Nous mettons l’infini dans l’amour. Ce n’est pas la faute des femmes.
ANATOLE FRANCE.
UPON a day Bennett Lawrie escaped early from his office, leaving his day’s work to be finished by a co-junior clerk on a promise to do as much for him when he should require it. He was feeling very tired, having had only a walk and two cigarettes for dinner, a practice so common among junior clerks that they have a name for it—Flag Hash. Twice during Gertrude’s absence he had taken Annette and her mother to the theatre—three dress-circle seats at five shillings—a heavy drain upon his income, which was now one pound fifteen shillings a week, paid monthly. His mother knew nothing of the advance of five shillings a week that he had obtained on the third application with the plea that he was engaged to be married. That helped a little, but, even so, his position was serious, and at moments made him feel very sick at heart. He had been making efforts to save money when Mrs. Folyat’s expression of regret that she had not been to the theatre plunged him into the rash offer to pay for seats. He had no thought but that she would pay for two of them at least. But no; Mrs. Folyat regarded it as the feminine privilege to enjoy entertainment at the expense of the masculine pocket.
Further cause had Bennett for anxiety in that his correspondence with Gertrude had dwindled from the devoted daily letter to an effusion with great difficulty squeezed out twice a week. That her letter had come at longer and longer intervals comforted him not at all. He had never asked testimony of devotion from his [Pg 201]betrothed; it was enough that she should so far stoop as to be engaged to him. . . . Also, as he walked to the station through the dark railway arches, through Town Hall Square with its statues of John Bright, the late Bishop, the Prince Consort, and a local philanthropic sweater, past the Infirmary, he was dogged by an unhappy realisation that it gave him no pleasure to be going to meet Gertrude. She had written him a romantic little note:
“Dear, I am coming back to you. I have no thought but for you. I shall arrive by the 5.45. Yours, G. F.”
Bennett rehearsed the meeting. He would greet her warmly and with dignity. He would kiss her hand; not her cheek. He would then silently convey that he was fully aware of his delinquences, but asked no pardon for them. Scoundrel as he had shown himself, he would have her “pass on and thank God she was rid of a knave.” . . . However, he reflected that upon former occasions his most eloquent silence had conveyed nothing at all to Gertrude, and he began to rehearse the scene from another standpoint. He would say; “You bade me come. I have come. In spite of what has happened, in spite of my sins of thought and deed, I will be loyal. I will keep my troth.” That was better, but not altogether appropriate from a station platform. He was still rehearsing when the train came in. He stood by the engine thinking that there he would be sure not to miss his quarry. There was a considerable crowd to meet the train, for in those days a journey from London was an important affair, and travellers were welcomed by their nearest and dearest, glad that they had escaped the perils of the way, hopeful that they had not succumbed to its fatigues, and mindful of the presents that would be in bag or trunk. . . . Bennett Lawrie thought not at all of presents. He was only bothered because he had not yet discovered the right mode of address.
The image of Gertrude that he had always chivalrously borne upon his mind, and what he was pleased to call his heart, bore very little resemblance to her features and figure. It happened that in London she had bought [Pg 202]a new hat of a new fashion, so that in the throng he did not recognise her. She saw his blank eyes upon her and petulantly walked past him without giving a sign. She also had been rehearsing their meeting, but she had solved all difficulties by relying upon the dog-like devotion that he had always given her. He would, she had thought, come forward with his sad eyes glowing, take her by the hand and with that solemn dignity of his stoop, kiss, and, if he lingered long enough over it, be kissed in return. He would take her baggage, and carry it, as he always carried her parcels or her umbrella, as though it were a Divine trust, and they would take a four-wheeled cab. By that time one or other would have found the correct words or the inevitable gesture of love, and all would be as it had been.
Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but, where the heart is not very deeply implicated, absence sometimes has the effect of driving love out altogether. Lovers like to vow that they will never change, but they vow the impossible, wherein lies half their pleasure. As Gertrude Folyat had gone farther and farther away from her boy-lover, she had seen him dwindling in stature, but with a microscopic clarity. Having a very human dislike of seeing things as they were presented to her she pumped up a sea of sentiment, dived into it and saw blurred the newly-revealed figure. That sufficed until in the gaieties of Folkestone—she never questioned the gaiety of what was presented to her for pleasure—and the excitement and opulence of life at Sydenham, near the Crystal Palace, she was able to forget him altogether. It had been in a sudden dread that he might be injured and morose when she next saw him that on the eve of her departure she had written to bid him come to meet her. She thought that would please him. As soon as she had done so she regretted it. It seemed to place him in the stronger position which she had always striven to reserve for herself. Her visits had shaken her resignation to marriage with him, for she had been staying with snobs and was ashamed that he should be only a clerk, but all the same she wished to cling to him to avoid solicitude [Pg 203]and the horrible possibility which had begun to shadow her of no marriage at all. She told herself that she loved Bennett, and the thought of love was quite enough for her. She never doubted that the thing itself was hers. She was not very intelligent.
It gave her a curious pleasure to ignore Bennett’s presence on the station platform. She had never thought of being angry with him, but when anger took possession of her she welcomed and fed it, for it solved her problem. She would overwhelm him with her displeasure and enslave him with a tender reconciliation.
She drove home alone in a four-wheeled cab to Fern Square and enjoyed an extremely pleasant evening with her mother talking about the William Folyats and the Folkestone Folyats, their friends and their refined manner of living. The house in Fern Square struck her as dingy and undistinguished, and she did not trouble to conceal her impression. She had brought a present for each member of her family, except Minna, and, being rather warmly received, complained that no one had come to meet her.
“We thought Bennett darling would be there,” said Minna.
“Was he not?” asked Mrs. Folyat.
Bennett arrived to answer the question. He too had found in anger the solvent of his qualms. He was one of those people who suffer cold tortures in sudden glimpses of their dead selves, and as he had paced up and down the station long after the crowd to meet the London train had dispersed he saw himself in his old relation with his betrothed, callow, docile, sheep-like; in a word, unfledged. The day on the river with Serge and Annette—(the rest counted for nothing in his memory of it)—had wrought a greater change in him that he knew. The shrill resentment at his old self that suddenly swept through and took possession of him was his first intimation of it. It was rather more than he could bear, and he shifted the burden of his animosity from himself to Gertrude. If she had not come by the train, well and good. She might perhaps have been kept in London, though a telegram [Pg 204]could have saved him from the discomfort of a long wait at the station. He had risked incurring the displeasure of his senior at the office to please her. If she had come and had not looked out for him, that was not lightly to be borne. His anger was just. She should be made to feel that he was not—so he phrased it—“dirt beneath her feet.” He resolved that he would not go to Fern Square until she wrote to him.
This resolve oozed away almost as soon as it was made. He had no money to pay for an evening’s entertainment, and, if he did not go to Fern Square he must perforce go home and spend the evening with his mother and sisters.
The hobgoblin opened the door to him.
“Has Miss Gertrude returned?” he asked.
“Oopstairs,” said the hobgoblin, and she shuffled away to the kitchen, leaving him to close the door.
He went upstairs to find the whole family assembled, with the exception of Frederic, who was at the Clibran-Bells. They all seemed so jolly that he felt that he had done wrong in coming and wished he had adhered to his first resolve. He felt that he was intruding, and by sheer force of the numbers present his old part of the humble, devoted and grateful lover was pressed upon him. In no other r?le could he find room in the company. Once again circumstances had played into Gertrude’s hands and she became, what to her family she had always been, the romantic mistress of an unhappy lowly lover.
Before very long their own skill in the playing of these parts and the general feeling of the family had driven them out of the room into the peace and solitude of the study. There silence fell upon them and they stole uneasy glances at each other. Gertrude sat in her father’s great chair, Bennett stood with his back against the mantelpiece under the portrait of Gertrude’s paternal grandmother.
