Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 8

MATTHEW and Anna were spending their honeymoon in London. It was not at all the weather for the country. And besides, Anna still had some shopping to do for her tropical outfit.

Matthew had made all the arrangements in his rather fussy, rather officious way for them to stay at a queer little hotel in Jermyn Street that he knew. Outside, it looked undistinguished, and even somewhat shady, with its dingy paint, and its closely covered windows that were like so many eyes closing in a sly and possibly disreputable wink. But once inside, treading the thick, hot, patterned carpets, surrounded by the ugly, monumental furniture, immensely solid mahogany islands set in immense oceans of florid woolliness, you knew instinctively that you were in the very stronghold of respectability.

The place was a pure survival from the past, leading straight back to the pride of the Victorian era with its vast solidity, and its stuffiness, and its cumbersome gilt mirrors, and its strangely hot-seeming, heavy, plushy, everlasting materials. Reminiscent of old volumes of Punch. And the thickly-carpeted, elephantine staircase, winding up like the moss-grown coils of some comatose, terrific serpent, up to the unimaginable, fusty recesses of roof and attics.

A porter showed Anna and Matthew to their room, set down their hand-luggage, and departed. Silence descended. A peculiar stuffy, hot, discreet silence, intensified rather than lessened by the distant growl of traffic.

Anna looked round the room, examining the furniture, the immense wardrobe, rising sheer like the hull of a battleship, and the suggestive double-bed, not quite so large. The room was far too small for the furniture. Between the bed and the wardrobe there was scarcely any floor space. The door could only be opened with difficulty. Anna was a little dismayed. And she was like a person waking uneasily from a deep sleep. In the car she had been drowsy and vague. Now she awoke slowly to this hideous apartment, and Matthew smiling and smirking at her, a bit constrained, but thoroughly pleased with himself as usual. She was a little dismayed.

‘What a small room!’ she exclaimed, glancing up and down.

The smirk was intensified on Matthew’s face.

‘Plenty of room for us. We’ll be nice and cosy here,’ he said, smirking at her, and taking her hand.

Anna was repelled, and very much surprised. This coy attitude, this almost lewd expression, was the last thing she had expected. All her alarms, which Matthew’s apparent coldness had dispersed, came hastening back to her. Up to now he had simply not existed, physically. What if he were to become physically importunate? The thought of his smooth, lean body made her shudder.

‘No. We must get another room,’ said Anna sharply. She moved as if to go to the door, but Matthew held her fast. There she was, tethered to him by her reluctant hand. She felt angry and humiliated. ‘Let me go!’ came her voice, petulant.

He took no notice.

‘We shall do very well here, in this room. I want you close to me.’

Anna looked up at him. He stood obstinate, with his neat row of teeth, his eyes smiling but opaque.

Then she looked at the bed.

‘I shall get another room,’ she said coldly. But a slow red covered her face. It angered her like a betrayal, coming when her heart was cold with resentment. She was afraid she would cry.

‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Matthew in his soft, stupid, gentle voice, so uncomprehending; but gentle as if she were a child. ‘You’ll stay here with me.’

She stiffened at his obtuseness. And as she stiffened, he put one arm round her, possessively, and kissed her. She felt the monkeyish, sinewy strength of his long, thin arm holding her with a certain conscious mastery, a certain deliberate disregard of her, as though she belonged to him. And he kissed her on the mouth, with relish, ignoring her resistance; also as if he owned her. He made her feel his predominance; the brainless, brute predominance of the husband. The triumph of pure brawn. He infuriated her. He lighted a flame of sheerest anger in her heart. She suffered shamefully at that moment. But in her heart, the black flame kindled, indestructible.

When he realeased her and moved away, his face was closed and smiling, but innocent, as though nothing had happened. Utterly unaware he seemed; it might really have been someone else who had embraced her. Distracting, the way the man had of stepping outside himself, of cutting clear away from his own behaviour. The naïve, rather winning look that came back to him between his enormities; some humility, some wistfulness in it. She could have forgiven him, if only he had not lighted the anger in her heart that burned up all clemency.

There was silence for some moments. He thought she had given in to him. He bent down and began to unfasten the luggage.

‘Won’t you unpack your things?’ he asked, glancing up at her.

She shook her head coldly.

‘Not yet. I’m tired. I shall rest a little.’ And she sat down by the wall.

