Kind Are Her Answers (26 page)

Janet, he saw, had taken pains with her appearance. It was some time since they had been out in the evening together. She had on a new dress of dark red watered silk, with a clear fluent line which emphasized her perfect carriage. Her beauty, like an insult flung at him in the street, pointed past failure and compensation lost. He admired the dress, and listened while she told him where she had found the design and her difficulties in getting it copied. She glanced at him with approval, the same kind of approval she had given to her coat and her other correct accessories.

Dinner at the Crown—a Christmas specialty—seemed the longest and most enormous meal with which he had ever been confronted. He ate it because he knew that if he did not Janet would ask about his health. On the way out he saw a thin grizzled cripple selling matches on the kerb. All his inward shame and self-hatred concentrated themselves in the thought that he had been forcing down, out of mere convention, unwanted food the cost of which would have kept this beggar for a week. He gave the man ten shillings when Janet was looking the other way.

There were a great many cars parked round the Abbey, and a bus disgorged its contents as they drove up. It occurred to Kit for the first time that all the seats might be taken, and, now that the moment had come, sent up a silent prayer that they would. But only the cheaper seats were gone; there were, the box-office girl cheerfully assured him, several seven-and-six-pennies left. Would he like them in Row C at the side, or Row B in the centre gangway?

He hesitated, holding up the queue; remembering the smallness of the theatre. They would be almost under the stage. It had not occurred to him before that Christie might see him. Expedients for getting away, all of them impossible, raced through his mind. Janet’s voice, politely impatient, cut across them. “The second row, don’t you think? The others are much too far along.” He pulled himself together and took the tickets.

Janet admired the theatre; the Summer School performance had been in the open air. Kit, staring at the curtain, said, “Yes, it’s supposed to be the third best private theatre in England.”

“How do you know?” asked Janet curiously.

“Know? Oh, I don’t. I suppose I heard some one say so.

The orchestra played a verse of
In Dulce Jubilo,
and the curtain rose.

The first scene had a formalized, but weirdly effective, backcloth of peaks and clouds. Kit recognized the touch of Rollo, and accorded it a surprised respect. On the right of the stage, where the clouds were lighter and pierced with gleams, St. Michael was standing, white and gold and glittering, leaning on his spear. So Rollo got some one, thought Kit, his tenseness broken by a faint amusement; Rollo would. St. Michael was tall, wore a fair wig which his dark eyes belied, and had a beautiful resonant voice whose rhythms soothed Kit for a moment into calm. He spoke a blank-verse prologue, about the eternal conflict of good and evil and the single combat to come. When he ended, lifting his spear, a distant roll of thunder answered from the left.

Some one behind Kit whispered, “Satan’s coming.”

Kit stiffened where he sat. Among all that he had thought of and dreaded, he had forgotten this.

Lucifer entered, in black armour, lit with green.

Strong make-up, stylized as if for ballet, reduced the face under the visor to a mask. No human traits remained. Kit found himself sane enough to perceive this obvious fact, but not sane enough to remember it. He could feel hatred streaming out of him and battering at the shadowed upslanting eyes, the artificially lengthened mouth. Michael broke into speech again, an exhortation or a challenge; Kit did not listen to the words, but again the calm and lovely voice, with its bell-like solemnity, for a moment smoothed his mind.

Satan stepped forward, and spoke in soliloquy.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.”

Kit’s hatred sprang out to meet the voice, and checked for a moment, puzzled by some quality it had, both of familiarity and the unexpected.

The chatterer behind whispered, “Isn’t he
good?”

Kit’s hatred shook itself free, and rode his mind. The concentration and gathered emotion of the audience gave it a more than earthly life, like the obsessions of nightmare. He saw, with nightmare’s clear monstrosity, Christie embraced by a grinning devil, smiling childishly into his slit eyes.

Janet tapped his arm. He realized, as he turned, that she must have tapped it several times.

“Kit,” she whispered, “are you feeling well?”

He nodded, and, as she still looked at him, whispered, “Yes, of course.”

