A Little Treachery

26

Meanwhile, the weather had altered at last; a heavenly spring was at its height, and with the return of the sun Emmy’s appearance had undergone a kind of charming simplification. Her little flexible figure, the artless figure of a young, immature girl, clothed in the light-coloured, airy garments suitable to the season, was indistinguishably one with the crowd of fresh young women who flocked in the country town; and there was a subtle fascination in that false, springlike charm which aped innocence.

Always flattering (but what did Catherine care, though she might smile a little?), always falling in willingly with her companion’s ways, always tolerant and putting up good-humouredly with those fidgety defects of middle-age which Catherine felt in herself, Emmy was wonderful company.

But the fact was that Emmy had not much to bear with. This sweet concord was not all of the girl’s making, as Catherine herself recognized.

In bewilderment, Catherine looked into herself: a self which had so often behaved intolerably with one on whom she had fastened her most real love, and was now amiable and complacent, on its best behaviour, with one for whom she felt, at the best, little but an amused fascination. Like an evil-tempered child, a burden in its own home, who will be charming with strangers! It was a hideous picture – this picture which came up sharply in the light of her conduct with Emmy.

Yet her perverse unkindness with Clem she had always felt powerless to check. It was as if they had somehow formed a wrong, a tragically wrong, combination, as if something between them had always been working as an irritant. So, in fact, it had. Clinging together, in an emotional fusion brought about by suffering, they were hopelessly disparate. And that harsh, angry, half-vitiated love, so terribly contaminated by selfishness, was never any good to Clem, perhaps had never even been recognized by her, who had merely needed gentle affection.

But it was not Catherine’s way to seek excuse for herself in psychological fatalities. It was done.

The fact that emerged in daily life in the cottage was a pleasant concord: Emmy’s sunny adaptability; Catherine’s gratitude.

No, she would do nothing to set the boat rocking.

This she was feeling while leaning from the window, in a warm, southern air, watching the ribbon-like shadows of the swifts which kept flickering across the sunny ground as the birds cruised over the house-top in small companies.

Simon was running in the garden; she could see his checked blouse bobbing among the bushes. Feeling with renewed surprise how well he had settled down with them, she went out, sat down by Emmy and praised her warmly, telling her that it was all her doing. However, she did add now, tentatively, ‘But I think perhaps we ought to be a little more careful of our subjects when he’s with us – I mean, not to talk of anything too grown-up for him. Yesterday, he went off into one of those dull moods, did you notice? I wondered if we’d said anything to upset him.’

To this, Emmy suddenly replied, ‘Why, really the kid’s a bit morbid, isn’t he? And well he may be, with a home like that behind him!’

‘I haven’t noticed. In what way?’

‘Oh, lord, nothing much. Only he’s just a bit morbid.’

‘Well, of course Margaret did warn me he’d been troublesome. But, Emmy, as for his home, you really mustn’t talk like that – what can you mean? Hungerford’s a perfectly decent man. And the mother, I believe, was a charming woman, she was Margaret’s great friend.’

Emmy turned wide, shocked eyes. ‘Decent?’ the expressive eyes said, making it unnecessary for the more expressive lips to form the word.

Catherine did not insist. It was true, too, that there was no name for Hungerford’s misdeed. If he was guilty of anything, it was one of those mean little actions which cannot be brought home to the doer, or even named.

‘I mean that Hungerford isn’t, of course, badly conducted in any way which could influence the child.’ But she spoke weakly.

Emmy drawled, ‘Fancy! Old Foxy!’

Was it a game?

It threw light on the remarkable moral atmosphere of Emmy’s upbringing that she seemed quite unable to visualize what type of man Hungerford was. It could only be supposed she genuinely could not, that she habitually spoke of him as if he was a fancy scamp who made a practice of it, as if nothing set him apart from the swindler who cheats women out of their money in lowlier walks of life (a type for which she had the greatest contempt and detestation) but the fact that he was ‘classy’. Catherine laughed at such talk, but in a kind of shock; this view of Hungerford was so grotesque.

But then again she thought it was a game. Emmy was merely play-acting and enjoying herself in the role of moral censor.

If so, perhaps it was a game to Catherine’s taste. She did not attempt now to make her meaning any clearer, but she asked languidly, ‘Morbid? Could you describe how?’

‘Well, he likes fairy-tales.’

‘Oh, Emmy, don’t be absurd!’

But she was lying back, staring up into a deep blue sky. It was warm. She was exhausted. She again let the matter slide. And she went on lying there long after the two of them had run off together. Often now she would lie like this, in complete idleness, as if half-insensible.

For the slack, soft dream was offset by hours of sharpest, blackest reality, of cruel harrowing, when Clem was seen or her affairs dealt with, those small matters of business, to her so onerous and bewildering, with which her position with the Court had laden her. Her life was split clean in two. Desperation worked below, weeping nights intervened, and a deep looming, melancholic horror had destroyed all the former magical delights of the creative world which had always been her solace. There was need of diversion, there was need of the intoxicant. There was need of frivolity, nonsense – evil nonsense, it might be said; she had no illusions as to what all this was. Torment and mockery, each monstrous; it was the polity of hell. From the scene given over to the cries and capers of lightest high spirits, she made the recurrent journey to the mental clime where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. She existed and swung between furious extremes. And the fierce interchanges of sun and black night, laughter and howling, were like an onset of the very disease which raged in Clem, were in themselves like the too violent alternations which precede mental breakdown. It was a rocking motion which brought on a deadly giddiness, which destroyed the balance more and more. She now simply succumbed to each mood as it came.

She would journey home, despairing, barely suppressing wild weeping, and would presently be sitting at a jolly tea-table, laughing helplessly at some unfastidious comedy mood of Emmy, in which the child figured, perhaps, most unedifyingly. An evening might follow, ending in physical riot between the two young ones, with huggings, kissings, mock-fightings, until the mishandled child was frantic or Emmy had had enough of ‘little toms’. With nerves intolerant of the noise, Catherine would leave them to it.