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CHAPTER VI
I
In the morning there arrived a letter from Clare. He guessed it from the postmark, and was glad that she had the tact to type the address on the envelope. When he tore it open he saw that the letter was also typewritten, and signed merely “C. H.”, so that he was able to read it at the breakfast-table without any fears of Helen guessing. It was a curious sensation, that of reading a letter from Clare with Helen so near to him, and so unsuspecting.
It ran:—
“DEAR KENNETH SPEED-AS I told you last night I feel thoroughly disgusted with myself—I knew I should. I’m very sorry I acted as I did, though of course everything I said was true. If you take my advice you’ll take Helen right away and never come near Millstead any more. Begin life with her afresh, and don’t expect it to be too easy. As for me—you’d better forget if you can. We mustn’t ever see each other again, and I think we had better not write, either. I really mean that and I hope you won’t send me any awfully pathetic reply as it will only make things more awkward than they are. There was a time when you thought I was hard-hearted; you must try and think so again, because I really don’t want to have anything more to do with you. It sounds brutal, but it isn’t, really. You have still time to make your life a success, and the only way to do it in the present circumstances is to keep away from my evil influence. So good-bye and good luck. Yours—C. H.”—“P.S. If you ever do return to Millstead you won’t find me there.”
He was so furious that he tore the letter up and flung it into the fire.
“What is it?” enquired Helen.
He forced himself to reply: “Oh, only a tradesman’s letter.”
She answered, with vague sympathy: “Everybody’s being perfectly horrid, aren’t they?”
“Oh, I don’t care,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders and eating vigorously. “I don’t care a damn for the lot of them.”
She looked at him in thoughtful silence.
Towards the end of the meal he had begun to wonder if it had been Clare’s object to put him in just that mood of fierce aggressiveness and truculence. He wished he had not thrown the letter into the fire. He would like to have re-read it, and to have studied the phrasing with a view to more accurate interpretation.
That was about seven-thirty in the morning. The bells were just beginning to ring in the dormitories and the floors above to creak with the beginnings of movement. It was a dull morning in early March, cold, but not freezing; the sky was full of mist and clouds, and very likely it would rain later. As he looked out of the window, for what might be the last time in his life, he realised that he was leaving Millstead without a pang. It astonished him a little. There was nothing in the place that he still cared for. All his dreams were in ruins, all his hopes shattered, all his enthusiasms burned away; he could look out upon Millstead, that had once contained them all, without love and without malice. It was nothing to him now; a mere box of bricks teeming with strangers. Even the terror of it had vanished; it stirred him to no emotion at all. He could leave it as casually as he could a railway station at which he had stopped en route.
And when he tried, just by way of experiment, to resuscitate for a moment some of the feelings he had once had, he was conscious only of immense mental strain, for something inside him that was sterile and that ached intolerably. He remembered how, on the moonlight nights of his first term, his eyes would fill with tears as he saw the great window-lit blocks of Milner’s and Lavery’s rising into the pale night. He remembered it without passion and without understanding. He was so different now from what he had been then. He was older now; he was tired; his emotions had been wrung dry; some of him was a little withered.
An hour later he left Millstead quite undramatic-ally by the 9.5. The taxi came to the door of Lavery’s at ten minutes to nine, while the school was in morning chapel; as he rode away and out of the main gates he could hear, faintly above the purr of the motor, the drone of two hundred voices making the responses in the psalms. It did not bring to his heart a single pang or to his eye a single tear. Helen sat beside him and she, too, was unmoved; but she had never cared for Millstead. She was telling him about Seacliffe.
As the taxi bounded into the station yard she said: “Oh, Kenneth, did you leave anything for Burton?”
“No,” he answered, curtly.
“You ought to have done,” she said.
That ended their conversation till they were in the train.
