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D
REW
hadn't heard. He was peering through the little fan-shaped patch of clear glass which his
windscreen wiper allowed him, and through a silver-grey sheet of rain, at the road. With the defeat of the sun a nip in the air which had seemed only a pleasant stimulation became a bleak and insidious cold. Millicent turned, said:

“My coat, please, Susan,” and saw her daughter sitting with her eyes half shut – not sleepily but painfully, as though her head were aching; and Bret looking at her with a queer expression – pity, puzzlement—

She sighed, struggling in the cramped space into the coat he handed her. It was just as well that she knew Bret! How she might have hated him otherwise! Just as well that she'd known him as a baby, heard of him as a small child from Agatha, known him again as a schoolboy, Colin's idol, a silent youth with his mother's sudden smile and a god-like proficiency at football and rowing. And later, going off with Colin to that unspeakable shambles—

Well, anyhow, he was all right. And it was strange how she seemed always to be thinking of him with relief, with a grateful sense of reliance. She'd thought when Colin went to school: “Oh, well, Bret Maclean is there – Colin will be all right with him.” And that hideous morning when they were all marching down
to the troopships – her one glimmer of comfort: “Oh, Tom, look, there's Bret.” And again years later when he had helped them so much to settle Colin on Kalangadoo. There wasn't any one who could do so much with Colin as Bret – until Margery appeared—

And now Susan. All through this last dreadful year it had been her one cry – her one selfish maternal thought: “Thank goodness it's Bret!”

She could even wonder now if she'd spared enough of her concern for Bret himself. He'd done a strange, quixotic, characteristic thing, swept off his feet emotionally, as she supposed they'd all been, by the suddenness of tragedy. But she wondered sometimes if she would have allowed it if it hadn't been for Tom. Tom, bless his heart, had very simple views. He probably, she reflected, had thought of his daughter as being “in trouble,” and of Bret as “making an honest woman of her!” He hadn't felt and feared, as she had, dark undercurrents swirling beneath the surface calmness of Bret's and Susan's rational discussion. He hadn't looked ahead as she had to this time which they were now facing, when a strange situation was to become quite abruptly a normal one, and they were to have no normal feelings with which to meet it. There was so much more to it, she'd felt apprehensively, than a few words in a registrar's office, a signature or two, a wedding ring. Those things didn't change you. Bret was still Bret, fighting an inner hostility: Susan was still Susan, her love stinging itself brutally, scorpion-wise, into strange frenzies.

She hadn't told Tom that first day. So that the second day, when, watching from her bedroom window she'd seen Susan get out of the taxi and come into the house, she'd felt a little shiver of pity for him
invade the more overwhelming compassion she was feeling for her daughter. And regret, too, a quite simple feeling of regret that her son-in-law was to be Jim, not Bret. Yes, she'd thought, going quickly down the stairs, it was a muddle the poor child had got herself into, falling in love, at such a time, with Bret—

And then she'd seen Susan standing just inside the front door, her face wet and streaked with rain, her eyes shut. She'd said quickly and softly, because Tom was in the library and she didn't want him – just yet:

“Darling! Susan! What is it?”

For she'd seen suddenly that the wet streaks were tears, not rain. Tears pouring out steadily from under closed lids, down a face so utterly still it might have been carved—

Upstairs, half an hour later, Susan had looked at her with a queer apathy. It was from the order in which she gave, unemotionally, her two stark bits of news that Millicent found the full realisation of her tragedy. For she didn't say, “Jim's dead and I'm going to marry Bret,” but first, “I'm going to marry Bret,” and then, exhaustedly, seeing her mother's face blankly uncomprehending, she'd explained dully: “Jim's dead.”

From that hour there had begun to beat in the background of Millicent's mind the refrain which it was still repeating, “Thank goodness it's Bret.”

She'd put Susan to bed. The child was just about finished. And Tom, looking as if his world had crumbled about his ears, had tramped the house muttering to himself, storming at her, but somehow even in his first anger, she liked to remember, not saying hard things of Susan.

