下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Mrs. Hilary hated travelling, which is indeed detestable. The Channel was choppy and she a bad sailor; the train from Calais to Paris continued the motion, and she remained a bad sailor (bad sailors often do this). She lay back and smelled salts, and they were of no avail. At Paris she tried and failed to dine. She passed a wretched night, being of those who detest nights in trains without wagons-lits , but save money by not having wagons-lits , and wonder dismally all night if it is worth it. Modane in the chilly morning annoyed her as it annoys us all. The customs people were rude and the other travellers in the way. Mrs. Hilary, who was not good in crowds, pushed them, getting excited and red in the face. Psycho-analysis had made her more patient and calm than she had been before, but even so, neither patient nor calm when it came to jostling crowds.
"I am not strong enough for all this," she thought, in the Mont Cenis tunnel.
Rushing out of it into Italy, she thought, "Last time I was here was in '99, with Richard. If Richard were here now he would help me." He would face the customs at Modane, find and get the tickets, deal with uncivil Germans—(Germans were often uncivil to Mrs. Hilary and she to them, and though she had not met any yet on this journey, owing doubtless to their state of collapse and depression consequent on the Great Peace, one might get in at any moment, Germans being naturally buoyant). Richard would have got hold of pillows, seen that she was comfortable at night, told her when there was time to get out for coffee and when there wasn't (Mrs. Hilary was no hand at this; she would try no runs and get run out, or all but run out). And Richard would have helped to save Nan. Nan and her father had got on pretty well, for a naughty girl and an elderly parent. They had appreciated one another's brains, which is not a bad basis. They had not accepted or even liked one another's ideas on life, but this is not necessary or indeed usual in families. Mrs. Hilary certainly did not go so far as to suppose that Nan would have obeyed her father had he appeared before her in Rome and bidden her change her way of life, but she might have thought it over. And to make Nan think over anything which she bade her do would be a phenomenal task. What had Mr. Cradock said—make her remember her first disobedience, find the cause of it, talk it out with her, get it into the open—and then she would be cured of her present lawlessness. Why? That was the connection that always puzzled Mrs. Hilary a little. Why should remembering that you had done, and why you had done, the same kind of thing thirty years ago cure you of doing it now? Similarly, why should remembering that a nurse had scared you as an infant cure you of your present fear of burglars? In point of fact, it didn't. Mr. Cradock had tried this particular cure on Mrs. Hilary. It must be her own fault, of course, but somehow she had not felt much less nervous about noises in the house at night since Mr. Cradock had brought up into the light, as he called it, that old fright in the nursery. After all, why should one? However, hers not to reason why; and perhaps the workings of Nan's mind might be more orthodox.
At Turin Germans got in. Of course. They were all over Italy. Italy was welcoming them with both hands, establishing again the economic entente. These were a mother and a backfisch , and they looked shyly and sullenly at Mrs. Hilary and the other English-woman in the compartment. They were thin, and Mrs. Hilary noted it with satisfaction. She didn't believe for one moment in starving Germans, but these certainly did not look so prosperous and buxom as a pre-war German mother and backfisch would have looked. They were equally uncivil, though. They pulled both windows up to the top. The two English ladies promptly pulled them down half-way. English ladies are the only beings in the world who like open windows in winter. English lower-class women do not, nor do English gentlemen. If you want to keep warm while travelling (to frowst, as the open air school calls it) do not get in with well-bred Englishwomen.
The German mother broke out in angry remonstrance, indicating that she had neuralgia and the backfisch a cold in the head. There followed one of those quarrels which occur on this topic in trains, and are so bitter and devastating. It had now more than the pre-war bitterness; between the combatants flowed rivers of blood; behind them ranked male relatives killed or maimed by the male relatives of their foes on the opposite seat. The English ladies won. Germany was a conquered race, and knew it. In revenge, the backfisch coughed and sneezed "all over the carriage," as Mrs. Hilary put it, "in the disgusting German way," and her mother made noises as if she could be sick if she tried hard enough.
So it was a detestable journey. And the second night in the train was worse than the first. For the Germans, would you believe it, shut both windows while the English were asleep, and the English, true to their caste and race, woke with bad headaches.
