“Actually,” said Timmie, getting it out with a hoarse crack, “I haven’t come to—to see you professionally. I came about a personal matter.”
Kit looked up sharply. Only one matter was personal to him at present. His visitor’s nervousness, which could almost be heard to vibrate like a tuning fork, pointed his own absurdity. Probably the boy had got a girl into trouble; or she said he had. Poor little devil. He sat down at the desk again. “Well, if there’s anything I can—will you smoke, by the way?”
“Er—no. No, thanks. I’ve given it up.”
Timmie worked his hand down over the side of his chair seat, and grasped it firmly.
“I came because I feel I ought to tell you—as a matter of honesty—that I’ve fallen in love with your wife.”
He awaited reply. Kit could have produced one more readily to a sandbag at the base of his skull. He sat in his revolving chair, dazedly watching the tweed jacket rise and fall, in jerks, over the boy’s thin chest.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said at length.
Timmie blinked his sandy lashes, and licked his lips again. He looked like some one in an extremity of stage-fright who has been handed the wrong cue, and is racked for some means of linking to it his proper lines. A light of purpose suddenly transformed him. He said, loudly, “Well, I’m not sorry. I may as well tell you at once that, though I’ve felt bound to come to you about it, I can’t alter what I feel, and I don’t want to. And nothing will make me.”
The first blankness of concussion left Kit’s mind. He looked at the face in front of his, noting, with distant attention, the dry skin, the signs of sleeplessness round the eyes, and a fine tremor which nervous strain does not produce in a few hours only.
He asked, “Have you known my wife long?”
“Since the twelfth of September.”
“Yes; that’s some time.”
“Probably you think I ought to have come clean about it before. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, as a matter of fact, but she …” He stopped, staring at the carpet.
“Quite.”
Timmie looked up, and braced himself in a kind of relief. At last something was conforming to plan. If the man was angry he would presently say something in character, something typically insensitive and callous to which one would know the answer.
“You’ve told her about this, I expect?” said Kit gently.
“Mrs. Anderson”—Timmie opened his shoulders—“is absolutely innocent in every way.”
“Yes, naturally. That isn’t what I wanted to know.”
“I haven’t made any dishonourable suggestion to your wife, if that’s what you mean.”
The corners of Kit’s mouth moved faintly.
“No; I—er—gathered that from your coming to me.”
(Cynical brute, thought Timmie, I expect he grins at her like that.) “If you mean does Mrs. Anderson know I admire her and sympathize with her, yes, she does.” Kit nodded; Timmie experienced the uneasy resentment usually roused by the sight of some one else arriving at a private conclusion, and went on rapidly, “And I don’t suppose I’m the first person to feel that way.”
“No, I don’t imagine so.”
Timmie shifted in his chair. He sensed, dimly, a kind of divergence from the blueprint drawn up by his guidance of the night before; but no readjusted guidance came to replace it. He stuck, doggedly, to the original. “I think you ought to realize—in fact, that’s partly why I came—that Mrs. Anderson has a—a very rare nature, and other people feel that, even if—”
“Even if I don’t.”
“Yes,” said Timmie. The effort of not looking at the floor made a kind of creaking sensation at the back of his neck.
“What exactly did you come to see me about?”
“That,” said Timmie, “really.”
“Yes, I see.”
Timmie blinked again, from the effort of trying to prevent himself. Once he began, it was hard to stop. He fiddled with his tie, and remembered a very good thing to say which he had thought of on the way. But when it had occurred to him, he had imagined himself being shouted at. It was not the kind of thing one said to a man who looked at you as if he were seeing something else. It was queer to think that he must really be quite young; as young anyhow as Dagger, the International. Timmie looked at the set of his mouth and thought, Anyhow, he can’t possibly be old enough to have been in the last war.
Kit roused himself.
“Well,” he said, “I should think you could do with a drink, couldn’t you, after that?”
Timmie’s hand dropped from his tie. “Oh, no. No, really, thanks.”
“I would. How about a brandy-and-soda; I’ve got it all here.”
