After the Fireworks (30 page)

‘I feel that in some way we're almost responsible for her,' said Catherine. ‘Oh, I wish I'd written to her! And why didn't she write to me?'

I propounded a comforting theory. ‘She probably hasn't been with Kingham at all,' I suggested. ‘She's gone abroad as usual with Peddley and the children. We shall probably find that the whole thing has died down by the time we get home.'

‘I wonder,' said Catherine.

We were destined to discover the truth, or at least some portion of it, sooner than we had expected. The first person I saw as I stepped out of the train at Modane was John Peddley.

He was standing on the platform some ten or fifteen yards away, scanning, with eyes that sharply turned this way and that, the faces of the passengers descending from the express. His glances were searching, quick, decisive. He might have been a detective posted there on the frontier to intercept the escape of a criminal. No crook, you felt, no gentleman cracksman, however astute, could hope to sneak or swagger past those all-seeing hunter's eyes. It was that thought, the realization that the thing was hopeless, that
made me check my first impulse, which was to flee—out of the station, anywhere—to hide—in the luggage-van, the lavatory, under a seat. No, the game was obviously up. There was no possible escape. Sooner or later, whatever I might do now, I should have to present myself at the custom-house; he would catch me there, infallibly. And the train was scheduled to wait for two and a half hours.

‘We're in for it,' I whispered to Catherine, as I helped her down on to the platform. She followed the direction of my glance and saw our waiting danger.

‘Heaven help us,' she ejaculated with an unaccustomed piety; then added in another tone: ‘But perhaps that means that Grace is here. I shall go and ask him.'

‘Better not,' I implored, still cherishing a foolish hope that we might somehow slip past him unobserved. ‘Better not.'

But in that instant, Peddley turned round and saw us. His large, brown, handsome face beamed with sudden pleasure; he positively ran to meet us.

Those two and a half hours in John Peddley's company at Modane confirmed for me a rather curious fact, of which, hitherto, I had been only vaguely and inarticulately aware: the fact that one may be deeply and sympathetically interested in the feelings of individuals whose thoughts and opinions—all the products, in a word, of their intellects—are utterly indifferent, even wearisome and repulsive. We read the Autobiography of Alfieri, the Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, and read them with a passionate interest. But Alfieri's tragedies, but Haydon's historical pictures, all the things which, for the men themselves, constituted their claim on the world's attention, have simply ceased to exist, so
far as we are concerned. Intellectually and artistically, these men were more than half dead. But emotionally they lived.

Mutatis mutandis
*
, it was the same with John Peddley. I had known him, till now, only as a relater of facts, an expounder of theories—as an intellect, in short; one of the most appallingly uninteresting intellects ever created. I had known him only in his public capacity, so to speak, as the tireless lecturer of club smoking-rooms and dinner-tables. I had never had a glimpse of him in private life. It was not to be wondered at; for, as I have said before, at ordinary times and when things were running smoothly, Peddley had no private life more complicated than the private life of his body. His feelings towards the majority of his fellow-beings were the simple emotions of the huntsman: pleasure when he had caught his victim and could talk him to death; pain and a certain slight resentment when the prey escaped him. Towards his wife he felt the desires of a healthy man in early middle life, coupled with a real but rather unimaginative, habit-born affection. It was an affection which took itself and its object, Grace, altogether too much for granted. In his own way, Peddley loved his wife, and it never occurred to him to doubt that she felt in the same way towards him; it seemed to him the natural inevitable thing, like having children and being fond of them, having a house and servants and coming home in the evening from the office to find dinner awaiting one. So inevitable, that it was quite unnecessary to talk or even to think about it; natural to the point of being taken publicly for granted, like the possession of a bank balance.

I had thought it impossible that Peddley should ever develop a private life; but I had been wrong. I had not fore
seen the possibility of his receiving a shock violent enough to shake him out of complacency into self-questioning, a shock of sufficient strength to shiver the comfortable edifice of his daily, taken-for-granted life. That shock he had now received. It was a new and unfamiliar Peddley who now came running towards us.

‘I'm so glad, I'm so particularly glad to see you,' he said, as he approached us. ‘Quite extraordinarily glad, you know.'