When they got to Rome in the morning Mrs. Hilary felt thoroughly ill. She had to strive hard for self-control; it would not do to meet Nan in an unnerved, collapsed state. All her psychical strength was necessary to deal with Nan. So when she stood on the platform with her luggage she looked and felt not only like one who has slept (but not much) in a train for two nights and fought with Germans about windows but also like an elderly virgin martyr (spiritually tense and strung-up, and distraught, and on the line between exultation and hysteria).
Nan was there. Nan, pale and pinched, and looking plain in the nipping morning air, though wrapped in a fur coat. (One of the points about Nan was that, though she sometimes looked plain, she never looked dowdy; there was always a distinction, a chic, about her.)
Nan kissed her mother and helped with the luggage and got a cab. Nan was good at railway stations and such places. Mrs. Hilary was not.
They drove out into the hideous new streets. Mrs. Hilary shivered.
"Oh, how ugly!"
"Rome is ugly, this part."
"It's worse since '99."
But she did not really remember clearly how it had looked in '99. The old desire to pose, to show that she knew something, took her. Yet she felt that Nan, who knew that she knew next to nothing, would not be deceived.
"Oh ... the Forum!"
"The Forum of Trajan," Nan said. "We don't pass the Roman Forum on the way to our street."
"The Forum of Trajan, of course, I meant that."
But she knew that Nan knew she had meant the Forum Romanum.
"Rome is always Rome," she said, which was safer than identifying particular buildings, or even Forums, in it. "Nothing like it anywhere."
"How long can you stay, mother? I've got you a room in the house I'm lodging in. It's in a little street the other side of the Corso. Rather a mediæval street, I'm afraid. That is, it smells. But the rooms are clean."
"Oh, I'm not staying long.... We'll talk later; talk it all out. A thorough talk. When we get in. After a cup of tea...."
Mrs. Hilary remembered that Nan did not yet know why she had come. After a cup of strong tea.... A cup of tea first.... Coffee wasn't the same. One needed tea, after those awful Germans. She told Nan about these. Nan knew that she would have had tiresome travelling companions; she always did; if it weren't Germans it would be inconsiderate English. She was unlucky.
"Go straight to bed and rest when we get in," Nan advised; but she shook her head. "We must talk first."
Nan, she thought, looked pinched about the lips, and thin, and her black brows were at times nervous and sullen. Nan did not look happy. Was it guilt, or merely the chill morning air?
They stopped at a shabby old house in a narrow mediæval street in the Borgo, which had been a palace and was now let in apartments. Here Nan had two bare, gilded, faded rooms. Mrs. Hilary sat by a charcoal stove in one of them, and Nan made her some tea. After the tea Mrs. Hilary felt revived. She wouldn't go to bed; she felt that the time for the talk had come. She looked round the room for signs of Stephen Lumley, but all the signs she saw were of Nan; Nan's books, Nan's proofs strewing the table. Of course that bad man wouldn't come while she was there. He was no doubt waiting eagerly for her to be gone. Probably they both were....
"Nan—" They were still sitting by the stove, and Nan was lighting a cigarette. "Nan—do you guess why I've come?"
Nan threw away the match.
"No, mother. How should I?... One does come to Rome, I suppose, if one gets a chance."
"Oh, I've not come to see Rome. I know Rome. Long before you were born.... I've come to see you. And to take you back with me."
Nan glanced at her quickly, a sidelong glance of suspicion and comprehension. Her lower lip projected stubbornly.
"Ah, I see you know what I mean. Yes, I've heard. Rumours reached us—it was through Rosalind, of course. And I'm afraid ... I'm afraid that for once she spoke the truth."
"Oh no, she didn't. I don't know what Rosalind's been saying this time, but it would be odd if it was the truth."
"Nan, it's no use denying things. I know ."
It was true; she did know. A few months ago she would have doubted and questioned; but Mr. Cradock had taught her better. She had learnt from him the simple truth about life; that is, that nearly everyone is nearly always involved up to the eyes in the closest relationship with someone of another sex. It is nature's way with mankind. Another thing she had learnt from him was that the more they denied it the more it was so; protests of innocence and admissions of guilt were alike proofs of the latter. So she was accurate when she said that it was no use for Nan to deny anything. It was no use whatever.