“No, honestly. I mean, it’s a thing we rather cut out in the Group, you know.” He blushed; he had not meant to excuse himself.
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I ought to have remembered.”
Timmie got out a handkerchief, made a motion to blow his nose, stopped, twisted the handkerchief and stuffed it back into his pocket. Speaking rather fast and indistinctly, because this was extempore, he said, “Look here, I’m afraid I haven’t gone about this very well. I mean, one ought to see a thing from the other person’s point of view, that’s the whole idea, of course. I do realize, absolutely, you do important work and naturally things get by you that a person notices who has time to get away by himself and think things out. I’ve been able to sit and talk to J—Mrs. Anderson for hours, when I expect you’ve had to go dashing off with people’s lives depending on you.”
He looked up anxiously. Kit got out a cigarette, and lit it with concentration.
“Talking of time,” Timmie continued, “some of us find it helps a lot to get up half an hour earlier in the morning and have a quiet time, getting things straight with ourselves. I don’t know if you’ve tried that at all. Sometimes things come to you that you wouldn’t think of, just racketing around. I think you might see things differently, about—about your wife, and all that. … What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want you to think I came here from selfish motives, to make a breach between you and Mrs. Anderson, or anything of that sort. On the contrary.”
“No. I quite realize you came entirely on her account. I’m sure she appreciates it too. You told her you were coming, I dare say?”
Timmie stiffened in his chair.
“Good G— No, certainly not. Of course she hasn’t the least idea of such a thing. Actually, I chose this afternoon because I happened to know she was going to be out. You mustn’t on any account think … As a matter of fact, she definitely said I wasn’t to. But afterwards I had gui— I decided I ought.”
“Yes, of course, I see.” Kit came out of himself, and considered the straining face that watched his own. Angry compassion rose in him. “Look here,” he said, “can’t you possibly get away for a bit?”
Timmie whitened. “You mean you forbid me to see your wife again?”
“Oh, God,” said Kit under his breath. “If I did,” he asked, “would it be likely to stop you?”
Timmie said slowly, “I’d give my word, if you gave yours to—to try and make her happier.”
Kit was drawing a lizard on his blotting pad. Without looking up he said, “As bad as that, is it?”
“If I thought it would be any use to her I’d …” He stopped, shocked by his own voice, which might almost have been that of some one confiding in a friend. He longed suddenly to get away, to be seeing the thing in retrospect and getting it straight in his head.
Kit looked up from the lizard. “What would you like me to promise?”
Timmie’s heart seemed to catch in his ribs.
“Well, I—I couldn’t bind you to anything in particular. I expect you know best what would—” He stammered into silence.
“You seem bent on making it easy for me,” said Kit. He added sets of claws to the lizard’s feet, and abruptly pushed the blotter away. “No. One’s got no right to short-circuit other people. You can take it
, I think.”
“How do you mean?” asked Timmie, swallowing.
There ought to be something, Kit was thinking, that I can do for him; or what’s been the use of it all? I can save his dignity, that’s always something, I suppose. His horn glasses, which he only used for consultations, were lying on the desk; he wished he had remembered to put them on.
“I appreciate your coming to me like this. It makes me feel I—” he stabbed an eye into the lizard; it was worse than he had thought—“I can leave your relationship with my wife to your sense of honour. I expect you and she do very valuable work together. As you say, I haven’t time to give to her interests that I ought to have.” He got up. “Look here, I don’t want to hurry you, but I’ve got to start out on some visits in a moment or two. Thank you for coming. I’ll think over what you’ve said.”
Timmie collected himself, inch by inch, to his feet. He found that his knees were shaking a little.
“Thanks awfully,” he said. “I—it’s good of you not to mind my butting in.” The exit speech he had prepared on the way there suddenly returned to his mind; he blushed again. Kit held out his hand. Timmie’s pink turned slowly to crimson. He took it.
“I’ll see you out,” Kit said. “Oh, by the way, I think I should be inclined not to mention this to Janet when you see her.”
