IT is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask
myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary,
baffled space of pain--what should these people have done? What,
in the name of God, should they have done?
The end was perfectly plain to each of them--it was perfectly
manifest at this stage that, if the girl did not, in Leonora's phrase,
"belong to Edward," Edward must die, the girl must lose her
reason because Edward died--and, that after a time, Leonora, who
was the coldest and the strongest of the three, would console
herself by marrying Rodney Bayham and have a quiet,
comfortable, good time. That end, on that night, whilst Leonora sat
in the girl's bedroom and Edward telephoned down below--that
end was plainly manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad already;
Edward was half dead; only Leonora, active, persistent, instinct
with her cold passion of energy, was "doing things". What then,
should they have done? worked out in the extinction of two very
splendid personalities--for Edward and the girl were splendid
personalities, in order that a third personality, more normal,
should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable,
good time.
I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after
the words that end my last chapter. Since writing the words "until
my arrival", which I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for
a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white
tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhone, the
immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all
Provence--and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in
the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only
Hell. . . .
Edward is dead; the girl is gone--oh, utterly gone; Leonora is
having a good time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in
Branshaw Teleragh. I have been through Provence; I have seen
Africa; I have visited Asia to see, in Ceylon, in a darkened room,
my poor girl, sitting motionless, with her wonderful hair about
her, looking at me with eyes that did not see me, and saying
distinctly: "Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem. . . . Credo in
unum Deum omnipotentem." Those are the only reasonable words
she uttered; those are the only words, it appears, that she ever will
utter. I suppose that they are reasonable words; it must be
extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes
in an Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it. all.
. . .
For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring, tiring,
tiring to have been in the midst of it; to have taken the tickets; to
have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to have
consulted the purser and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent
patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an Omnipotent
Deity. That may sound romantic--but it is just a record of fatigue.
I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I
don't resent it--but I have never been the least good. Florence
selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her;
Edward called me to come and have a chat with him, and I
couldn't stop him cutting his throat.
And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in
my room at Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It
was a very pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy.
Colonel Rufford had left the army and had taken up an
appointment at a tea-planting estate in Ceylon. His letter was
pathetic because it was so brief, so inarticulate, and so
business-like. He had gone down to the boat to meet his daughter,
and had found his daughter quite mad. It appears that at Aden
Nancy had seen in a local paper the news of Edward's suicide. In
the Red Sea she had gone mad. She had remarked to Mrs Colonel
Luton, who was chaperoning her, that she believed in an
Omnipotent Deity. She hadn't made any fuss; her eyes were quite
dry and glassy. Even when she was mad Nancy could behave
herself.
Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was
any chance of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible
that if she could see someone from Branshaw it might soothe her
and it might have a good effect. And he just simply wrote to
Leonora: "Please come and see if you can do it."
I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that simple,
enormous request of the old colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was
cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad
wife, who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was totally
mad--and yet he believed in the goodness of human nature. He
believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to
Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora
didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that that, in the
circumstances, was natural enough. At the same time she agreed,
as it were, on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go
from Branshaw to Ceylon. She sent me and her old nurse, who
had looked after Nancy from the time when the girl, a child of
thirteen, had first come to Branshaw. So off I go, rushing through
Provence, to catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn't the
least good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't the least
good. Nothing has been the least good. The doctors said, at
Kandy, that if Nancy could be brought to England, the sea air, the
change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of things,
might restore her reason. Of course, they haven't restored her
reason. She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from
where I am now writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic
about it. She is very well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very
beautiful. The old nurse looks after her very efficiently.
Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all
very humdrum, as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if
her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the
meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it is probable that
her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her appreciate
the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore I cannot
marry her, according to the law of the land.
So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the
attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no
attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married
Rodney Bayham in my absence and went to live at Bayham.
Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it into her head
that I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I
disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I
am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself
following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I
should really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with
Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with
Florence. I am no doubt like every other man; only, probably
because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am
able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person. I have
never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or
the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only
followed, faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward
Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he
really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney
Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted
Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't
really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a
nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted
Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer
and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The
things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the
wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond
me.
Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the
olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what
they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are
all men's lives like the lives of us good people--like the lives of
the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken,
tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated
by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil
knows?
For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of
the Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what
they wanted. It was only Edward who took a perfectly clear line,
and he was drunk most of the time. But, drunk or sober, he stuck
to what was demanded by convention and by the traditions of his
house. Nancy Rufford had to be exported to India, and Nancy
Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from him. She was exported
to India and she never heard a word from Edward Ashburnham.
It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of
Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of
the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work
blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the
extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.
Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the
sentimentalist about him; and society does not need too many
sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about
her a touch of madness. Society does not need individuals with
touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found
themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly
normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For
Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is
expected to have a baby in three months' time.
So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism
and their passions--those two that I really loved--have gone from
this earth. It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have
made of Edward if she had succeeded in living with him; what
would Edward have made of her? For there was about Nancy a
touch of cruelty--a touch of definite actual cruelty that made her
desire to see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward suffer.
And, by God, she gave him hell.
She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued
that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it
with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see
him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and
flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration
of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves
together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon the body
of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of
Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a
stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted
upon him.
Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,
sweating, seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear
the voices going on and on. And day after day Leonora would
come to him and would announce the results of their
deliberations.
They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal;
they were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside
them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the
girl--though Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I
have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in
normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is
needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an
establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up
appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her
utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted
perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the
world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the
complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the
villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal,
hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will
become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still
more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was
made for normal circumstances--for Mr Rodney Bayham, who
will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and
make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.
In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went
all over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore
extraordinary and ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment
she was all for revenge. After haranguing the girl for hours
through the night she harangued for hours of the day the silent
Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and that was his
undoing. Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon.
She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want?
What did he want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told
you". He meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father in India
as soon as her father should cable that he was ready to receive her.
But just once he tripped up. To Leonora's eternal question he
answered that all he desired in life was that--that he could pick
himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if--the
girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him.
He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more.
Well, he was a sentimentalist.
And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the
girl should not go five thousand miles away and that she should
not continue to love Edward. The way she worked it was this:
She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward; she
was going to get a divorce; she was going to get a dissolution of
marriage from Rome. But she considered it to be her duty to warn
the girl of the sort of monster that Edward was. She told the girl of
La Dolciquita, of Mrs Basil, of Maisie Maidan, of Florence. She
spoke of the agonies that she had endured during her life with the
man, who was violent, overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and
monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities. And, at hearing of the
miseries her aunt had suffered--for Leonora once more had the
aspect of an aunt to the girl--with the swift cruelty of youth and,
with the swift solidarity that attaches woman to woman, the girl
made her resolves. Her aunt said incessantly: "You must save
Edward's life; you must save his life. All that he needs is a little
period of satisfaction from you. Then he will tire of you as he has
of the others. But you must save his life."
And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew--by a curious
instinct that runs between human beings living together--exactly
what was going on. And he remained dumb; he stretched out no
finger to help himself. All that he required to keep himself a
decent member of society was, that the girl, five thousand miles
away, should continue to love him. They were putting a stopper
upon that.
I have told you that the girl came one night to his room. And that
was the real hell for him. That was the picture that never left his
imagination--the girl, in the dim light, rising up at the foot of his
bed. He said that it seemed to have a greenish sort of effect as if
there were a greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall bedposts that
framed her body. And she looked at him with her straight eyes of
an unflinching cruelty and she said: "I am ready to belong to
you--to save your life."
He answered: "I don't want it; I don't want it; I don't want it."
And he says that he didn't want it; that he would have hated
himself; that it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the
immense temptation to do the unthinkable thing, not from the
physical desire but because of a mental certitude. He was certain
that if she had once submitted to him she would remain his for
ever. He knew that.
She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to love
him from a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can never
love you now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you
to save your life. But I can never love you."
It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least know
what it meant--to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled
himself together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky,
overbearing, as he would have done to a servant or to a horse.
"Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to
sleep. This is all nonsense."
They were baffled, those two women.
And then I came on the scene.
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