Читать книгу The Bigamist - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 9

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They were difficult days which followed. Pamela went about as usual, but she looked white and worn, and evidences of sleepless nights and much weeping disfigured her eyes. Arnott, unequal to the tension, decided on a brief separation, and took a trip round the coast. His absence—it was the first time he had gone away without her since their marriage—might bring home to her some realisation of what life would be like if they finally parted. Perhaps, when she was alone, when she missed his actual presence, she would relent. If, when he returned, he found her still obdurate he would broach the subject of a more complete separation.

He did not seriously believe that she would bring herself to the point of parting irrevocably. As things were, it was more difficult to part now than it would have been in the first shock of revelation. She had had time in which to adjust her mind to the altered conditions, to be called upon to readjust it, to do so late what she had felt she ought to have done at the beginning, and had failed to do, would add a fresh humiliation to the former difficulty, would make the difficulty greater. He felt fairly convinced that she would not willingly leave him, and he meant to force her into compliance by holding out this suggestion as the only possible alternative.

Pamela received the news of his intended departure with a sense of relief. She too had felt the strain to be well nigh intolerable, more so in view of his increased kindness and consideration for her, which made it so terribly difficult to refuse to listen to his pleading. She welcomed the thought of his absence as a relief from the constant pain and embarrassment of his reproachful presence; but when he was gone she missed him, missed him so sorely that she experienced, as he had hoped she would, a sort of terror at the idea of living without him. Almost it seemed to her that the talked-of separation had actually taken place, that he had gone away from her finally, that she would never see him again. A fear took hold of her imagination that he might have gone with the intention of not returning, that this might be his way of avoiding further distresses. Perhaps he would write and inform her that he had chosen this means as the best solution of the problem. He had not, she recalled, made any mention of returning. He had stated simply that he couldn’t stand it, that he must get away. And she had accepted this without questioning, had felt glad that he should go. She no longer felt glad: she only wanted him back.

An aching sense of loneliness oppressed her as the days passed and brought no letter from him. She had expected to hear from him when the boat reached Algoa Bay. He sent no word until he was as far as Durban, then he wrote briefly that he was going on further up the coast. She had no knowledge of his movements after that. He did not write again.

In the weeks which followed she had ample time for reflection, time in which to determine her future course of action. She spent long hours in the garden revolving things in her mind, trying to disentangle thoughts and emotions and impulses of right and wrong, trying to sift them and get them into some consecutive order. And always she worked back to the one impassable point, the point which his absence made so distressingly clear, that life apart from him was a sheer impossibility. She could not face it. The long lonely years...

And yet to continue to live with him! ... That were to choose evil deliberately. And all their life together would be a lie,—an outward respectability which at any moment was liable to exposure for the sham it was.

From the bottom of her heart she wished that she might have remained in ignorance of this horrible truth. Then the responsibility of choice would not have been hers. She wanted to keep her happiness and her peace of mind, and that was now impossible. She wanted to continue as Herbert’s wife, and yet remain virtuous; and she could not; her happiness or her virtue must be sacrificed, the one for the other.

Pamela prayed for strength and guidance, but her prayers held—as the prayers of many people hold—reservations. She attempted to bargain for the retention of her happiness. She asked to be shown the path of duty clearly, and when it was revealed to her she shut her eyes. There is never great difficulty in seeing the road which is called Duty; it shows always direct and straight ahead; but many people turn their backs on it and look in the opposite direction, because the path of duty is an uphill path, and it is not until one has reached the summit that one can appreciate the fairness of the prospect and the exhilarating freshness of the air. Pamela stood in the valley, and the steepness and the loneliness of the ascent appalled her. Hers was not a nature fashioned for high purposes. The big battles of life require sterner moral principles to bring them to a triumphant issue. She was not gifted with that altruism which enables one to meet a great crisis with the utter self-abnegation by which alone such crises are successfully overcome. Pamela fought her great battle handicapped by reason of her limitations. The high ideals which, while unfaced with any great issue, she had cherished with unconscious hypocrisy failed her in the stress of her need. She was just a weak, loving woman, stricken to the heart, and lonely beyond words to describe,—a woman hungry for her lover, whose last scruple of honour faded into nothingness in the period of his absence.

Arnott came home unexpectedly. He sent no intimation of his return; he had not, as a matter of fact, intended to turn back when he did. He obeyed an odd impulse, prompted by a queer, unaccountable fear that if he prolonged his absence Pamela might grow reconciled to doing without him, might grow independent of him. He felt no longer so confident that his temporary separation had been a wise move. He had prolonged it unduly. He had given her time to miss him, and had made the mistake of giving her further time in which to grow used to the idea. With this doubt in his mind he hurried back.

He got back in the afternoon rather late for tea. They had met with contrary winds round the coast, and the boat was delayed some hours. Arnott took a taxi at the docks and drove out to his home. He dismissed the taxi at the gate and carried his luggage himself up the path and dumped it down on the stoep for one of the servants to take inside. Then he looked about him with a strange feeling of unreality, and an unexpected sensation of nervousness that manifested itself chiefly in the dryness of his throat. Where, he wondered, was Pamela? This return to a silent, unwelcoming house was disconcerting. He forgot that he was not expected, and began to feel unreasonably annoyed.

