Sally Bishop Part 54

"Do you think I shall want to sub-let?" she said stridently. "Do you think I shall care what I do, where I live, how I live?"

"You'll be a fool if you don't," he remarked.

The hysterical note in her voice had jarred through him. Once before in his life he had had a woman screaming about his ears. There was no desire in his mind to relish the enjoyment of it again. He turned slowly towards the door. This was the worst of women. A man's relations with them were bound to end something after this fas.h.i.+on.

In common with most men, he shared a hatred of that termination of all intimacies which one calls a scene.

But, really, he had no cause for apprehension. The tears now were streaming down her face, sobs were choking her, convulsive shudderings that shook her body in a merciless grip. Her spirit was utterly broken. No worse could happen to her now. But through all her misery, she could still think first of him. That tentative drawing away, the hand stretching out for the door, she knew the meaning of that; she saw that he had had enough--enough of her weeping, enough of her despair. Just as when, watching the fight, she had struggled against her weakness lest it should spoil his pleasure, so now she fought down the hysteria of her mind to give him ease.

Very wearily she crossed the room and stood beside him, forcing back tears with lips that were trembling and contorted. It was no show of bravado, no spurious bravery, aping self-respect, taking it well, as the phrase has it. She was not brave. She felt a coward to all of life that offered. Her heart was that of a derelict--numbed, inert, no spirit left in it--just lifting its head with sluggish weariness above the body of the waves. But simply out of love for him she could not bear to see him annoyed by her suffering.

"You needn't hurry to go," she said finely; "I shan't make a fool of myself--the way you think. I shan't be a drag on you--I promise you that. And if you're going to-morrow, wouldn't you stop just a little while and talk?"

At any other moment the simplicity of that would have touched him; but the affection that Devenish had seen to be tiring had been snapped--a thread in a flame--when he had found her watching his actions, d.o.g.g.i.ng his footsteps. His liberty--that which a man of his type most prizes when he finds it being encroached upon--had been threatened. There was no forgiveness in the heart of him for that.

In the sudden freedom of his affections--just as Mrs. Durlacher had so deftly antic.i.p.ated--he had let them drift--a moth to the nearest candle, a floating seed to the nearest sh.o.r.e--and Coralie Standish-Roe had claimed them.

"Can anything be gained by talking?" he asked, quietly.

"Yes--perhaps it's the last time."

"But nothing can be gained by it. You'll only make yourself more miserable. What is the good of that?"

"Do you think I could be more miserable?" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

This scarcely, without seeking defence for Traill, is the most difficult part for a man to play well. He had never offered, in the first beginning of their acquaintance, to deceive her. He was not a man who had respect for marriage, he had said quite honestly. He had told her to go--have no truck with him; and if she had gone, if she had not taken upon herself to return his present, he would have seen no more of her. She had known of his love of liberty, and she herself had threatened it; yet now, seemingly, he was playing a mean part, deserting her, casting her off, when she loved him with every breath her trembling lips drew through her body. It is hard to play such a part well. Even the least sensitive of men, conscious of their own cruelty, will seek to end it as quickly as may be. Wherefore, how could he be expected to see the good gained by staying and talking? What good, in G.o.d's name, did talking do? With the agony prolonged, the strain drawn out, how were they--either of them--to benefit? Here, indeed, is a judgment of the head. But it was with her heart alone that Sally craved for its continuance. It was the last she was to see of him; the last time that he would be in her bedroom where all the pa.s.sionate a.s.sociations of her life would always lie buried. Can it be wondered that she would willingly have dragged the misery of it through all that night, if only to keep him for the moments as they pa.s.sed, by her side?

Yet he was driven to play the mean part--the part for which there never will be--perhaps never should be--any sympathy. And he must play it with the best grace he could. A man is always a spectator to his own actions; a woman, in her emotions--never. So women lose their self-respect more easily than men.

But Traill was not the type to allow these abstract considerations to worry him. The love in him she found to be dead. He was not even moved by the piteousness of her appeal. There, then, it must end.

It was not his nature to choose the most graceful, the kindest way to end it. He snapped it off as, across the knees, you break a f.a.ggot for the burning. And that, too, is the only way to do it.

"I didn't come up here," he said, "to discuss anything. The whole thing's discussed in my mind. When I saw you running after the car, pus.h.i.+ng your way along the gutter--that ended it. You'd better read through your settlement now and if you don't think I've been generous enough, tell me to-morrow morning. I shall be downstairs till eleven."

He opened the door--pa.s.sed through--closed it. She listened to each one of his steps as he descended the stairs, her mouth hanging open, her eyes struck in a fixed glare at the spot where he had stood. Then, when she heard him close his door below, she just crumpled up in an abandoned heap upon the floor, and with each breath she moaned--"Oh--oh--oh."

Traill, undressing below, heard it. With a muttered exclamation, he dragged his s.h.i.+rt over his head and flung it violently into the corner of the room amongst the bundle of dirty linen.

