LITMIR.BIZ

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mother, am I not, Leslie?”

      “Too devoted,” he replied.

      “There!” she exclaimed in triumph —“When I have to sign my name and occupation in a visitor’s book, it will be, ‘— Mother’. I hope my business will flourish,” she concluded, smiling.

      There was a touch of ironical brutality in her now. She was, at the bottom, quite sincere. Having reached that point in a woman’s career when most, perhaps all, of the things in life seem worthless and insipid, she had determined to put up with it, to ignore her own self, to empty her own potentialities into the vessel of another or others, and to live her life at secondhand. This peculiar abnegation of self is the resource of a woman for the escaping of the responsibilities of her own development. Like a nun, she puts over her living face a veil, as a sign that the woman no longer exists for herself: she is the servant of God, of some man, of her children, or maybe of some cause. As a servant, she is no longer responsible for her self, which would make her terrified and lonely. Service is light and easy. To be responsible for the good progress of one’s life is terrifying. It is the most insufferable form of loneliness, and the heaviest of responsibilities. So Lettie indulged her husband, but did not yield her independence to him; rather it was she who took much of the responsibility of him into her hands, and therefore he was so devoted to her. She had, however, now determined to abandon the charge of herself to serve her children. When the children grew up, either they would unconsciously fling her away, back upon herself again in bitterness and loneliness, or they would tenderly cherish her, chafing at her love-bonds occasionally.

      George looked and listened to all the flutter of conversation, and said nothing. It seemed to him like so much unreasonable rustling of pieces of paper, of leaves of books, and so on. Later in the evening Lettie sang, no longer Italian folk songs, but the fragmentary utterances of Debussy and Strauss. These also to George were quite meaningless, and rather wearisome. It made him impatient to see her wasting herself upon them.

      “Do you like those songs?” she asked in the frank, careless manner she affected.

      “Not much,” he replied, ungraciously.

      “Don’t you?” she exclaimed, adding with a smile, “Those are the most wonderful things in the world, those little things”— she began to hum a Debussy idiom. He could not answer her on the point, so he sat with the arrow sticking in him, and did not speak.

      She enquired of him concerning Meg and his children and the affairs of Eberwich, but the interest was flimsy, as she preserved a wide distance between them, although apparently she was so unaffected and friendly. We left before eleven.

      When we were seated in the cab and rushing down-hill, he said:

      “You know, she makes me mad.”

      He was frowning, looking out of the window away from me. “Who, Lettie? Why, what riles you?” I asked.

      He was some time in replying.

      “Why, she’s so affected.”

      I sat in the small, close space and waited.

      “Do you know —?” he laughed, keeping his face averted from me. “She makes my blood boil. I could hate her.”

      “Why?” I said gently.

      “I don’t know. I feel as if she’d insulted me. She does lie, doesn’t she?”

      “I didn’t notice it,” I said, but I knew he meant her shirking, her shuffling of her life.

      “And you think of those poor devils under the bridge — and then of her and them frittering away themselves and money in that idiocy —”

      He spoke with passion.

      “You are quoting Longfellow,” I said.

      “What?” he asked, looking at me suddenly.

      “‘Life is real, life is earnest —’”

      He flushed slightly at my good-natured gibe.

      “I don’t know what it is,” he replied. “But it’s a pretty rotten business, when you think of her fooling about wasting herself, and all the waste that goes on up there, and the poor devils rotting on the Embankment — and —”

      “And you — and Mayhew — and me —” I continued.

      He looked at me very intently to see if I was mocking. He laughed. I could see he was very much moved.

      “Is the time quite out of joint?” I asked.

      “Why! “— he laughed. “No. But she makes me feel so angry — as if I should burst. — I don’t know when I felt in such a rage. I wonder why. I’m sorry for him, poor devil. Lettie and Leslie’— they seemed christened for one another, didn’t they?”

      “What if you’d had her?” I asked.

      “We should have been like a cat and dog; I’d rather be with Meg a thousand times — now!” he added significantly. He sat watching the lamps and the people and the dark buildings slipping past us.

      “Shall we go and have a drink?” I asked him, thinking we would call in Frascati’s to see the come-and-go.

      “I could do with a brandy,” he replied, looking at me slowly.

      We sat in the restaurant listening to the jigging of the music, watching the changing flow of the people. I like to sit a long time by the hollyhocks watching the throng of varied bees which poise and hesitate outside the wild flowers, then swing in with a hum which sets everything aquiver. But still more fascinating it is to watch the come and go of people weaving and intermingling in the complex mesh of their intentions, with all the subtle grace and mystery of their moving, shapely bodies.

      I sat still, looking out across the amphitheatre. George looked also, but he drank glass after glass of brandy. “I like to watch the people,” said I.

      “Ay — and doesn’t it seem an aimless, idiotic business — look at them!” he replied in tones of contempt. I looked instead at him, in some surprise and resentment. His face was gloomy, stupid and unrelieved. The amount of brandy he had drunk had increased his ill humour.

      “Shall we be going?” I said. I did not want him to get drunk in his present state of mind.

      “Ay — in half a minute,” he finished the brandy, and rose. Although he had drunk a good deal, he was quite steady, only there was a disagreeable look always on his face, and his eyes seemed smaller and more glittering than I had seen them. We took a bus to Victoria. He sat swaying on his seat in the dim, clumsy vehicle, saying not a word. In the vast cavern of the station the theatre-goers were hastening, crossing the pale grey strand, small creatures scurrying hither and thither in the space beneath the lonely lamps. As the train crawled over the river we watched the far-flung hoop of diamond lights curving slowly round and striping with bright threads the black water. He sat looking with heavy eyes, seeming to shrink from the enormous unintelligible lettering of the poem of London.

      The town was too large for him, he could not take in its immense, its stupendous poetry. What did come home to him was its flagrant discords. The unintelligibilty of the vast city made him apprehensive, and the crudity of its big, coarse contrasts wounded him unutterably.

      “What is the matter?” I asked him as we went along the silent pavement at Norwood.

      “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing!” and I did not trouble him further.

      We occupied a large, two-bedded room — that looked down the hill and over to the far woods of Kent. He was morose and untalkative. I brought up a soda-syphon and whisky, and we proceeded to undress. When he stood in his pyjamas he waited as if uncertain.

      “Do you want a drink?” he asked.

      I did not. He crossed to the table, and as I got into my bed I heard the brief fizzing of the syphon. He drank his glass at one draught, then switched off the light. In the sudden darkness I saw his pale shadow go across to the sofa

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