“But …”
“It’s all right. I won’t let on.”
Timmie’s face went through a moment of curious plasticity, like one of those toy rubber faces whose expression one changes with a squeeze of the thumb. It was blank for a moment; then the eyes and mouth opened in incredulous relief; finally it returned a dazed version of Kit’s smile.
“Well … I do think, probably, if you wouldn’t mind …”
“Right, that’s settled.” They went out. Kit paused with his hand on the front door. “There’s an old English proverb,” he said. “‘That passed; so will this.’ It’s perfectly true.”
“Not of some things.” Timmie lifted his chin. “I know that.”
“I envy you. Good-bye.”
Timmie swung out into the street, bumping into people on the pavement in his bemused meditation. He almost tripped over a newsvendor’s placard : it said “CONSCRIPTION FOR ENGLAND?”, but Timmie, staring at it unseeingly, apologized and strode on.
Kit stood, for a moment or two, staring out of the window, then turned with a jerk to look at the clock. He got his bag out of the corner, checked its contents, and then, suddenly remembering the mess upstairs and the sequels of previous messes, went to tidy it up. He pushed back the chair to its proper place, knocked out the pipe, cleaned up the books and papers, and stood, with a certain grimness about the mouth, surveying the suave neatness of the room, before he went out to his car.
He spun out his short round, yielding to patients whom the season made talkative and who were anxious to extend his visit into a social call. The last one offered him tea, and he accepted. He wanted to let his feelings settle before he saw Janet again; he hoped to avoid, if he could, anything—and a look might do it, while he felt as he felt now—that might turn their guarded neutrality to an established bitterness. The boy’s simplicity, his lack of resource, had released stored-up forces of reaction too dangerous to be liberated on his own account. He resented his own helplessness; he too, he supposed, by escaping out of her reach, had been accessory to this slaughter of the innocent. The thing would have to run its course now; arrested, the child would immortalize it, and some girl who loved him would find, years later, a ghostly Janet in her bed.
As he thought this, the image of Christie returned to warm him. Even the memory of her presence was like a glowing hearth beside which he relaxed in contentment and in toleration for the world. Even in her passion there was friendliness, even in her small patches of sophistication a zest of youth which put the cold and dry humours out of countenance. His anger against Janet faded; he found himself remembering, in pity, how much of her must be the unalterable substance of her blood. Some man very likely existed who was her counterpart, some dreamer with a streak of masochism, whose love was seated chiefly in his brain. He had imagination enough to conceive such a man and the kind of happiness they might have had together. He had deluded both her and himself with a transient promise of it, so that now she would never find it: and he had found Christie. He was ashamed of his own condemnation. As he drove back through the winter darkness he thought of his next visit to the Abbey, made happy by it even from its distance as sailors by the expectation of harbour a week away. Perhaps there would be a letter waiting for him; she had not written to him for Christmas yet.
As he turned the car in at the gates, he heard the choir from the Parish Church singing carols in the drive of the house next door.
Star of wonder, star of light,
Star with royal beauty bright …
While he walked through the garden, an invisible starlight seemed to spangle the familiar trees, and the warmth in his heart spread outward to embrace the world.
The salver in the hall was piled with envelopes. Most of them were Christmas cards, but there was a soft fat one at the bottom, addressed in Christie’s sprawling hand. He pushed the others back into a pile and took it, smiling to himself, into the consulting room where he could be sure of peace.
Christie had sent him a tie. It was a good tie, and the colouring and design were charming. It had, indeed, everything in the world to recommend it, except the casual circumstance that it was the choice, not only of Christie but of the Coldstream Guards. A regimental tie, he thought—stroking the silk because she would have stroked it—would probably have cost more than she could afford. He would get her to change it; she was quite without petty dignities, and, when he explained, would think it marvellously funny. Her letter was inside the tissue paper, folded round the tie.
