“I hope you’ll forgive me for this?”
Her face had softened. It looked smoother, happier.
“I think I can. But I wouldn’t—if I thought. . . .”
Her hesitation led him on.
“If I was the sort of man? But I’m not. I’ve never had much to do with women—save as a lawyer. I have never been married. My life has been nothing—but work. So that when one meets a woman who works——”
She seemed to be watching the two cubs playing with their mother.
“I work—because I have to.”
“Bread and butter——”
“And often—the butter—is rather rancid. I’m not complaining. But you see. . . .”
Again she hesitated.
“I ought not to talk—like this.”
“I want you to. Shall I tell you what first struck me about you?”
Her lashes flickered.
“Aren’t we being rather personal? Besides——”
“What else should you and I be? It seemed to me that you lived in fear of something.”
For a moment she seemed to stiffen and he wondered whether his touch had been too intimate.
“I do. Aren’t we all like that?”
He remembered his narrowing future and felt a spasm of conscious yearning.
“Oh, yes. But you?”
“I? I have had to scratch a living for myself for the last ten years. A girl who works and has no capital and no friends—has some pretty bad moments. Cheap lodgings and your last pound note. And the fear of losing your job and being stranded.”
“Have you been stranded?”
“Twice. So people have got you rather badly, like their mother. Oh, but I’m not being fair. It’s the idea of being sent adrift—in a strange country perhaps, without the money to take you home.”
“It ought not to be,” he said. “Believe me—I understand.”
It seemed to him that she shrank into herself for a moment. She had that tragic sensitiveness that is for ever drawing a curtain and feeling shocked with itself. She had been blurting out confidences to a comparative stranger, showing herself perhaps as a poor, plaintive, beggarly thing.
She flushed.
“But—I’m getting harder. Don’t you think we ought to be moving on?”
He stood his ground. He pretended to be watching the children, who had christened the two tiger cubs “Pip” and “Squeak.” He did not like the idea of her getting harder. Those brown eyes were not meant to be hard. Also, he had become suddenly and acutely conscious of his own fate. He began to suffer, for he was becoming so very conscious of her as a woman, a pleasant and gracious creature, a live and comely thing.
“They are quite happy. Don’t hurry me. I was going to tell you——”
But he was not allowed to tell her just then, for Eileen and Pam came and collected them, the tiger cubs having insisted on going to sleep.
“Let’s see the lions.”
“Yes, to the lions,” said Callendar, echoing that cry of old Imperial Rome.
To tell her or not to tell her? He shirked the issue and as the days passed the decision became more difficult. For insensibly they found themselves lovers, though it was love unconfessed—shy, diffident, an affair of glances and of little meetings on the stairs or in the lounge or under the trees of the Borghese. How else could it happen, with that little yellow-headed shrew of a woman, thinly licentious, picking at life with jealous fingers. Yet Callendar realized that Una Summerhayes did not avoid him. Her eyes lifted to meet his. They were such very honest eyes.
He found himself looking in his mirror at the face of a man of seven-and-forty who had cancer of the throat. His face might be a little thinner, but it was still a youngish face. The skin had not lost its colour or its fine texture. He had some grey in his hair.
“How astonishing,” he thought, “and how tragic!”
A lover with death on his shoulders, the heart of youth in the body of dissolution! And he wanted to remain the lover for a day or a week or a month, to enjoy the exquisite stealth of it, to watch that other love awakening in a woman’s eyes.
But was it fair?
True, he was going to strike the shackles from her and put her beyond the power of such women as Mrs. Pym; but would not the Una Summerhayes of his second youth ask for something more than an alteration in his will? A good woman who loves is the least mercenary of creatures. His loving her was a beautiful reality. Death was a reality. And if she cared—was not her caring a reality to be tenderly reverenced?
He came to realize that he would have to tell her and to tell her soon and that an attitude of sentimental fatherliness was false. He was her lover. He loved her with the head of forty-seven and the heart of five-and-twenty.
Standing beside the fountain of the nymph with the pitcher in the Pincian gardens, he began to prepare the stage. The Pym children had found other children to play with and were running races round the bandstand.
“Don’t you ever get a day to yourself?”
Her eyes had a liquid look.
“Oh, once a month.”
“When does it happen?”
“It could happen next Thursday.”
He touched her shoulder with shy gentleness.
“I am hiring a car. I am going to Hadrian’s villa and Tivoli. Will you come?”
“On Thursday?”
“Yes, on Thursday. It is very serious to me, Una. I want you to come.”
She was silent for a moment, but it was not the silence of hesitation.
“Ought I to tell Mrs. Pym?”
“Mrs. Pym does not matter. Tell her anything or nothing. You need not think of the woman.”
“What right has she to be told?”
“None.”
IX
It was a day of live, warm sunlight. They drove across the Campagna, with Tivoli and the little hill towns rising into white distinctness. They had their lunch with them, a bottle of red wine, two glasses, and coffee in a thermos. When they left the car at the entrance to the villa, the hedges of box were sending out their fragrance and the cypresses pointed to an exquisite blueness.