As he looked out of the window at the dull, bleak fen country he wondered how he could ever have thought it beautiful. Mile after mile of bare, grey-green fields, ditches of tangled reeds, forlorn villages, trees that stood solitary in the midst of great plains. He saw every now and then the long, flat road along which he had cycled many times to Pangbourne. And in a little while Pangbourne itself came into view, with its huge dominating cathedral round which he had been wont formerly to conduct little enthusiastic parties of Millsteadians; Pangbourne had seemed to him so pretty and sunlit in those days, but now all was dull and dreary, and the mist was creeping up in swathes from the fenlands. Pangbourne station…
Again he wished that he had not burnt Clare’s letter. At noon he was at Seacliffe, booking accommodation at the Beach Hotel.
II
“Heaven knows what we are going to do with ourselves here,” he remarked to Helen during lunch. “You’ve got to rest,” replied Helen.
He went on to a melancholy mastication of bread. “So far as I can see, we’re the only visitors in the entire hotel.”
“Well, Kenneth, March is hardly the season, is it?”
“Then why did we come here? I’d much rather have gone to town, where there’s always something happening. But a seaside-place in winter!—is there anything in the world more depressing?”
“There’s nobody in the world more depressing than you are yourself,” she answered tartly. “It isn’t my fault we’ve come here in March. It isn’t my fault we’ve come here at all. And what good would London have done for you? It’s rest you want, and you’ll get it here.”
“Heavens, yes—I’ll get it all right.”
After a silence he smiled and said: “I’m sorry, Helen, for being such a wet blanket. And you’re quite right, it isn’t your fault—not any of it. What can we do this afternoon?”
“We can have a walk along the cliffs,” she answered.
He nodded and took up a week-old copy of the Seacliffe Gazette. “That’s what we’ll do,” he said, beginning to read.
So that afternoon they had a walk along the cliffs. In fact there was really nothing at all to do in Seacliffe during the winter season except to take a walk along the cliffs. Everything wore an air of depression—the dingy rain-sodden refreshment kiosks, the shuttered bandstand, the rusting tram rails on the promenade, along which no trams had run since the preceding October, the melancholy pier pavilion, forlornly decorated with the tattered advertisements of last season’s festivities. Nothing remained of the town’s social amenities but the cindered walk along the cliff edges, and this, except for patches of mud and an absence of strollers, was much the same as usual. Speed and Helen walked vigorously, as people do on the first day of their holidays-grimly determined to extract every atom of nourishment out of the much-advertised air. They climbed the slope of the Beach hill, past the gaunt five-storied basemented boardinghouses, past the yachting club-house, past the marine gardens, past the rows of glass shelters, and then on to the winding cinder-path that rose steeply to the edge of the cliffs. Meanwhile the mist turned to rain and the sea and the sky merged together into one vast grey blur without a horizon.
Then they went back to the Beach Hotel for tea. Then they read the magazines until dinner-time, and after dinner, more magazines until bedtime.
The next day came the same routine again; walk along the cliffs in the morning; walk along the cliffs in the afternoon; tea; magazines; dinner; magazines; bed. Speed discovered in the hotel a bookcase entirely fille
d with cheap novels that had been left behind by previous visitors. He read some of them until their small print gave him a headache. Helen revelled in them. In the mornings, by way of a variant from the cliff walk, they took to sitting on the windless side of the municipal shelters, absorbed in the novels. It was melancholy, and yet Speed felt with some satisfaction that he was undoubtedly resting, and that, on the whole, he was enduring it better than he had expected.
III
Then slowly there grew in him again the thought of Clare. It was as if, as soon as he gained strength at all, that strength should bring with it turmoil and desire, so that the only peace that he could ever hope for was the joyless peace of exhaustion. The sharp sea-salt winds that brought him health and vigour brought him also passion, passion that racked and tortured him into weakness again.
