The Jury (14 page)

“Yes, you are,” said Stella with emphatic decision. “Quite extraordinary. I believe you've quite forgotten that Agnes is having a baby——”

“My
dear!”
he broke in. “How
could
I forget! It makes it so much more difficult, I know. This moment of all moments. You and I, and Agnes having a baby.”

“—and that her life is in danger,” finished Stella obstinately.

“Yes, yes,” said Cyril. He smiled a strange sad smile, like a martyr forgiving his persecutors. “It's terrible. Only you, dear, can understand what this ordeal means to me. I tell you, Stella, I'm simply worn out with it.”

“Are you?” Her eyes gleamed. “Poor Cyril! Thoughtless of Agnes to put such a strain on you.”

He went on, unhearing. The theme drew him irresistibly. “Yes, my dear. No one knows what I've been through these last few days …”

“Don't they?” said Stella, widening her wide eyes. “Well, it's not for want of telling, is it?”

He heard that, and was puzzled. The dialogue was taking an unexpected turn. She was doubtless distraught, not quite herself, talking at random in her brave resolve to be loyal to Agnes. Ah, little bird, you have nothing to fear. No need for this iron control. No need for dissembling. Your secret is safe with me. Think of me, darling, not of Agnes. Think how I've suffered, be sorry for me, celibate all these weeks, anxious, thinking of my child and of poor Agnes. Come and be comforted, come and comfort, give me your lips … a kiss of kindness, pure kindness—what could be lovelier, what could be purer?—let the tears come, let the tears gush out. …

There was a tap at the door. Stella opened it.

What was all this? Ah, the doctor! “Doctor,” he stammered, “is it …?”

Yes, it was all over. It was all right. A boy.

“May we see her?” asked Stella, clutching the doctor's hand.

“Him, Stella,” said Cyril, gently correcting her. “It's a boy. Didn't you hear?” My son. My firstborn.

Cyril Gaskin was happy. And with good reason. A new Cyril Gaskin had entered the world of men.

MARK may be right up to a point, said Roderick, back in his office. But he over-simplifies everything—the journalist's trick. Daphne running away to make me run after her. Well, supposing she is? And suppose she
does
dramatize her suffering and make the most of it, that doesn't prove she's not suffering. And, so, it doesn't let
me
out. In the train that evening, on the way to Widdicot, he resumed the argument,
telling himself that there was, whether one liked it or not, a sort of identity between himself and Daphne. That phrase about being one flesh was not entirely meaningless, though it was rather in the spirit than in the flesh that people got so damnably united. He felt in his bones that he would never really get away from her so long as they both lived. It's the sharing that does it, he said. Sex is nothing—or at least it's only one thing, and it passes. But the sharing, having house and purse in common, eating together, being tired together, or amused or bored or excited, even quarrelling and gradually learning how to avoid quarrels—good or bad, lively or dull, intimacy or habit, it was all one, and it was marriage: not the legal fiction or the mystic self-dedication, but the inconvenient reality that came of continuous living together.

Roderick both soothed and terrified himself with these reflections, for while they provided moral support to the craven impulse that urged him to surrender, they also, by the same token, threatened to betray his new love and cheat him of his heart's desire. At moments he suspected himself of the subtlest form of hypocrisy, the deceiving oneself into the belief that to submit to the so-called inevitable is the true part of wisdom. And at such moments he clung frenziedly to the fact of Elisabeth. It was Elisabeth that he wanted. In her love, in her life, in her very flesh, he was fulfilled. She's all I want, he said, and the rest is lies. … Then why am I in this train? he cried in a sort of terror. What idiot weakness is driving me to Daphne, to listen, to talk, to let myself be spiritually blackmailed, to be betrayed into a pious treachery? Nevertheless he winced at the thought of the alternative policy, the ruthless but perhaps less cruel policy, of calling her bluff, leaving her alone to her anger and misery. Now he faced the fact that bluff it was, this running away, this refusal to see him; and now, a moment later, that fact seemed dubious indeed. Perhaps her image of him was really dead, killed by his own act. And to think that was to feel that Daphne herself was in some sense dead, and so to be beset by memories of happy times together. And though he knew that memory too is a deceiver, with a strong sentimental bias, he could not but lend himself to the deception. His past was himself, and Daphne was part of his past. To cut her out of
himself was a piece of surgery he lacked the nerve to perform. Yet perform it he must, or be for ever something less than a man.

