“Oh, Esther—curiosity!”
“No, not mere curiosity. Don’t you see if it is my Mrs. Arne who talked to you like this, it is very serious? I have thought her ill for a long time; but as ill as that—”
At St. Adhelm’s Church, Esther Graham pointed out a woman who was kneeling beside a pillar in an attitude of intense devotion and abandonment. She rose from her knees, and turned her rapt face up towards the pulpit whence the Reverend Ralph Bligh was holding his impassioned discourse. George Graham touched his cousin on the shoulder, and motioned to her to leave her place on the outermost rank of worshippers.
“That is the woman!” said he.
IV
“Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne.” The doctor came across this note in his blotting-pad one day six weeks later. His daughter was out of town. He had heard nothing of the Arnes since her departure. He had promised to go and see her. He was a little conscience-stricken. Yet another week elapsed before he found time to call upon the daughter of his old tutor.
At the corner of Tite Street he met Mrs. Arne’s husband, and stopped. A doctor’s professional kindliness of manner is, or ought to be, independent of his personal likings and dislikings, and there was a pleasant cordiality about his greeting which should have provoked a corresponding fervour on the part of Edward Arne.
“How are you, Arne?” Graham said. “I was on my way to call on your wife.”
“Ah—yes!” said Edward Arne, with the ascending inflection of polite acquiescence. A ray of blue from his eyes rested transitorily on the doctor’s face, and in that short moment the latter noted its intolerable vacuity, and for the first time in his life he felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the wife of such a husband.
“I suppose you are off to your club?—er—good bye!” he wound up abruptly. With the best will in the world he somehow found it almost impossible to carry on a conversation with Edward Arne, who raised his hand to his hat-brim in token of salutation, smiled sweetly, and walked on.
“He really is extraordinarily good-looking,” reflected the doctor, as he watched him down the street and safely over the crossing with a certain degree of solicitude for which he could not exactly account. “And yet one feels one’s vitality ebbing out at the finger-ends as one talks to him. I shall begin to believe in Esther’s absurd fancies bout him soon. Ah, there’s the little girl!” he exclaimed, as he turned into Cheyne Walk and caught sight of her with her nurse, making violent demonstrations to attract his attention. “She is alive, at any rate. How is your mother, Dolly?” he asked.
“Quite well, thank you,” was the child’s reply. She added, “She’s crying. She sent me away because I looked at her. So I did. Her cheeks are quite red.”
“Run away—run away and play!” said the doctor nervously. He ascended the steps of the house, and rang the bell very gently and neatly.
“Not at—” began Foster, with the intonation of polite falsehood, but stopped on seeing the doctor, who, with his daughter, was a privileged person. “Mrs. Arne will see you, Sir.”
“Mrs. Arne is not alone?” he said interrogatively.
“Yes, Sir, quite alone. I have just taken tea in.”
Dr. Graham’s doubts were prompted by the low murmur as of a voice, or voices, which came to him through the open door of the room at the head of the stairs. He paused and listened while Foster stood by, merely remarking, “Mrs. Arne do talk to herself sometimes, Sir.”
It was Mrs. Arne’s voice—the doctor recognised it now. It was not the voice of a sane or healthy woman. He at once mentally removed his visit from the category of a morning call, and prepared for a semi-professional inquiry.
“Don’t announce me,” he said to Foster, and quietly entered the back drawing-room, which was separated by a heavy tapestry portière from the room where Mrs. Arne sat, with an open book on the table before her, from which she had been apparently reading aloud. Her hands were now clasped tightly over her face, and when, presently, she removed them and began feverishly to turn page after page of her book, the crimson of her cheeks was seamed with white where her fingers had impressed themselves.
The doctor wondered if she saw him, for though her eyes were fixed in his direction, there was no apprehension in them. She went on reading, and it was the text, mingled with passionate interjection and fragmentary utterances, of the Burial Service that met his ears.