Presently he went out of the room for a minute. This was her opportunity. Off she hurried, down the lethargic staircase, down to the stuffy little manager’s office, and demanded another room.

The manager, a pallid, saturnine elderly man, was in immediate opposition to Anna. No, there was nothing else available. Every room in the place was booked. There seemed to be a look of triumph in his eyes as he thus frustrated her. As though in some way he had joined forces with Matthew, against her. The inevitable male conspiracy against the female.

But Anna was quite determined. She would have another room. She would take no denial. The heat of anger kept her inflexible. She would not go away.

The manager suddenly capitulated: he had an empty suite on the second floor. He told her vindictively that it was very expensive. She asked the price and agreed to pay it. If it had been fifty pounds a night she would not have hesitated. She went upstairs with two servants to collect the luggage: she had everything taken to the new suite: she spread things over the rooms: and here she meant to stick. When Matthew appeared, she had already hastily unpacked her dressing-case. The room was littered with garments.

She felt reckless and excited. Her emotions were almost pleasurable. Matthew looked on, very annoyed, from the doorway.

‘I have changed the rooms,’ she cried, challenging.

‘So I see,’ said Matthew.

Matthew prided himself on his arrangements. He was an inveterate organizer, always planning ahead, most conscientious, albeit somewhat inefficient. He hated to have his plans disarranged.

‘Don’t you like this better?’ asked Anna.

He stared disapprovingly without answering. She wondered if he was going to make a scene.

‘It must be very expensive,’ he said.

Anna told him the price.

‘Ridiculous! We can’t possibly afford it,’ he said, bad-tempered and rather shrewish, as he often was about money matters.

‘I’ll pay the bill myself,’ said Anna, brightly contemptuous.

Matthew stared with bright, blue, disapproving eyes at the flushed, excited, determined face of the girl. He had a censorious look, which Anna did not recognize, rather mean and distrustful. Then it vanished, and the neat smile took its place. Once more she felt the exudation of his peculiar attention — so extraordinary, somehow, but with real warm-heartedness underneath.

‘We mustn’t quarrel on our wedding-day,’ he said, coming near and smiling into her face.

She knew he thought he was behaving generously.

Their first dinner together passed off fairly well. Anna was preoccupied with the other diners — they were so totally different from any collection of people she had ever seen. They were all very respectable — yes, overwhelmingly respectable; and aristocratic-looking most of them. But not attractively aristocratic. Most of the women were oldish and badly dressed. And then most of them had those haughty, heavy-jowled faces which have no humanity at all. In that museum-like show-case of ancient gentility and obsolete deportment, it was the heavy, cold, aged, repressive faces which dominated, while the scattered youthful faces looked dismal and negative, overshadowed. It was strangely inappropriate for Anna, so young and vivid and direct, to find herself sitting in the dry, airless, stagnant atmosphere of the ugly past, where no honesty could possibly draw breath.

‘What extraordinary people,’ she said to Matthew. ‘And how impressive! All the women look like dowager duchesses.’

‘Most of them are,’ he said, with a distant, surprising satisfaction in his tone.

‘Is that why you come here?’ she asked, teasing him.

He bridled in the most curious way, and cocked his bright blue eyes at her, complacent and prim.

‘Well, one likes to be among decent people; when one can,’ he said.

And the astonishing thing was that he was quite sincere. Anna became silent with astonishment. Food for consideration here, indeed.

After dinner they went to the theatre. Matthew had taken seats for a musical comedy; quite a popular show, but not the show of the moment. And the seats were quite good seats, but not the best. Fourth or fifth row of the stalls they were; one could see the stage pretty well. Anna, long accustomed to Lauretta’s lavishness in matters of this kind, was a little surprised. But in a dim, indeterminate way. The surprise was not strong enough to rise to the surface of her mind.

She hardly noticed the music, or the antics on the stage. She was tired and effaced. Things seemed dream-like to her. It was like a dream to be sitting in the hot, crowded theatre beside Matthew. It was queer to have him draw her attention to this or that. She tried to be polite and to take an interest. But her brain was drowsy.

All this time Matthew was reassuringly restrained. There was no sign of a physical advance, no return of the horrible, lewd smirk to his face. True, his sharp teeth flashed disquietingly now and then in her direction; but always under the chastening curb of the customary neat smile. She began to feel relieved.