He opened it out, spread it on the closed cover of his roll-top desk; smiling through the opening, through the first two sentences, through the first part of the third. His smile stopped. He turned the pages quickly to look at the end, turned back to be beginning, read it through fast, skipping the words that were hard to read; read it through, in a last hope, slowly again. He looked up from it and stared in front of him, trying to fight off the knowledge that stared from it like a colour in which the pages had been dyed. There was no arguing with certainty. Its feverish promises, its compassionate and remorseful tenderness, the cracked and desperate ring of its assurances, shouted what they tried to conceal as plainly as if Christie had printed it out in words of one syllable. He even knew the name of the man.
Neatly and blindly, Kit folded her letter into four and put it in his pocket, wrapped the tie in its tissue paper again and shut it in the bottom drawer of the desk. Everything became, suddenly, quite silent, as if his ears had been plugged with wool. He did not know how long it was before he became aware again of external sound. Then, as abruptly as if he had waked from sleep or an anaesthetic, he found that the carol-singers had moved from the house next door, and were singing just under the window. A boy’s voice, pure and sexless floated out alone:
Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind grows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know not how …
There were footsteps on the stairs. Janet was coming down, to hear better, perhaps, or to give silver at the end. His body seemed to shrink back of itself, like an injured animal hiding.
“… no longer.” The last notes of the treble died away; the tenor leaped into its confident answer. Kit walked over to the switch and put out the light.
CHAPTER 16
WHILE IT WAS STILL dark, the Christmas bells began to ring. Kit closed The Thirty-nine Steps, which he had been reading since four, welcoming the sound, as he would have welcomed factory hooters or the screech of a tram. They were like small nail-holes piercing the wall of his private darkness with evidence of an external world. A little later he heard Janet leaving the house on her way to church. He dressed himself, and walked through the s
treets in the grey creeping light, on pavements that rang like iron under the delusive down of a white frost. He felt bitterly cold, and no increase of pace would warm him. The faces of the people he met looked pinched and withered; everything that moved seemed to be moving with feverish noise and speed.
He got in just before Janet, kissed her at the breakfast table, and gave her his present, a dress clip which she had chosen when he had asked her what she would like. She gave him a pigskin wallet, stamped with his initials. He admired it and thanked her for it with so much animation and charm that she glowed almost into warmth; he observed, curiously, that one part of him felt an overkeyed pleasure in their friendliness, like the bonhomie one feels in the middle stages of drink, while another part of him was thinking that he would never be able to look at the wallet without being reminded of wizened faces and freezing streets. They each had letters from relatives, and read aloud to one another items of family news.
Janet’s mother was driving over to lunch. She and Janet got on badly. She had belonged to a rackety set in the post-war years, and Janet’s character had been partly formed on violent reaction from her. Since then she had mellowed, but still thought Janet a prig. This morning, for the first time, Janet admitted aloud that she wished her mother had decided to spend Christmas elsewhere. Kit was cheerfully sympathetic about it, and promised to get back as early as possible from the hospital to break up the tête-à-tête. They talked on, sitting at the table, for half an hour. Kit clung to the conversation, as sick men will cling to a chance visitor whose gossip distracts them from the fear of death. At the end of the half-hour, the talk fell flat all in a moment, like an effervescence ceasing; they were left looking at each other awkwardly, and presently Janet made an artificial excuse and went away. The fact that Kit had eaten nothing at all had escaped her notice, because of their chattering and the scattered letters and cards.
Kit was left alone in the dining room. He got up and stared out of the window, waiting for the telephone bell to ring. His mind pushed at it, like the mind of some one in haste pushing at a slow train. In a minute it would ring and he would answer it, and it would be Christie to wish him a happy Christmas. He would ask what she had meant by her letter, and it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding, or some mood that she had had and would almost have forgotten. He could go on pretending this for some time, he thought; and at once turned away from it revolted, as the talk and laughter with Janet had revolted him in the end. But his mind was still stretched for the telephone; he found he could not relax it. He wished it would ring for some complicated emergency which would not allow him for several hours to use his brain for anything else. But he knew that if it did, he would come back to himself with the same disgust as before.