“‘For as in Adam all die!’ All die! It says all! For he must reign . . . The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. What shall they do if the dead rise not at all! . . . I die daily! . . . Daily! No, no, better get it over . . . dead and buried . . . out of sight, out of mind . . . under a stone. Dead men don’t come back . . . Go on! Get it over. I want to hear the earth rattle on the coffin, and then I shall know it is done. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit!” Oh, what did I do? What have I done? Why did I wish it so fervently? Why did I pray for it so earnestly? God gave me my wish—”
“Alice! Alice!” groaned the doctor.
She looked up. “‘When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption—’ ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth—’ Yes, that is it. ‘After death, though worms destroy this body—’”
She flung the book aside and sobbed.
“That is what I was afraid of. My God! My God! Down there—in the dark—for ever and ever and ever! I could not bear to think of it! My Edward! And so I interfered . . . and prayed . . . and prayed till . . . Oh! I am punished. Flesh and blood could not inherit! I kept him there—I would not let him go . . . I kept him . . . I prayed . . . I denied him Christian burial. . . . Oh, how could I know. . . .”
“Good heavens, Alice!” said Graham, coming sensibly forward, “what does this mean? I have heard of schoolgirls going through the marriage service by themselves, but the burial service—”
He laid down his hat and went on severely, “What have you to do with such things? Your child is flourishing—your husband alive and here—”
“And who kept him here?” interrupted Alice Arne fiercely, accepting the fact of his appearance without comment.
“You did,” he answered quickly, “with your care and tenderness. I believe the warmth of your body, as you lay beside him for that halfhour, maintained the vital heat during that extraordinary suspension of the heart’s action, which made us all give him up for dead. You were his best doctor, and brought him back to us.”
“Yes, it was I—it was I—you need not tell me it was I!”
“Come, be thankful!” he said cheerfully. “Put that book away, and give me some tea, I’m very cold.”
“Oh, Dr. Graham, how thoughtless of me!” said Mrs. Arne, rallying at the slight imputation on her politeness he had purposely made. She tottered to the bell and rang it before he could anticipate her.
“Another cup,” she said quite calmly to Foster, who answered it. Then she sat down quivering all over with the suddenness of the constraint put upon her.
“Yes, sit down and tell me all about it,” said Dr. Graham good-humouredly, at the same time observing her with the closeness he gave to difficult cases.
“There is nothing to tell,” she said simply, shaking her head, and futilely altering the position of the tea-cups on the tray. “It all happened years ago. Nothing can be done now. Will you have sugar?”
He drank his tea and made conversation. He talked to her of some Dante lectures she was attending; of some details connected with her child’s Kindergarten classes. These subjects did not interest her. There was a subject she wished to discuss, he could see that a question trembled on her tongue, and tried to lead up to it.
She introduced it herself, quite quietly, over a second cup. “Sugar, Dr. Graham? I forget. Dr. Graham, tell me, do you believe that prayers—wicked unreasonable prayers—are granted?”
He helped himself to another slice of bread and butter before answering.
“Well,” he said slowly, “it seems hard to believe that every fool who has a voice to pray with, and a brain where to con
ceive idiotic requests with, should be permitted to interfere with the economy of the universe. As a rule, if people were long-sighted enough to see the result of their petitions, I fancy very few of us would venture to interfere.”
Mrs. Arne groaned.
She was a good Churchwoman, Graham knew, and he did not wish to sap her faith in any way, so he said no more, but inwardly wondered if a too rigid interpretation of some of the religious dogmas of the Vicar of St. Adhelm’s, her spiritual adviser, was not the clue to her distress. Then she put another question—“Eh! What?” he said. “Do I believe in ghosts? I will believe you if you will tell me you have seen one.”
“You know, Doctor,” she went on, “I was always afraid of ghosts—of spirits—things unseen. I couldn’t ever read about them. I could not bear the idea of some one in the room with me that I could not see. There was a text that always frightened me that hung up in my room: ‘Thou, God, seest me!’ It frightened me when I was a child, whether I had been doing wrong or not. But now,” shuddering, “I think there are worse things than ghosts.”