But afterwards, back in the hotel, it was a different matter. As soon as the door was closed upon them, he kissed Anna on the cheek, putting his arms round her clumsily.

‘At last I’ve got you to myself,’ he said. ‘All to myself.’

With a strange, determined pressure, like the pull of a strong river current upon a swimmer, he tried to draw her down, on to his knee.

She twisted herself out of his grip, feeling weak and exhausted, as though she were really struggling against a river, and hurriedly began to talk about the theatre. The young man stirred uneasily, and stared in an unseeing way as he answered.

Their suite consisted of three rooms and a bathroom. A sitting-room with an uncomfortable, tightly-stuffed sofa and two plushy armchairs; then the bedroom opening out of it, and beyond that another room, very cramped and closet-like: but it had a bed in it. The bathroom was down a bit of a passage at the end.

They talked for a few minutes constrainedly. Someone had put some imitation flowers, carnations, in a ricketty silver vase on the table. The greenish table-cloth had a fringe of soft plush balls. There was an atmosphere of awkwardness and constraint. Matthew grew stiffer, his smile more meaningless, as the minutes passed, his voice became rather uneven.

‘Let’s go to bed now,’ he said. ‘It’s late. And I want to have you near me. Really to have you at last.’ His blue eyes stared with a kind of blank triumph at Anna. He stood up. ‘Come along, my dear. Come to bed.’

He opened the bedroom door. Behind him, she could see his pyjamas laid out on the bed beside her own things. It produced a fury of opposition in her, the sight of his folded pyjamas. A swift, inflexible decision formed in her mind. Matthew was watching her, waiting. She wanted to throw something at his round, complacent anticipatory head. She detested the sight of it. He stood there in the open doorway, watching her, his lips parting in the slightly lewd, smirking smile, as he waited for her to come to bed. And she had utterly decided against him. She would not go to bed with him; no, not for anything in this world. He looked as neat and brown and presentable as ever, he had still the rather attractive artlessness hanging about him. But his head had a ball-like inanity, which she so disliked, and the suggestive simper came slyly, indecently, at the ends of his mouth. He looked quite handsome; and yet there was that queer buttoned-up closeness, that insentience, that made him seem so non-human to her. He repelled her, thoroughly. And she loathed his complacency, his smirking, proprietary lewdness.

The seconds went past. Matthew began to move forward into the room. Anna suddenly sprang up and made a wild scurrying dash into the passage. He followed, trying to detain her; his head came plunging after her out into the passage.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, beginning to be roused again.

But Anna had locked herself into the bathroom. She giggled rather breathlessly, and gazed at her face in the glass, where a curious expression was reflected. A most curious change had come over her. Her colourless, frail, rather ethereal face now wore a bold, hard, brilliant look, derisive and vicious. And her grey-blue eyes had become harder and colder, smaller apparently. In her quiet gravity and her composure, Anna’s eyes would grow large with a deep, jewel-coloured stillness, like deep water. But now, in her excited aversion, they were small and shallow and stony. Her serenity, her delicate, grave aloofness — so unusual — had vanished. Her face was pinched and malicious, like a goblin-face.

Matthew came up and rattled the handle of the door. His blue eyes, with their untransparent glassiness, their non-luminousness, stared out resentfully at the closed door. A blind, angry spitefulness, rather stupid, came into them.

‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. I’m going to have a bath,’ said Anna, from the other side of the door.

There was a pause, during which she continued to meet in the mirror the strange pair of goblin-eyes, steady with strange malice.

‘Don’t be long, then,’ he said at last, unseen by her. But his voice was complacent again, even indulgent. He was so sure of winning that he could afford to humour her.

She kept silence. His cocksureness made her furious. Staring into the mirror, she stood rigid and silent.

‘Don’t be too long,’ he repeated. And presently she heard his brisk footfalls — curiously heavy for a small-made man — retreating along the passage.

She smiled to herself, brightly malicious, in the narrow, old-fashioned bathroom. The clumsy metal taps reflected her face, which had taken on the queer goblin look. She undressed slowly, and had her bath, and prepared for the night, all with the bright, alien, vicious look on her face. And then, for a long time, she waited: quite motionless, with a very odd, sardonic expression. She wondered if Matthew would come back and speak to her again. But he did not. Evidently, in his cocksureness, he was content to wait, and humour her caprices.

