The Helpmate Part 49

She considered that she had found it in Majendie's habits, his silences, his moods, the facility of his decline upon the Hannays and the Ransomes.

He was determined to deteriorate, to sink to their level.

To-night, when he remarked tentatively that he thought he would dine at the Hannays', she made an effort to stop him.

"Must you go?" said she. "You are always dining with them."

"Why?--do you mind?" said he.

"Well--when it's night after night--"

"Is it that you mind my dining with the Hannays, or my leaving you?"

"I mind both."

"Oh--if I'd thought you wanted me to stay--"

She made no answer, but rose and led the way to the dining-room.

He followed. Her arm had touched him as she pa.s.sed him in the doorway, and his heart beat thickly, as he realised the strength of her dominion over him. She had only to say "Stay," and he stayed; or "Come," and she could always draw him to her. He had never turned away. His very mind was faithful to her. It had not even conceived, and it would have had difficulty in grasping, the idea of happiness without her.

To-night he was profoundly moved by this intimation of his wife's desire to have him with her. His surprise and satisfaction made him curiously shy. He sat through two courses without speaking, without lifting his eyes from his plate; brooding over their separation. He was wondering whether, after all, it had been so inevitable; whether he had misunderstood her; whether, if he had had the sense to understand, he might not have kept her. It was possible she had been wounded by his absences. He had never explained them. He could not tell her that she had made him afraid to be alone with her.

The situation, which he had accepted so obediently, had been more than a mere mortal man could endure. Especially in the terrible five minutes after dinner, before they settled for the evening, when each sat waiting to see if the other had anything to say. Sometimes Majendie would take up his book and Anne her work. She would sew, and sew, patient, persistent, in her tragic silence. And when he could bear it no longer, he would put down his book and go quietly away, to relieve the intolerable constraint that held her. Sometimes it was Anne who read, while he smoked and brooded. Then, in the warm, consenting stillness of the summer evenings (they were now in June), her presence seemed to fill the room; he was possessed by the sense of it; by the sound of her breathing; by the stirring of her body in the chair, or of her fingers on the pages of her book; and he would get up suddenly and leave her, dragging his pa.s.sion from the sight of her.

As he considered these things, many perplexities, many tendernesses, stirred in him and kept him still.

Anne watched him from the other end of the table, and her thoughts debased him. He seemed to her disagreeably incommunicative, and she had found an ign.o.ble explanation of his mood. There had been too much salt in the soup, and now there was something wrong with the salmon. He had not responded to her apology for these accidents, and she supposed that they had been enough to spoil his evening with her.

She had come to consider him a creature grossly wedded to material things.

"It's a pity you stayed," said she. "Mrs. Hannay would have given you a better dinner."

He had nothing to say to so preposterous a charge. His eyes were fixed more than ever on his plate. She saw his face flush as he bowed his head in eating; she allowed her fancy to rest in its morbid abhorrence of the act, and in its suspicion of its grossness. She went on, lashed by her fancy. "I cannot understand your liking to go there so much, when you might go to the Eliotts or the Gardners. They're always asking you, and you haven't been near them for a year."

"Well, you see, the Hannays let me do what I like. They don't bother me."

"Do the Eliotts bother you?"

"They bore me. Horribly."

"And the Gardners?"

"Sometimes--a little."

"And Canon Wharton? No. I needn't ask."

He laughed. "You needn't. _He_ bores me to extinction."

"I'm sorry it is my friends who are so unfortunate."

"It's your husband who's unfortunate. He is not an intellectual person.

Nor a spiritual one, either, I'm afraid."

He looked up. Anne had finished her morsel, and her fingers played irritably with the hand-bell at her side. Poor Majendie's abstraction had combined with his appet.i.te to make him deplorably slow over his dinner.

She still sat watching him, pure from appet.i.te, in resignation that veiled her contempt of the male hunger so incomprehensibly prolonged. He had come to dread more than anything those attentive, sacrificial eyes.

"I'm awfully sorry," he said, "to keep you waiting."

She rang the bell. "Will you have the lamp lit in the drawing-room or the study?"

He looked at her. There was no lamp for him in her eyes.

"Whichever you like. I think I shall go over to the Hannays', after all."

He went; and by the lamp in the drawing-room Anne sat and brooded in her turn.

