Of Catharine Gordon, for instance, he spoke with peculiar respect. ‘She has the heart of a child,’ he said. ‘She would be the happiest thing alive if she were less generous-minded. People take advantage of her.’
‘Don’t you think she’s a little affected?’ said Nelly.
‘Not a bit of it! She has her own manner; why not? but that’s natural to her. It’s a cruel thing she should be so involved with Karmakoff.’
‘Don’t you like him?’ said Nelly, a little startled. ‘I thought everybody liked Ivan.’
Roger Lamb laughed. ‘Of course I like him,’ he responded. ‘But I can’t honestly say I think he’s very good for Catharine. She’s an elemental; and he’s a fire spirit. He withers her up.’
With an irresistible impulse Nelly led the conversation round to the problem by which she herself was confronted. ‘It’s all so wretchedly mixed up, this business of men and women. Don’t you think so? Whether for instance a man who knows a girl is false to him should go on just the same, or should have it out with her and make her confess? Doesn’t it seem to you that it’s disgusting when a man knows he’s being deceived and made a fool of and he just does nothing?’
Roger Lamb became very grave. He got up from where he was sitting and walked about the room. Nelly began to fear that in her indirect hovering round her own situation she had prodded an open wound.
‘We’re all too touchy,’ he burst out at last, ‘over this business of deception. Our idea is that when a person we love loves someone else they triumph over us unless they confess everything. But, you know, if they did confess everything we should regard them as heartless and callous beasts. We should accuse them of abominable bad manners. It’s all frightfully difficult. But I don’t believe myself that a woman who deceives a man enjoys doing it or derides or despises the man she deceives. I think if we were a little more generous lots of these people who “deceive” us would come back to us all right. It’s often a mere passing attraction. It’s our bitterness and jealousy that drives them on.’
Nelly made a little grimace at this point. ‘But it’s so disgusting− the idea of sharing a person! I’m sure I should despise anyone who tamely submitted to that sort of thing. I should feel they’d no self-respect.’
Roger Lamb bit his underlip and threw back his head like a restive horse. He had fine eyes and a sensitive mouth but his nose and chin were shapeless and badly moulded.
‘Oh, this self-respect!’ he burst out. ‘It’s the cause of half the misery in the world. Have you ever met Pat Ryan, by the way? No relation to the great financier.’
The introduction of this name gave Nelly a bitter stab.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘He reminds me of someone and I can’t think who it is.’
‘It’s William Jennings Bryan, of course! Everyone notices that. But what I was going to say was this. I know Pat well; and he’s got a very difficult wife, and he himself is a very — what shall I say? — amorous kind of person. But they get along quite happily. They go their own way, but always come back; and they’ve got no children either. I think that Pat and Mary are models of what married people should be — unless they’re naturally good and faithful.’
Nelly sighed deeply and bitterly. ‘Are there any faithful ones in the world? Oh, I think life’s a terrible thing. They ought to warn women before they’re born what they’ve got to expect!’
The girl’s visitor looked distractedly at the shaded electric light. ‘I don’t think many of us have got at the secret of life yet,’ he remarked. ‘The worst of it is we’ve nothing to go upon and no proof that there’s a secret at all. But I think there is; and I think it has nothing to do with self-respect.’
For a moment Nelly was stirred by his words and by his manner into an obscure response. Then she relapsed into her habitual feminine contempt for all these vague generalizations that seem to do little to ease the hurt of the iron teeth of the great trap.
Chapter 16
‘Nelly — listen to me,’ said Richard, standing behind his wife that night as she was combing out her silky fair hair and tying it together with a black ribbon. ‘I swear to you on my dying oath that I didn’t see you in that taxi! Whatever wrong I may have done you I couldn’t do a thing like that.’
Their eyes met in the mirror and he was the first to turn away.
‘I believe you,’ she said.
‘Well, do do more than just believe me! Do smile at me and say something like your old self. Don’t let’s hurt each other any further.’
Nelly did swing round at this. With a flash of clear-eyed indignation and with a tilt to her chair so that she could face him, she flung out her challenge.
‘Are you going to give up that woman and never, never, never see her again?’
She gave a sharp little tap. to the floor with her slippered foot as she uttered these words. Deep in a somewhat ambiguous portion of her heart she was almost sorry that he had not jeered at her in that taxi. That would have been a definite gross brutality and she could have held him in contempt for it. Now, after he had confessed to her about Elise, there was nothing she had against him except the fact that he loved someone else; and Nelly, in spite of her bitterness, recognized that she could not hate him with the intensity he deserved, as long as this was his only fault.
Richard certainly was staggered by the violence of her words and the directness of her demand. It did not seem to him that his attitude to her had changed at all because of the appearance of Elise upon the scene. He loved her still. He loved both of them! It was the old recurrent dilemma, into the real psychology of which women seemed debarred from entering. With them the state of being in love was a clearly outlined condition with sharply defined edges. One either was in love or one was not; that seemed to be their code; and one couldn’t by any possible means be in love with two people at the same time! And yet, he thought, it is unfair; because Nelly herself in a sense loved both himself and Canyot. Why then, couldn’t he be allowed to love Nelly and Elise? Because the element of passion entered into it. Yes — he had to confess to himself that there was a difference! He knew perfectly well that Nelly’s affection for the young painter was entirely free from the last sensual element. But suppose he had loved Elise in an absolutely platonic manner, would that have reconciled Nelly to their association? It might; but he doubted if it would. She would never believe that it was possible to love a passionate provocative woman, with a body predestined for heathen dalliance, in a manner that was entirely chaste. Yet Richard knew that it only needed that Elise’s own wayward heart should be ensnared by someone else for him to have just that pure devotion to her. For even now the deeper portion of what he felt was a thrilled and grateful response to her genius as an artist.
In his own mind he was able to separate into two distinct worlds his emotion towards the dancer. On the one hand she appealed so overwhelmingly — and that was what had made him leave her at the beginning — to his sophisticated senses. On the other hand she inspired in him a pure flame of hero worship, such as any critic might feel for any creative spirit.
The spell she exercised over his senses could hardly be called ‘love’. It was the old immemorial heathen craving for the beauty that troubled the blood, that aroused insatiable desire. And though he craved for her in that way, he knew very well that he hated her also in that way. He was not blind to the secret law that makes love and hate so evilly interchangeable when the senses are once enslaved. All these thoughts whirled through his mind as he leant back against the little chest of drawers in their bedroom and looked into Nelly’s reproachful eyes.