“Well,” he said doubtfully, “remember Scobell’s unsound.” He went on talking. He talked for two hours and a half. Reviewing the setbacks, analysing the possibilities, outlining possible theories. He was hardly conscious of Henrietta’s presence. And yet, more than once, as he hesitated, her quick intelligence took him a step on the way, seeing, almost before he did, what he was hesitating to advance. He was interested now, and his belief in himself was creeping back. He had been right—the main theory was correct—and there were ways, more ways than one, of combating the toxic symptoms.
And then, suddenly, he was tired out. He’d got it all clear now. He’d get on to it tomorrow morning. He’d ring up Neill, tell him to combine the two solutions and try that. Yes, try that. By God, he wasn’t going to be beaten!
“I’m tired,” he said abruptly. “My God, I’m tired.”
And he had flung himself down and slept—slept like the dead.
He had awoken to find Henrietta smiling at him in the morning light and making tea and he had smiled back at her.
“Not at all according to plan,” he said.
“Does it matter?”
“No. No. You are rather a nice person, Henrietta.” His eye went to the bookcase. “If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I’ll get you the proper stuff to read.”
“I’m not interested in this sort of thing. I’m interested in you, John.”
“You can’t read Scobell.” He took up the offending volume. “The man’s a charlatan.”
And she had laughed. He could not understand why his strictures on Scobell amused her so.
But that was what, every now and then, startled him about Henrietta. The sudden revelation, disconcerting to him, that she was able to laugh at him.
He wasn’t used to it. Gerda took him in deadly earnest. And Veronica had never thought about anything but herself. But Henrietta had a trick of throwing her head back, of looking at him through half-closed eyes, with a sudden tender half-mocking little smile, as though she were saying: “Let me have a good look at this funny person called John…Let me get a long way away and look at him….”
It was, he thought, very much the same as the way she screwed up her eyes to look at her work—or a picture. It was—damn it all—it was detached. He didn’t want Henrietta to be detached. He wanted Henrietta to think only of him, never to let her mind stray away from him.
(“Just what you object to in Gerda, in fact,” said his private imp, bobbing up again.)
The truth of it was that he was completely illogical. He didn’t know what he wanted.
(“I want to go home.” What an absurd, what a ridiculous phrase. It didn’t mean anything.)
In an hour or so at any rate he’d be driving out of London—forgetting about sick people with their faint sour “wrong” smell…sniffing wood smoke and pines and soft wet autumn leaves…The very motion of the car would be soothing—that smooth, effortless increase of speed.
But it wouldn’t, he reflected suddenly, be at all like that because owing to a slightly strained wrist, Gerda would have to drive, and Gerda, God help her, had never been able to begin to drive a car! Every time she changed gear he would be silent, grinding his teeth together, managing not to say anything because he knew, by bitter experience, that when he did say anything Gerda became immediately worse. Curious that no one had ever been able to teach Gerda to change gear—not even Henrietta. He’d turned her over to Henrietta, thinking that Henrietta’s enthusiasm might do better than his own irritability.
For Henrietta loved cars. She spoke of cars with the lyrical intensity that other people gave to spring, or the first snowdrop.
“Isn’t he a beauty, John? Doesn’t he just purr along?” (For Henrietta’s cars were always masculine.) “He’ll do Bale Hill in third—not straining at all—quite effortlessly. Listen to the even way he ticks over.”
Until he had burst out suddenly and furiously:
“Don’t you think, Henrietta, you could pay some attention to me and forget the damned car for a minute or two!”
He was always ashamed of these outbursts.
He never knew when they would come upon him out of a blue sky.
It was the same thing over her work. He realized that her work was good. He admired it—and hated it—at the same time.
The most furious quarrel he had had with her had arisen over that.
Gerda had said to him one day:
“Henrietta has asked me to sit for her.”
“What?” His astonishment had not, if he came to think of it, been flattering. “You?”
