At last he stopped in front of Catharine. What was to be done with the stricken girl?
‘Nelly has gone away,’ he said. ‘I’ve treated her badly and she’s gone away. She’s sailed for England.’
Catharine stared at him with a puzzled uncomprehending look. ‘Nelly’s left you?’ she murmured.
‘Yes — devil that I am! She’s treated me as I deserve and has gone off.’
‘Not alone?’
‘No, Robert Canyot’s with her.’
The absence of anything in his tone except self-abasement seemed to rouse Catharine’s pity.
‘Poor Richard!’ she murmured and stretched out one of her long arms towards him. That naïve gesture of sympathy from one so cruelly hit herself was too much for Richard’s self-control. He found himself on his knees by the side of the girl’s chair struggling with violent sobs that shook his whole frame. Still tearless herself Catharine smoothed his hair caressingly with her fingers. An onlooker would have been made aware at that moment of what an immense fund of passionate human feeling lay beneath that queer Greenwich Village smock-frock, coloured like a Matisse painting.
He rose to his feet in a little while, relieved by his outburst. One of the cynical demons that were always ready to whisper unpardonable things in his ear commented with sardonic interest on the fact that somewhere within his consciousness there was an actual throb of self-congratulation that he was still able to shed tears.
The question now presented itself vividly to his mind: what was to be done with Catharine?
The girl had crossed her knees and clasped her hands round them, and now sat staring blankly in front of her.
It struck his inner consciousness how queer a thing it was, this pathology of wounded love! How it seemed to be something impersonal, like a madness that fell upon a person out of the air, quite independently of the value or worth or nature of the object for which it vexed itself.
He looked at his watch. It was already past ten. ‘Shall I see you back to your flat?’ he said, touching the girl’s hand.
The idea of her room in Thirty-fifth Street, full of little objects associated with her friendship for Ivan, brought such a woebegone expression into Catharine’s face that he wished he had not suggested such a thing. But what else was to be done? He hesitated for a moment, looking helplessly round the apartment. Then he said, ‘All right. The best thing you can do is to stay right here, where you are. You shall sleep in Nelly’s room and I’ll pull my own bed into this room. Nobody will be any the wiser. And after all what does it matter? We’re both past fussing about things of that sort!’
She seemed relieved at his suggestion; and he got a grim satisfaction from the thought of that postscript in Nelly’s letter — Look after Catharine. She has no friends.
Having settled this matter he proceeded to drag the second of the two beds into the sitting room. Then he lit the gas under the stove so as to make them both some tea. He was touched by finding that Nelly had stocked their small cupboard with more provisions than he had ever seen there before.
He managed with difficulty to persuade the unhappy girl to swallow some oatmeal biscuits and a raw egg made palatable by the last drops of his brandy flask. These things and a cup of milkless tea formed their melancholy supper.
It was a curious situation, not likely to recur in either of their lives — sitting thus alone together beneath the same roof, while the man and the woman who had thrown them aside were no doubt drinking Olympian drinks in the sumptuous apartment so well known to Richard.
‘I shall have to get another job,’ said Catharine wearily. But Richard was relieved to hear her say even that; still more relieved when she didn’t refuse the cigarette he proffered.
‘How lucky Roger is to be safe out of the whole thing!’ she remarked after a long silence.
‘Well! we shall all be out of it before so very long!’ responded Richard.
‘I’ve got some morphia tablets in my room,’ she added.
He laid his hand upon hers. ‘You mustn’t talk like that, Catharine,’ he said sadly. ‘You’ll have to see it through, just as I shall. Sometimes I feel as if the whole mad business were a sort of dream and that when we wake up we shall be quite free from all this misery.’
‘Do you mean death?’
‘Yes. Death — but something else too. Anyway we should quite spoil what I mean by killing ourselves.’
The girl sighed. ‘I wish I could understand better what is underneath it all. If there were any point in it, any purpose in it, it would be easier.’ She added desperately, ‘I would give my life for Ivan.’
‘I have a sort of idea,’ Richard went on, ‘that after death all the people who care for each other come together without any of this wretched jealousy.’
‘I shall never bear to see him again, or her either!’ cried Catharine Gordon.
‘Some day,’ said Richard, ‘it may be completely different with these complications. The human race may learn to disentangle itself from its flesh and blood. It may learn to love without wanting to possess.’
‘Do you feel like that now?’ she asked him suddenly.
‘No, no, my dear; I’m far below such feelings. Don’t talk about me. I sometimes wonder whether I’ve got a heart at all.’
She looked at him with a puzzled frown and he fancied that she had been hurt by his words as if by something clumsy and banal.
‘You must never say a thing like that to anyone who loves you,’ she said earnestly.
Richard smiled. ‘Why not, my dear?’
Her answer was a surprise to him. ‘Because it’s unfair; because it’s mean and cunning!’
There was a considerable flicker of annoyance at that moment flung across ‘the lake of his mind’. Had the girl managed to pierce the core of a very subtle form of self-complacency and vanity? Her words certainly broke up Richard’s mood of superior protective strength. In some profoundly recondite way they gave him the sensation of being exposed. The feeling he derived from this sensation was not a pleasant one; he experienced that kind of unharmonious shock from it which, as he had noted on other occasions, gave a severer prod to his life illusion than anything else.
‘I expect you are right, Catharine,’ he muttered, resuming his walk up and down the room. He made that time a genuine effort to break the crust of egoism which imprisoned his soul. Yes, the girl was undoubtedly right. That vague self-accusation ‘I have no heart’ was only too obvious an example of a mental trick he was always playing himself — an unctuous salve of moral evasion with which he covered up drastic issues!
His analysis of his real inmost reaction to all these events revealed to him that he had been all the while, secretly and without any self-forgetful suffering, dramatizing his situation. He had been making it all a part of one long stream of not wholly intolerable occurrences, in the flowing tide of which the figure of Nelly herself, the figures of Elise and Catharine and all the rest, were there to be exploited, were there to be contemplated subjectively, as scenes in the human play which after all remained his play — whereof he was not only an actor on the stage but an appreciative critic in the gallery!
His thoughts whirled confusedly through his brain now as he paced that little room, his guest’s purple stockings and white sand-shoes mingling with first one mental image and then another.
It cannot, he thought, be altogether selfish and contemptible to dramatize one’s life and to detach one’s self from it. Nelly never does that. Catharine never does. But surely Elise must do it, or she couldn’t put so much art into her dancing. How is it then that I annoy Elise so much with the way my mind works? Why does she despise my poetry so? Poetry must, surely, be detached from a person’s life and yet be the residuum of a person’s life. Am I hopelessly inhuman and unnatural in all this?