Anna sat on the hard white chair, looked at the closed door, looked at her reflection in the glass, and smiled at it knowingly, with goblinish satisfaction. One would have said she was enjoying herself. Then she rose and opened the door quietly, looking down the passage; a short, dim, empty passage, with doors on either side, and Matthew waiting for her behind the door at the end. She shivered in repulsion, but still she went on smiling, as if enjoying it all. Then quietly she went out into the passage. She went into the bedroom and locked the door.

The other door, into the sitting-room, was still open. She could see two feet in their neat, squarish, patent-leather shoes planted on the floor beyond. The leather was starting to crack a little, in the creases. There was Matthew.

He had heard her movements, and looked up, smiling his anticipative satisfaction, rather ogreish in spite of his flat unreality. As though he licked his chops at her. The horrid part was that though he stared hungrily at Anna, he did not seem to see her at all, as an individual. She, personally, did not exist as far as he was concerned; he had reduced her to a sort of extension of himself. He missed her out completely. And now his blue eyes met hers with a gleam of complacent anticipation — self-congratulatory, it appeared — as if he prided himself on his rights over her. And he was going to exercise them, too. Oh yes, he meant to exact his husband’s pound of flesh. There was something a bit pasha-like in his attitude towards her. The age-old, man-to-woman tyrannous condescension. He began to approach her with his prancing gait. But she slammed the door in his face, shutting him out, and turned the key on him. Just as the door closed, she saw the death of his neat smile, and the ugly, spiteful look, mean and cunning and in some way almost imbecile, taking it’s place. She shuddered, and her heart beat quickly. But the goblin-brightness stayed on her face.

‘Let me in,’ said Matthew, trying the door.

‘No,’ said Anna.

‘Open the door,’ he said angrily. A nasty tone was coming into his voice.

She did not answer, but watched the door. He had got his shoulder against it and was pushing. She could hear the faint roar of his angry breath.

Suddenly he remembered the other door, and dashed round there. In a moment he was rattling the handle on that side.

Anna looked round with hard, bright, unnatural eyes. She did not seem to be herself at all, but some heartless creature, inflexible and malicious and rather diabolical. So cold; so sprightly. There was a devilish little cold sparkle on her face as she gathered up his belongings, darting about the room with rapid, flicking motions; collecting his things and bundling them out into the sitting-room; then turning the key again. Quick as thought, the room was clear of all trace of him.

‘Your things are outside the door,’ she called. ‘You must sleep in the little room.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ came his voice, somewhat dangerously. ‘You have no right to keep me out. Open the door at once.’

Anna detested him.

‘You must sleep in the other room,’ she said.

‘No! I’m not going to put up with such treatment. You shall let me in! Come now. Open the door. I love you far too much to be shut out on my wedding night. Let me in!’ His anger was really roused now. He was losing control. He began to shake the door again, more violently this time.

Anna was surprised. She had no idea that her surprise packet included this quota of bullying, unbalanced fury. She smiled to herself as she listened to his onslaughts on the door. She was excited. But certainly she was not nervous; or the least bit compassionate. The new goblin in her was contemptuously amused at this display of black rage. And she hated him. She was glad that she was able to insult his male conceit. She tilted her head, and stared mockingly at the shaking door.

‘Don’t try to make a fool of me,’ came his dangerous, muffled voice, through the wood. Such a hot, stupid, animal sound in the angry voice.

‘Go away,’ said she, continuing to stare derisively and brightly ahead.

‘Let me in!’ he shouted, beside himself with rage. ‘Open, I tell you!’

He lurched against the door, not knowing what he was doing, kicked it with his feet, battered it with his shoulder, swung back, and battered it, using his shoulder as though it had been a battering-ram against the panels. In a blind frenzy of anger he struggled with the door.

‘Let me in!’ he shouted again and again. ‘Let me in!’ He fought with the locked door.

Anna drew back instinctively before the violence of his attack, her eyes like vicious stones in her face. She was silent.

‘Open! open!’ he went on, loudly distracted, like a clumsy, stupid animal in his incontinent wrath. ‘I have my rights. I won’t be fooled like this!’

‘Go away,’ said Anna coldly. ‘People will be coming to see what is the matter if you make such a noise.’

