by George Moore
‘I’ve been in London all my life,’ Dick said, ‘and I haven’t been to the Tower or to St. Paul’s. However, dear, if you’d like to see them we’ll visit all these places together as soon as Chilpéric is produced.’
With this promise he consoled her in a measure, and she watched Dick depart and then took up a novel and read it till she could read no longer. She then went out for a little walk, but soon returned, finding it wearisome to be always asking the way. So forlorn and lost did she seem that even the fat landlady, the mother of the ten children who clattered about the head of the kitchen staircase, took pity upon her and told her the number of the bus that would bring her to the British Museum, assuring her that she would find a great deal there to distract her attention.
It did not matter to her where she went if Dick wasn’t with her; without Dick all places were the same to her, and the British Museum would do as well as any other place. She must go somewhere, and the British Museum would do as well as the Tower or St. Paul’s. There were things to be seen, and she didn’t mind what she saw as long as she saw something new. She couldn’t look any longer at the two pictures on the walls— “With The Stream” and “Against The Stream,” the wax fruit, the mahogany sideboard, the dingy furniture, the torn curtains; and of all she must get out of hearing of the children and the surly landlady, who a few minutes ago was less surly, and had told her of the British Museum, and all the wonderful things that were to be seen there. But she hadn’t the bus fare, and didn’t like to ask the landlady for a few pence. As long as she hadn’t any money she was out of temptation, and it was by her own wish that Dick left her without money. As she walked to and fro she caught sight of his clothes thrown over the back of a chair in the bedroom; and he might have left a few pence in one of his pockets.
She searched the trousers; how careless Dick was: several shillings: one, two, three, four, five. Five and sixpence. She would take sixpence. As she walked out of the bedroom clinking the coppers the desire to read his letters fell upon her, and yielding to it she put her hand into the inside pocket of his coat and drew from it a packet of letters and some papers, manuscripts, poems.
‘Now, who,’ she asked, ‘can have been sending him these Classical Cartoons, number four?’
She read of heroes, the glory of manhood collected along the shores of the terrible river that guards the dominions of Pluto. She knew nothing of Pluto, but recognized the handwriting as a woman’s, and the lines:
‘Zeus, the monarch of heaven, clothed in the form of a
mortal,
Kneeling, caressed and caressing, drank from her lips
joy and love-draughts,’
caused Kate to dash the manuscript from her. A letter accompanied the poem and read:
‘My dear, nothing can be done without you, and if you don’t come at once we shall miss getting a theatre this season, and without a theatre we are helpless.’
Kate did not need to read any more. The letter left no doubt that Dick was engaged in an intrigue with a woman who had written some play or opera which he was going to produce, and the envelope out of which she had taken the letter bore the direction: ‘Richard Lennox, Esq., Post Restante, Margate.’
‘So it was lies all the while at Margate,’ she said to herself, walking about the room, stopping now and again to stare at some object which she did not see. ‘There was no American, and no Chilpéric, no Trône d’Écosse, no L’Oeil Crevé, no La Belle Poule, no Marguerite de Navarre. Lies, lies! Nothing but lies! He never intended to produce one of them, or that I should play “Fredegonde.” Lies! Lies! And the great part in Le Canard à Trois Becs which would establish my reputation in London. Lies! He never intended to produce one of these operas,’ she cried. ‘He shut me up here in this lodging so that I should be out of the way while he carried on with that What’s-her-name.’
Her brain at that instant seemed to catch fire, and snatching up some money from the mantelpiece, she rushed out of the house tumbling over the children as she made her way to the front door without hat or jacket. The sunlight awoke her and she looked round puzzled, and only just escaped being run over by a passing cart. In front of her was a public-house. Drink! She went in and drank till she recovered her reason and began to lose it again.
A ‘bottle of gin, please,’ she said, and put the money on the counter and returned to her lodging almost mad with jealousy and rage and thirst for revenge. ‘No, she wouldn’t drink any more, for if she were to drink any more she’d not be able to have it out with Dick, and this time she would have it out with him and no mistake. If he were to kill her it didn’t matter; but she would have it out with him.’ As she sat by the table waiting hour after hour for him to return, her whole mind was expressed by the words— ‘I’ll have it out with him’ — and she didn’t weary of repeating them, for it seemed to her that they kept her resolution from dying: what she feared most was that his presence might quell her resolution. To have it out with him as she was minded, she mustn’t be drunk, nor yet too sober.
