CHAPTER IV
Then it was that, one afternoon, while the spring of the year was
young and new she met all in her own way his frankest betrayal of
these alarms. He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn't
settled and she was presented to him in that long fresh light of
waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper
than the greyest hours of autumn. The week had been warm, the
spring was supposed to have begun early, and May Bartram sat, for
the first time in the year, without a fire; a fact that, to
Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth
and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and
cold meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again. Her
own aspect--he could scarce have said why--intensified this note.
Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as
numerous and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with
soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf on the
delicate tone of which the years had further refined, she was the
picture of a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx, whose
head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with
silver. She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green
fronds she might have been a lily too--only an artificial lily,
wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain,
though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint
creases, under some clear glass bell. The perfection of household
care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but
they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in,
put away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with nothing
more to do. She was "out of it," to Marcher's vision; her work was
over; she communicated with him as across some gulf or from some
island of rest that she had already reached, and it made him feel
strangely abandoned. Was it--or rather wasn't it--that if for so
long she had been watching with him the answer to their question
must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her
occupation was verily gone? He had as much as charged her with
this in saying to her, many months before, that she even then knew
something she was keeping from him. It was a point he had never
since ventured to press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might
become a difference, perhaps a disagreement, between them. He had
in this later time turned nervous, which was what he in all the
other years had never been; and the oddity was that his nervousness
should have waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held off
so long as he was sure. There was something, it seemed to him,
that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that
would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak
the wrong word; that would make everything ugly. He wanted the
knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own
august weight. If she was to forsake him it was surely for her to
take leave. This was why he didn't directly ask her again what she
knew; but it was also why, approaching the matter from another
side, he said to her in the course of his visit: "What do you
regard as the very worst that at this time of day CAN happen to
me?"
He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with the
odd irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged
ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool
intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever
been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it
required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again,
sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his
enquiry quite freshly and patiently. "Oh yes, I've repeatedly
thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't quite
make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between which it
was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."
"Rather! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I
appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but
dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different times
named to you, but there were others I couldn't name."
"They were too, too dreadful?"
"Too, too dreadful--some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an
inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full
clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only
beautiful with a strange cold light--a light that somehow was a
part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the
pale hard sweetness of the season and the hour. "And yet," she
said at last, "there are horrors we've mentioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a
picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes
something stranger yet--though even of this he was to take the full
measure but afterwards--and the note of it already trembled. It
was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were
having again the high flicker of their prime. He had to admit,
however, what she said. "Oh yes, there were times when we did go
far." He caught himself in the act of speaking as if it all were
over. Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended for
him clearly more and more on his friend.
But she had now a soft smile. "Oh far--!"
It was oddly ironic. "Do you mean you're prepared to go further?"
She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at
him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. "Do you
consider that we went far?"
"Why I thought it the point you were just making--that we HAD
looked most things in the face."
"Including each other?" She still smiled. "But you're quite
right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears;
but some of them have been unspoken."
"Then the worst--we haven't faced that. I COULD face it, I
believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, "as
if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he wondered
if he looked as blank as he sounded. "It's spent."
"Then why do you assume," she asked, "that mine isn't?"
"Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't a
question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn't a
question now of choosing." At last he came out with it. "You know
something I don't. You've shown me that before."
These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment,
exceedingly, and she spoke with firmness. "I've shown you, my
dear, nothing."
He shook his head. "You can't hide it."
"Oh, oh!" May Bartram sounded over what she couldn't hide. It was
almost a smothered groan.
"You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of
something you were afraid I should find out. Your answer was that
I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have. But you
had something therefore in mind, and I see now how it must have
been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities,
has settled itself for you as the worst. This," he went on, "is
why I appeal to you. I'm only afraid of ignorance to-day--I'm not
afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while she said nothing:
"What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in
this air and amid these appearances, that you're out of it. You've
done. You've had your experience. You leave me to my fate."
Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as on a
decision to be made, so that her manner was fairly an avowal,
though still, with a small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect
surrender. "It WOULD be the worst," she finally let herself say.
"I mean the thing I've never said."
It hushed him a moment. "More monstrous than all the monstrosities
we've named?"
"More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express," she
asked, "in calling it the worst?"
Marcher thought. "Assuredly--if you mean, as I do, something that
includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable."
"It would if it SHOULD happen," said May Bartram. "What we're
speaking of, remember, is only my idea."
"It's your belief," Marcher returned. "That's enough for me. I
feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you
give me no more light on it, you abandon me."
"No, no!" she repeated. "I'm with you--don't you see?--still."
And as to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair--a
movement she seldom risked in these days--and showed herself, all
draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. "I haven't
forsaken you."
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous
assurance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been
great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure.
But the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before
him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was for the minute
almost a recovery of youth. He couldn't pity her for that; he
could only take her as she showed--as capable even yet of helping
him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any
instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it. There
passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted
most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips
really covered the others. "Then tell me if I shall consciously
suffer."
She promptly shook her head. "Never!"
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on
him an extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that? Do
you call that the worst?"
"You think nothing is better?" she asked.
She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply
wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. "Why
not, if one doesn't KNOW?" After which, as their eyes, over his
question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his
purpose came prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he
took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with
the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything
fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became
articulate. "I see--if I don't suffer!"
In her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?"
"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."
She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always
meant. It's different."
"It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little. "Something new. It's not what you
think. I see what you think."
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be
wrong. "It isn't that I AM a blockhead?" he asked between
faintness and grimness. "It isn't that it's all a mistake?"
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. THAT possibility, for her, he
saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity
from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. "Oh
no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort. You've been right."
Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed,
speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a
hole if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling
me the truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can
bear to know? I HAVEN'T lived with a vain imagination, in the most
besotted illusion? I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my
face?"
She shook her head again. "However the case stands THAT isn't the
truth. Whatever the reality, it IS a reality. The door isn't
shut. The door's open," said May Bartram.
"Then something's to come?"
She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him.
"It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished
the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to
him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken. Her movement
might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once
hesitating and deciding to say. He had been standing by the
chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect old
French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its
furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him
waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement. She
only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited. It had
become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and
vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted
face delicately shone with it--it glittered almost as with the
white lustre of silver in her expression. She was right,
incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth, and
strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful
was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately
soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more
gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some
minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably
pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none
the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him.
Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first
in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant
to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring--though he
stared in fact but the harder--turned off and regained her chair.
It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him
thinking only of that.
"Well, you don't say--?"
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk
back strangely pale. "I'm afraid I'm too ill."
"Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his
lips, the fear she might die without giving him light. He checked
himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered
as if she had heard the words.
"Don't you know--now?"
"'Now' -?" She had spoken as if some difference had been made
within the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was
already with them. "I know nothing." And he was afterwards to say
to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an
impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his
hands of the whole question.
"Oh!" said May Bartram.
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
"No," said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her
room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite
of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.
"What then has happened?"
She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and,
feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and
gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer.
"What WAS to," she said.
