LITMIR.BIZ

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ship, he felt sure, was a sign. A sign of what?

      His mind suddenly cleared, and he knew as well as if he had thought it out that he would take ship for some far-off country, Australia or Brazil or the South Seas. He would sign on as a sailor, a cattle-man, anything: the voyage would take months, months of hard work far from pubs and women; at the other end there would be at least one’s pay, and a week or two of glorious rioting in a new country. Somewhere in the South Seas. He had had enough of the North.

      Hutcheon’s people were shipping agents: young Hutcheon would help him to do it and would keep his mouth shut. He would sign on to work his passage. He still had over two hundred and fifty pounds of his own: that would help to start him in something at the other end: or he could ship again for another voyage somewhere else if there was nothing doing where he landed. Clear out! By God! he would.

      He sat staring into vacancy, lost in his dream, voyaging into that unknown which put Calderwick in its right perspective, reducing even John to a fat, foolish puppet whom it was absurd to take seriously. He had been too young, too raw, when he was shot out to Canada; he had not seen how unimportant the family was, how little Calderwick mattered; but this time he would stand on his own feet. He snapped his fingers. The ghost of his father wavered and vanished from his brain.

      Hard work, hard physical labour, and then a spree; that was a life he could enjoy. In Calderwick there was opportunity for neither the one thing nor the other: all a fellow could do was to soak himself rotten in the rotten Club, and then addle himself still more on an office stool, or go to church on Sunday like a good little boy and be jawed at by all his family…. An uneasiness began to disturb him: he jabbed at the paper again. Well, let them think he was a quitter – a natural, heaven-born quitter: if that was his line he would follow it out. To hell with them all!

      A noise outside made him start. He sat up and moistened his dry lips; he became conscious that he wanted a stiff whisky. He looked at his watch; it was past five o’clock. Old Mason must think he’d turned damned industrious. Hardly had the thought shaped itself when he was again startled. Wasn’t that Elizabeth’s voice?

      In the few seconds during which he sat staring at the door before it opened he was, as he would have termed it, in a blue funk. He had avoided thinking about Elizabeth while dismissing her from his life, as he had avoided thinking about Aunt Janet, or even Mabel. By lumping them all together as ‘women’ and putting them in the same phrase as ‘drink’ he had escaped the necessity of considering them as individuals. Even now he was unwilling to think of Elizabeth as Elizabeth. His sense of guilt and his resentment at feeling guilty, which combined to produce the blue funk, threw up another impersonal phrase. ‘Just like a woman. Just like a woman,’ something muttered savagely at the back of his mind as he sat with jaw set and eyes fixed on the door.

      It is much easier to dismiss people from one’s business than from one’s life. The absolute importance of money is impressed on us both directly and indirectly with such force that it seems a final argument to say that So-and-so costs us too much; even So-and-so sees the force of it, although he may resent dismissal. Money, after all, is money. But we do not feel with the same conviction, with the same prospect of general approval, that we are, after all, ourselves, and that if So-and-so costs us too much he must be thrust out of our lives. Civilization, in binding us to one another with a solid wall, turns into ramshackle structures the private dwellings of our spirits; we lean lopsidedly upon each other and hesitate to complain of encroachment, or to refuse support even when the roof tree is cracking under the strain. We rely more and more upon the wall of civilization to stave off collapse, and less and less upon ourselves. In fact, we live so much upon the wall and so little in ourselves that we do not often know what condition our house is in, or whether it needs repairs.

      Hector’s decision to rid his house of encumbrances and to repair it was so recent, and apparently so spontaneous, that he could not justify himself, and it was natural that the arrival of Elizabeth should put him in a blue funk. She was ushered in by Mason, who was relieved to find that there was a comprehensible reason for Mr Hector’s waiting so long in the office. Mason’s eye was rather appealing, and Hector, glad of a diversion, answered the unspoken appeal.

      ‘We won’t be a minute, Mason,’ he cried, hastily rising. ‘Get me my coat, will you?’

      To Elizabeth he said nothing: he could not think what to say, but stood leaning his hands on the desk. Without noting whether Mason had shut the door again Elizabeth ran towards him. ‘My dear love,’ she said, ‘my dear, dear love.’

      Hector, armoured in the conviction that she despised him, had been hard to her. He had returned an equal coldness and silence to hers, and had been infuriated by her tears, which he interpreted as reproaches. But she came towards him now with such tenderness in her eyes and in her voice that he was taken off his guard, and before he could stop her she had her arms round his neck.

      ‘My dear love,’ she said again, with a vibration in her voice which he had never heard before. He remembered that her bosom was comforting, his head sank, his arm went round her, and for a long minute they embraced each other. When he tried to lift his head Elizabeth stroked it and whispered: ‘I’ve come to tell you I’ve been a bad, bad wife, and now I’m going to be a good one. My darling, my darling.’

      His eyes blurred and he put out a hand to steady himself against the desk. He was damned tired, he remembered. Elizabeth felt the almost imperceptible droop of his body and for the first time since coming in she looked at his face. His eyelids were wet. She kissed them, but he kept his eyes shut.

      ‘I’m damned tired, Elizabeth,’ he said.

      She took his coat from Mason, who was coughing in the doorway, found his hat, and led him downstairs. They walked home arm-in-arm, closely pressed together.

      Elizabeth did not suspect that the tears in Hector’s eyes might have been tears of disappointment. She felt tender and protective towards him, as if he were a baby she must foster and encourage, and the strength of her feeling at the moment excluded any doubt of its necessity. The perfect wife is bound to assume that her husband requires her devotion, that without her he would be ‘lost’. This traditional and easy attitude fits loosely over the real problem, the problem of one individual’s relationship to another, and conceals its shape exactly as the cloak of charity conceals failings.

      But Hector surrendered himself without resistance to his wife’s devotion. He had been unconsciously reaching for that cloak of charity ever since his marriage. Time after time he had confessed his sins in Elizabeth’s lap as if she were his mother, but he had never got the desired assurance that whatever he did she would still be a mother to him. That assurance was now hovering around him at last as he sat in the arm-chair before a glowing red fire and let Elizabeth put on his warm slippers for him.

      And yet he felt miserable. The spark of hope in his breast seemed to have been blown out. He tried to excuse himself.

      ‘I’ve been thinking all day what a rotter I am…. Going the same way as the old man did, Elizabeth. You won’t let me come to that, will you?’

      Elizabeth sat on the padded arm of the chair and took his head on her bosom. Her face shone with exaltation.

      ‘No, I won’t let you. I love you more than anything in the world – more than myself even. I’ve just discovered that.’

      ‘Keep me off the drink, Elizabeth….’

      She kissed him on the forehead.

      ‘I promise.’

      He suddenly lifted his head.

      ‘And make me a good boy for ever and ever. Amen.’

      His tone was bitter, almost savage. Elizabeth peered into his face.

      ‘What is it?’ she said half under her breath.

      He buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth knelt beside him and tugged at his wrists.

      ‘What is it, my love? Hector, I want to help you.’

      She clasped his wrists and caressed them. Strong arms, she thought, sliding her fingers and the

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