The padrone of the little restaurant looked disapprovingly at Callendar’s luncheon-basket. A grizzled, old guide, kindly denied even the privilege of carrying the basket, was given a ten-lire note to save the human touch.
They passed up and along the cypresses and box.
“How peaceful!”
Her face dreamed and Callendar observed her as a man might gaze at his beloved in heaven.
“It’s a wonderful spot. Have you been here before?”
“Never.”
They paused by the ruins of the little theatre.
“It is Nature that matters here,” he said. “I should imagine that it was a pompous, garish place in Hadrian’s day. But the trees have come into their own. When the trees grow as they please, vulgarity goes.”
She smiled round at him.
“Imagine Leicester Square in ruins and oaks and beeches growing out of the ruins!”
“Exactly!” he said. “Everything comes back to beauty.”
They wandered up and on and under the ilex shade, with the Vale of Tempe a hollow full of sunlight. And Callendar felt an inward trembling. The day was so alive—and so was she—and he had brought her here to tell her that he was a dying man. Oh, bitterness and exquisite pain! How would she take it? What would she say? And when he told her that never again need she be humiliated by the world’s Mrs. Pyms, would she accept his last homage? He had no thought of asking her for anything. He wanted to see her happy, secure, unexposed to vulgar things. He would impose upon her no conditions.
She noticed his silence, but it seemed part of the day’s blessedness. She had no other woman to fear. She was free, herself, a happy and unselfconscious creature—for this one day at least.
“Mayn’t I have my turn with the basket?”
“No,” he said; “man likes to carry things while he can.”
“Protected womanhood!”
“Do you resent it?”
She shook her head.
“Does any woman like to be—independent—really? We have to make the best of things—and pretend.”
“There’s such a thing as freedom,” he said. “I don’t believe wholly in the male hand. After all—everything is relative. And men like giving.”
“So do we.”
“And a woman gives—when she really gives. A cheque-book is a poor reply, but it is something.”
They idled about amid massive ruins. Here were old red walls and chambers and naked arches and fragments of pavement. What each ruin had been mattered nothing. What mattered was the sky and the sun and the stately stone pines and the clouding blackness of the ilexes and each other. Callendar still carried the basket and her eyes grew playful and tender.
“Since you won’t let me help with the basket, hadn’t we better have lunch and empty it?”
“I’m ready.”
“Let’s choose a place. Not—any place, though all of this is lovely.”
The sun was so strong that they chose the thin shade of an old olive tree and, spreading their raincoats on the grass, knelt down to open the basket. Callendar had had a special lunch put up. The red wine was old, but not too old.
“Hungry?”
“I am.”
“You—unpack.”
“Shall I?”
He watched her and between them they spread a cloth; and, as he watched her hands, he thought: “They are young hands. I’ll tell her after lunch. I wonder if she’ll shrink from me? Disease—is so repulsive. I should like to have kissed her—once—without her knowing that I’m rotten fruit. But it wouldn’t have been fair. And perhaps—after all—she doesn’t care and I am fancying things. I must be nearly twenty years older than she is.”
They lunched. The red wine had the warmth of the sun in it and, after the second glass, he began to tell her things about himself and his life, as though she had a right to know them. He was leading up to the stark reality. She was a good listener, perhaps because no other man had interested her as he did. The appeal was not wholly emotional. She could see him sitting in his office chair, what the world called a dull man, doing the same things from day to day and doing them with patient efficiency. He had had sisters to help and a young brother to educate. Yes, work had been his inspiration, until—as he confessed—he had discovered that his work was at an end.
She was surprised. He happened to appear younger to her than he was.
“You have retired?”
He leant over and refilled her glass.
“Life has retired me. I came out here for the first long holiday I have ever had. It had a most strange effect upon me, Una. I realized—oh, well, something had been asleep in me all these years; I had missed things. But in Rome—I woke up.”
She touched the glass with her lips.
“Here’s to your awakening.”
He smiled.
“That’s to—you.”
Her lashes remained a-droop. She was very still.
“To—me?”
“You drink—to yourself. But let me tell you everything. Try and be forbearing——”
She gave him a questioning glance.
“Forbearing? To you——?”
“Wait, my dear. I want to tell you quickly. I came out here—a doomed man. I came just to sit in the sun for a month or two. And then—you happened. Just think, how beautiful and ironical and strange to find the woman—the beloved—just when you are face to face with death.”
She was gazing at him. He saw the glass tilt and some of the red wine spill over upon her dress. She had a strange, poignant, incredulous look. Her eyes seemed to grow larger.
“To die? You?”
He nodded.
“They told me in London that I had only a few months to live. It’s true. Though, sitting here with you in the sunlight—I can hardly believe it——”
He saw her lips move.