Nan had become cool and sarcastic—her nastiest, most dangerous manner.
"Do you think you would care to be a little more explicit, mother? I'm afraid I don't quite follow. What is it no use my denying? What do you know?"
Mrs. Hilary gathered herself together. Her head trembled and jerked with emotion; wisps of her hair, tousled by the night, escaped over her collar. She spoke tremulously, tensely, her hands wrung together.
"That you are going on with a married man. That you are his mistress," she said, putting it at its crudest, since Nan wanted plain speaking.
Nan sat quite still, smoking. The silence thrilled with Mrs. Hilary's passion.
"I see," Nan said at last. "And it's no use my denying it. In that case I won't." Her voice was smooth and clear and still, like cold water. "You know the man's name too, I presume?"
"Of course. Everyone knows it. I tell you, Nan, everyone's talking of you and him. A town topic, Rosalind calls it."
"Rosalind would. Town must be very dull just now, if that's all they have to talk of."
"But it's not the scandal I'm thinking of," Mrs. Hilary went on, "though, God knows, that's bad enough—I'm thankful Father died when he did and was spared it—but the thing itself. The awful, awful thing itself. Have you no shame, Nan?"
"Not much."
"For all our sakes. Not for mine—I know you don't care a rap for that—but for Neville, whom you do profess to love...."
"I should think we might leave Neville out of it. She's shown no signs of believing any story about me."
"Well, she does believe it, you may depend upon it. No one could help it. People write from here saying it's an open fact."
"People here can't have much to put in their letters."
"Oh, they'll make room for gossip. People always will. Always. But I'm not going to dwell on that side of things, because I know you don't care what anyone says. It's the wrongness of it.... A married man.... Even if his wife divorces him! It would be in the papers.... And if she doesn't you can't ever marry him.... Do you care for the man?"
"What man?"
"Don't quibble. Stephen Lumley, of course."
"Stephen Lumley is a friend of mine. I'm fond of him."
"I don't believe you do love him. I believe it's all recklessness and perversity. Lawlessness. That's what Mr. Cradock said."
"Mr. Cradock?" Nan's eyebrows went up.
Mrs. Hilary flushed a brighter scarlet. The colour kept running over her face and going back again, all the time she was talking.
"Your psycho-analyst doctor," said Nan, and her voice was a little harder and cooler than before. "I suppose you had an interesting conversation with him about me."
"I have to tell him everything," Mrs. Hilary stammered. "It's part of the course. I did consult him about you. I'm not ashamed of it. He understands about these things. He's not an ordinary man."
"This is very interesting." Nan lit another cigarette. "It seems that I've been a boon all round as a town topic—to London, to Rome and to St. Mary's Bay.... Well, what did he advise about me?"
Mrs. Hilary remembered vaguely and in part, but did not think it would be profitable just now to tell Nan.
"We have to be very wise about this," she said, collecting herself. "Very wise and firm. Lawlessness.... I wonder if you remember, Nan, throwing your shoes at my head when you were three?"
"No. But I can quite believe I did. It was the sort of thing I used to do."
"Think back, Nan. What is the first act of naughtiness and disobedience you remember, and what moved you to it?"
Nan, who knew a good deal more about psycho-analysis than Mrs. Hilary did, laughed curtly.
"No good, mother. That won't work on me. I'm not susceptible to the treatment. Too hard-headed. What was Mr. Cradock's next brain-wave?"
"Oh well, if you take it like this, what's the use...."
"None at all. I advise you not to bother yourself. It will only make your headache worse.... Now I think after all this excitement you had better go and lie down, don't you? I'm going out, anyhow."
Then Stephen Lumley knocked at the door and came in. A tall, slouching hollow-chested man of forty, who looked unhappy and yet cynically amused at the world. He had a cough, and unusually bright eyes under overhanging brows.
Nan said, "This is Stephen Lumley, mother. My mother, Stephen," and left them to do the rest, watching, critical and aloof, to see how they would manage the situation.