Michael and Lucifer were debating, in rhymed dialogue of single lines. While Michael was speaking, vestiges of Kit’s moral command would return. He could feel his jealousy like some parasitic growth, external to him. In another moment he would be able to loosen it and be clean. Then Lucifer would begin, and it would become part of him again. He hated it and himself, but he hated Lucifer more. It was all horribly new to him: he had thought that Janet had drilled him in most kinds of endurance, forgetting this in which he had never been tried. During one moment when Michael was speaking, he saw all this quite coolly.

When the curtain fell and the applause began, his mind was sick and bruised, but silent.

Janet said, “I told you they were good, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry I interrupted in such a silly way. I thought you looked queer, but it must have been the lighting.”

“Yes, it does that, I’ve noticed before.”

“Have you the programme? We hadn’t time to look at it.”

Kit handed it, and glanced over her shoulder without attention. He had a feeling that something was amiss with it, but could not, for a few minutes, summon up concentration enough to see what it was. His eyes fixed themselves on the word
Lucifer,
and wearily rested there. At last they travelled on to the name that followed. It was
Rollo Baines.

The words about it were:
Persons in order of Appearance. St. Michael the Archangel: Lionel Fell.

Kit stared at the page. Nothing would move in him; only a little, silly voice in his head remarked, “Of course, Rollo couldn’t find any one else tall enough.” He stopped himself, just in time, from saying it aloud. His mind had the dead flatness of a substance whose reaction has been neutralized. No new reaction would come.

The first interval was a short one. Before Janet had had time to notice his lack of conversation, the curtain rose again.

This scene was a winter pastoral. Three shepherd boys were sheltering under a snowy bent, while the eldest played to the others on a wooden pipe. As he played, a hidden orchestra took up the air, and to this music Gabriel advanced and stood before them: Florizelle in all her glory, silvered and lilied. In this, her favourite rôle, her Rossetti face and figure still brought murmurs of “Ooh! Isn’t that
lovely!”
from the back of the theatre. Her voice was too female for the part, and of a cloying sweetness, but it suited the nursery-tale sentiment of the scene.

Afterwards, the youngest shepherd boy encountered the caravan of the Kings, and told them of the vision, and they watched the resting of the star. Kit noticed that the indefatigable Rollo was doubling the part of Balthasar. Through all this Christie had not appeared.

Kit longed to get away before his transient calm was broken by the sight of her. He felt that if he did, he might effect some kind of reconciliation with himself, and gather all that had happened into some memory in whose company he could bear to live. So strong was the impulse that he even thought of saying he felt ill, since Janet had already supposed it. But she was greatly enjoying the play; the expedient seemed mean, as well as hysterical and ridiculous. As he was reflecting on it the curtain rose. He wished at once that he had left under any pretext at all; but it was too late now.

This was the last scene, the finale at the Christmas crib. Florizelle’s Child-Angels were grouped before a gauzy dark veil, spangled with stars, which was slowly drawn aside. Within it Christie was sitting, her head draped with the blue garment of the Madonna, a baby on her knees.

All the tangled conflicts of the last hour were wiped from Kit’s mind. Nothing that happened since he left her was real any longer. There seemed no mockery in this translation, nothing shocking nor unholy. She sat looking at the child, as she had looked at him in the wood, with her tender downward smile. There was nothing false in her face of poise, nothing artificial or even studied. She was herself.

The baby was not, as he had thought for a moment, a property doll, but real. It wriggled in her arm, and gave the beginning of a cry, and she cuddled it into a more comfortable hold so that at once it was quiet, and presently, to the delight of the women in the audience, crowed. Kit looked at her in a timeless moment of revelation, and did not see, till she turned in greeting, the entry of the shepherds and the kings.

She had no lines to say, but her silence seemed to contain her more perfectly than words. A little sigh of pleasure ran through the theatre; Kit felt it pass him, like a light wind. In the background of his own emotion he could see like a stranger her lightness in this instant of the story, the only one she could have filled. As Mater Dolorosa she would have been shallow, pathetic, lost; she was a Christmas Madonna, loving and amazed and unsuspecting of grief. As he watched, one of the smallest and fattest angels, too little to have been rehearsed in what it did, pulled away from an elder child who was holding its hand, and, waddling unsteadily towards her, saved itself from falling by clutching her blue robe in its fists.

