A Little Treachery

40

The car ran quietly, rather slowly, downhill, between banks, hollies, tall beech hedges. Its open window gathered in snatches of the wild, stony songs of the robins, together with the honied scent which the bluish pines with the long cones exuded. At intervals they passed large houses. Vast, ornamental trees of great majesty and perfect form suggested the scale of the gardens within. Masses of yellow leaves lay by the roadside. It was the hour when the trees stand dark against the west and the rays of the sun blind and confuse, shining levelly. The walls ended, and there came a sweep of open country with a distant wood of oaks which the faint sun fired to the pinkish auburn of human hair, giving it the light and sun-soaked look of hanging long faded in a southern room and there for a while she had before her eyes the house from which she had come, far-off, placed on a southward-sloping hillside, facing open land and backed by the woods; a most beautiful site.

But if she had not been told, in coming, that that was the house, she would have doubted it. For that intensely posed building set on a knoll in the forest, a little more elaborate than her untutored eye was prepared for, had at once struck her as old-fashioned. This epithet she applied, without knowing it, because of certain features which resulted in a subtle predominance of the verticals, a light imaginative echo of the gothic which had been happily woven into its design; fanciful touches which the architect had permitted himself and which the woodland setting absorbed in utmost harmony.

A house in the newest of new fashions, had she known it, entirely of its times; product of an imagination tinged, after the modern manner, with neuroticism. A sophisticated romantic, beautifully at one with its romantic yet softly cultivated setting, reminiscent of a building placed on a knoll in a leafy tapestry. The shadows lay across its lawns, but the house stood clear of these still, its facade flushed with light.

There it stood; a vanity, a folly; for all that elaborate charm enclosed nothing but a little dreaming face turned to the wall, a little savage mind gone back, gone back to sleep, gone inward, returned to the dark mother, making the one protest in its capacity.

Thick screens of branches, a press of other memories, obliterated the picture, and for ever.

Soon, climbing from chill, shadowy depths, they came to the straight, long-drawn, rampart-like road with the black sentinel hollies at its parapets. On either hand appeared great stretches of country, meadow on meadow, with ranges of elms knotting the hedgerows, with hamlets, spires, towers, dark tongues of woodland; all growing smaller, dimmer, diminutive in the distance, spidery frail, finally to be lost in the blue mist. Countryside after countryside was spread out before her, like a land of promise, and she remembered seeing it, long ago, in full daylight in the sunny spring, when she had cried, ‘Ah, Clem, look at that! Is it possible that we shall ever live there?’ It had been possible.

Strangely she felt now that it was through some defect of her eyes that she could not see it as she had seen it then, not because night was falling.

The man switched on the headlights and that promising land, too, was extinguished for ever.

The car now ran at great speed and in a noiseless way, and from this effortless progress she began to draw a kind of comfort, which was not physical; for her body felt so weak and inert that she wondered, without giving speculation a name, and, in fact, without the least sensible apprehension, what had happened to her. It might well be that something fatal had happened; for how had she gone on so long, even as it was, weak being, under blow after blow? ‘How can you expect her to take such a load?’ Fragments of that cruel dream out of the famous book still haunted her, lamentably applied to her own case with the savage humour, the utilization of the grotesque in its torments, in which hell delights. And the prophetic answer had been, she remembered well, ‘Come on . . . no pity.’

Yet now, suggested to her perhaps by the powerful motion and gentle cradling of the car, she had a presentiment that something had at last taken charge; something new in which there was no cruelty because there was no human feeling, only a purpose. She felt rescued, wrested away. Something had taken charge of her, of her will and conscience, and all the terrible disorder of heart and mind, and henceforth everything would be done for her. No more heavenly feeling could come upon one always and by nature helpless and now mortally weary. ‘Rest. Sit still. It will all be done for you.’

An illusion, apparently – and what else could it have been? In the darkness, they had come down into Ockentree and were drawing up before the cottage; and once more she had to rouse up her exhausted, reluctant body, and the man – this barely polite chauffeur, whose dry and supercilious manner reminded her of his master’s, coarsened – did not even open the door for her. Still, after all, she could do it for herself, although she had first to think and her hands seemed to be all thumbs; and she could stand also, and cross the pavement; and, encouraged by this, she looked round to wish the man goodnight, only to find the car already drawing away and the man’s face turned.

She stood gazing after it, while feeling for her key. So then she was looking towards a point a little lower down, a little past the entrance to the steps which led down to their own right of way. There the road widened, and starting from there a line of cars was parked along the kerb, as was often the case at night because a hundred yards or so down the road was a public hall where there was frequently some sort of occasion in the evenings. Now and again a car drew out of this line or came in. Two moved as she looked. The road was full of lights; the light fell on the sheen of the cars and the whole line glittered. The traffic roared by. Noise and glitter both dazzled her to some odd degree; the hubbub of the road made a sudden unbearable assault on her senses.

She closed the door on it, and the little, cold, malevolent house received her in silence and darkness. For the moment that seemed better. She felt exhausted and a little dizzy, but not really ill.