I have never had my hand so warmly shaken as it was then. Nor had Catherine, as I could see by the way she winced, as she abandoned her fingers to his crushing cordiality.

‘You're the very man I particularly wanted to see,' he went on, turning back to me. He stooped and picked up a couple of our suitcases. ‘Let's make a dash for the douane,' he said. ‘And then, when we've got those wretched formalities well over, we can have a bit of a talk.'

We followed him. Looking at Catherine, I made a grimace. The prospect of that bit of a talk appalled me. Catherine gave me an answering look, then quickened her pace so as to come up with the energetically hurrying Peddley.

‘Is Grace with you here?' she asked.

Peddley halted, a suit-case in each hand. ‘Well,' he said, slowly and hesitatingly, as though it were possible to have metaphysical doubts about the correct answer to this question, ‘well, as a matter of fact, she isn't. Not really.' He might have been discussing the problem of the Real Presence.

As if reluctant to speak about the matter any further, he turned away and hurried on towards the custom-house, leaving Catherine's next question—‘Shall we find her in London when we get back?'—without an answer.

The bit of a talk, when it came, was very different from what I had gloomily anticipated.

‘Do you think your wife would mind,' Peddley whispered to me, when the douanier had done with us and we were making our way towards the station restaurant, ‘if I had a few words with you alone?'

I answered that I was sure she wouldn't, and said a word to Catherine, who replied, to me by a quick significant look, and to both of us together by a laughing dismissal.

‘Go away and talk your stupid business if you want to,' she said. ‘I shall begin my lunch.'

We walked out on to the platform. It had begun to rain, violently, as it only rains among the mountains. The water beat on the vaulted glass roof of the station, filling all the space beneath with a dull, continuous roar; we walked as though within an enormous drum, touched by the innumerable fingers of the rain. Through the open arches at either end of the station the shapes of mountains were dimly visible through veils of white, wind-driven water.

We walked up and down for a minute or two without saying a word. Never, in my presence at any rate, had Peddley preserved so long a silence. Divining what embarrassments kept him in this unnatural state of speechlessness, I felt sorry for the man. In the end, after a couple of turns up and down the platform, he made an effort, cleared his throat and diffidently began in a small voice that was quite unlike that loud, self-assured, trombone-like voice in which he told one about the Swiss banking system.

‘What I wanted to talk to you about,' he said, ‘was Grace.'

The face he turned towards me as he spoke was full of a
puzzled misery. That common-placely handsome mask was strangely puckered and lined. Under lifted eyebrows, his eyes regarded me, questioningly, helplessly, unhappily.

I nodded and said nothing; it seemed the best way of encouraging him to proceed.

‘The fact is,' he went on, turning away from me and looking at the ground, ‘the fact is . . .' But it was a long time before he could make up his mind to tell me what the fact was.

Knowing so very well what the fact was, I could have laughed aloud, if pity had not been stronger in me than mockery, when he wound up with the pathetically euphemistic understatement: ‘The fact is that Grace . . . well, I believe she doesn't love me. Not in the way she did. In fact I know it.'

‘How do you know it?' I asked, after a little pause, hoping that he might have heard of the affair only through idle gossip, which I could proceed to deny.

‘She told me,' he answered, and my hope disappeared.

‘Ah.'

So Kingham had had his way, I reflected. He had bullied her into telling Peddley the quite unnecessary truth, just for the sake of making the situation a little more difficult and painful than it need have been.

‘I'd noticed for some time,' Peddley went on, after a silence, ‘that she'd been different.'

Even Peddley could be perspicacious after the event. And besides, the signs of her waning love had been sufficiently obvious and decisive. Peddley might have no sympathetic imagination; but at any rate he had desires and knew when they were satisfied and when they weren't. He hinted at explanatory details.

‘But I never imagined,' he concluded—‘how could I imagine?—that it was because there was somebody else. How could I?' he repeated in a tone of ingenuous despair. You saw very clearly that it was, indeed, quite impossible for him to have imagined such a thing.

‘Quite,' I said, affirming comfortingly I do not know exactly what proposition. ‘Quite.'