“Well, Milly, it's a nasty business, but if this chap offers a way out—”

“As long as it
is
a
way out, Tom, and not a way into worse unhappiness for her.”

“Don't be absurd, Milly; it means – well, you know what it means. Disgrace for her – for the child—”

Dear Tom! He hadn't said, “For us.” She doubted whether he'd thought it. She suggested:

“There might be even worse things than disgrace. She could be with us, couldn't she?” And she'd added with a wintry little smile, “You wouldn't turn her out?”

He'd snorted ferociously:

“This isn't a time for joking, Milly,” and she'd answered meekly, hugging his arm: “No, dear.”

“I always said,” he cried out, beginning to walk about again, “that I didn't want her to go. I said so at the time. And look what's come of it. But you would have your own way. I was most definitely against it. Wasn't I?”

“Yes, darling.”

“When's this fellow coming?”

“Bret?”

“Yes.”

“Any time now, Tom.”

“What sort of a chap is he?”

“A very good chap indeed.”

“How long since you've seen him?”

“Oh, a long time – years – when he came back from the war.”

“Well, I'm going to the library. You can send him in there.”

He'd stamped away. “Send him in there!” She'd hoped, smiling after him ruefully, that he wouldn't try to be too school-masterish with Bret—

And she'd gone to the window to watch for him—

As he got out of the taxi
she caught a glimpse beneath his hat of a profile she didn't know she had remembered so clearly. All his movements as he banged the door shut, paid the driver and turned to the house, were so brisk, so business-like that she'd felt a fleeting sense of resentment; but at the foot of the steps he'd paused, so brief a hesitation in his movement that it was scarcely perceptible, but it turned her swiftly from the window to get the front door open before he rang.

They'd looked at each other blankly for a moment across the threshold. She thought he looked tired – more than tired, ill—

And she'd remembered that he had probably been doing miserable and distressing things – arranging for a funeral, telling Kathleen and Ken – collecting Jim's belongings from wherever they were—

And she'd held out both her hands to him suddenly, forgetting all about Susan—

“Come in, Bret.”

“Thank you.” He followed her into the drawing-room.

There seated opposite to her, he had begun at once:

“Susan has told you, Mrs. Drew—? About Jim—”

“Yes, Bret. I” And she'd discovered that you can't look at some one just bereaved and say, “I'm sorry,” because those are words which you use if you bump into him or hit him accidentally with a tennis ball – and there are no others but phrases of stilted formality. So she'd just waited, looking at him unhappily, and he'd ploughed on:

“And about us? That we want – that we think it best—” And she'd interrupted him quickly:

“She's told me everything, Bret. I don't know yet
what to think. I can't feel sure what's best. It's a difficult – a dangerous way out, a marriage of this sort.”

He'd shrugged his shoulders.

“Can you suggest a better?”

She'd admitted, “No,” watching the rain beating against the window she had left uncurtained. And she'd said at last, “The only alternative I can see is for her not to attempt a ‘way out' at all.”

“Which is rough,” Bret had said shortly, “on the child.”

The child. Millicent, huddled in her fur coat, seeing the road dimly through a blur of rain, thought that it seemed ironical that the child for whose welfare they had all thought and acted, should have slipped casually out of a life so carefully prepared for him. There'd been, somewhere, for all of them, a snub, a jeer in that death of something which had hardly been a life at all. As though a guest of honour should come at last to a reception most laboriously arranged for him, and, after the briefest glance, cynical, faun-like, turn his back and walk out—

Leaving them all—

Well, rather foolishly stranded. Rather absurdly committed to something whose essential reason simply didn't exist any longer—

It
would
have been rough on the child. Bret, from first to last, had talked plain facts. It was, indeed, his magnificent nonawareness of any other aspect which had frightened her most. What did he think a marriage
was? A wedding-ring and a double bed? It almost sounded as if he did not really conceive it as anything more—

So she'd said slowly:

“Yes, possibly in some ways it would be rough on the child. Legally and socially —”

And he'd asked, quite seriously:

“Are there other ways?”