This seemed to bring him to himself. Suddenly, abruptly, he abandoned his struggles and was still. He made no more noise. But he remained outside the door; he had no notion of going away.

There was a very long silence. Anna imagined him standing, narrow and stiff, outside the door, waiting: his rather long arms hanging limp, with the brown hands dangling — curiously simian in suggestion. She listened to his breathing, hoarse and smothered at first, but growing slowly quieter, more normal. She wondered about him; what was he thinking? Would he stand there all night?

‘Won’t you let me in?’ he asked at last, in a small, wistful voice, rather distressing. ‘Let me come in just for a moment — to say good night.’

‘No,’ she answered coldly. Her inflexibility never wavered.

He waited a minute or two longer. She heard him fumble once more — but half-heartedly this time — with the door-knob. Then he sighed heavily, rather ludicrously, and went away. Presently she heard him fumbling about in the sitting-room, picking up his pyjamas and slippers and dressing-gown which she had thrown on the floor. And shortly afterwards a door closed.

It was all over. Anna went and sat on the bed, cross-legged on the crimson eiderdown, her face tilted back, a queer flower at the end of her backward-curving neck. Her mind was a kind of blank, and half consciously she wondered why she had no more feeling. She was quite cold, cold as a stone, as though she would never feel anything any more. And yet, in a way, she was absolutely flabbergasted by the scene she had just been through. She had no idea that people behaved like that, so violent and uncontrolled. It staggered her, as an exhibition of sheer unrestraint. But she was not really affected. She felt herself aloof.

She seemed not to be there at all, really. She, Anna-Marie, was absent, and some malicious hobgoblin had taken her place. There she sat in the locked room, cross-legged on the ugly red eiderdown, looking out with shallow, distant eyes, and the hard, bright glaze over her face, a bit devilish in the midnight solitude.

Queer, the change that had come over her. The tall, dignified slenderness, the rather slow graciousness of movement, the attractive, grave repose, all vanished: and in their place a hard, cold, jeering brightness, rather disgusting, and a certain febrile quickness, even her movements changed from lingering, deliberate grace to a restless, flame-like flicking, a strange destructive rhythm of darts and jerks. She seemed to have become smaller, and quicker, and brighter, and harder. Less ethereal, though more unearthly: more like some little malignant imp. The bright, arch, reckless, indifferent look upon her face! The goblin-Anna didn’t care.

Next morning she was her old self again — almost. But about her face still hovered a queer expression, like a dim reflection from far off, and her mouth had a little twist, half smile, half grimace, that did not rightly belong there.

It was late when she woke up, and ten o’clock before she was dressed. As she put on her clothes, she wondered rather uneasily what Matthew’s attitude would be after last night’s affair. How would he behave? She simply couldn’t conceive. She felt quite interested, impersonally, to see what he would do. Nothing would surprise her now. Nothing. But she was not quite comfortable about him.

He was waiting for her in the sitting-room, very neat and compact-looking in his navy-blue suit with the white stripe in it. He held his shoulders more rigid than ever. She wondered if there was a bruise where he had crashed against the door. He looked rather down in the mouth; but calm, she was glad to see.

As she came in, he took a step towards her, standing straight up to attention, and looking like a soldier who has been called up to receive a formal reprimand. Which made her amused and uncomfortable.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I apologize. I can’t think what came over me. Can you forgive me?’

He stared at her rather wanly out of his absurd stiffness.

Anna looked at his strange round head, shuddered inwardly, and moved towards the door.

‘It’s over now,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s talk of it any more.’

He got in front of her, blocking the way.

‘But you do forgive me, don’t you? Say you forgive me?’ he cried.

He looked at her humbly. But she could see the complacent, bullying pasha behind the appealing ingenuousness. And yet his humility was quite sincere. Quite a real part of him. Perhaps it was the real Matthew, the man himself, who was naive and humble and rather charming. And something outside, some devil, that possessed him from time to time and perpetrated his atrocities. Or perhaps the bully was his own real self. Who could tell?

Matthew, standing in front of her, bent forward unexpectedly and took her hand, pressing it against his face.

‘Forgive me! You do forgive me, don’t you?’ he said, plaintive and subdued as he held her hand to his mouth and kissed it. The words came out muffled with his warm breath against the palm of her hand. ‘Everything is all right again now, isn’t it?’

