Athalie Part 51

"Oh, Clive! How desperately sad! And, she is young and beautiful, isn't she? Oh, I am so sorry for you--for you both. Don't you see, dear, that I am not jealous? If you could be happy with her, and if she could understand me and let me be your friend,--that would be wonderful, Clive!"

He remained silent, thinking of Winifred and of her quality of "understanding"; and of the miserable matter of business which had made her his wife--and of his own complacent and smug indifference, and his contemptible weakness under pressure.

Always in the still and secret depths of him he had remained conscious that he had never cared for any woman except Athalie. All else had been but a vague realisation of axioms and theorems,--of premises that had rusted into his mind,--of facts which he accepted as self-evident,--such as the immutable fact that he couldn't marry Athalie, couldn't mortify his family, couldn't defy his friends, couldn't affront his circle with impunity.

To invite disaster would be to bring an avalanche upon himself which, if it wounded, isolated, even marooned him, would certainly bury Athalie out of sight forever.

His parents had so reasoned with him; his mother continued the inculcation after his father's death. And then Winifred and her mother came floating into his cosmic ken like two familiar planets.

For a while, far away in interstellar s.p.a.ce, Athalie glimmered like a fading comet. Then orbits narrowed; adhesion and cohesion followed collision; the bi-maternal pressure never lessened. And he gave up.

Of this he was thinking now as he sat there in her rose and ivory room, gazing at the grey silk carpet underfoot; and all the while exquisitely, vitally conscious of Athalie--of her nearness to him--to tears at moments--to that happiness akin to tears.

"Clive, do you remember--" and she breathlessly recalled some gay and long forgotten incident of that never to be forgotten winter together when the theatres and restaurants knew them so well, and the day-world and night-world both credited them with being to each other everything that they had never been.

"Where will you live?" she asked.

He said: "You know I have sold our old house.... I don't know--" He looked at her gravely and ashamed: "I think I will take your old apartment."

She blushed to her hair: "Were you annoyed with me because I left it?"

"It hurt."

"But Clive!--I _couldn't_ remain,--after you had become engaged to marry."

"Did you need to leave everything you owned?"

"They were not mine," she said in a low, embarra.s.sed voice.

"Whose then?"

"Yours. I never considered them mine.... As though I were a girl of little consideration ... who paid herself, philosophically, for what she had lost.... Like a man's mistress after the inevitable break has come--"

"Don't say that!"

She shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I am a woman old enough to know what the world is, and what women do in it sometimes; and what men do.... And I am this sort of woman, Clive: I can give, I can receive, too, but only because of the happiness it bestows on the giver. And when the sympathy which must exist between giver and receiver ends, then also possession ends, for me.... Why do you look at me so seriously?"

But he dared not say. And presently she went on, happily, and at random: "Of course I kept Hafiz and the first thing you ever gave me--the gun-metal wrist-watch. Here it is--" leaning across him and pulling out a drawer in her dresser. "I wear it every day when I am out. It keeps excellent time. Isn't it a darling, Clive?"

He examined it in silence, nodded, and returned it to her. And she laid it away again, saying:

"So you think of taking my old apartment? How odd! And how very sentimental of you, Clive."

He said, forcing a light tone: "Nothing has ever been disturbed there.

It's all as it was when you left. Even your gowns are hanging in the closets--"

"Clive!"

"We'll go around if you like. Would you care to see it again?"

"Y--yes."

"Then we'll go together, and you can investigate closets and bureaus and dressers--"

"Clive! Why did you let those things remain?"

"I didn't care to have anybody else take that place."

"Do you know that what you have done is absurdly and frightfully sentimental?"

"Is it?" he said, trying to laugh. "Well that snivelling and false sort of sentiment is about the best that such men as I know how to comfort themselves with--when it's too late for the real thing."

"What do you mean?"

"Just what I am saying. Cheap minds are fed with false sentiment; and are comforted.... I made out of that place a smug little monument to you--while you were living alone and almost penniless in a shabby rooming house on--"

"Oh, Clive! You didn't know that! And anyway it would not have altered things for me."

"I suppose not.... Well, Athalie; you are very wonderful to me--merciful, forgiving, n.o.bly blind--G.o.d!" he muttered under his breath, "I don't understand how you can be so generous and gentle with me,--I don't, indeed."

"If you only knew how easy it is to care for you," she said with that sweet fearlessness so characteristic of her.

He bit his lips in silence.

Presently she said: "I suppose there'll be gossip in the other room.

Rosalie and Cecil will be cynical and they also will try to be witty at our expense. But I don't care. Do you?"

"Shall we go in?"

"No.... I haven't had you for four years. If you don't care what is said about us, I don't." And she looked up at him with the most engaging candour.

"I'm only thinking about you, Athalie--"

"Don't bother to, Clive. Pretty nearly everything has been said about me, I fancy. And, unless it might damage you I'll go anywhere with you, do anything with you. _I_ know that I'm all right; and I care no longer what others say or think."

"But you know," he said, "that is a theory which will not work--"

"You are wrong, Clive. n.o.body cares what sort of character a popular actress may have. Her friends are not disturbed by her reputation; the public crowds to see her. And it's about that way with me, I imagine.

Because I don't suppose many people believe me to be respectable.

Only--there is no man alive who can say of his own knowledge that I am not,--whatever he and his brothers and sisters may imagine."

"So why should I care?--as long as the public affords me an honest living! _I_ know what I am, and have been. And the knowledge, so far, does not keep me awake at night."

She laughed--the sweet, fresh, unembarra.s.sed laugh of innocence,--not that ignorance and stupidity which is called innocence, but innocence based on a worldly wisdom which neither her intelligence nor her experience permitted her to escape.

After a short silence he bent forward and laid one hand on a crystal which stood clasped by a tiny silver tripod on the table beside her bed.

"So you did develop your--qualities--after all, Athalie."