The triangle within which he has lived – frettingly but safely – for so long is now broken, and the new geometry frightens him. His grieving exaltation fades, and lethargy overtakes him. He wanders the grounds of Undershaw as if they had been laid out by a stranger long ago. He visits his horses, but does not want them saddled. He goes daily to Touie's grave, and returns exhausted. He imagines her comforting him, reassuring him that wherever the truth lies, she has always loved him and now forgives him; but this seems a vain and selfish thing to demand of a dead woman. He sits in his study for long hours, smoking and looking at the glittering, hollow trophies acquired by a sportsman and successful writer. All his baubles seem meaningless beside the fact of Touie's death.
He leaves all his correspondence to Wood. His secretary has long since learned to reproduce his employer's signature, his inscriptions, his turns of phrase, even his opinions. Let him be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a while – the name's owner has no desire to be himself. Wood may open everything, and discard or answer as he wishes.
He has no energy; he eats little. To be hungry at such a time would be an obscenity. He lies down; he cannot sleep. He has no symptoms, only a general and intense weakness. He consults his old friend and medical adviser Charles Gibbs, who has attended him since his South African days. Gibbs tells him it is everything and nothing; in other words, it is nerves.
Soon, it is more than nerves. His guts give way. This at least Gibbs can identify, even if there is little he can do about it. Some microbe must have got into his system at Bloemfontein or on the veldt, and it remains there, waiting to break out when he is at his weakest. Gibbs prescribes a sleeping draught. But he can do nothing about the other microbe abroad in his patient's system, which is equally unkillable; the microbe of guilt.
He always imagined that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief and guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
He knows he must rouse himself, but feels incapable; after all, this will mean rousing himself to lie again. First, to perpetuate, to make historical, the old lie about his devoted love-marriage to Touie; afterwards, to organize and propagate the new lie, about Jean bringing unexpected solace to a grieving widower's heart. The thought of this new lie disgusts him. In lethargy there is at least truth: exhausted, gut-plagued, dragging from room to room, he is at least misleading no one. Except that he is: his condition is ascribed by everyone merely to grief.
He is a hypocrite; he is a fraud. In some ways, he has always felt a fraud, and the more famous he has become, the more fraudulent he has felt. He is lauded as a great man of the age, but though he takes an active part in the world, his heart feels out of kilter with it. Any normal man of the age would not have scrupled to make Jean his mistress. That is what men did nowadays, even in the highest ranks of society, as he has observed. But his moral life belongs more happily in the fourteenth century. And his spiritual life? Connie judged him an early Christian. He prefers to locate himself in the future. The twenty-first century, the twenty-second? It all depends how quickly slumbering humanity wakes up and learns to use its eyes.
And then his thoughts, already on a downward slope, tumble further. After nine years of wanting – of trying not to admit to wanting – the impossible, he is now free. He could marry Jean tomorrow morning and face only the bickering of village moralists. But wanting the impossible canonizes the wanting. Now that the impossible has become the possible, how much does he want? He cannot even tell this now. It is as if the muscles of the heart, overtaxed for so long, have turned to fraying rubber.
He once heard a story, narrated over port, of a married man who maintained a long-term mistress. This woman was of good social standing, certainly fit to marry him, which is what had always been anticipated and promised. Eventually, the wife died, and within weeks the widower duly remarried. But not his mistress; instead, a young woman of a lower social class whom he had met a few days after the funeral. At the time he had sounded to Arthur like a double cad: cad to the wife, then cad to the mistress.
Now, he realizes how easily such things happen. In the ragged months since Touie's death, he had scarcely entered society, and those to whom he has been introduced have left only the faintest impression. Yet even so – and allowing for the fact that he does not understand the other sex – some of its members were flirting with him. No, that is vulgar and unfair; but certainly, they were looking at him differently, at this famous author, this knight of the realm, who is now a widower. He can well imagine how the fraying rubber might suddenly break, how a young girl's simplicity, or even a coquette's scented smile, might suddenly pierce a heart grown temporarily impervious to a long and secret attachment. He understands the behaviour of the double cad. More than understands: he sees the advantage. If you allow yourself to succumb to such a coup de foudre, then it is, at least, the end to lying: you do not have to produce your long-secret love and introduce her as a new-met companion. You do not have to lie to your children for the rest of your life. As for your new wife: yes, you say, I know how she strikes you, and she could never replace the irreplaceable, but she has brought a little cheer and consolation into my heart. The forgiveness sought might not be immediately forthcoming, but at least the situation would be less complicated.
He sees Jean again, once in company and once alone, and on both occasions the awkwardness between them continues. He finds himself waiting for his heart to pulse again – no, he is instructing his heart to pulse again – and it refuses to do his bidding. He has been so used to forcing his thoughts, to pressing them and directing them where they have to go, that it comes as a shock that he is unable to do the same with the tender emotions. Jean looks as adorable as ever, except that her adorability does not set off the normal response. Some impotence of the heart appears to have struck him.
In the past, Arthur has eased the torments of thought by physical exertion; but he feels no desire to ride, to spar, to strike a ball at cricket, tennis or golf. Perhaps, if he were instantly transported to a high, snow-covered Alpine valley, an icy breeze might disperse the mephitic air which hangs around his soul. But it seems impossible. The person he once was, the Sportesmann who brought his Norwegian skis to Davos and crossed the Furka Pass with the Branger brothers, seems to him long departed, long out of sight on the other side of the mountain.
When, at length, his mind stops descending, when he feels less febrile of mind and gut, he tries to make a clearing in his head, to establish a little area of simple thought. If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty. This is what he did with Touie, and what he must now do with Jean. He has loved her hopelessly and hopefully for nine years; such a feeling cannot simply disappear; so he must wait for its return. Until then, he must negotiate the great Grimpen Mire, where green-scummed pits and foul quagmires on every side threaten to pull a man down and swallow him for ever. To plot his course, he must call on everything he has learned up to now. In the Mire, there were hidden signs – bunches of reeds and strategically planted sticks – to guide the initiate to firmer ground; and it is the same when a man is morally lost. The path lies where honour directs. Honour has told him how to behave in the past years; now honour must tell him where he is to head. Honour binds him to Jean, as it bound him to Touie. He cannot tell at this distance if he will ever be truly happy again; but he knows that for him there can be no happiness where honour is absent.