‘I must rest,’ she said aloud, speaking aloud purposely; for her face felt queer, she was conscious of her mouth in an odd way, her lower jaw seemed slightly out of control when she formed the words. But she formed them. It was nothing; she was only very tired. In the dark, she began to pull off hat and coat, and while doing this she heard a soft tapping on the garden door in the basement. She heard it most unwillingly. But it did not make her nervous, she was beyond that, and anyway had never lacked physical courage. The tapping was soft and brief, and it was not repeated. Then she fancied the handle was slightly turned. A stream of traffic hurtled by with a great clatter and she heard no more. She went down through the kitchen, turning up the lights, opened the back door wide, without hesitation. A tall, a very tall man stood there framed against the blackness of all the valley, with the light from the room falling upon him.

He was something of a shock. Besides being of that unusual, almost abnormal height, he was handsome, rankly handsome, in a dark, strongly aquiline way, but his face was arresting on another and less agreeable score, for he had but one eye and the other lid was fallen down upon the empty socket. However, from this fixed, inadvertent wink any suggestion of gamesomeness was entirely lacking, for the natural flattening of the eyebrow over the blind side, forming a one-sided scowl, made the effect anything but light-hearted. Yet the impression produced was not so much of something bad as of something mutilated and ruinous. She said to herself, as she could not fail to do at the sight of that disfigurement, ‘Well, this is the gentlemanly Ferdy, of course, this is Rest-in-peace;’ and, true, gentlemanly he was as far as his clothes went, which perhaps had been Emmy’s meaning.

A blackguard barely in disguise, she would have thought him at one time, and would have shrunk from him – a creature from an underworld with which she could never have any sort of contact. As it was, it could hardly be that they would be found to speak the same language. Yet something was said, she did not know what; she stood aside and he came lightly and swiftly into the room, and at once walked into the kitchen where she had drawn the curtains.

‘But Emmy isn’t here now,’ she said at random. ‘Did you not know?’

He began to speak, and it was as she had expected; the hoarse, deep voice with peculiar slurrings, the curious elliptical slang he employed, made him almost unintelligible to her. She gathered that he was offering sympathy of a kind, based, she thought, on some parallel experience of his own, involving his own father (who was not Emmy’s); and she heard with surprise that it was a kind of plaint to which she was listening, not at all the growling, animal protest one might have expected of such a mask, but something mild, elegiac, in which the words ‘put inside’, ‘put away’, in a tone of grievance recurred.

She listened with concentration, and asked him if he meant his father had been insane. But she had the curious feeling of having failed to make any sort of contact with him. Perhaps he, too, found her unintelligible. Perhaps indeed she was, for her mouth still felt queer. Instead of answering, he took from his pocket some sort of paper or journal, spread it on the table and dropped upon that a metal object which she stared at in a bemused fashion while she understood him to say that she could take it, keep it, he made her a present of it; an article in any case so foreign to her eyes outside a picture that she leaned forward to look at it in curiosity. She gathered that he was inviting her, with intonations now encouraging, to take hold of it, pick it up. Did she know how to handle a gun? He would show her. She watched him, watched the long, deft fingers swivelling the chamber, slipping the rounds in and out, to demonstrate its working, apparently.

‘Better than caged up,’ she heard him say.

Then she thought she saw what he was urging upon her.

‘But Clem is dead – my sister is dead!’ she stammered. She cried out these words to herself. Something had happened in her mind, some icy block of incredulity had shifted, and the fact of Clem’s death had at last come home to her. ‘Yes, she is really gone – she has really escaped!’ she went on saying, in a heart-broken voice, even while she smiled. ‘She’s dead. Yes, we are parted – parted at last and for ever. For wherever I go it will be far below her –’ talking to him like this because she was hardly aware of speaking at all, and because she could not feel that he could hear and understand her.

She became conscious that he had the air of one taken aback. He seemed, astonishingly, to intimate that the death was a blessing, even to show a species of relief. But he looked at her contemplatively, as if with changed motive, and she saw that he was like one rearranging his plans.

She scarcely heeded what she plainly saw. Her two shades, her two poor ghosts – it was they who rose before her, sight enough to burst one’s heart and reason. ‘God, if I had had that revolver years and years ago!’ she cried. ‘But, oh, God, why do I pretend? I could never have used it. Take it. I don’t want it.’

Then she saw by his face that he was going to kill her, because of the will, as she could only surmise; and at this, without warning, of its own volition, as it seemed, her flesh utterly rebelled. She turned hurriedly, thinking to run up the stairs to the road and safety, for merely by standing where he was he barred the door on the garden-room. Her girlhood, her deeply wretched, ecstatic, poetry-haunted girlhood, was suddenly very close, in the foreground of her memory; she was back at the edge of the great, mysterious forest, with a heart on fire at the sound of the faint bugles. Oh, the pure, childish dream of the right path! She had time to think, ‘What am I running from? The first mercy He has shown me! This mercy, too, I owe to Emmy. Can it be – Emmy under God?’ and she could have laughed. Yet still she ran.