IV
PHILLOTSON was sitting up late, as was often his custom,
trying to get together the materials for his long-neglected
hobby of Roman antiquities. For the first time since reviving
the subject he felt a return of his old interest in it.
He forgot time and place, and when he remembered himself and
ascended to rest it was nearly two o'clock.
His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other side
of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his wife
had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place,
which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively.
He entered, and unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement.
Before the schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue
starting up half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon
the floor on the side away from him, which was towards the window.
This was somewhat hidden by the canopy of the bedstead,
and in a moment he heard her flinging up the sash. Before he had
thought that she meant to do more than get air she had mounted
upon the sill and leapt out. She disappeared in the darkness,
and he heard her fall below.
Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply
against the newel in his haste. Opening the heavy door
he ascended the two or three steps to the level of the ground,
and there on the gravel before him lay a white heap.
Phillotson seized it in his arms, and bringing Sue into the hall
seated her on a chair, where he gazed at her by the flapping
light of the candle which he had set down in the draught on
the bottom stair.
She had certainly not broken her neck. She looked at him with eyes
that seemed not to take him in; and though not particularly large
in general they appeared so now.
She pressed her side and rubbed her arm, as if conscious of pain;
then stood up, averting her face, in evident distress at his gaze.
"Thank God--you are not killed! Though it's not for want of trying--
not much hurt I hope?"
Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the
lowness of the old rooms and to the high level of the ground without.
Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow in the side she had apparently incurred
little harm.
"I was asleep, I think!" she began, her pale face still turned away from him.
"And something frightened me--a terrible dream--I thought I saw you--"
The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her, and she was silent.
Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched
Phillotson flung it round her. "Shall I help you upstairs?"
he asked drearily; for the significance of all this sickened him
of himself and of everything.
"No thank you, Richard. I am very little hurt. I can walk."
"You ought to lock your door," he mechanically said, as if lecturing
in school. "Then no one could intrude even by accident."
"I have tried--it won't lock. All the doors are out of order."
The aspect of things was not improved by her admission.
She ascended the staircase slowly, the waving light of
the candle shining on her. Phillotson did not approach her,
or attempt to ascend himself till he heard her enter her room.
Then he fastened up the front door, and returning, sat down on
the lower stairs, holding the newel with one hand, and bowing
his face into the other. Thus he remained for a long long time--
a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him; till, raising his
head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that the business
of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or no,
he took the candle and went upstairs to his lonely room on the other
side of the landing.
No further incident touching the matter between them occurred
till the following evening, when, immediately school was over,
Phillotson walked out of Shaston, saying he required no tea,
and not informing Sue where he was going. He descended from
the town level by a steep road in a north-westerly direction,
and continued to move downwards till the soil changed from its
white dryness to a tough brown clay. He was now on the low
alluvial beds
Where Duncliffe is the traveller's mark,
And cloty Stour's a-rolling dark.
More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity of evening.
Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible
On the grey-topp'd height
Of Paladore, as pale day wore
Away... [1]
The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine
as if watching him, one of which windows was his own. Above it
he could just discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity Church.
The air down here, tempered by the thick damp bed of tenacious clay,
was not as it had been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when
he had walked a mile or two he was obliged to wipe his face with
his handkerchief.
Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without
hesitation through the shade, as a man goes on, night or day,
in a district over which he has played as a boy. He had walked
altogether about four and a half miles
Where Stour receives her strength,
From six cleere fountains fed, [2]
when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton--
a little town of three or four thousand inhabitants--
where he went on to the boys' school, and knocked at the door
of the master's residence.
[1] William Barnes. [2] Drayton.
A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson's inquiry
if Mr. Gillingham was at home replied that he was, going at
once off to his own house, and leaving Phillotson to find
his way in as he could. He discovered his friend putting away
some books from which he had been giving evening lessons.
The light of the paraffin lamp fell on Phillotson's face--
pale and wretched by contrast with his friend's, who had a cool,
practical look. They had been schoolmates in boyhood,
and fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many years
before this time.
"Glad to see you, Dick! But you don't look well? Nothing the matter?"
Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed
the cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.
"Why you haven't been here--let me see--since you were married?
I called, you know, but you were out; and upon my word it
is such a climb after dark that I have been waiting till
the days are longer before lumpering up again. I am glad you
didn't wait, however."
Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally
used a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.
"I've come, George, to explain to you my reasons for taking
a step that I am about to take, so that you, at least,
will understand my motives if other people question them anywhen--
as they may, indeed certainly will.... But anything is better
than the present condition of things God forbid that you should
ever have such an experience as mine!"
"Sit down. You don't mean--anything wrong between you and Mrs. Phillotson?"
"I do.... My wretched state is that I've a wife I love who not only
does not love me, but--but Well, I won't say. I know her feeling!
I should prefer hatred from her!"
"Ssh!"
"And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame
as I. She was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I took
advantage of her inexperience, and toled her out for walks,
and got her to agree to a long engagement before she well knew
her own mind. Afterwards she saw somebody else, but she blindly
fulfilled her engagement."
