Sally Bishop Part 56

It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me--something about there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ from the dead--and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the very lowest depth of despair."

Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said quietly--

"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"

"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little boys--sons of gentlemen--preparatory for the Grammar School at Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when she gets as poor as mother is."

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to deal in her business of designing.

"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham Court Road--he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying.

'He's something to do with the stage--his brother's in the booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him out.'"

Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound since Janet had been with her.

"It's true," said Janet. "I'm not making it up. He got that car--allowing for his trade discount--for a hundred and thirty-five pounds--cape-cart hood and all. It only costs him thirteen pounds a year in tyres--and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol with him inside, and he reckons he's been saved five shillings a week regularly in dinners since he got it. Well, what else do you think a man buys a motor-car for if he can't afford it? Some one has to pay for it--why not his friends? That's the English system of hospitality--what I buy you pay for; what you pay for I get, and what I've got I must have bought, otherwise I shouldn't have it. It's the principle of the _reductio ad absurdum_, if you know what that is.

Everybody gets what they want, everybody else pays for it, and everybody's happy. I'll do your washing if you'll do mine. Can you have a more generous hospitality than that?"

Sally laughed again, and then Janet launched her boat of enterprise.

"You're fond of kiddies, aren't you, Sally?" she asked suddenly.

A tender look crept into Sally's eyes. "You know I am," she replied.

"Well--why don't you go down to your people at Cailsham and help them for a little while in the school?"

The look of tenderness died out. Her eyes roamed pitiably about the room.

"I couldn't leave here," she said powerlessly.

"Why not?"

"I couldn't. It's all reminding me I know; but I couldn't be happy anywhere else. I should be miserable away from here."

The meeting of such obstacles as this, Janet had antic.i.p.ated. She knew well that slough of the mind which sucks in its own despair, and with all the concentration of her persuasion, she strove to lift Sally out of the mora.s.s. Failing on that occasion, she turned the conversation into another channel--let it drift as it pleased; but the next day she led it back again. At all costs Sally must be removed from the a.s.sociation of her surroundings, and no means offered better than these. Yet at the end of three weeks, notwithstanding all the patient persuasion that she employed, her object was as far from being reached as at the beginning.

"If you spoil your life, Sally," she said, as she was going, "it'll be the bitterest disappointment to me that I can think of. No man is worth it to a woman--no woman's worth it to a man. Can't you get some ambition to do something? All your time's your own, and you haven't got to work for your living. He's been generous enough--I'll admit that. Let me give you lessons in drawing."

"I could never learn anything like that," said Sally, wearily.

"Haven't got it in me."

This mood of wilful depression, bordering upon melancholia, can be perhaps the most trying test to friendship that exists. To throw life into the balance of chance--to fling it absolutely away in a moment of heroism for a friend one loves, is a simple task compared with the unwearying patience that is needed to face the lightless gloom of another's misery. It taints all life, discolours all pleasures, tracks one--dogs one, like a shadow on the wall. Yet Janet pa.s.sed the test with love the greater, even at the end of the gauntlet of those three weeks.

"I'll be with you all day, the day after to-morrow," she said, as she departed; "and think about teaching the kiddies--I would if I were you. You'd get awfully fond of them--as if they were your own.

Sons of gentlemen! Think of them! Dear little chaps! My G.o.d--the mothers bore them, though."

CHAPTER III

It should not be lightly touched upon, this heroism of Janet Hallard's in sacrificing three weeks of her work--every hour of which meant some living to her--in order to save Sally from that ultimate dark world of dementia towards which she was inevitably drifting.

It was not the sacrifice of time alone, not the fact that on her return she was compelled to sell some of her valued possessions in order to meet the rent of her studio which the work she had left undone would have amply supplied. Much rather was it the n.o.ble perseverance of effort through the dim, impenetrable gloom of Sally's wide-eyed misery, her own spirits never cast down by the seeming impossibility of the task, her resources never exhausted by the persistent drain that was made upon them. Here was the strength of her masculinity united with the patient endurance of the woman in her heart. No man, of his own nature alone, could have won through the sweating labour of those three weeks--few women either. But that very combination of s.e.x, that very duality of her nature which, as a woman, made her unlovable to any man, and endeared her so closely to Sally's life, had succeeded where a thousand others of her s.e.x would have failed.

She left Sally, it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted ma.s.s that lies before her.

So she slowly returned to the common factors of existence, and in six weeks from the time of Traill's departure, was ready to smile at any moment to the humour of Janet's dry criticisms of life. But to move from her rooms, to disa.s.sociate herself from the past with every sorrow and every joy that it contained, was more than she could bring herself to do. Through all Janet's persuasions, Sally remained obdurate.

"I've only got the rooms for three years," she replied finally. "I can't think of it as really past until that time's gone by; Then, I will. I'll go anywhere you like. I'll come and share your studio with you."

They entered into a formal agreement on that and, knowing the Romance in Sally's nature, Janet pursued her quest of success on the other point no further.

But circ.u.mstance, with an arm stronger than Janet could ever wield, succeeded where she had failed.

One evening, as Sally was preparing to go out alone to dinner, she heard footsteps mounting the stairs to her floor. On the moment, her heart leapt, beating to her throat. Her hands, raising the hat to her head, so trembled that she had to put it back upon the dressing-table. A cold dew damped her forehead. She put her hand up and found it wet. Then the knock fell and, shaking in every limb, she set her lips and walked as firmly as she could to the door. There she stopped, taking a deep breath. Then she swung it open.

It was Devenish.

He took off his hat and held a hand out to her. She accepted it, confused in her mind as to the reason of his coming. Did he know?

Or was he utterly unconscious? He must have known; he had come to her door.

"Do you mind my coming in?" he asked.

"No, not at all."

She made way for him to pa.s.s into her sitting-room. There followed an awkward pause which he tried to fill with the laying down of his hat and the discarding of his gloves. Sally stood there where she had closed the door, waiting for him to explain his presence. Had he brought a message for her from Jack? Had he come to see Jack--knowing nothing--and, finding the rooms below occupied by another tenant, had he come to learn the reason of her? Why had he come? And at last he turned frankly to her.

"Miss Bishop, I saw Jack the other day. He told me."

Sally lifted her head with an a.s.sumption of pride, a strained effort to show the pride that Janet had urged her to possess. She crossed the room and dropped into a chair.

"Aren't you going to sit down?" she asked.

"Thanks." He took the nearest chair, winding his watch-chain about his finger to convey the air that he was at ease.

"Did Jack send you to see me?" she asked then.

"No."

"You've no message from him?"

"No."

"Then, why do you come here?" She wanted to put the question firmly, but in her ears it sounded wavering; in his, touched only with surprise.

"Do you remember that evening we dined together?" he asked in reply.

Could she forget it? She nodded her head in silence.