And then abruptly he became aware of Pamela, standing in the opening of the drawing-room window, gravely regarding him. He looked round suddenly, and their gaze met.

“So you have come back?” she said.

Her eyes were deep and very intense; the man as he met their shining look felt certain of his welcome. He advanced towards her quickly.

“Couldn’t stick it any longer, Pam,” he said. “I wanted you.”

He held out his arms. She went forward unhesitatingly, and put her arms about his neck and drew his face to hers and kissed him.

“I am so glad you have come home,” she said.

Arnott’s clasp of her tightened.

“Oh! Pam,” he said, “how good, how jolly to have you again.”

He drew her inside the room, looking away from her a little awkwardly, looking about him with an overdone air of ease. Pamela also, now that their greeting was over, assumed an outward calm which she certainly was not feeling, and busied herself with the tea things, having an equal difficulty it seemed in meeting his eyes. That, she discovered later, was one of the developments of their adjusted relations, a sort of furtiveness, that comprised a mixture of deprecation and a shamed shyness that was more instinctive than anything else. The realisation of this hurt her; it detracted immensely from the beauty of their love. But just at first she did not recognise it other than as a temporary embarrassment; it did not distress her particularly.

“I was just going to have a lonely tea,” she said, and rang the bell for a fresh supply; “and now—there’s you!”

She glanced at him brightly, a swift colour flushing her cheeks. He seated himself on the sofa near the tea-table, and studied her curiously when he believed himself unobserved. He speculated on what might be in her mind, what the actual thoughts and feeling were which she hid so successfully behind her welcoming manner. For the first time within his knowledge of her he realised a subtlety, a certain secretive force, which he had not suspected in her. It was like coming unexpectedly upon a familiar spot and finding the view altered and contracted by surprising innovations. One felt that behind the obstructions the prospect was exactly the same; it was one’s own view that was restricted and created these new impressions.

“It’s good to be home,” he said, and dropped into a discursive chat about the places he had visited. “Tried all I could to get rid of the thought of you, Pam,” he said at the finish, and glanced at her with a sudden, faintly deprecating smile. “It wasn’t a bit of use. You pursued and brought me back... God! how you haunted me at nights! ... And your face looked back at me from the water whenever I gazed down at the sea.”

Pamela sat down beside him. She slipped a hand into his, but she did not look at him.

“It’s been the same with me,” she said,—“you were always there, somehow. I wonder... I suppose there are lots of people like ourselves who grow dependent on one another... You’ve never been away from me before.”

“And you missed me?” he questioned.

She looked at him then with grave, perplexed eyes, and nodded.

“It was an experiment,” he said presently. “I wanted to see if we could do it—and we can’t... We can’t part.”

“And we can’t,” Pamela repeated slowly. “No, I don’t think we can.”

Suddenly she leaned forward and played nervously with a little fanciful spoon in her saucer.

“I meant to,” she said,—“at first. I felt—I still feel it’s the right thing to do. After you had gone away, I knew I couldn’t. I suppose I am not a good woman really.” She broke off the jerky sentences, and gazed at him somewhat wistfully. “It’s hard to want to be happy, and to know that one ought not to be. I suppose that’s why she told me... She wouldn’t leave me to be peacefully ignorant. She wanted to stretch me on the rack too.”

“Lord knows!” he answered, and stirred his tea irritably. “She’s threatened to tell you,” he added, “ever since some fool of an acquaintance, who’d been out here and was struck with the name, told her that I was living here; but I thought I could intercept the letter. I didn’t allow for it coming to the house. I knew she would never make an open scandal. She’s too proud, for one thing. Besides, she is absolutely indifferent. So long as we are not in the same country, it would never trouble her what I did.”

“But,” said Pamela, a little shyly, “she must have loved you once.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I am beginning to doubt myself, whether it is really love which brings the greater part of the world together. Not infrequently curiosity is at the bottom of it,—or the desire to make a home. The majority of cases, of course, are the result of passion,—the fundamental scheme for the continuance of the race. I don’t see that it’s much use bothering one’s head about these matters. I married when I was a hot-headed young fool; after I found out my mistake—too late. I met love... Well, I suppose I ought to have turned my back on love,—and I didn’t. There you are.”

“Yes,” Pamela returned slowly. “That is just the part I find it impossible to excuse. That was your big error; and it is going to be responsible for our further wrong-doing.”

“Look here!” he cried. “Life is in one’s own hands. One either makes it difficult by moralising, or simple by being philosophical and taking all it has to offer. It holds a lot of good for you and me, Pam... Why moralise?”

“Because,” Pamela answered, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears, “in making a deliberate choice of evil I don’t wish to cheat myself into believing that it is the only course open to me; it isn’t. If I am a bad woman, I will at least be sincere.”

He took her two hands and held them between his own and looked with kindly tolerance into the sweet, distressed face. He no longer felt any need to plead with her; he knew his case was won. Very tenderly he put her hands to his lips.

“You odd inconsistency,” he murmured, “how you delight in tormenting yourself! Can’t you see that in this matter you are entirely blameless? All the evil is mine. You are driven into a corner, poor child. Nobody in his senses would hold you responsible. Put the blame on to me, Pam,—I’m equal to shouldering it.” He slipped an arm about her, and drew her closer. “If it had all to be gone through again, I’d do the same.”