Again their eyes met and clung together in a long mysterious questioning look. And after that they both were silent.
‘Perhaps later it will be different!’ the dancer repeated under her breath; and there awoke within her a sickening envy of that rare company of faithful souls who have the power of loving once and not again.
Then as the great fantastic hotel loomed above them, like the dream palace of some mad king of Thule, the old Dionysian mood surged up once more. ‘I’ve found him at last!’ she whispered to herself. ‘The free spirit worthy of me. It will be easy enough if he loves me. But if I love him — let him beware!’
And in her heart she caught a strain of that southern music to which she was wont to dance when the northern harmonies grew too heavy for the fire within her.
A couple of hours later Richard stood in the hallway of the Hotel Ransom watching Catharine read Karmakoff’s letter.
As he saw that tall willowy figure shiver from head to foot and bend and sway under the blow, he thought within himself quite suddenly — We are all wrong, we irresponsible ones! Suffering goes deeper than joy and to save from suffering is better than to give pleasure.
When the girl turned to him at last, mechanically crumpling up the wicked note in her hand, the look upon her face went to his heart as nothing in his whole life had ever done before. For Catharine had nothing of Nelly’s pride, and to see her inarticulate suffering, nakedly exposed before him, made him hate the whole business of love and the whole system of the world in which such things were possible.
It was even worse when the girl tried to smile at him, tried to take the thing lightly. She was so smitten that not a tear came to her eyes. She just swayed backwards and forwards and smiled, her hands fumbling weakly, foolishly, meaninglessly, at the piece of paper which she held. She kept thrusting it into the envelope and taking it out again; and her words tripped over one another blunderingly, confusedly, like the words of a person in a fever.
Richard experienced such a pang of pity for her that he felt as though his whole philosophy of life would be different from that moment. ‘Damn these cruelties!’ he said to himself. ‘This can’t be endured!’
They had gone first to his own hotel, thinking to find them there. His feelings when he read Elise’s letter had, even then, been swallowed up in his concern for Catharine.
The link between himself and the dancer had been already stretched to the breaking point. I must get her back to New York at once, he thought. I must take her to Nelly. His naïve dependence upon his wife’s powers of comfort did not arouse any sense of humour in him, did not appear to him as singular under the circumstances.
He could be cynical and sardonic enough sometimes, but at other times he behaved with the innocent egoism of a spoilt child. Elise being disposed of, his natural instinct was to go straight back to Nelly. She need never know, except in vague suspicion, he thought, how things worked out down here.
Catharine was like wax in his hands during the rest of that day. She let him help her pack her things; she let him convey her to the station and place her by his side in the compartment, without a word.
He wondered, as he saw her lean sideways against the edge of the window, whether she wasn’t half-asleep, whether indeed she hadn’t swallowed some sort of drug. Once, however, when by a sudden movement forward he obtained a glimpse of her face he knew that she was only too completely in possession of her faculties. It was clear to him then that it was the blow to her heart which had deprived her body of all muscular resistance.
Chapter 20
It was about nine o’clock in the evening when Richard and Catharine mounted the steps of the Charlton Street house.
Richard left the girl leaning helplessly against the wall of the passage, as if she were an umbrella or a stick that he had been carrying and, quickly turning the handle of the door, he entered the room.
The place was dark except for the light of a lamp in the street opposite. Nelly’s gone to bed, he thought. But I must wake her, as Catharine’s here. He could not help experiencing a certain cowardly relief at the girl’s presence, as it was an obvious raft of escape from immediate explanations. He struck a match and lit the gas. Then he went back into the passage. Leading in Catharine by the hand he placed her in that same big armchair where he had first made her acquaintance.
The girl looked at him out of hollow miserable eyes and murmured Nelly’s name.
‘Hush! my dear!’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right. I’ll wake her now and she’ll look after you.’
He opened the door of the bedroom and went in. The bed was unoccupied, and the empty room, left in perfect order, mocked him with its neatness as if with a leer of derisive contempt.
He went up to the dressing-table, entirely bare now of Nelly’s brush and comb and bottle of eau-de-cologne.
In the place of these things was a letter addressed to himself in Nelly’s girlish hand.
He returned to the living-room where Catharine was sitting exactly where he had left her, her eyes fixed in vacancy.
Standing under the gas burner he opened the note and read it. It ran as follows: ‘If you only hadn’t lied to me it would have been different. Why did you do it, Richard? How could you do it? I should have thought — but what’s the use of saying any more? If neither for my sake nor the child’s you can’t give up your pleasures, it’s no use pretending that you care for us. By the time you read this I shall be on the sea. Robert is sailing on the same ship. He will take me to Mrs Shotover’s. He wants me to divorce you, but I shall never do that. He is very angry with you and unhappy. I think I am myself too sad about everything to be angry ever again. Goodbye Richard. When you get tired of this person, as I know you will very soon, you will be sorry you forced me to leave you. I have to think of my child and I couldn’t endure it any more. You will never be able to understand what a woman feels. Perhaps it isn’t your fault altogether. I am afraid I must ask you to send me a little money, at regular intervals? I shall be happier when I see the Downs. Don’t be afraid I shall do anything rash. I feel only too clear-headed. It is the Village Laundry, not Ebstein’s, who come for our washing now. Goodbye. I am all right. The voyage won’t hurt me.’
The letter was signed ‘Nelly’ and there was a postscript to it containing one sentence: ‘Please keep in touch with Catharine, for the girl has no friends.’
Richard carefully folded up this letter and put it in his pocket. Then he took it out of his pocket and read it again very slowly. Then he carried it to the chimneypiece and placed it under a book.
He noticed casually as he did this that the elemental sprites, who accompany every human disaster with their satiric commentary, had arranged that the book under which he placed it should be the Vita Nuova. Well did he recall the romantic nonsense he had written for Nelly on the flyleaf of that book. But it served very well as a letter weight just then to keep that particular letter from blowing away!
He walked up and down the room several times trying to visualize Nelly on the ship. He felt no jealousy of Canyot at that moment. He felt only relief that his wife was not alone. But how he longed for her; for her voice, her look, her silent reproaches even! He had never longed so much for the presence of any human being.