One Man in His Time Part 35

"You used to care for her a great deal--once?"

He appeared to ponder the question. "We were great friends," he answered.

Friends! The single word seemed to her to express not only his att.i.tude to Alice Rokeby, but his temperamental inability to call things by their right names, to face facts, to follow a straight line of thought. Here was the epitome of that evasive idealism which preferred shams to realities.

"Are you still friends?"

He shook his head. "No, we've drifted apart in the last year or so. I used," he said slowly, "to go there a great deal; but I've had so many responsibilities of late that I've fallen into the habit of letting other interests go in a measure."

It was harder even than she had imagined it would be--harder because she realized now that they did not speak the same language. She felt that she had struck against something as dry and cold and impersonal as an abstract principle. A ludicrous premonition a.s.sailed her that in a little while he would begin to talk about his public duty. This lack of genuine emotion, which had at first appeared to contradict his sentimental point of view, was revealed to her suddenly as its supreme justification. Because he felt nothing deeply he could afford to play brilliantly with the names of emotions; because he had never suffered his duty would always lie, as Gideon Vetch had once said of him, "in the direction of things he could not hurt."

"It is a pity," she said gently, "for she still cares for you."

The hand that held his cigar trembled. She had penetrated his reserve at last, and she saw a shadow which was not the shadow of the wind-blown flowers, cross his features.

"Did she tell you that?" he asked as gently as she had spoken.

"There was no need to tell me. I saw it as soon as I looked at her."

For a moment he was silent; then he said very quietly, as one whose controlling motive was a hatred of excess, of unnecessary fussiness or frankness: "I am sorry."

"Have you stopped caring for her?"

The shadow on his face changed into a look of perplexity. When he spoke, she realized that he had mistaken her meaning; and for an instant her heart beat wildly with resentment or apprehension.

"I am fond of her. I shall always be fond of her," he said. "Does it make any difference to you, my dear?"

Yes, he had mistaken her meaning. He was judging her in the dim light of an immemorial tradition; and he had seen in her anxious probing for truth merely a personal jealousy. Women were like that, he would have said, applying, in accordance with his mental custom, the general law to the particular instance. After all, where could they meet? They were as far divided in their outlook on life as if they had inhabited different spiritual hemispheres. A curiosity seized her to know what was in his mind, to sound the depths of that unfathomable reserve.

"That is over so completely that I thought it would make no difference to you," he added almost reproachfully, as if she, not he, were to be blamed for dragging a disagreeable subject into the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!"

she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again; but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the egoist's view of duty--of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations; suppose--"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience--or at least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have always been able to feel just so much and no more--to give just so much and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the secret--or was it the emptiness?--of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my--my old friends.h.i.+p for Mrs. Rokeby come between us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I could believe in--that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can one build a world on except human relations--except relations between men and women?"

"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith with Mrs. Rokeby?"

"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she pleaded, with outstretched hands.

He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment. "I realized that I had made a mistake," he said slowly, "but I believed that I had put it out of my life--that we had both put it out of our lives. There were so many more important things--the war and coming face to face with death in so many forms. Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears to me to be merely on the surface of life. I have been trying to fulfil other responsibilities--to live up to the demands on me--I had got down to realities--"

A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her when she tried to smile. "Realities!" she exclaimed, "and yet you must have seen her face as I saw it to-day."

For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous irritation, he repeated gravely, "I am sorry."

"There is nothing more real," she went on presently, "there is nothing more real than that look in the face of a living thing."

For the first time her words seemed to reach him. He was trying with all his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to feel and to think what she expected of him. With his natural fairness he was honestly struggling to see her point of view.

"If it is really like that," he said, "What can I do?"

All her life, it seemed to Corinna, she had been adjusting the difficulties and smoothing out the destinies of other persons. All her life she had been arranging some happiness that was not hers. To-night it was the happiness of Alice Rokeby, an acquaintance merely, a woman to whom she was profoundly indifferent, which lay in her hands.

"There is something that you can do," she said lightly, obeying now that instinct for things as they ought to be, for surface pleasantness, which warred in her mind with her pa.s.sion for truth. "You can go to see her again."

CHAPTER XX

CORINNA FACES LIFE

AT nine o'clock the next morning Corinna came through the suns.h.i.+ne on the flagged walk and got into her car. She was wearing her smartest dress of blue serge and her gayest hat of a deep old red. Never had she looked more radiant; never had she carried her glorious head with a more triumphant air.

"Stop first at Mrs. Rokeby's, William," she said to the chauffeur, "and while I am there you may take this list to market."

As the car rolled off, her eyes turned back lovingly to the serene brightness of the garden into which she had infused her pa.s.sion for beauty and order and gracious living. Rain had fallen in the night, and the glowing borders beyond the house shone like jewels in a casket.

Beneath the silvery blue of the sky each separate blade of gra.s.s glistened as if an enchanter's wand had turned it to crystal. The birds were busily searching for worms on the lawn; as the car pa.s.sed a flash of scarlet darted across the road; and above a clear s.h.i.+ning puddle clouds of yellow b.u.t.terflies drifted like blown rose-leaves.

"How beautiful everything is," thought Corinna. "Why isn't beauty enough? Why does beauty without love turn to sadness?" Her head, which had drooped for a moment, was lifted gallantly. "It ought to be enough just to be alive and not hungry on a morning like this."

The house in which Mrs. Rokeby lived appeared to Corinna, as she entered it presently, to have given up hope as utterly as its mistress had done. Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the front pavement had not been swept, the hall was still dark, and a surprised coloured maid, in a soiled ap.r.o.n, answered the doorbell.

"Poor thing," thought, Corinna. "I always heard that she was a good housekeeper. It is queer how soon one's state of mind pa.s.ses into one's surroundings. I wonder if unhappiness could ever make me so indifferent to appearances?" To the maid, who knew her, she said, "I think Mrs.

Rokeby will see me if she is awake. It is only for a minute or two."

Then she went into the drawing-room, where the shades were still down, and stood looking at the furniture and the curtains which were powdered with dust. On the table, where the books and photographs were disarranged and a fancy box of chocolates lay with the top off, there was a crystal vase of flowers; but the flowers were withered, and the water smelt as if it had not been changed for a week. Over the mantelpiece the long gilt-framed mirror reflected, through a gray film, the darkened room with its forlorn disarrangement. The whole place had the vague depressing smell of closed rooms, or of dead flowers, the very odour of unhappiness.

"Poor thing!" thought Corinna again. "That a man should have the power to make anybody suffer like this!" And beneath her sense of fruitless endeavour and wasted romance, there awoke and stirred in her the dominant instinct of her nature, the instinct to bring order out of confusion, to make the crooked straight, to change discord into harmony, that irresistible instinct for things as they ought to be. She longed to fling up the shades, to let in the suns.h.i.+ne, to drive out the dust and cobwebs, to put fresh flowers in the place of the dead ones.

She longed, as she said to herself with a smile, "to get her hands on the room." If she could only change all this hopelessness into happiness! If she could only restore pleasure here, or at least the semblance of peace! "It is just as well that all of us can't feel things this much," she reflected.

"Mrs. Rokeby ain't dressed, but she says would you mind coming up?" The maid, having attired herself in a clean ap.r.o.n and a crooked cap, stood in the doorway. As Corinna followed her, she led the way up the narrow stairs into the bedroom where Alice was waiting.

"I thought you wouldn't be dressed," began Corinna cheerfully, "but it's the only time I have free, and I wanted to see you this morning."

"It is so good of you," responded Alice, putting out her hand.