"Loving the other?"
"Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly; though her exact
feeling for him is a riddle to me--and to him too, I think--
possibly to herself. She is one of the oddest creatures I
ever met. However, I have been struck with these two facts;
the extraordinary sympathy, or similarity, between the pair.
He is her cousin, which perhaps accounts for some of it.
They seem to be one person split in two! And with her
unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband, even though
she may like me as a friend, 'tis too much to bear longer.
She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to no purpose.
I cannot bear it--I cannot! I can't answer her arguments--she has
read ten times as much as I. Her intellect sparkles like diamonds,
while mine smoulders like brown paper.... She's one too many
for me!"
"She'll get over it, good-now?"
"Never! It is--but I won't go into it--there are reasons why she never will.
At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave me and go to him.
The climax came last night, when, owing to my entering her room by accident,
she jumped out of window--so strong was her dread of me! She pretended it
was a dream, but that was to soothe me. Now when a woman jumps out of window
without caring whether she breaks her neck or no, she's not to be mistaken;
and this being the case I have come to a conclusion: that it is wrong to so
torture a fellow-creature any longer; and I won't be the inhuman wretch to do
it, cost what it may!"
"What--you'll let her go? And with her lover?"
"Whom with is her matter. I shall let her go; with him certainly,
if she wishes. I know I may be wrong--I know I can't logically,
or religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers,
or harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in.
Only I know one thing: something within me tells me I am doing
wrong in refusing her. I, like other men, profess to hold
that if a husband gets such a so-called preposterous request
from his wife, the only course that can possibly be regarded
as right and proper and honourable in him is to refuse it, and put
her virtuously under lock and key, and murder her lover perhaps.
But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable,
or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don't profess to decide.
I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles
take care of themselves. If a person who has blindly walked
into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it,
if possible."
"But--you see, there's the question of neighbours and society--
what will happen if everybody----"
"Oh, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer! I only see what's
under my eyes."
"Well--I don't agree with your instinct, Dick!" said Gillingham gravely.
"I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that such a sedate, plodding fellow as
you should have entertained such a craze for a moment. You said when I called
that she was puzzling and peculiar: I think you are!"
"Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to be intrinsically
a good woman, while she has pleaded for release--been the man she has
knelt to and implored indulgence of?"
"I am thankful to say I haven't."
"Then I don't think you are in a position to give an opinion.
I have been that man, and it makes all the difference
in the world, if one has any manliness or chivalry in him.
I had not the remotest idea--living apart from women as I have
done for so many years--that merely taking a woman to church
and putting a ring upon her finger could by any possibility
involve one in such a daily, continuous tragedy as that now shared
by her and me!"
"Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you,
provided she kept to herself. But to go attended by a cavalier--
that makes a difference."
"Not a bit. Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure her
present misery than be made to promise to keep apart from him?
All that is a question for herself. It is not the same thing
at all as the treachery of living on with a husband and
playing him false.... However, she has not distinctly implied
living with him as wife, though I think she means to....
And to the best of my understanding it is not an ignoble,
merely animal, feeling between the two: that is the worst of it;
because it makes me think their affection will be enduring.
I did not mean to confess to you that in the first jealous
weeks of my marriage, before I had come to my right mind, I hid
myself in the school one evening when they were together there,
and I heard what they said. I am ashamed of it now,
though I suppose I was only exercising a legal right.
I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity,
or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow
took away all flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is
to be together--to share each other's emotions, and fancies,
and dreams."
"Platonic!"
"Well no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it. They remind me of--
what are their names--Laon and Cythna. Also of Paul and Virginia a little.
The more I reflect, the more ENTIRELY I am on their side!"
"But if people did as you want to do, there'd be a general
domestic disintegration. The family would no longer be the social unit."
"Yes--I am all abroad, I suppose!" said Phillotson sadly.
"I was never a very bright reasoner, you remember.... And yet,
I don't see why the woman and the children should not be the unit
without the man."
"By the Lord Harry!--Matriarchy! ... Does SHE say all this too?"
"Oh no. She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this--
all in the last twelve hours!"
"It will upset all received opinion hereabout. Good God--
what will Shaston say!"
"I don't say that it won't. I don't know--I don't know! ... As I say,
I am only a feeler, not a reasoner."
"Now," said Gillingham, "let us take it quietly, and have something
to drink over it." He went under the stairs, and produced
a bottle of cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer each.
"I think you are rafted, and not yourself," he continued.
"Do go back and make up your mind to put up with a few whims.
But keep her. I hear on all sides that she's a charming
young thing."
"Ah yes! That's the bitterness of it! Well, I won't stay.
I have a long walk before me."
Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting
expressed his hope that this consultation, singular as its subject was,
would be the renewal of their old comradeship. "Stick to her!"
were his last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson;
from which his friend answered "Aye, aye!"
But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night, and no sound
was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour, he said,
"So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments against it
than those!"