He wished a thousand times that he had not burned Clare’s letter. He felt sure that somewhere in it there must have been a touch of verbal ambiguity or subtlety that would have given him some message of hope; he could not believe that she had sent him merely a letter of dismissal. In one sense, he was glad that he had burned the letter, for the impossibility of recovering it made it easier for him to suppose whatever he wished about it. And whatever he wished was really only one wish in the world, a wish of one word: Clare. He wanted her, her company, her voice, her movements around him, the sight of her, her quaint perplexing soul that so fitted in with his own, her baffling mysterious understandings of him that nobody else had ever had at all. He wanted her as a sick man longs for health; as if he had a divine right to her, and as if the withholding of her from him gave him a surging grudge against the world.
One dreary interval between tea at the hotel and dinner he wrote to her. He wrote in a mood in which he cared not if his writing angered her or not; her silence, if she did not reply, would be his answer. And if she did not reply, he vowed solemnly to himself that he would never write to her again, that he would put her out of his life and spend his energies in forgetting her.
He wrote:—
“Dear CLARE—I destroyed your letter, and I can’t quite remember whether it forbade me to reply or not. Anyhow, that’s only my excuse for it. I’m having a dreadfully dull time at Seacliffe—we’re the only visitors at the hotel and, so far as I can see, the only visitors in Seacliffe at all. I’m not exactly enjoying it, but I daresay it’s doing me good. Thanks ever so much for your advice—I mean to profit by it—most of it, at any rate. But mayn’t I write to you—even if you don’t write to me? I do want to, especially now. May I?—Yours, KENNETH SPEED.”
No answer to that. For nearly a week he scanned the rack in the entrance-hall, hoping to see his own name typewritten on an envelope, for he guessed that even if she did reply she would take that precaution. But in vain his hurried and anxious returns from the cliff-walks; no letter was there. And at last, tortured to despair, he wrote again.
“DEAR CLARE—You haven’t answered my letter. I did think you would, and now I’m a prey to all sorts of awful and, no doubt, quite ridiculous fears. And I’m going to ask you again, half-believing that you didn’t receive my last letter—may I write to you? May I write to you whenever I want? I can’t have your company, I know—surely you haven’t the heart to deny me the friendship I can get by writing to you? You needn’t answer: I promise I will never ask for an answer. I don’t care if the letters I write offend you or not; there is only one case in which I should like you to be good enough to reply to me and tell me not to write again. And that is if you were beginning to forget me—if letters from me were beginning to be a bore to you. Please, therefore, let me write.—Yours, KENNETH SPEED.”
To that there came a reply by return of post:
“MY DEAR KENNETH SPEED,—I think correspondence between us is both unwise and unnecessary, but I don’t see how I can prevent you from writing if you wish to. And you need not fear that I shall forget you.—CLARE.”
He replied, immediately, and with his soul tingling with the renewal of happiness:
“DEAR CLARE,—Thank God you can’t stop me from writing, and thank God you know you can’t. I don’t feel unhappy now that I can write to you, now that I know you will read what I write. I feel so unreticent where you are concerned-I want you to understand, and I don’t really care, when you have understood, whether you condemn or not. This is going (perhaps) to be a longish letter; I’m alone in the lounge of this entirely God-forsaken hotel—Helen is putting on a frock for dinner, and I’ve got a quarter-of-an-hour for you.
“This is what I’ve found out since I’ve come to Seacliffe. I’ve found out the true position of you and me. You’ve sunk far deeper into my soul than I have ever guessed, and I don’t honestly know how on earth I’m to get rid of you! For the last ten days I’ve been fighting hard to drive you away, but I’m afraid I’ve been defeated. You’re there still, securely entrenched as ever, and you simply won’t budge. The only times I don’t think of you are the times when I’m too utterly tired out to think of anything or anybody. Worse still, the stronger I get the more I want you. Why can’t I stop it? You yourself said during our memorable interview after the ‘rag’ that it wasn’t a bit of good trying to stop loving somebody. So you know, as well as me—am I to conclude that, you Hound of Heaven?