The shepherds and the kings had made their gifts. The orchestra began the music of the hymn with which the scene closed. Christie stood up, holding the child in one arm, and raised the other in benediction. As he was thinking that this too was like her, that she seemed to caress rather than to bless the crowd below her, she saw him.

For an instant she was arrested in mid-movement: then her smile lit and warmed with gladness, and her arm, moving a little further, extended deliberately the circle of its gesture beyond the stage. She blessed him, smiling with the anxious love of a mother into his eyes, and the curtain came down.

The sky was dark blue, clear, and powdered with a frosty galaxy, as Kit drove home. Janet was silent beside him; his thoughts were undisturbed. As the schoolmen used to meditate the thorny mystery of the Trinity, he meditated the truth that this, and the Christie whose letter he had in the drawer at home, were both actual, and equal in reality. He did not think about the future, perhaps because the present was enough, perhaps because he knew.

Janet had thoughts of her own. She had seen, for her part, the pattern of motherhood, and her husband’s eyes turned to his symbol in worship. Her heart, for a moment, knew its own bitterness. It was during this hour that a thought of escape, formless as yet and unadmitted, touched her mind for the first time.

“H
ULLO, HULLO. HAPPY NEW
Year and all that,” said Rollo.

For most of the week he had been acting two parts, been responsible for scenery and lighting to suit costumes, half of which he had designed, in a play he had mainly produced, so he was in particularly good spirits; and when in good spirits he loved to answer the door, even forestalling the maids when they were able and willing to discharge this duty. “Haven’t seen you lately. Been to the play? Good for you. Oh, nice of you to say so. The notices weren’t too bad. Looking for Christie?”

Kit was.

“She’s doing hampers upstairs. We’re a bit behindhand, with the play and so on. She said, if you came, would you like to go up and talk to her while she finished. She’s in the wardrobe room—by herself,” he added, with kindly tact. “You know the way, don’t you?”

Kit thanked him. The sight of Rollo, so unchanged in his dirty grey flannels, but with Lucifer’s iridescent green paint clinging unmistakably round his eye-sockets, deepened the dual unreality he had felt all the way there. Side by side with the furious conflict, lasting for days, which had preceded the journey, he had a feeling, equally strong, that nothing had really happened at all. Tossed between these opposites he groped his way, in semi-darkness, up the twisting staircase that led to the wardrobe room.

Christie was packing for
As You Like It.
When he came in she was pairing off suède thigh-boots, with a list of sizes in her hand. She dropped the list and ran to him, clasping a russet-coloured boot to her breast.

Kit had gone over the things they would say to one another till his mind was like a nineteenth century letter, with the lines superimposed and counter-crossed. This simple and silent alternative had not entered into his calculations. For a moment, while he kissed her, the illusion of security and continuity was complete, and he rested in it. Then, with compensating violence, imagination woke in him. He thrust her away.

She looked up at him with wide distressed eyes, and dropped the boot to the floor.

“Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you to know!”

The remorse in her voice was of the kind she might have shown if she had broken something which had sentimental value for him, but had hoped to get it replaced, or invisibly mended, before he found put about it. Words deserted him. He gazed at her, helplessly.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“From your letter, of course.”

“Not my Christmas letter? But I was so terribly careful not to … Oh, darling, and I was thinking of you so hard and wanting you to be happy. I spoilt your Christmas. I wouldn’t have done it for the world, if I’d known that. I feel such a beast.”

“That reminds me, thanks very much for the tie.”

“Did you like it? You haven’t got it on. Were you too upset with me to wear it? Kit, darling, I feel so bad about you. Look here, I
can’t
leave off packing these hampers, they’ve got to catch a train. Just sit down on that chair there, then I can get on. You don’t mind, do you? We can talk just the same.” As he did not move, she pulled him gently by the arm towards it. “That’s right. You can hold the list, do you mind? I don’t suppose I shall want it again, but I just might.”