She knew that things were very far from all right. But what was the use of saying so? He understood nothing. And she wanted her breakfast. She nodded, acquiescent, feeling a little ashamed for him, her hand growing hot against his mouth.

He was beginning to regain his aplomb. He was still humble. But his self-satisfaction was coming back, she could see his head perking up again.

‘You’ll forget all about last night?’ he said, still in the same humble manner.

‘Yes,’ she replied. She wanted to have breakfast.

He pulled her to him, and kissed her rather clumsily on the edge of her mouth, one of his strangely unconvincing kisses that meant nothing at all to her. She submitted in cool distaste, extricating herself as soon as possible.

‘There,’ he said, quite in his ordinary voice, ‘we’re friends again now.’

The re-establishment of his complacency irritated her. She managed to get past him into the corridor.

That afternoon a friend of Matthew’s, a man named Webber, came to offer his congratulations. He held an important government post of some kind in the East. Mr. Webber, who was pale, and who had a sort of gallantry about him, had tea with them in the plushy sitting-room.

His gallantry, though persistent, was far from flattering. He persisted in paying childishly laborious compliments to Anna. It was no compliment at all to think that she might swallow such stuff. And all the time he contrived, by his expressions and by his clumsy deference, to surround her with the aura of his gallantry while simultaneously making her feel that she was of no serious account. He flattered her, and posed in front of her, rolled his eye at her and smiled with playful archness. He assumed an elaborately artificial manner for her benefit: but it was the sort of manner one might put on for a child. He was playing down to her all the time.

Anna was disgusted but also amused. She wanted to burst out laughing at the preposterous fellow who thought himself too high and mighty to take her seriously: who condescended to her out of his glorious masculine conceit. She was not worthy to be treated as his equal! Here was a blow for her! But Matthew apparently was enjoying the situation. He sat back on the sofa, drinking in Webber’s flattery, taking the whole credit to himself. He loved to feel that his friend was envious, that Webber envied him his young wife. He seemed to swell with complacency as he sat. His habitual neat stiffness of pose relaxed somewhat; he almost lolled against the over-stuffed upholstery.

Mr. Webber sat on, staying for a dreary hour after tea. Anna thought he would never go. He talked at her all the time in a gallant, or an inane fashion. He didn’t notice that she gave him no encouragement. He drivelled on.

Hearing the clock strike six, he started theatrically, looked at his watch with an exaggerated, falsely incredulous expression, and finally rose. He took an elaborate farewell of Anna; to which she responded without undue politeness. At last he moved off.

But he was not quite done yet. At the door he stopped and put his hand on Matthew’s hard shoulder.

‘Well, old man,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘I congratulate you. Wonderful wife you’ve got. Wonderful girl. Wonderfully fine girl.’

And he leered with a horrible archness, running his eye over Anna as though she had been a valuable animal. She gasped. She gasped with outraged surprise. The impudence of it, the beastly, insulting impudence! And Matthew was still smiling, neatly, contentedly, as if he had been paid a well-deserved compliment.

When he had gone away she refused to speak of him, that horrible friend of Matthew’s. And she was so cold, so distant, that Matthew was bewildered. He couldn’t make out what was wrong. Anna would not try to explain. She knew it was quite useless. But the resentment which she felt for him was almost as strong as her dislike of Mr. Webber. Not content with allowing her to be insulted, Matthew had to take the insult to her as a compliment to himself. She looked at him with sardonic, stony eyes.

The days of what was called the honeymoon followed one another slowly. It is unnecessary to say that Anna did not enjoy them. One might almost expect her to have been miserable. But she was not — merely bored. She liked the independent feeling of freedom from Lauretta and the Blue Hill tyranny — that was something.

She was her own mistress, more or less. She could go out when and where she liked, spend her money how she liked, and in general gratify the trivial wishes of the moment. Matthew did not interfere with her comings and goings. He did not even talk to her very much. But he wanted to be with her all the time. He seemed to have a craving to be near her, a craving for her physical presence. It did not matter if she never spoke to him, if she ignored him entirely; just so long as he could keep her in sight. It would have been pathetic if it had not been so irritating. He would have liked to accompany her everywhere.

As soon as she appeared in her hat and coat, he stood up and prepared to follow her out of doors.

‘Don’t bother to come with me,’ she said to him. ‘I’ve got a dress to try on. It will take me a long time.’