“Yes, I’m going over to the studio tomorrow.”
“What on earth does she want you for?”
Yes, he hadn’t been very polite about it. But luckily Gerda hadn’t realized that fact. She had looked pleased about it. He suspected Henrietta of one of those insincere kindnesses of hers—Gerda, perhaps, had hinted that she would like to be modelled. Something of that kind.
Then, about ten days later, Gerda had shown him triumphantly a small plaster statuette.
It was a pretty thing—technically skillful like all Henrietta’s work. It idealized Gerda—and Gerda herself was clearly pleased about it.
“I really think it’s rather charming, John.”
“Is that Henrietta’s work? It means nothing—nothing at all. I don’t see how she came to do a thing like that.”
“It’s different, of course, from her abstract work—but I think it’s good, John, I really do.”
He had said no more—after all, he didn’t want to spoil Gerda’s pleasure. But he tackled Henrietta about it at the first opportunity.
“What did you want to make that silly thing of Gerda for? It’s unworthy of you. After all, you usually turn out decent stuff.”
Henrietta said slowly:
“I didn’t think it was bad. Gerda seemed quite pleased.”
“Gerda was delighted. She would be. Gerda doesn’t know art from a coloured photograph.”
“It wasn’t bad art, John. It was just a portrait statuette—quite harmless and not at all pretentious.”
“You don’t usually waste your time doing that kind of stuff—”
He broke off, staring at a wooden figure about five feet high.
“Hallo, what’s this?”
“It’s for the International Group. Pearwood. The Worshipper.”
She watched him. He stared and then—suddenly, his neck swelled and he turned on her furiously.
“So that’s what you wanted Gerda for? How dare you?”
“I wondered if you’d see….”
“See it? Of course I see it. It’s here.” He placed a finger on the broad heavy neck muscles.
Henrietta nodded.
“Yes, it’s the neck and shoulders I wanted—and that heavy forward slant—the submission—that bowed look. It’s wonderful!”
“Wonderful? Look here, Henrietta, I won’t have it. You’re to leave Gerda alone.”
“Gerda won’t know. Nobody will know. You know Gerda would never recognize herself here—nobody else would either. And it isn’t Gerda. It isn’t anybody.”
“I recognized it, didn’t I?”
“You’re different, John. You—see things.”
“It’s the damned cheek of it! I won’t have it, Henrietta! I won’t have it. Can’t you see that it was an indefensible thing to do?”
“Was it?”
“Don’t you know it was? Can’t you feel it was? Where’s your usual sensitiveness?”
Henrietta said slowly:
“You don’t understand, John. I don’t think I could ever make you understand…You don’t know what it is to want something—to look at it day after day—that line of the neck—those muscles—the angle where the head goes forward—that heaviness round the jaw. I’ve been looking at them, wanting them—every time I saw Gerda…In the end I just had to have them!”
“Unscrupulous!”
“Yes, I suppose just that. But when you want thi
ngs, in that way, you just have to take them.”
“You mean you don’t care a damn about anybody else. You don’t care about Gerda—”
“Don’t be stupid, John. That’s why I made that statuette thing. To please Gerda and make her happy. I’m not inhuman!”
“Inhuman is exactly what you are.”
“Do you think—honestly—that Gerda would ever recognize herself in this?”
John looked at it unwillingly. For the first time his anger and resentment became subordinated to his interest. A strange submissive figure, a figure offering up worship to an unseen deity—the face raised—blind, dumb, devoted—terribly strong, terribly fanatical…He said:
“That’s rather a terrifying thing that you have made, Henrietta!”
Henrietta shivered slightly.
She said, “Yes—I thought that….”
John said sharply:
“What’s she looking at—who is it? There in front of her?”
Henrietta hesitated. She said, and her voice had a queer note in it:
“I don’t know. But I think—she might be looking at you, John.”
Five
I
In the dining room the child Terry made another scientific statement.