“Well, now, what sort of things?” he asked good-humouredly. “Astral bodies—?”
She leaned forward and laid her hot hand on his.
“Oh, Doctor, tell me, if a spirit—without the body we know it by—is terrible, what of a body”—her voice sank to a whisper, “a body—senseless—lonely—stranded on this earth—without a spirit?”
She was watching his face anxiously. He was divided between a morbid inclination to laugh and the feeling of intense discomfort provoked by this wretched scene. He longed to give the conversation a more cheerful turn, yet did not wish to offend her by changing it too abruptly.
“I have heard of people not being able to keep body and soul together,” he replied at last, “but I am not aware that practically such a division of forces has ever been achieved. And if we could only accept the theory of the de-spiritualised body, what a number of antipathetic people now wandering about in the world it would account for!”
The piteous gaze of her eyes seemed to seek to ward off the blow of his misplaced jocularity.
He left his seat and sat down on the couch beside her.
“Poor child! poor girl! you are ill, you are over-excited. What is it? Tell me,” he asked her as tenderly as the father she had lost in early life might have done. Her head sank on his shoulder.
“Are you unhappy?” he asked her gently.
“Yes!”
“You are too much alone. Get your mother or your sister to come and stay with you.”
“They won’t come,” she wailed. “They say the house is like a grave. Edward has made himself a study in the basement. It’s an impossible room—but he has moved all his things in, and I can’t—I won’t go to him there. . . .”
“You’re wrong. For it’s only a fad,” said Graham, “he’ll tire of it. And you must see more people somehow. It’s a pity my daughter is away. Had you any visitors today?”
“Not a soul has crossed the threshold for eighteen days.”
“We must change all that,” said the doctor vaguely. “Meantime you must cheer up. Why, you have no need to think of ghosts and graves—no need to be melancholy—you have your husband and your child—”
“I have my child—yes.”
The doctor took hold of Mrs. Arne by the shoulder and held her a little away from him. He thought he had found the cause of her trouble—a more commonplace one than he had supposed.
“I have known you, Alice, since you were a child,” he said gravely. “Answer me! You love your husband, don’t you?”
“Yes.” It was as if she were answering futile prefatory questions in the witness-box. Yet he saw by the intense excitement in her eyes that he had come to the point she feared, and yet desired to bring forward.
“And he loves you?”
She was silent.
“Well, then, if you love each other, what more can you want? Why do you say you have only your child in that absurd way?”
She was still silent, and he gave her a little shake.
“Tell me, have you and he had any difference lately? Is there any—coldness—any—temporary estrangement between you?”
He was hardly prepared for the burst of foolish laughter that proceeded from the demure Mrs. Arne as she rose and confronted him, all the blood in her body seeming for the moment to rush to her usually pale cheeks.
“Coldness! Temporary estrangement! If that were all! Oh, is every one blind but me? There is all the world between us!—all the difference between this world and the next!”
She sat down again beside the doctor and whispered in his ear, and her words were like a breath of hot wind from some Gehenna of the soul.
“Oh, Doctor, I have borne it for six years, and I must speak. No other woman could bear what I have borne, and yet be alive! And I loved him so; you don’t know how I loved him! That was it—that was my crime—”
“Crime?” repeated the doctor.
“Yes, crime! It was impious, don’t you see? But I have been punished. Oh, Doctor, you don’t know what my life is! Listen! Listen! I must tell you. To live with a—At first before I guessed when I used to put my arms round him, and he merely submitted—and then it dawned on me what I was kissing! It is enough to turn a living woman into stone—for I am living, though sometimes I forget it. Yes, I am a live woman, though I live in a grave. Think what it is!—to wonder every night if you will be alive in the morning, to lie down every night in an open grave—to smell death in every corner—every room—to breathe death—to touch it. . . .”