Mrs. Hilary managed it by rising from her chair and standing rigidly in the middle of the room, breathing hard and staring. Stephen Lumley looked enquiringly at Nan.
"How do you do, Mrs. Hilary," he said. "I expect you're pretty well played out by that beastly journey, aren't you."
Mrs. Hilary's voice came stifled, choked, between pants. She was working up; or rather worked up: Nan knew the symptoms.
"You dare to come into my presence.... I must ask you to leave my daughter's sitting-room immediately . I have come to take her back to England with me at once. Please go. There is nothing that can possibly be said between you and me—nothing."
Stephen Lumley, a cool and quiet person, raised his brows, looked enquiry once more at Nan, found no answer, said, "Well, then, I'll say good-bye," and departed.
Mrs. Hilary wrung her hands together.
"How dare he! How dare he! Into my very presence! He has no shame...."
Nan watched her coolly. But a red spot had begun to burn in each cheek at her mother's opening words to Lumley, and still burned. Mrs. Hilary knew of old that still-burning, deadly anger of Nan's.
"Thank you, mother. You've helped me to make up my mind. I'm going to Capri with Stephen next week. I've refused up till now. He was going without me. You've made up my mind for me. You can tell Mr. Cradock that if he asks."
Nan was fiercely, savagely desirous to hurt. In the same spirit she had doubtless thrown her shoes at Mrs. Hilary thirty years ago. Rage and disgust, hot rebellion and sick distaste—what she had felt then she felt now. During her mother's breathless outbreak at Stephen Lumley, standing courteous and surprised before her, she had crossed her Rubicon. And now with flaming words she burned her boats.
Mrs. Hilary burst into tears. But her tears had never yet quenched Nan's flames. Nan made her lie down and gave her sal volatile. Sal volatile eases the head and nervous system and composes the manners, but no more than tears does it quench flames.
The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life often does not. Nan took Mrs. Hilary out to lunch at a trattoria near the Forum, as it were to change the subject, and they spent the usual first afternoon of visitors in Rome, who hasten to view the Forum with a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands. Mrs. Hilary felt completely uninterested to-day in recent or any other excavations. But, obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather) not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley, Capri, returning to England, and her infant acts of wilfulness, whenever her mother opened them, which was frequently, as Mrs. Hilary found these things easier conversational topics than the buildings in the Forum. Nan was determined to keep the emotional pressure low for the rest of the day, and she was fairly competent at this when she tried. As Mrs. Hilary had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest. When she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out. The Forum is tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring; travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.
However, they had tea.
Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical. Nan, who was living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the differences between the Forum in '99 and the Forum to-day (a subject on which Mrs. Hilary was hazy) was not fit, until she came to a better mind, to be spoken to. Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tight and averted her reddened eyes. She hated Nan just now. She could have loved her had she been won to repentance, but now—"Nan was never like the rest," she thought.
Nan persisted in making light, equable conversation, which Mrs. Hilary thought in bad taste. She talked of England and the family, asked after Grandmama, Neville and the rest.
"Neville is extremely ill," Mrs. Hilary said, quite untruly, but that was, to do her justice, the way in which she always saw illness, particularly Neville's. "And worried to death about Gerda, who seems to have gone off her head since that accident in Cornwall. She is still sticking to that insane, wicked notion about not getting married."
Nan had heard before of this.
"She'll give that up," she said, coolly, "when she finds she really can't have Barry if she doesn't. Gerda gets what she wants."
"Oh, you all do that, the whole lot of you.... And a nice example you're setting the child."
"She'll give it up," Nan repeated, keeping the conversation on Gerda. "Gerda hasn't the martyr touch. She won't perish for a principle. She wants Barry and she'll have him, though she may hold out for a time. Gerda doesn't lose things, in the end."
"She's a very silly child, and I suppose she's been mixing with dreadful friends and picked up these ideas. At twenty there's some excuse for ignorant foolishness." But none at thirty-three, Mrs. Hilary meant.
"Barry Briscoe," she added, "is being quite firm about it. Though he is desperately in love with her, Neville tells me; desperately."