He might bring home a friend with him, but that wouldn’t stay her hand. Montgomery too had deceived her. Dick was rehearsing his opera; he had written music for that Mrs. Forest, and this was the end of their friendship.
Many hours went by, but they didn’t seem long, passion gave her patience. At last a sound of footsteps caused her to start to her feet. It was Dick.
‘This is going to be an all-night affair,’ he said to himself as soon as he crossed the threshold. ‘I hope you didn’t wait supper for me?’ His manner was most conciliatory, and perhaps it was that conciliatory manner that inflamed her.
‘Business, I suppose; I know damned well what your business was: I know all about it, you and your woman, Mrs. Forest; the theatre she’s taken for you; where you are rehearsing Montgomery’s opera. You cannot deny it,’ she cried. ‘Mrs. Forest is her name,’ and reading in his face certain signs of his culpability her anger increased, her teeth were set and her eyes glared.
Dick feared she was going mad, and with an instinctive movement he put out his arms to restrain her.
‘Don’t touch me! don’t touch me!’ she screamed, and struck at him with clenched fists, and then feeling that her blows were but puny she went for him like a bird of prey, all her fingers distended.
‘Take that, and that, and that, you beast! Oh, you beast! you beast! you beast!’
Her shrieks rang through the house as she pursued him round the furniture; he retreating like a lumbering bull striving to escape from her claws.
‘How do you like that?’ she cried, as she tore at him with her nails again. ‘That will teach you to go messing about after other women. I’ll settle you before I’ve done with you.’
Chairs were thrown down, the coal-scuttle was upset, and at last, as Dick tried to get out of the room, Kate stumbled against a rosewood cabinet, sending one of the green vases with its glass shade crashing to the ground, summoning the landlady.
Dick spoke about his wife having had a fit.
‘Fit or no fit, I hope you’ll leave my house to-morrow.’
‘Meanwhile,’ Dick answered, ‘will you leave my room?’ and he shut the door in the face of the indignant householder.
Kate, who had now recovered herself a little, poured out a large glass of raw gin, and to her surprise Dick made no attempt to prevent her drinking it.
‘As soon as she drinks herself helpless the better,’ he thought, as he went into the bedroom to attend to his wounds. The scratches she had given him before their marriage were nothing to these. One side of his nose was well-nigh ripped open, and there were two big, deep gashes running right across his face, from the cheek-bone to his ear. It was very lucky, he thought, she hadn’t had his eye out, and it might be as well to go round to the apothecary’s and get some vaseline, some antiseptic treatment, for nails are poisonous, he added, and his eyes going round the room caught sight of his clothes in disorder. ‘Ah! she has been at my clothes,’ and he took up the classical cartoons and his
letters and put them away into his pocket, and went into the sitting room, and tried to explain to his wife that he was going out to see if he could get something from the apothecary to heal the wounds she had given him.
Kate did not answer. ‘She’s dead drunk,’ he said, and it seemed to him that he couldn’t do better than to undress her and put her into bed, and when he had done this he lay down upon a sofa hoping that he would wake first, and be able to get out of the house without disturbing her, leaving word with the landlady that he would come back as soon as his rehearsal was over, and make arrangements to leave her house since she didn’t wish them to stay any longer. He fell asleep thinking that he might find his landlady in a different mood, and might persuade her in the morning to allow them to stay on. The vase, of course, should be paid for. There was a kindly look in her pleasant country face when she wasn’t angry; his torn face might win her pity, and not wishing to increase his troubles, she would probably allow them to stay on; if she didn’t he would have to find another lodging that very afternoon, which would be unfortunate, for his engagements were many. As it was he’d have to hasten to keep an appointment which he had made with Mrs. Forest in the National Gallery. ‘She really will have to make some alterations in her second act,’ he said, going to the glass. Kate had clawed him with a vengeance, and he’d have to tell Laura how he came by his torn face; and after some consideration it seemed to him that it would be well to admit that he had received these wounds in a conflict with a wife who was, unfortunately, given to drink. It was on these thoughts he fell asleep, and overslept himself, he feared, but Kate was still asleep, and without awakening her he stole downstairs to visit the landlady in her parlour, but hearing his step she bounced out of the room with a view, no doubt, to repeating the warning she had given him overnight, but the sight of his torn face brought pity into hers, and she said:
‘Oh, Mr. Lennox, I’m so sorry for you.’
