” said myra.
so, thought olivia, was myra’s remark.
“i’ve always loved him, you see,” said myra. “i suppose you’ll have no objections to my going to bury him?”
“my dear old myra,” cried olivia. “of course, my dear, you can go—go whenever you like.”
“i’ll come back as soon as it’s over,” said myra.
she turned and walked away, and olivia saw her lean and unexpressive shoulders rise as though a sob had shaken her.