‘Well then, one day,' he pursued, ‘one day just before we had arranged to come out here into the mountains, as usual, she suddenly came and blurted it all out—quite suddenly, you know, without warning. It was dreadful. Dreadful.'

There was another pause.

‘That fellow called Kingham,' he went on, breaking the silence, ‘you know him? he's a friend of yours, isn't he?'

I nodded.

‘Very able man, of course,' said Peddley, trying to be impartial and give the devil his due. ‘But, I must say, the only times I met him I found him rather unsympathetic.' (I pictured the scene: Peddley embarking on the law relating to insurance companies or, thoughtfully remembering that the chap was literary, on pianolas or modern art or the Einstein theory. And for his part, Kingham firmly and in all likelihood very rudely refusing to be made a victim of.) ‘A bit too eccentric for my taste.'

‘Queer,' I confirmed, ‘certainly. Perhaps a little mad sometimes.'

Peddley nodded. ‘Well,' he said slowly, ‘it was Kingham.'

I said nothing. Perhaps I ought to have ‘registered amazement,' as they say in the world of the cinema; amazement, horror, indignation—above all amazement. But I am a poor comedian. I made no grimaces, uttered no cries. In silence
we walked slowly along the platform. The rain drummed on the roof overhead; through the archway at the end of the station the all but invisible ghosts of mountains loomed up behind white veils. We walked from Italy towards France and back again from France towards Italy.

‘Who could have imagined it?' said Peddley at last.

‘Anybody,' I might, of course, have answered. ‘Anybody who had a little imagination and who knew Grace; above all, who knew you.' But I held my tongue. For though there is something peculiarly ludicrous about the spectacle of a self-satisfaction suddenly punctured, it is shallow and unimaginative only to laugh at it. For the puncturing of self-satisfaction gives rise to a pain that can be quite as acute as that which is due to the nobler tragedies. Hurt vanity and exploded complacency may be comic as a spectacle, from the outside; but to those who feel the pain of them, who regard them from within, they are very far from ludicrous. The feelings and opinions of the actor, even in the morally lowest dramas, deserve as much consideration as the spectator's. Peddley's astonishment that his wife could have preferred another man to himself was doubtless, from my point of view, a laughable exhibition. But the humiliating realization had genuinely hurt him; the astonishment had been mixed with a real pain. Merely to have mocked would have been a denial, in favour of the spectator, of the actor's rights. Moreover, the pain which Peddley felt was not exclusively the product of an injured complacency. With the low and ludicrous were mingled other, more reputable emotions. His next words deprived me of whatever desire I might have had to laugh.

‘What am I to do?' Peddley went on, after another long
pause, and looked at me again more miserably and bewilderedly than ever. ‘What
am
I to do?'

‘Well,' I said cautiously, not knowing what to advise him, ‘it surely depends how you feel about it all—about Grace in particular.'

‘How I feel about her?' he repeated. ‘Well,' he hesitated, embarrassed, ‘I'm fond of her, of course. Very fond of her.' He paused; then, with a great effort, throwing down barriers which years of complacent silence, years of insensitive taking for granted had built up round the subject, he went on: ‘I love her.'

The utterance of that decisive word seemed to make things easier for Peddley. It was as though an obstruction had been removed; the stream of confidences began to flow more easily and copiously.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘I don't think I had quite realized how much I did love her till now. That's what makes it all so specially dreadful—the thought that I ought to have loved her more, or at least more consciously when I had the opportunity, when she loved me; the thought that if I had, I shouldn't, probably, be here now all alone, without her.' He averted his face and was silent, while we walked half the length of the platform. ‘I think of her all the time, you know,' he continued. ‘I think how happy we used to be together and I wonder if we shall ever be happy again, as we were, or if it's all over, all finished.' There was another pause. ‘And then,' he said, ‘I think of her there in England, with that man, being happy with him, happier perhaps than she ever was with me; for perhaps she never really did love me, not like that.' He shook his head. ‘Oh, it's dreadful, you know, it's dreadful. I try to get these thoughts out of my
head, but I can't. I walk in the hills till I'm dead-beat; I try to distract myself by talking to people who come through on the trains. But it's no good. I can't keep these thoughts away.'