"I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses--
that's what I think!" murmured Gillingham, as he walked
back alone.
The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told Sue:
"You may go--with whom you will. I absolutely and unconditionally agree."
Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to Phillotson
more and more indubitably the true one. His mild serenity
at the sense that he was doing his duty by a woman who was
at his mercy almost overpowered his grief at relinquishing her.
Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had come--
a cloudy evening with wind--which indeed was very seldom absent
in this elevated place. How permanently it was imprinted upon
his vision; that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea;
a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness,
and marked by the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic
possibilities quite at variance with her times of buoyancy;
a trying of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either.
Her nervous manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be injured
by her course, might have been interpreted by a stranger as displeasure
that Phillotson intruded his presence on her for the few brief minutes
that remained.
"You had better have a slice of ham or an egg, or something with your tea?
You can't travel on a mouthful of bread and butter."
She took the slice he helped her to; and they discussed as they
sat trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he would find
the key of this or that cupboard, what little bills were paid,
and what not.
"I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue," he said, in a heroic attempt
to put her at her ease. "So that being without a wife will not really be
irksome to me, as it might be to other men who have had one a little while.
I have, too, this grand hobby in my head of writing 'The Roman Antiquities
of Wessex,' which will occupy all my spare hours."
"If you will send me some of the manuscript to copy at any time,
as you used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!" she said
with amenable gentleness. "I should much like to be some help
to you still--as a--friend."
Phillotson mused, and said: "No, I think we ought to be really separate,
if we are to be at all. And for this reason, that I don't wish to ask
you any questions, and particularly wish you not to give me information
as to your movements, or even your address.... Now, what money do you want?
You must have some, you know."
"Oh, of course, Richard, I couldn't think of having any of your
money to go away from you with! I don't want any either.
I have enough of my own to last me for a long while, and Jude
will let me have----"
"I would rather not know anything about him, if you don't mind.
You are free, absolutely; and your course is your own."
"Very well. But I'll just say that I have packed only a change or two
of my own personal clothing, and one or two little things besides that are
my very own. I wish you would look into my trunk before it is closed.
Besides that I have only a small parcel that will go into Jude's portmanteau."
"Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your luggage!
I wish you would take three-quarters of the household furniture.
I don't want to be bothered with it. I have a sort of affection
for a little of it that belonged to my poor mother and father.
But the rest you are welcome to whenever you like to send
for it."
"That I shall never do."
"You go by the six-thirty train, don't you? It is now a quarter to six."
"You ... You don't seem very sorry I am going, Richard!"
"Oh no--perhaps not."
"I like you much for how you have behaved. It is a curious thing
that directly I have begun to regard you as not my husband,
but as my old teacher, I like you. I won't be so affected as to
say I love you, because you know I don't, except as a friend.
But you do seem that to me!"
Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these reflections,
and then the station omnibus came round to take her up.
Phillotson saw her things put on the top, handed her in,
and was obliged to make an appearance of kissing her as he wished
her good-bye, which she quite understood and imitated.
From the cheerful manner in which they parted the omnibus-man had no
other idea than that she was going for a short visit.
When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs
and opened the window in the direction the omnibus had taken.
Soon the noise of its wheels died away. He came down then,
his face compressed like that of one bearing pain; he put on his
hat and went out, following by the same route for nearly a mile.
Suddenly turning round he came home.
He had no sooner entered than the voice of his friend Gillingham
greeted him from the front room.
"I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I walked in,
and made myself comfortable. I said I would call, you remember."
"Yes. I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly for coming to-night."
"How is Mrs.----"
"She is quite well. She is gone--just gone. That's her tea-cup,
that she drank out of only an hour ago. And that's the plate she--"
Phillotson's throat got choked up, and he could not go on.
He turned and pushed the tea-things aside.
"Have you had any tea, by the by?" he asked presently in a renewed voice.
"No--yes--never mind," said Gillingham, preoccupied. "Gone, you say she is?"
"Yes.... I would have died for her; but I wouldn't be cruel
to her in the name of the law. She is, as I understand,
gone to join her lover. What they are going to do I cannot say.
Whatever it may be she has my full consent to."
There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson's pronouncement
which restrained his friend's comment. "Shall I--leave you?"
he asked.
"No, no. It is a mercy to me that you have come. I have some articles
to arrange and clear away. Would you help me?"
Gillingham assented; and having gone to the upper rooms
the schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all Sue's
things that she had left behind, and laying them in a large box.
"She wouldn't take all I wanted her to," he continued.
"But when I made up my mind to her going to live in her own way I
did make up my mind."
"Some men would have stopped at an agreement to separate."
"I've gone into all that, and don't wish to argue it. I was, and am,
the most old-fashioned man in the world on the question of marriage--
in fact I had never thought critically about its ethics at all.
But certain facts stared me in the face, and I couldn't go
against them."
They went on with the packing silently. When it was done Phillotson closed
the box and turned the key.
"There," he said. "To adorn her in somebody's eyes; never again in mine!"