She said to herself: "It's no use my trying to keep him from them. It only irritates him. He lets me see plainly that he prefers their society to mine. I don't wonder. They can flatter him and kow-tow to him, and I cannot. He can be a little G.o.d to them; and he must know what he is to me. We haven't a thought in common--not a feeling--and he cannot bear to feel himself inferior. As for me--if I've married beneath me, I must pay the penalty."

But there was no penalty for her in these reflections. They satisfied her. They were part of the curious mental process by which she justified herself.

CHAPTER XXIII

Up to that moment when he had looked across the dinner table at Anne, Majendie had felt secure in the bonds of his marriage. Anne's repugnance had broken the natural tie; but up to that moment he had never doubted that the immaterial link still held. If at times her presence was a bodily torment, at other times he felt it as a spiritual protection. His immense charity made allowance for all the extraordinary att.i.tudes of Anne. In his imagination they reduced themselves to one, the att.i.tude of inscrutable physical repugnance. He had accepted (as he had told himself so often) the situation she had created. It appeared to him, of all situations, the crudest and most simple. It had its merciful limits. The discomfort of it, once vague, had grown, to his thwarted senses, almost brutally defined. He could at least say, "It was here the trouble began, and here, therefore, it shall end."

He thought he had sounded the depths of her repugnance, and could measure by it his own misery. He said, "At any rate I know where I am"; and he believed that if he stayed where he was, if he respected his wife's prejudices, her prejudices would be bound to respect him. He could not make her love him, but at least he considered that he had justified his claim to her respect.

And now she had opened his eyes, and he had looked at her, and seen things that had not (till that moment) come into his vision of their separation. He saw subtler hostilities, incurable, indestructible repugnances, att.i.tudes at which his charity stood aghast. The situation (so far from being crude and simple) involved endless refinements and complexities of torture. He despaired now of ever reaching her.

Majendie had caught his first clear sight of the spiritual ramparts.

"I'm not good enough for her," he said. She had kept him with her that evening, not because she wanted him to stay, but because she wanted him to understand.

He had shown her that he understood by going to the friends for whom he was good enough, who were good enough for him.

He went more than ever now, sometimes to the Ransomes, oftener to Gorst, oftenest of all to Lawson Hannay. He liked more than ever to sit with Mrs. Hannay; to lean up against the everlasting soft cushion she presented to his soreness. More than ever he liked to talk to her of simple things; of their acquaintance; of Edith, who had been a little better, certainly no worse, this summer; of Peggy, of Peggy's future and her education. He would sit for hours on Mrs. Hannay's sofa, his body leaning back, his head bowed forward, his chin sunk on his breast, listening attentively, yet with a dazed and rather stupid expression, to Mrs. Hannay's conversation. His own was sometimes monotonous and a little dull. He was growing even physically heavy. But Mrs. Hannay did not seem to mind.

There was a certain justice in Anne's justification. He didn't consciously prefer the Hannays' society to hers; but he actually found it more agreeable, and for the reasons she suspected. They did worship him; and their worship did make him feel superior, perhaps when he was least so. They did flatter him; for, as Mrs. Hannay said, "He needed a little patting on the back, now and then, poor fellow." And perhaps he was really sinking a little to her level; he had so lost his sense of her vulgarity.

He used to wonder how it was that she had kept Lawson straight. Perfectly straight, Lawson had been, ever since his marriage. Possibly, probably, if he had married a wife too inflexibly refined, he would have deviated somewhat from that perfect straightness. His tastes had always been a little vulgar. But there was no reason why he should go abroad to gratify them when he possessed the paragon of amenable vulgarity at home. The Gardners, whose union was almost miraculously complete, were not in their way more admirably mated. And Lawson's reform must have been a stiff job for any woman to tackle at the start.

A woman of marvellous ingenuity and tact. For she had kept Lawson straight without his knowing it. She had played off one of Lawson's little weaknesses against the other; had set, for instance, his fantastic love of eating against his sordid little tendency to drink. Lawson was now a model of sobriety.

And as she kept Lawson straight without his knowing it, she helped Majendie, too, without his knowing it, to hold his miserable head up. She ignored, resolutely, his att.i.tude of dejection. She reminded him that if he could make nothing else out of his life he could make money. She convinced him that life, the life of a prosperous ship-owner in Scale, was worth living, as long as he had Edith and Anne and Peggy to make money for, especially Peggy.

And Majendie became more and more absorbed in his business, and more and more he found his pleasure in it; in making money, that is to say, for the persons whom he loved.