A little sympathetic conversation followed; and Dick went off to meet Laura, whom he recognized in the woman who leaned over the railings between the pillars, seemingly attracted by the view across Trafalgar Square. She still wore her green silk dress, the one which he had first seen her in on the pier at Hastings, and the long draggled feather boa.
‘She doesn’t spend money on dress,’ he thought as he lifted his hat with not quite the same ceremonious gesture as usual, for he didn’t wish to exhibit his scars yet.
‘So here you are, Dick, and I waiting for you on the steps of this gallery, glorious with all the imaginations of the heroes.’
‘She hasn’t seen the scratches yet,’ he said to himself, and turned from the light instinctively, preferring that she should make the discovery indoors, rather than out of doors. His wounds would appear less in the gallery than in the open air. ‘Why didn’t she take a little more trouble with her make-up?’ he asked himself, and then reproved himself for describing it as a make-up. ‘She’s not made up,’ he said to himself, ‘she’s painted,’ and he wondered how it was that she could plaster her dark skin so flagrantly with carmine, and put her eyebrows so high up in the forehead. ‘Yet the face,’ he said, ’is a finely moulded one, and compelling when she forgets her cosmetics,’ and while Dick regretted that she didn’t show more skill with these, he heard her telling him that she would prefer to stop and talk with him in the gallery devoted to the Italian pictures than elsewhere; ‘the sublime conceptions of Raphael raise me above myself.’ And then, as if afraid that her words would seem vainglorious to Dick, she said: ‘You’re always in the same mood, never rising above yourself or sinking below yourself, finding it difficult to understand the pain that those who live mostly in the spiritual plane experience lest they fall into a lower plane. Not that I regard you, Dick, as a lower plane, but your plane is not mine, and that is why you’re so necessary to me, and why, perhaps, I’m so necessary to you, or would be if I’m not. Come, let us sit here in front of the Raphael and talk, since we must, of comic opera. It’s a pity we’re not talking of the Parcoe who have been in my mind all the morning,’ and she began to recite some verses that she had written. But, interrupting herself suddenly, she cried: ‘Dick, who has been scratching you? How did your face get torn like that — who’s been scratching you?’ and Dick answered:
‘My wife.’
‘Your wife? But you never told me that you were married.’
‘If I’d told you I was married I would have had to tell you that my wife is a drunkard and is rapidly drinking herself to death, a thing that no man likes to speak about.’
‘My poor friend, I didn’t mean to reprove you. How did all this come about?’
It wouldn’t do to admit that Kate had discovered Laura’s letters and poems in his pockets, and so he told the story of a former experience with his wife, and had barely finished it when Laura begged of him to tell her how he had met his wife. And when he had told her the story, to which she listened solemnly, she answered, and there was the same gravity in her voice as in her face: ‘All this comes, my dear Dick, of lewdness.’
‘But, Laura, I was faithful to my wife.’
‘But she was the wife of another man,’ Laura replied, ‘not that that is an insuperable barrier, but you brought, I fear, lewdness into your conjugal life, and lewdness is fatal to happiness whether it be indulged within or outside the bonds of wedlock. I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that you had to leave Yarmouth before my lecture on the chastity of the marriage state.’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Dick replied, ‘for my wife had taken to drink long before we met at Hastings.’ An answer that darkened Laura’s face despite all the paint she wore, and encouraged Dick to ask her if she had never felt the thorns of passion prick her when she ran away from her convent school.
She seemed uncertain what answer she should return, but only for a moment; and recovering herself quickly she maintained that it wasn’t passion, which is but another name for lewdness, but imagination that had prompted this elopement, and that if she had gone to Bulgaria it was to seek there a nobler life than the one she had left behind.
‘It was the immortal that drew me,’ she said.
‘Even so,’ Dick answered, ‘the mortal seems necessary for the immortal, and to provide him with a habitation a woman must give herself to a man.’
‘That,’ she replied, ’is one of the penalties entailed by our first parents upon women, but one that is entailed upon a condition that you have not respected, but which I have striven always to respect myself. It would be impossible for me to give myself to a man unless I thought I was going to bear him a child.’
It was on Dick’s lips to remind Laura that a woman can always think she is going to bear a child, but he refrained, it seeming to him that his purpose would be better served by allowing Laura to justify herself as she pleased, and he waited for an opportunity to speak to her about the alteration which he deemed altogether necessary in the second act. But Laura was away on her favourite theme, and in the end he had recourse to his watch.
