“The porcelain,” she echoed with scornful emphasis. “What does that matter? You have no use for it now. You will never see it again.”
“But I—I need your help for other things.”
“Then I must not give it.” Still with her gaze fixed upon him, she shook her head slowly from side to side. “It is altogether too painful for me. Better, in your own words, the sharp, clean cut.”
A moment of complete silence followed, during which he could find nothing to say except “why”, and he had said that before. Then she went on, with that same solemnity, almost sounding a note of doom.
“My friend, my dear friend, my feeling for you, and it is deep beyond your knowledge, has misled me. I am a woman, and weakly I have given in, to help you. But yesterday, at the party, meeting all your friends, I see that I have been wrong, greatly wrong. For all are in dismay, all have the same opinion of you.”
“I’m obliged for their concern,” he muttered, nettled that they should have discussed him in his absence. “But I don’t see how I merit it.”
“They see it!” Her voice stung him. “They were, every one, speaking of you, a man who has worked all his life to make a great success, and become rich, who has good friends, and a beautiful home. And who, no longer young, throws all, all away, for a sudden idea, so extreme that even your Mr Stench was saying, in his nasty smiling way, you had bitten more than you could chew.”
“I’m obliged to Stench, and the others,” he said bitterly. “Nevertheless, I believe I know what I’m doing.”
“But do you? Now you are so busy, so obsessed, you never read or even listen to the news. Yesterday Mr Stench was telling us—it had just come in—that in another town, Kalinda, which is so near your Willie’s place, hordes of these tribesmen came with flaming arrows and cutlasses, broke into the Belgian mission and massacred all who were inside. Not killed alone, first mutilated them, cutting off their hands. Mein Gott, when I think of your hands, so fine and sensitive, which I have always admired, and some beastly savage hacking them off, do you wonder that I, and others too, are heartbroken for you?”
He bit his lip, frowning, uneasiness and anger striving for mastery in him. Anger predominated.
“You seem to forget that Willie warned me there might be danger. I’ve fully considered the risks to run.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do you accuse me of lying?”
“I accuse you of deliberate self-deception.”
“If so, it’s from the highest motives.”
“So you want to be a holy martyr, perhaps be shot with arrows, for a change, like Sebastian, and win a harp and a halo after.” Her eyes narrowed scornfully. “I am speaking in your true interest when I tell you . . .”
“It’s no use,” he interrupted her sharply. “You won’t dissuade me.”
They faced each other during a long and, on her part, a calculated silence.
“So you are going,” she said at last, in a hard voice.
“Yes.”
“Then go. You are totally blind and devoid of sense, in fact quite out of your mind.”
“Thank you.”
They were quarrelling, creating a scene—the realisation caused him an acute distress.
“You say you do this because of a great ideal, to amend your life. You do not. It is all done for the sake of going to bed with a silly young woman, a religious killjoy, who has infatuated you, who has no maturity, no meeting of minds, a common nurse who does not know a Bonnard from a bedpan.”
Pale to the lips under these insults, delivered with a fatal, telling force, he ran true to form in his indignant reply: “You are speaking of the young lady who will be my wife.”
“And as such, what do you delude yourself she can give you? Not passion, for it is not in her. These religious women are without sex.” He winced. “For passion such as you demand, you need a strong, vital body. An answering force which she does not possess. She is feeble. And she is already bound to her Willie, you are for her only a father figure. Besides, you have too strong a competitor. She cannot love both you and the Lord.”
“I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”
She was breathing with a deep, though controlled violence, a Wagnerian prima donna, splendid in figure, with fire in her eyes. Then all at once she was calm, cold as ice.
“Yes, I am leaving. But do not forget that I have warned you. And remember one important thing: if you should return to reason, I am still at the Seeburg, still your friend.”
He barely waited until she had passed the drive before shutting the door with a bang. He was furiously angry, hurt, outraged, and above all inflexibly confirmed in his intention. How dared she take such scandalous liberties with Kathy and himself! This, and the maddening fact that his friends had made him the object of their malicious gossip at the party, was in itself enough to fuse and forge his resolution, into solid steel. What stung most of all, quickened by a flashback thought to that night of docile surrender, was the shameful allegation against the pudendum of his future bride. A father figure indeed, competing for affection against Willie and the Lord—could any allegation be more unjust, more unutterably shameful—blasphemous, in fact? Yet that poisoned barb, worst of all, had pierced deep and still quivered in his flesh. To make matters worse, in slamming the heavy door he had aggravated his strained back and now, blaming her all the more since the casualty was basically her fault, he found that his limp had become more pronounced.
Altogether he was so worked up, he could not bring himself to remain passive in the house. What then? It was essential that he get his back put right at once and, as he had additionally some final purchases to make, he decided to take the train for Zurich and consult his good friend Dr Müller. Having cancelled lunch, he was driven by the mystified Arturo to Schwansee station in time to take the 11.45 Schnellzug.
Settling himself in the comfortable window seat—no other trains, in his opinion, could match the Swiss—he opened the Gazette Suisse which, almost instinctively, he had picked up at the bookstall. Naturally, Madame von Altishofer had exaggerated in order to alarm him; nevertheless it was true, as she suggested, that he had lately been too preoccupied to heed external events. He rarely did heed them, preferring to banish from his exclusive life the shocks and discords of a disordered world. Now, however, he felt it would repay him to sift the news. He had no need to sift. There, on the front page, were the headlines.
MASSACRE ATROCE A LA MISSION KALINDA.
Still keyed to a high intensity, he read the graphic report. More than a hundred persons, men, women and children, who had sought refuge in the mission, had been butchered with inhuman ferocity. In this blood-bath the missionaries themselves, two Franciscan priests, had been singled out for special treatment, first mutilated, then beheaded, and their bodies hacked to bits. It was a gruesome story, yet it had the ring of truth and following on the earlier slaughter at Tochilenge, was undoubtedly part of the general pattern of frenzied outrage that had broken loose.
Frida had spoken the truth: what an end for a sensitive, civilised man. A quiver of nausea constricted his stomach as he lowered the paper and gazed out at the placid Swiss landscape, the belled, brown cows grazing peacefully in the green pastures amongst the pear and cherry trees. Perhaps, after all, in making his heroic decision he had not fully weighed the obligations and dangers imposed by it. But he killed the thought before it entered his mind. Even if he had not wanted to go, he wanted Kathy. He would never turn back.