“I went to meet you,” said Bennett at length.
“I didn’t see you.”
“If you had looked for me you must have seen me. I am tall enough.”
There was considerable irritation behind his words.
[Pg 205]
“Am I then,” said Gertrude, “am I so very short that you could not see me?”
“I waited,” returned Bennett. “You didn’t.”
“I did. I waited quite five minutes.”
“I waited half an hour.”
Gertrude took her courage in both hands and said:
“If you had cared for me, you would have seen me.”
“I waited,” mumbled Bennett, obstinately.
They were silent again. Gertrude began to feel uneasy. They had quarrelled before, but always when she had touched on his affection for her his opposition had been broken. She could not take his stubbornness seriously even now. A little maliciously she was thinking:
“After all he is ten years younger than I am.”
Unhappily for her, Bennett, with more malice, was thinking:
“After all, she is ten years older than I am.”
For the first time he had become dimly aware that the advantage lay with himself. He said:
“I left the office earlier than I had any right to do to meet you. You could not have looked for me.”
“Why will you go on arguing about it?”
“I’ve no wish to argue.”
He only wished to avoid silence, to avoid facing what was irresistibly being borne in upon him, that all his relations with this woman had been a phantasm, a thing of the mists of yesterday. It was a hateful shock to all his theories, to all his ideals of constancy and single-minded devotion. He had worshipped this woman, set her—(at her own suggestion, though he did not know it)—on a pedestal, and lo! a day had come when she was no longer there. The pedestal remained, but the goddess was spirited away. He was very unhappy.
Gertrude was exasperated. She could have slapped him with infinite pleasure. She tapped with her foot on the ground.
“You are being too ridiculous,” she said.
“Am I ever anything else?” returned Bennett, with a sudden plunge into self-torment.
Pat came the reply:
[Pg 206]
“Never!”
Bennett felt savage, turned on her and cried:
“Now I know what you think of me.”
Gertrude was sorely tempted to let him think so, but she had in mind the difficulty of confessing to the women upstairs, her mother and three sisters, her return to unplighted maidenhood. She could not face that. She began to mop at her eyes, ate her words humbly, and declared that he had made her utterly miserable. She had so looked forward to seeing him again. It had made her so happy to be with him in the study once more, like old times, and all he could do was to snarl and growl; and if he was going to be like that before, what would he be like after. . . . Bennett pacified her as best he could, abused himself, said that he was not worthy to touch the hem of her garment, and, just as she was prepared for the final redeeming sinking into tenderness, amazed her—(himself too)—by announcing that he must go and help Annette prepare the supper.
He left her gasping. She hated him in that moment. Never, never, would she forgive him. All the same she followed him. He was almost as aghast at his conduct as she, and it was a relief to him to see her enter the kitchen before he had time to explain his entry to Annette. He stood and smiled weakly—a little vacantly—and, with a forced joviality, he said: “We—we’ve come to help you with the supper.” Gertrude took his arm and said, “Yes, she had come to show Annette how to make a real Indian curry as Uncle William had it done, according to a native recipe, at Sydenham.” Annette explained that she was not making a curry, and had not the ingredients for it, but she said how glad she would be of their help, as she was rather late. Bennett and Gertrude selected activities which were necessarily separate. Bennett chose to help at the oven. Gertrude took the heaped-up tray into the dining-room.
Bennett was filled with an extraordinary elation as he saw her go. He had asserted himself more forcibly than he had intended, and, so far as he could see, with a success beyond all anticipation. It went to his head, he [Pg 207]brandished a piece of bread on the end of a toasting-fork and chanted to himself:
“I shall be twenty next March, twenty-one next year, twenty-two the year after—twenty-nine in . . . But there. How old are you Annette?”
“Nineteen.”
“Have you been confirmed?”
“Of course. Ages ago. At school.”
“I wasn’t confirmed until I was sixteen. It made a great change in my life.”