He had sent a telegram, and there was Daphne on the platform to meet him. He was astonished to see her. It had seemed inconceivable that she would feel friendly enough to come. Relieved of its misgiving, his heart gave a bound. Often he had thought: If only Daphne were someone else, so that I could talk to her quite frankly about all this, man to man! And now … was it possible …? He stepped out of the train and went towards her. But she, after one glance of recognition, one oddly neutral glance, turned her head away and awaited him with apparent apathy. “Hullo,” he said, tentatively. “Hullo,” she answered. She did not look at him again. She stood aside so that he might give his ticket to the collector and precede her out of the station.

“So you're staying at Mrs Hewitt's again,” remarked Roderick, when they reached the road together.

“Yes,” said Daphne. “I asked Mark not to tell you.”

He stole a glance at her profile. “Why did you do that?”

“Do you want a meal?” she asked.

“No, I had one on the train.”

She seemed to hesitate. He noticed that her glance rested for a moment on the suitcase that he carried.

“I'd better put this thing in the cloakroom here, hadn't I?” he suggested. He felt awkward and guilty. “And see about a room somewhere,” he explained, in an agony of discomfort.

“Yes,” she said. “No doubt the hotel will have room.”

“Oh, sure to.” He spoke hurriedly. He was doubly at a loss. Desperately afraid of saying the wrong thing, he blurted out: “Well, perhaps it would be more sense to go to the hotel straight away?” He waited in vain for her answer. “Would it?” What a feeble idiot I am, he thought. No guts. No decision. Crawling down here like a beaten dog, to ask for another beating.

Her blank face offering no help, he went back into the station and got rid of the suitcase, returning two minutes later to find her still standing in precisely the same attitude of rigid inattention.

He came and stood at her elbow. “Well, shall we go and walk by the sea?”

“Just as you like,” said Daphne politely.

“Well, I mean, if we are to have a talk,” he explained, blunderingly. “After all,” he added, in a tone grown suddenly angry, “you said you wanted to talk.”

But the anger was superficial: underneath it was mere misery. Without more words they began walking at a brisk pace, and no sooner were his legs in motion than Roderick began to feel his burden less heavy. But the soothing of his ruffled nerves brought a new burden. In the earliest days of his marriage walking had been among the chief of the pleasures shared with Daphne, and for an instant of time he was able to cheat himself into believing that the old easy taken-for-granted comradeship was restored to life again. These moments, contradicted at every other step by his sense of fact, added to this experience a poignancy which he was afraid to recognize. These two mortal spirits, enclosed together in the heart of a lovely summer, and walking side by side at an easy, swinging pace, were yet divided and at odds, each suffering a solitary confinement. When they came within sight of the sea, that sudden amplitude, that large sane horizon, offered Roderick a moment's escape, from himself and from Daphne. But, alas, the beauty of the sea put him in mind of Elisabeth, and that it should do so made him feel guilty. The crystal of the evening was shattered, and he glanced stealthily at Daphne's shut face. He saw nothing there that Brian Goodeve, that Mark Perryman, had seen. And his heart sank into despair. If only I could look on her with desire, he thought. But I can't. It's Elisabeth I want.

They had been walking, along the cliffs, for what seemed a long time, without exchanging a word; and even now he could not bring himself to begin making words, more words, of the plight in which they found themselves. It's utterly commonplace, nothing the least unusual about it. And God knows we've talked enough. Too much. Though peace had taken flight from the summer evening, silence remained, and he entertained a vague fond hope that silence, if only it were given time, might heal them as no words could do; might bring them magically into a state of serene, passionless
harmony. Refusing to engage itself with the tedious problem, which was indeed no problem at all, but a plain deadlock, his tired mind wandered off once more in contemplation of sea and sky and the random dreams that their strangely personal presence set moving in him; so that it was almost with the effect of waking that he became again sharply aware of Daphne.