He's soon got over you, even if he did care for you once, and even if you did send him away, her emphasis implied.
In Nan, casually flicking the ash off her cigarette, a queer impulse came and went. For a moment she wanted to cry; to drop hardness and lightness and pretence, and cry like a child and say "Mother, comfort me. Don't go on hurting me. I love Barry. Be kind to me, oh be kind to me!"
If she had done it, Mrs. Hilary would have taken her in her arms and been all mother, and the wound in their affection would have been temporarily healed.
Nan said nonchalantly "I suppose he is. They're sure to be all right.... Now what next, mother? It's getting dark for seeing things."
"I am tired to death," said Mrs. Hilary. "I shall go back to those dreadful rooms and try to rest.... It has been an awful day.... I hate Rome. In '99 it was so different. Father and I went about together; he showed me everything. He knew about it all. Besides...."
Besides, how could I enjoy sight-seeing after that scene this morning, and with this awful calamity that has happened?
They went back. Mrs. Hilary was desperately missing her afternoon hour with Mr. Cradock. She had come to rely on it on a Wednesday.
Nan sat up late, correcting proofs, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed. Galleys lay all round her on the floor by the stove. She let them slip from her knee and lie there. She hated them....
She pressed her hands over her eyes, shutting them out, shutting out life. She was going off with Stephen Lumley. She had told him so this morning. Both their lives were broken; hers by Barry, whom she loved, his by his wife, whom he disliked. He loved her; he wanted her. She could with him find relief, find life a tolerable thing. They could have a good time together. They were good companions; their need, though dissimilar, was mutual. They saw the same beauty, spoke the same tongue, laughed at the same things. In the very thought of Stephen, with his cynical humour, his clear, keen mind, his lazy power of brain, Nan had found relief all that day, reacting desperately from a mind fuddled with sentiment and emotion as with drink, a soft, ignorant brain, which knew and cared about nothing except people, a hysterical passion of anger and malice. They had pushed her sharply and abruptly over the edge of decision, that mind and brain and passion. Stephen, against whom their fierce anger was concentrated, was so different....
To get away, to get right away from everything and everyone, with Stephen. Not to have to go back to London alone, to see what she could not, surely, bear to see—Barry and Gerda, Gerda and Barry, always, everywhere, radiant and in love. And Neville, Gerda's mother, who saw so much. And Rosalind, who saw everything, everything, and said so. And Mrs. Hilary....
To saunter round the queer, lovely corners of the earth with Stephen, light oneself by Stephen's clear, flashing mind, look after Stephen's weak, neglected body as he never could himself ... that was the only anodyne. Life would then some time become an adventure again, a gay stroll through the fair, instead of a desperate sickness and nightmare.
Barry, oh Barry.... Nan, who had thought she was getting better, found that she was not. Tears stormed and shook her at last. She crumpled up on the floor among the galley-slips, her head upon the chair.
Those damned proofs—who wanted them? What were books? What was anything?
Mrs. Hilary came in, in her dressing-gown, red-eyed. She had heard strangled sounds, and knew that her child was crying.
"My darling!"
Her arms were round Nan's shoulders; she was kneeling among the proofs.
"My little girl—Nan!"
"Mother...."
They held each other close. It was a queer moment, though not an unprecedented one in the stormy history of their relations together. A queer, strange, comforting, healing moment, the fleeting shadow of a great rock in a barren land; a strayed fragment of something which should have been between them always but was not. Certainly an odd moment.
"My own baby.... You're unhappy...."
"Unhappy—yes.... Darling mother, it can't be helped. Nothing can be helped.... Don't let's talk ... darling."
Strange words from Nan. Strange for Mrs. Hilary to feel her hand held against Nan's wet cheek and kissed.
Strange moment: and it could not last. The crying child wants its mother; the mother wants to comfort the crying child. A good bridge, but one inadequate for the strain of daily traffic. The child, having dried its tears, watches the bridge break again, and thinks it a pity but inevitable. The mother, less philosophic, may cry in her turn, thinking perhaps that the bridge may be built this time in that way; but, the child having the colder heart, it seldom is.
There remain the moments, impotent but indestructible.