“Lead salts are more soluble in cold water than hot. If you add potassium iodide you get a yellow precipitate of lead iodide.”
He looked expectantly at his mother but without any real hope. Parents, in the opinion of young Terence, were sadly disappointing.
“Did you know that, Mother—”
“I don’t know anything about chemistry, dear.”
“You could read about it in a book,” said Terence.
It was a simple statement of fact, but there was a certain wistfulness behind it.
Gerda did not hear the wistfulness. She was caught in the trap of her anxious misery. Round and round and round. She had been miserable ever since she woke up this morning and realized that at last this long-dreaded weekend with the Angkatells was upon her. Staying at The Hollow was always a nightmare to her. She always felt bewildered and forlorn. Lucy Angkatell with her sentences that were never finished, her swift inconsequences, and her obvious attempts at kindliness, was the figure she dreaded most. But the others were nearly as bad. For Gerda it was two days of sheer martyrdom—to be endured for John’s sake.
For John that morning as he stretched himself had remarked in tones of unmitigated pleasure:
“Splendid to think we’ll be getting into the country this weekend. It will do you good, Gerda, just what you need.”
She had smiled mechanically and had said with unselfish fortitude: “It will be delightful.”
Her unhappy eyes had wandered round the bedroom. The wallpaper, cream striped with a black mark just by the wardrobe, the mahogany dressing table with the glass that swung too far forward, the cheerful bright blue carpet, the watercolours of the Lake District. All dear familiar things and she would not see them again until Monday.
Instead, tomorrow a housemaid who rustled would come into the strange bedroom and put down a little dainty tray of early tea by the bed and pull up the blinds, and would then rearrange and fold Gerda’s clothes—a thing which made Gerda feel hot and uncomfortable all over. She would lie miserably, enduring these things, trying to comfort herself by thinking, “Only one morning more.” Like being at school and counting the days.
Gerda had not been happy at school. At school there had been even less reassurance than elsewhere. Home had been better. But even home had not been very good. For they had all, of course, been quicker and cleverer than she was. Their comments, quick, impatient, not quite unkind, had whistled about her ears like a hailstorm. “Oh, do be quick, Gerda.” “Butterfingers, give it to me!” “Oh don’t let Gerda do it, she’ll be ages.” “Gerda never takes in anything….”
Hadn’t they seen, all of them, that that was the way to make her slower and stupider still? She’d got worse and worse, more clumsy with her fingers, more slow-witted, more inclined to stare vacantly at what was said to her.
Until, suddenly, she had reached the point where she had found a way out. Almost accidentally, really, she found her weapon of defence.
She had grown slower still, her puzzled stare had become even blanker. But now, when they said impatiently: “Oh, Gerda, how stupid you are, don’t you understand that?” she had been able, behind her blank expression, to hug herself a little in her secret knowledge…For she wasn’t as stupid as they thought. Often, when she pretended not to understand, she did understand. And often, deliberately, she slowed down in her task of whatever it was, smiling to herself when someone’s impatient fingers snatched it away from her.
For, warm and delightful, was a secret knowledge of superiority. She began to be, quite often, a little amused. Yes, it was amusing to know more than they thought you knew. To be able to do a thing, but not let anybody know that you could do it.
And it had the advantage, suddenly discovered, that people often did things for you. That, of course, saved you a lot of trouble. And, in the end, if people got into the habit of doing things for you, you didn’t have to do them at all, and then people didn’t know that you did them badly. And so, slowly, you came round again almost to where you started. To feeling that you could hold your own on equal terms with the world at large.
(But that wouldn’t, Gerda feared, hold good with the Angkatells; the Angkatells were always so far ahead that you didn’t feel even in the same street with them. How she hated the Angkatells! It was good for John—John liked it there. He came home less tired—and sometimes less irritable.)