END OF BOOK II

BOOK III

DERELICT

CHAPTER I

Virtue is the personality of many women. Rob them of it, those of them whose value it enhances, and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star out of the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth. It is a common trend of the mind in these modern days to make n.o.bility out of the women whose personality needs no virtue to lift it to a pedestal of fame. But really, it is they who make the n.o.bility for themselves. Phryne of Athens, Helen of Troy, Catherine of Russia, Mary of Scotland--these are women who have enn.o.bled themselves without aid of eulogy. Personality has been theirs without necessity for the robe of virtue to grace them in the eyes of the world. But with the seemingly lesser women, the women of seemingly no vast account--with those whose whole individuality depends upon the invaluable possession of their virtue, no great epic can well be sung, no loud paean sounded. You may find just a lyric here, a rondel there, set to the lilt of a phrase in an idle hour and sung in a pa.s.sing moment to send a tired heart asleep. But that is all. Yet they are the women upon whom the world has spent six thousand years in the making; they are the women at whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s are fed the sons of men. The whole race has been weaned by them; every country has been nursed into manhood in their arms. But they are too normal or they are too much a cla.s.s to have men sing of them. There is not one mother of children in the vast calendars of history who stands out now for our eyes to reverence. Upon the stage of the world their part is played, and what eye is there can grasp in comprehensive glance the whole broad sweep of power which their frail hands have wielded? Only upon that mimic platform of fame, raised where the eyes of all can watch the figure as it treads the boards, have women stood apart where the recorder can jot their names upon a scroll of history for the world to read. There is no virtue essential here; virtue indeed but adds a glamour with its absence.

There is some subtle attraction in a Catherine of Russia or a Manon Lescaut which tempts the cunning l.u.s.t of men to cry their praise for the n.o.bility of heart that lies beneath. But what elusive charm is there in the mother of children whose stainless virtue is her only personality? None? Yet to the all-seeing eye, to the all-comprehending brain--to that omniscience whom some call G.o.d, be it in Trinity or in Unity, and others know not what to call--these are the women who lift immeasurably above fame, infinitely above repute.

So, therefore, rob them of their virtue and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star from the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth, you filch from the generous hand of Nature that very possession which she holds most dear. For without virtue, these women are nothing. Without virtue, you may see them dragging the bed of the streets for the bodies they can find. It is the last task which Nature sets them--bait to lure men from the theft of that virtue in others which they can in no wise repay.

And this very virtue itself needs no little power of subtle comprehension to understand; for intrinsically it is a fixed quality while outwardly it changes, just as the tide of custom ebbs or flows.

Intrinsically then, it is that quality in a woman which breeds respect in men--respect, the lure of which is so often their own vanity. And the pure, the chaste, the untouched woman, whether it be vanity or not, is she whom men most venerate. Of these they make mothers--for these alone they will live continently. And however much love a man may bear in his heart for a woman whom some other than himself has possessed, the knowledge of it will corrupt like a poison in the blood though he forgive her a thousand times.

Such a woman, pure, chaste, and untouched, had been Sally Bishop.

But to one man alone can a woman be this, and then, only so long as she remains with him. Once he has cast her off, when once she is discarded, she becomes to all who know her, a woman of easy virtue, prey to the first hungry hands that are ready to claim her. This, in an age when the binding sacrament of matrimony is being held up to ridicule both in theory and in practice, is perhaps the only reasonable argument that can be utilized in its defence. It is surely not pedantic to hope that the purity of some women is still essential for the race, and it is surely not illogical to suppose that marriage is the means, in such cases as that of Sally Bishop, to this humble end.

Pure, certainly, she had been, even in the eyes of such a man as Devenish; but in the light of a discarded mistress, all her virtue vanished. Innate in the mind of the worst of men is the timid hesitation before he brands a virtuous woman; but when once he knows that she has fallen, conscience lifts, like a feather on the breeze.

With a light heart, he reaps the harvest of tares which some other than himself must be blamed for sowing, and with a light heart he goes his way, immune to remorse.

This then is the Tragedy which, like some insect in the heart of the rose, had eaten its way into the romance of Sally Bishop.

For three days after Traill had left her, she broke under the flood of her despair. For those three days she did not move out of her rooms, taking just what nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards where they stored the food for their breakfasts. On the side of her bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread--anything that she could find--in that unconscious instinct with which the body prompts the mind for its own preservation. But these meals--if such they can be called--she took at no stated times. Crusts of bread lay about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had fed herself. For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence, with eyes strained staringly before her. Of tears, there were none.

Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it. It was more like the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.

For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the darkness came. She did not undress. The nights were warm then, or cold might have driven her between the clothes. But, on the third evening, she disrobed. This was habit rea.s.serting itself. She did it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed at all.

The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes--fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration--would have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out, then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where all glimmer of intelligence is dead.

Inevitably this must have followed, had not Janet visited her late in the evening of the fourth day. Two days before, she had written saying that she would come if Traill were not likely to be there.

Her note finished abruptly, characteristic of all her letters.

"If I don't hear from you to the contrary," it concluded, "I shall arrive."

She heard nothing to the contrary. The letter had lain, since its arrival, in the box downstairs. Sally had not moved out of her room.

The possibility of a letter from Traill might have drawn her forth; but she knew that such a possibility did not exist. The woman who attended to their rooms she had sent away.

"I shall be able to look after these two rooms myself," she had thought vaguely. Then she had locked herself into her bedroom, taken up a duster to begin the morning's work and, after five minutes, idly lifting each thing in her hand, she had seated herself by the side of the bed, allowing the duster to fall limply from her fingers. Then, throwing herself on to the pillows, had given way with tearless eye to her despair.

When Janet's knock fell, she was lying in bed, eyes gaping at the ceiling above her in a gaze that scarcely wandered or moved from the spot upon which they were fixed. At the unexpected sound, she sat up. Intelligence struggled for the mastery in her mind. There, in her eyes, you could see it fight for victory.

"Who's that?" she called out querulously in a thin voice.

"Janet! Do you mean to say you're not up yet?"

"No."

"Well, come and unlock the door. I can't get in."

Sally drove the energy into her limbs with an effort and tumbled from the bed. As her feet touched the floor, she lurched forward with weakness. She clutched at the clothes and held herself erect; but her knees trembled, knocking together like wooden clubs that are shaken by reckless vibration.