The portière in front of the door shook, a hoopstick parted it, a round white clad bundle supported on a pair of mottled red legs peeped in, pushing a hoop in front of her. The child made no noise. Mrs. Arne seemed to have heard her, however. She slewed round violently as she sat on the sofa beside Dr. Graham, leaving her hot hands clasped in his.
“You ask Dolly,” she exclaimed. “She knows it, too—she feels it.”
“No, no, Alice, this won’t do!” the doctor adjured her very low. Then he raised his voice and ordered the child from the room. He had managed to lift Mrs. Arne’s feet and laid her full length on the sofa by the time the maid reappeared. She had fainted.
He pulled down her eyelids and satisfied himself as to certain facts he had up till now dimly apprehended. When Mrs. Arne’s maid returned, he gave her mistress over to her care and proceeded to Edward Arne’s new study in the basement.
“Morphia!” he muttered to himself, as he stumbled and faltered through gaslit passages, where furtive servants eyed him and scuttled to their burrows.
“What is he burying himself down here for?” he thought. “Is it to get out of her way? They are a nervous pair of them!”
Arne was sunk in a large arm-chair drawn up before the fire. There was no other light, except a faint reflection from the gas-lamp in the road, striking down past the iron bars of the window that was sunk below the level of the street. The room was comfortless and empty, there was little furniture in it except a large bookcase at Arne’s right hand and a table with a Tantalus on it standing some way off. There was a faded portrait in pastel of Alice Arne over the mantelpiece, and beside it, a poor pendant, a pen and ink sketch of the master of the house. They were quite discrepant, in size and medium, but they appeared to look at each other with the stolid attentiveness of newly married people.
“Seedy, Arne?” Graham said.
“Rather, today. Poke the fire for me, will you?”
“I’ve known you quite seven years,” said the doctor cheerfully, “so I presume I can do that . . . There, now! . . . And I’ll presume further—What have we got here?”
He took a small bottle smartly out of Edward Arne’s fingers and raised his eyebrows. Edward Arne had rendered it up agreeably; he did not seem upset or annoyed.
“Morphia. It isn’t a habit. I only got hold of the stuff yesterday—found it about the house. Alice was very jumpy all day, and communicated her ne
rves to me, I suppose. I’ve none as a rule, but do you know, Graham, I seem to be getting them—feel things a good deal more than I did, and want to talk about them.”
“What, are you growing a soul?” said the doctor carelessly, lighting a cigarette.
“Heaven forbid!” Arne answered equably. “I’ve done very well without it all these years. But I’m fond of old Alice, you know, in my own way. When I was a young man, I was quite different. I took things hardly and got excited about them. Yes, excited. I was wild about Alice, wild! Yes, by Jove! though she has forgotten all about it.”
“Not that, but still it’s natural she should long for some little demonstration of affection now and then . . . and she’d be awfully distressed if she saw you fooling with a bottle of morphia! You know, Arne, after that narrow squeak you had of it six years ago, Alice and I have a good right to consider that your life belongs to us!”
Edward Arne settled in his chair and replied, rather fretfully—
“All very well, but you didn’t manage to do the job thoroughly. You didn’t turn me out lively enough to please Alice. She’s annoyed because when I take her in my arms, I don’t hold her tight enough. I’m too quiet, too languid! . . . Hang it all, Graham, I believe she’d like me to stand for Parliament! . . . Why can’t she let me just go along my own way? Surely a man who’s come through an illness like mine can be let off parlour tricks? All this worry—it culminated the other day when I said I wanted to colonise a room down here, and did, with a spurt that took it out of me horribly,—all this worry, I say, seeing her upset and so on, keeps me low, and so I feel as if I wanted to take drugs to soothe me.”
“Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and I’ll take this away, by your leave.”
“I really can’t argue!” replied Arne. “If you see Alice, tell her you find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell her. . . . I feel as if I wanted to sleep. . . .” he added brusquely.
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