She stared at him.

“Happiness? A child born by a happy mother – brought up in a – harmonious home—? You don't think that important?”

He'd moved restlessly, spoken politely:

“You know best, of course, how much such things count. In any case I – I don't see why marriage with me should necessarily make Susan irretrievably miserable. I know there isn't – she doesn't care for me, but—”

She'd spoken swiftly then, almost anxious that a persistent glimmer of what she knew to be quite unreasonable hope should be sharply and finally quenched, leaving her with a clearer if a harder problem to tackle:

“And you don't care for her?”

He made a desperate movement with his hand.

“How could I? I hardly know her. What I do know is not—”

He stopped. Her, “Yes? What were you going to say?” was not less a challenge for being so softly spoken. He met it at once, his face curiously hard.

“Is not to her credit, was what I was going to say, Mrs. Drew. I stopped because – I'm not quite sure. I haven't had time to think about it – to make up my mind if she has any justification for what seems to be
a very definite point of view—” And then he'd said suddenly, wearily: “Anyhow, it isn't relevant.”

Not relevant! She'd only felt able to stare at him. He protested:

“You must take my word for it that I'll treat her decently—”

She smiled a little.

“I wasn't questioning your good intentions, Bret. I was only wondering if they're enough to save Susan from the misery of an unhappy marriage—”

Then suddenly he was on his feet, furious, speaking fast and bitterly.

“Susan's welfare! Susan's happiness! I tell you quite plainly they don't concern me. Jim was worth a thousand of her, and he's dead – not able to help the child. I want to take over his responsibility – but not for Susan's sake. Legally because she's not of age, the decision rests with you and her father. Please let me have it, Mrs. Drew. I can't talk any more—”

So she'd gone away to find Tom, leaving him standing at the window, his hands in his pockets, his mind wrestling, she felt sure now, with a doubt, a torment, which a few days afterwards he had confessed to her—

Not that he need ever have felt it. She had told him so strenuously at the time, feeling sorry for him in his sudden lapses into silence, the brief abstractions of his gaze. Later on, she had promised him, he would be able to feel what even now he must know, that he could not reasonably blame himself for what had happened. What influence he had with them all – Jim, Kathleen, Ken – he had won less by holding than by letting go.

“Jim wasn't a child, Bret—”

“No – but I knew. I might have done something. I might have told you – I just stood back and let it go on—”

And she'd said, sighing:

“Well, you're doing your best now.”

And it was
only that conviction which had remained with her, the conviction that he was always doing and would always continue to do his best, which had saved her from utter despair in the last few months. She should have realised, she saw now, that Susan married was Susan most terribly isolated. Whatever new miseries and problems had come to her as Bret's wife, she had to deal with them alone. Millicent would have bitten her tongue out rather than imply a doubt of Bret by questioning; Susan would have died rather than portray him to her family by words or manner, as anything less than perfect. So they'd all found themselves playing parts. It wasn't easy between herself and Tom—

She remembered now, before the wedding, behind all their fears for Susan, their grief for her in this bitter-tasting one-sided love of hers, they had surprised sometimes in each other's eyes the glimmer of a smile, born of some deep, unshakeable parental pride! “Ah, but it's Susan! Our Susan! Just wait – of course he'll fall in love with her. Who could help it?”

And how only this morning, walking back up the path which she had so mendaciously proclaimed too steep, their eyes had met again with a vague bewilderment, an unacknowledged fear—

To Tom, she knew, it had been a year of incessant irritation. It was all so indefinable, the very kind of trouble he most detested. What was there to do with a problem but grab it and wring its neck? But when you
weren't quite sure where its neck was, or even if it had a neck at all, you were being most intolerably victimised by Life— He had rumbled and grumbled his disapproval, he had picked and brushed at his doubts as at persistent cobwebs, but still they were there—