“You must be very glad to have Gertrude back again.”
“I am.” He let the toasting-fork drop against the grate. Annette rushed at him:
“You mustn’t burn it. It’s for pa’s toast-and-water. It must never be burned.”
The tricksy spirit which is ever lying in wait for the moment when a man is swollen with vanity pounced on Bennett, and out of buffoonery and high spirits he dodged Annette and held the toasting-fork out of her reach. She clutched at it; he dodged again. In her eagerness she tripped and lunged against him. His arm went round her shoulder and he caught her arm. . . . They stood like that for a second and then he found that he could not let her go. His hand gripped tight and hurt her, but she too had passed from laughing excitement to another strange and melting emotion. . . .
She could see the door; he could not. She saw Gertrude, and wrenched away. He followed her, and in a curious strangled voice that he hardly knew for his own he cried:
“Annette . . . I . . .”
But Annette had rushed out of the kitchen and he was alone with Gertrude. He picked up the toasting-fork and held the bread before the glowing coals.
“What are you doing?” asked Gertrude.
“Making toast for your father’s toast-and-water.”
“So I see. And what was Annette doing?”
“Annette was showing me how to make it.”
Gertrude drew herself up heroically, and with what she took for dramatic intensity she said:
[Pg 208]
“Bennett, do you love me?”
“No,” said he, startled into truth.
Gertrude sat down with emphatic suddenness. His answer had crumpled her up, but also it acted boomerang-fashion, flew back and knocked the wind out of Bennett. (In a world of liars truth always acts like that.) He was the first to recover and he approached Gertrude with contrition.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t feel myself to-night. Queer things going on inside me and outside. It isn’t quite true what I said just now. I do love you. I do, really. But love isn’t what I thought it was. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t what I thought it was.”
Miserably enough Gertrude murmured:
“Are you in love with Annette?”
Hotly and indignantly he answered:
“No, I am not.”
“But you . . .”
“I was not making love to Annette. It was an accident.”
Gertrude jumped at the occasion for magnanimity and said:
“I believe you.”
“Thank you.” His heart leaped within him, and privately to his own innermost conscience he whispered delightedly:
“I am in love with Annette; in love, in love, in love with Annette.”
This new idea, the admission of the new fact, so absorbed him that he became oblivious of Gertrude. He had not even any regret for the months of folly through which she had dragged him. He was ashamed, not because he had turned from Gertrude, but because he had desired Annette.
True love can never tolerate secrecy. The true lover must cry his emotion from the house-tops, for a new glory has come to the world and it is well that all men should know of it.
A prophet of those days has said: “The woman should not venture to hope for or think for perfectness in [Pg 209]him she would love, but he should believe the maiden to be purity and perfection absolute and unqualified.”—The shadow of that prophet had been on Gertrude and Bennett, unknown to them, and they had gone to the God of Love and asked him to make up the prescription, with this result, that with one little word of truth he had kicked down the slender props of their castle in Spain and brought him to the reality of himself, her to emptiness. She suffered most, for she had a highly developed instinct of possession, lived altogether in her possessions, and was left like a dismantled hulk when any of them were taken from her.
She wept copiously, and Bennett tried to comfort her. He kissed her, and found a sort of pleasure in the salt savour of her tears. He soothed her at last, and with more common sense than he had anticipated she said only:
“You won’t let anybody know just yet.”
She drew the trumpery little engagement-ring he had given her—(she had not worn it at Folkestone or Sydenham)—from her finger and laid it on the table. He took it up, and after a moment’s hesitation, restored it to its place.
“I want you,” he said, returning to the old romantic mood that had served them so well in the past, “I want you always to be my friend.”
“Always. Always.” replied Gertrude with no less fervour, and she took his hand and pressed it against her cheek and kissed it.
She was smiling and cheerful when Annette returned. Bennett took another slice of bread and toasted it a beautiful brown, perfect for the toast-and-water of Annette’s father.