Dear John, she thought. John was wonderful. Everyone thought so. Such a clever doctor, so terribly kind to his patients. Wearing himself out—and the interest he took in his hospital patients—all that side of his work that didn’t pay at all. John was so disinterested—so truly noble.
She had always known, from the very first, that John was brilliant and was going to get to the top of the tree. And he had chosen her, when he might have married somebody far more brilliant. He had not minded her being slow and rather stupid and not very pretty. “I’ll look after you,” he had said. Nicely, rather masterfully. “Don’t worry about things, Gerda, I’ll take care of you….”
Just what a man ought to be. Wonderful to think John should have chosen her.
He had said with that sudden, very attractive, half-pleading smile of his: “I like my own way, you know, Gerda.”
Well, that was all right. She had always tried to give in to him in everything. Even lately when he had been so difficult and nervy—when nothing seemed to please him. When, somehow, nothing she did was right. One couldn’t blame him. He was so busy, so unselfish—
Oh, dear, that mutton! She ought to have sent it back. Still no sign of John. Why couldn’t she, sometimes, decide right? Again those dark waves of misery swept over her. The mutton! This awful weekend with the Angkatells. She felt a sharp pain through both temples. Oh, dear, now she was going to have one of her headaches. And it did so annoy John when she had headaches. He never would give her anything for them, when surely it would be so easy, being a doctor. Instead he always said: “Don’t think about it. No use poisoning yourself with drugs. Take a brisk walk.”
The mutton! Staring at it, Gerda felt the words repeating themselves in her aching head, “The mutton, the MUTTON, THE MUTTON….”
Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. “Why,” she thought, “does nothing ever go right for me?”
Terence looked across at the table at his mother and then at the joint. He thought: “Why can’t we have our dinner? How stupid grown-up people are. They haven’t any sense!”
Aloud he said in a careful voice:
“Nicholson Minor and I are going to make nitroglycerine in his father’s shrubbery. They live at Streatham.”
“Are you, dear? That will be very nice,” said Gerda.
There was still time. If she rang the bell and told Lewis to take the joint down no
w—
Terence looked at her with faint curiosity. He had felt instinctively that the manufacture of nitroglycerine was not the kind of occupation that would be encouraged by parents. With base opportunism he had selected a moment when he felt tolerably certain that he had a good chance of getting away with his statement. And his judgement had been justified. If, by any chance, there should be a fuss—if, that is, the properties of nitroglycerine should manifest themselves too evidently, he would be able to say in an injured voice, “I told Mother.”
All the same, he felt vaguely disappointed.
“Even Mother,” he thought, “ought to know about nitroglycerine.”
He sighed. There swept over him that intense sense of loneliness that only childhood can feel. His father was too impatient to listen, his mother was too inattentive. Zena was only a silly kid.
Pages of interesting chemical tests. And who cared about them? Nobody!
Bang! Gerda started. It was the door of John’s consulting room. It was John running upstairs.
John Christow burst into the room, bringing with him his own particular atmosphere of intense energy. He was good-humoured, hungry, impatient.
“God,” he exclaimed as he sat down and energetically sharpened the carving knife against the steel. “How I hate sick people!”
“Oh, John.” Gerda was quickly reproachful. “Don’t say things like that. They’ll think you mean it.”
She gestured slightly with her head towards the children.
“I do mean it,” said John Christow. “Nobody ought to be ill.”
“Father’s joking,” said Gerda quickly to Terence.
Terence examined his father with the dispassionate attention he gave to everything.
“I don’t think he is,” he said.
“If you hated sick people, you wouldn’t be a doctor, dear,” said Gerda, laughing gently.
“That’s exactly the reason,” said John Christow. “No doctors like sickness. Good God, this meat’s stone cold. Why on earth didn’t you have it sent down to keep hot?”
“Well, dear, I didn’t know. You see, I thought you were just coming—”
John Christow pressed the bell, a long, irritated push. Lewis came promptly.