“No, let me go right through with it, dear. It’s both so sweet and so bitter. If you could have cared a little—I should have asked. But how could I? It wasn’t fair. You—with your youth—and I—a dying man. And yet—the great thing has been mine. You—appeared to me—just before dusk. But there will be no more Mrs. Pym.”
He did not look at her; he felt that he dared not look, while she, shocked, almost incredulous and a little frightened, sat mute for a moment. What a bewildering, tragic climax! For she had allowed herself to dream during the early days of this Roman spring and—now—there was death in her dream. But with the first heart-pang came compassion, a reaching out of the hand.
“Oh, my dear friend, is it true?”
He grasped her hand and held it for a moment.
“It is true. And here—in the sunlight—I had to tell you. How strange! Perhaps—if it had been otherwise—you could have cared a little.”
She answered him instantly and with a flash of feeling.
“I do care.”
“My dear!”
“Why should you be surprised? But tell me, is it so certain? You look. . . . What is it?”
He touched his throat.
“There. Haven’t you noticed my voice? It may be quite easy for me. I may not have much pain. I shall just shrivel up——”
“Oh, don’t,” she said and her mouth and eyes were tremulous. “It’s too—too tragic. You—of all men.”
His face seemed to catch the sunlight.
“Well, there it is. Forgive me—for being a man. You—just happened. But there is one thing death cannot do. It cannot cheat me of asking you to take a part of me that would have been yours and is yours.”
“You don’t mean——?”
“I mean, Una, that there shall be no more Mrs. Pym, no more strandings. Oh, my dear, you’ll let me do this? There is so little that I can do. I don’t ask for anything.”
“You mean——?”
“Oh, money, dirt—but blessed dirt. I want to go out—seeing you, yourself, free, secure, unhindered. I want to leave you five hundred a year. You are robbing no one. My sisters and my brother will each have something, though they need nothing—now. I’m not a facile fool, my dearest. It’s just my wish, a sacred sort of wish. Will you quarrel with it? I ask you not to quarrel with it.”
“And you ask—for nothing?”
“Nothing. Only—that you’ll try not to feel any shrinking. I shall just go back to England, to finish things. You need not ever see me—when—I’m getting beyond being seen.”
He saw her put down her wine-glass and she did it with a steady hand. She had been holding it all this time. Her face perplexed him. Her young, dark dignity seemed to be taking counsel with itself. Almost, her eyes looked hard. And he wondered and felt a little afraid and, when she got up slowly and stood and gazed, he remained very still, fearing her youth and its fastidiousness. She gave him the impression of being utterly alone with herself for the moment. And suddenly she turned and walked slowly towards a group of cypresses that cut the blue distance of the Campagna.
He watched her with miserable eyes.
“Yes, she shrinks,” he thought. “I must have the smell of death about me. It’s natural.”
And, with the submissive courage of the plain man, he reached for the thermos and poured himself out a cup of coffee.
X
He was replacing the cup of the thermos when he received the impression that she had spoken to him. He glanced towards the group of cypresses. She was leaning against one of the trees, looking at him with peculiar intentness, her eyes like two little circles of shadows. And as he looked at her, he seemed to know that his impression had been both fanciful and real; that she had uttered no sound and yet that her inward self had called to him.
He said: “You have forgotten your coffee.”
She did not reply. Her eyes continued to look at him with that compelling, dark intentness, and he aware of his whole consciousness becoming centred upon her motionless
, young figure. It was as though he saw her as an allegory, a live soul evolved and evolving out of the world’s past, a creature more gracious and sensitive and mysterious than any of the pagan women who had known an emperor’s embraces. He still had the illusion of life in him and yet she was no illusion. Her consciousness called to his.
He rose and went towards her across the grass. He was aware of her leaning against the trunk of the tree like some young priestess in an ecstasy leaning against the pillar of a temple. Her face was upturned. He saw the white of her throat. Her eyes looked straight into his. They never wavered. They gave him a feeling of infinite understanding. They seemed to have the comprehending and tranquillizing softness of a southern sky at night.
Neither of them uttered a word. When he was quite near to her she met him with a little upward movement of the chin, naïve and tender and confiding.
“Kiss me,” it said; “I am not afraid of the death in you—if death it is.”
Very gently he touched her lips with his. He felt the warmth and the youth and the freshness of them. It seemed to him like death touching a flower.
“My dear,” he said, and stood speechless holding her hands.
XI
In the days of old Rome, men drove hard bargains, but the argument between these two was less utilitarian.
She said: “I don’t take everything and give nothing. I’m not that sort of woman. I don’t want to be that sort of woman.”
They had wandered away to a kind of a high cliff of a ruin where the old red brickwork raised a platform above the valley. They sat on the grass in the sun. No one disturbed them, not even the crowd of black-frocked students who drifted about like crows seeking historical carrion. Her love was wide-eyed and brave, almost a young widow’s love and, in listening to her voice, he seemed to hear life and death in argument.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 30