“But you can’t get rid of me, I hope, any more than I can of you. You may go to the uttermost ends of the earth, but it won’t matter. I shall still have you, I shall always bore you—in fact, I’ve got you now, haven’t I? Don’t we belong to each other in spite of ourselves?
“I tell you, I’ve tried to drive you out of my mind. And I really think I might succeed better if I didn’t try. Therefore, I shan’t try any more. How can you deliberately try to forget anybody? The mere deliberation of the effort rivets them more and more eternally on your memory!
“Helen and I are getting on moderately well. We don’t quarrel. We exchange remarks about the weather, and we discuss trashy novels which we both have read, and we take long and uninteresting walks along the cliffs and admire the same views, over and over again. Helen thinks the rest must be doing me a lot of good. Oh my dear, dear Clare, am I wicked because I sit down here and write to you these pleading, treacherous letters, while my wife dresses herself upstairs without a thought that I am so engaged? Am I really full of sin? I know if I put my case before ninety-nine out of a hundred men and women what answer I should receive. But are you the hundredth? I don’t care if you are or not; if this is wickedness, I clasp it as dearly as if it were not. I just can’t help it. I lie awake at nights trying to think nice, husbandly things about Helen, and just when I think I’ve got really interested in her I find it’s you I’ve really been thinking about and not Helen at all.
“There must be some wonderful and curious bond between us, some sort of invisible elastic. It wouldn’t ever break, no matter how far apart we went, but when it’s stretched it hurts, hurts us both, I hope, equally. Is it really courage to go on hurting ourselves like this? What is the good of it? Supposing—I only say supposing—supposing we let go, let the elastic slacken, followed our heart’s desire, what then? Who would suffer? Helen, I suppose. Poor Helen!—I mustn’t let her suffer like that, must I?
“It wasn’t real love that I ever had for her; it was just mere physical infatuation. And now that’s gone, all that’s left is just dreadful pity—oh, pity that will not let me go! And yet what good is pity—the sort of pity that I have for her?
“Ever since I first knew you, you have been creeping into my heart ever so slowly and steadily, and I, because I never guessed what was happening, have yielded myself to you utterly. In fact, I am a man possessed by a devil—a good little devil—yet—-“
He looked round and saw Helen standing by the side of him. He had not heard her approach. She might have been there some while, he reflected. Had she been looking over his shoulder? Did she know to whom was the letter he was writing?
He started, and instinctively covered as much of the writing as he could with t
he sleeve of his jacket.
“I didn’t know you still wrote to Clare,” she said, quietly.
“Who said I did?” he parried, with instant truculence.
“You’re writing to her now.”
“How do you know?”
“Never mind how I know. Answer me: you are, aren’t you?”
“I refuse to answer such a question. Surely I haven’t to tell you of every letter I write. If you’ve been spying over my shoulder it’s your own fault. How would you like me to read all the letters you write?”
“I wouldn’t mind in the least, Kenneth, if I thought you didn’t trust me.”
“Well, I do trust you, you see, and even if I didn’t I shouldn’t attempt such an unheard-of liberty. And if you can’t trust me without censoring my correspondence, I’m afraid you’ll have to go on mistrusting me.”
“I don’t want to censor your correspondence. I only want you to answer me a straight question: is that a letter to Clare that you’re writing?”
“It’s a most improper question, and I refuse to answer it.”
“Very well…I think it’s time for dinner; hadn’t you better finish the letter afterwards? Unless, of course, it’s very important.”
During dinner she said: “I don’t feel like staying in from now until bedtime. You’ll want to finish your letter, of course, so I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go to the local kinema.”
“You can’t go alone, can you?”
“There’s nobody can very easily stop me, is there? You don’t want to come with me, I suppose?”
“I’m afraid I don’t care for kinemas much. Isn’t there a theatre somewhere?”
“No. Only a kinema. I looked in the Seacliffe Gazette. In the summer there are Pierrots on the sands, of course.”
“So you want to go alone to the kinema?”