For she came to a sudden standstill and said: “I think I shall sit down.”

The announcement sounded so much like an accusation that he could find no answer. Frowning, confused, he watched her sit down, and then followed her example.

“We
are
having a nice talk, aren't we?” said Daphne, with aggressive loudness.

He met her sudden stare with raised eyebrows and deprecating face. “I'm ready enough to talk, if there's anything to say. That's what I've come for, isn't it?”

“Well, what are we going to do about everything? We can't go on like this: that's evident. Are you going to send me hotel bills or something? I'm sure that will be very nice.”

Ah, thought Roderick, so it's beginning. The same chattering recrimination.

“One thing I've made up my mind about,” said Daphne. “I won't have any of your money.”

“That's hardly reasonable, is it?” He spoke in the carefully level voice of an exasperation too profound for utterance.

“I won't take your money,” she repeated.

“Then what are you going to live on?” he asked.

“That's my own business. I won't have any money from
you.
I'm not a kept woman, to be pensioned off.”

“I see,” said Roderick. He saw. He recognized the tactics and almost, in his extreme bitterness, admired them. Already, against all reason, he felt mean, because he no longer wanted to live with his wife; and now a more vulgar kind of meanness was to be forced upon him; he was to be put in the position of a defaulting husband, a man who leaves his wife without money, so that she must fend for herself and excite the world's indignation against him. “That's what I call hitting below the belt.”

They lapsed into silence again, and sat staring at the sea. Daphne's violence had spent itself. But it had done its work. Before her outburst he had felt melancholy and bewildered, the victim, with her, of a disaster he could have neither foreseen nor averted. But he was not to escape like that. Her voice, her very posture, accused him. He alone was responsible. He had done it all, and done it with the sole purpose of wounding her love and dragging her pride in the dust. This, he felt, was what her bitter speech had told him. But glancing again at her averted profile he saw that she was quietly weeping. The sight of that small puckered face made his heart turn over. Resentment died in him. Knowing that he risked rebuff, he put out a hand and touched her drooping shoulder.

“Don't do that,” he said. “It's not worth it.”

She turned and leaned against him, like a child wanting to hide its tears and to be comforted. Frightful, he thought, that people have to hurt each other like this.

“We'll find a way out,” he said, holding her. For now they were indeed two children confronted by an impersonal calamity. But on the heels of that thought came the fear: Have I said too much? Have I surrendered?

She lifted a tear-stained face. “Oh, Rod, I hate us not being friends.”

“I know,” he answered.

She scrutinized him with knitted, childish brows.
“Can't
we be friends? Can't we save
something
out of this smash?”

“If only we can,” he said eagerly, “it will be wonderful. You know how it is with me. If somehow you could bring yourself not to mind too much.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at the ground. “I think perhaps I could, if you would help me. When your telegram came I thought anything might be possible. I even thought that you could have us both, me and … her. But when you came you seemed so strange, so shut away, that I went all ugly again. I didn't, you know, mean everything I said—it just came out of me.”

He was a little dazed. A miracle was happening, the remote, impossible thing he had so fondly prayed for. “Let's forget all that. We've both said things we didn't mean.” But is that true? he asked himself.

After a pause she spoke again. “Is she
very
important to you?”

Say no, say no, urged his weakness. It's easiest to say no. But if I say no, he argued, it will be a lie, and it will lose me all I've been fighting for.

He said: “Yes. I won't pretend otherwise. But you're important too.”

He half expected an outburst of emotion, but she took the avowal calmly, resignedly. “Yes, she's very important to you. I must face that. But I've sometimes wondered, the last day or two, if it's worth quarrelling about. People have got to be free, haven't they? No one has the right to interfere.”