But Matthew, with the obstinate little smile on his face, did not seem to have heard. He insisted on coming, all the same.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ she said, when they were near to the shop.

But smilingly, softly, without speaking, he seemed to disregard her. He escorted her right up to the door.

She went inside hurriedly and left him standing on the pavement. Up to the fitting-room she went, and shut herself in the little mirrored box with the gay, flimsy dresses and the pleasant, slightly airless smell of materials and artificial lights. It was a relief to be shut away there in the bright, close, lighted box, away from Matthew and his endless, patient, obstinate pursuing. His insentient, dumb persistency was beginning again to give her a feeling of suffocation, as if she were being stifled in feathers. It was good to escape him. She stayed in the shop as long as possible. But when she came out, he was still there, staring at the brilliant windows.

‘Why didn’t you go on?’ she asked him, irritably.

‘I don’t mind waiting for you,’ he answered.

He carried her parcels for her, and walked stiffly along, keeping scrupulously to the outside of the pavement, protecting her. He pranced a little, as he walked. And when they crossed the street he took her arm firmly and steered her officiously across, like a zealous but somewhat inefficient sheep-dog: though she was much quicker and more expert at avoiding the traffic than he. She wished that his bowler hat did not come down so low on his head, making it seem more than ever like a smooth black ball: and that he wouldn’t stick quite so close to her, like a conscientious but unwanted dog. But most of all she resented his prancing, the way he cavaliered her about the streets — so annoying when she got on much better alone.

So much for the days. Anna spent a lot of time in the shops. She walked with Matthew in the streets and in the parks. She went with him to a theatre or to a cinematograph, or she sat with him in the ponderous, stuffy lounge of the hotel, or at meals in the dark dining-room, always alone with him. And he was attentive to her, very agreeable and obliging, though with a permanent look of reproach in his blue eyes. He contrived to make it clear that he considered himself very badly used. And at night, as bed-time drew near, the look of hurt reproachfulness deepened; he would stare and stare at her with an expression hovering between accusation and magnanimity. He was quiet and well-behaved. He made no more scenes. But each time that she went alone into her ugly bedroom she was conscious of his melancholy stare burning her retreating back. Silent and reproachful he was; he said nothing to her. But he never forgot, not for a single minute, his grievance against her. Nor did he allow her to forget.

Outwardly, officially, all was forgiven. He was very much the little Sir Galahad in his behaviour. The aggravating beam of Christian charity was in his eye again. And he was firmly seated on his chivalrous mount. He never followed her into the bedroom. Nevertheless, Anna felt herself threatened. She wondered when the bully would oust the knight-errant, and become active again. But it was not really the bully in him that disquieted her. There was something, ultimately, much more alarming: his complacency. She shuddered sometimes when she saw him smile, because he was so certain, so sure of everything. He could afford to let magnanimousness triumph over reproach, because he was so confident. It had never occurred to him, really, that he might not conquer her. In the end he was bound to get what he wanted. He simply waited. His waiting was so patient, so mindless, like a force of nature, unconscious. Would she be able to resist it for ever? She shuddered, and was afraid.

Matthew wanted to leave London. He was rather out of his element amongst all the traffic and the high houses; a bit washed out. He could not feel himself sufficiently important. So he wanted to go home, back to his own roost, where he really was somebody. He wanted to show off Anna, his wife, the new acquisition. But he was a little nervous of suggesting the move to her. A little afraid of being thought mean at thus curtailing their stay in town. He was very conscious of the money going out all the time.

Anna was rather relieved, if anything, when he made the proposal. The stuffy hotel, where the air came stalely, as if filtered through innumerable double windows, was becoming rather a nightmare to her. As was this prolonged solitude à deux. She wanted to get into a house with other people again, other human beings. Matthew’s strange inarticulateness had given her a craving for intimacy of speech. Not that she was likely to find it in the bosom of his family. She was rather curious to see the native haunts of this very queer specimen.

Matthew’s mother was fanatically Irish; the real Irish mixture of thriftlessness and enthusiasm, with a makeweight of mysticism thrown in. His father, dead some years, had belonged to a more devitalized type. The widow lived quite alone with her only other child — a daughter — in a big, inconvenient house at Richmond. But it was her son to whom she was really devoted. She willed him to come back to her.