I

He had only to seclude his mind in order to imagine himself in the train again, to hear its steady beat, and to sway monotonously with its rocking. As soon as he had isolated himself in this day-dream, he was impervious to the sights and sounds that washed round on the outskirts of his consciousness. He was safely withdrawn. He sat staring, not at the green baize of the card-table, where his wife, with white, plump, be-ringed hands, under the strong light thrown down by the shaded lamp, set out the neat rows of shiny cards for her Patience; he sat staring, sheltered within the friendly shadows, not at this evening security of his home, but out through the rectangular windows of the train, that framed the hard blaze of the southern country, the red rocks and the blue sea; the train curving in and out of tunnels, round the sharp promontories, disclosing the secrets of little bays, the pine-trees among the boulders, and the blackened scrub that betokened a previous hillside fire.

Opposite him, she slept, curled up in the corner of the seat, very young and very fragile under the big collar of soft fur of her coat thrown over her to keep off the dust. He had wished that she would look out of the window with him; he knew how she would sit up, and the quick impatient gesture by which she would dash the hair out of her eyes, but she slept so peacefully, so like a child, that he would not wake her. He bent forward, knocking the ash of his cigarette off against the window-ledge, to get a better view out of the window; and every little creek, as the curving train took it out of view, he pursued with regretful eyes, knowing that he would not pass that way again. This forlorn and beautiful coast, whose every accident was so faithfully followed by the train, this coast, every bit of it, was a party to his happiness, and he had been reluctant to let it go.

How his heart ached! Perhaps it was not wholesome to have trained his mind to enter so readily, so completely, into that world of recollections? He dragged himself out:

“Patience going well?”

“Not very well to-night.”

He drifted away again, before he well knew that he had drifted. Not to the train this time—his memories were illimitably various. (The time had been when he could not trust himself to dip into them, those memories that were now perpetually his refuge, his solace, and his pain.) An hotel bedroom. What hotel?—it didn’t matter. All hotel bedrooms were alike; all Paradise, so long as they had contained her. In what spot?—that didn’t matter, either; somewhere warm and gaudy; all their escapades had been in southern places. Somewhere with bougainvillÆa ramping over creamy houses, somewhere with gay irresponsible negroes selling oranges out of immense baskets at the street corners. She had never tired of the gash of their white teeth in their black faces as they grinned. She would stop to buy their oranges just to get the grin. And some of them could juggle with oranges, which made her laugh and turn to him in delight and clap her hands. He clenched his fingers together, out of sight, as he lounged in the depths of his arm-chair. That hotel bedroom! Her clothes.... He used to kneel on the floor beside her open dressing-case, lifting out her clothes for her, because she was too lazy to unpack for herself. She watched him through her eye-lashes, amused at his complaints which so ill concealed his joy in her possessions; then she would catch his head and strain it hungrily against her. They were always violent, irresistible, surprising, those rare demonstrations of hers, and left him dizzy and abashed. That hotel bedroom! Always the same furniture; the iron bedstead under the draped mosquito curtains that were so oddly bridal; the combined wash-stand and chest of drawers (the drawers incorrigibly half-open and spilling the disorder of her garments, her ribbons, and her laces), the hanging wardrobe with the long looking-glass door, the dressing-table littered with her brushes, her powder, and her scent bottles. The evenings—he would come noiselessly into her room while she lingered at her mirror, in her long silk nightgown, her gleaming arms lifted to take the pins out of her hair; and after standing in the doorway to watch her, he would switch off the electric light, so that the open window and the dark blue sky suddenly leapt up, deep, luminous, and spangled with gold stars behind her. Then the coo of her voice, never startled, never hasty: a coo of laughter and remonstrance, rather than of displeasure; and he would go to her and draw her out on to the balcony, from where, his arm flung round her shoulders and her suppleness yielding contentedly to his pressure, they watched the yellow moon mount up above the sheaves of the palm-trees, and glint upon a shield of distant water.

And there were other nights: so many, he might take his choice amongst them. Carnival nights, when she fled away from him and became a spirit, an incarnation of carnival, and the sweep of her dancing eyes over his face was vague and rapid, as though he were a stranger she had never seen before. He used to feel a small despair, thinking that any domino who whirled her away possessed her in closer affinity than he. And when he had at last thankfully brought her back into her room at the hotel, with confetti scattered over the floor, fallen from her carnival clothes, whose tawdry satin and tinsel lay thrown across a chair, then, although he could not have wished her sweeter, she still kept that will-o’-the-wisp remoteness, that air of one who has strayed and been with difficulty recaptured, which made him wonder whether he or anyone else would ever truly touch the secret of her shy and fugitive heart.

“How funny you are, Paul. You haven’t turned over a page of your book for at least twenty minutes.” Not a rebuke—merely a placid comment. Another set of Patience nicely dealt out.

After that he turned the pages assiduously, it wouldn’t do to be caught dreaming. Then came the relapse....

She had flitted away from him; yes, the day had come when she had flitted. He had known, always, somewhere within himself, that it would come. To whom had she gone?—he didn’t know; he hadn’t tried to find out, perhaps to no one; and, anyway, the fate of her body, passionately as he had loved it, didn’t seem so vital a matter; what mattered was the flame within her; he couldn’t bear to think that she should have given anyone that. Not that he was fatuous enough to suppose that he had ever had it. Oh, no!—he was far too humble, too diffident in his mind. He had worshipped her all the more because he knew there was something in her withdrawn, the eternal pilgrim, the incorrigible truant. He knew that he could never have loved any woman who hadn’t that element in her, and since he had only found it once, quite logically he had never loved but once. (He had been young then. It had been easy enough for his relations to pick holes in her: “Flighty,” they had said, and, snorting, “She takes the best years of his life and then throws him aside,” and to all their comments he had never answered once, but had looked at them with deeply wounded eyes, so that they wondered uneasily what thoughts were locked in his heart. Nor had they ever got any information out of him; all their version of the story had been pieced together from bits of gossip and rumour; correct in the main as to facts, but utterly at sea as to essentials. But as he disdained to set them right, they were never any the wiser.) Never loved but once; and here he was, fifty, prosperous, even envied by other men, going daily about his affairs, dining well, talking rationally, a certain portliness in his manner which his figure had escaped.... He and his wife, a commendable couple; a couple that made one disbelieve in anarchy, wild oats, or wild animals. People smiled with the satisfaction of approval when they came into a room; here were security, decorum; here were civilization and politeness; here was a member of the civic corporation, a burgher to admire and to respect. He had a grave, courtly manner, slightly indulgent towards women, which they found not unattractive, although they knew that he varied it towards none of them, whether plain or pretty, staid or skittish. There was always the same grave smile on his lips, always the same sustained, controlled interest in his eyes; attention, perhaps, rather than interest; the line was a difficult one to draw. The type of man who made other men say, “Wish we had more fellows like him,” and of whom the women said amongst themselves, “A puzzling man, somehow, isn’t he? So quiet. One never knows what he is really thinking, or whether he isn’t laughing at us all. Do you suppose, though, that he has ever really felt?”

The madcap things she did! He recalled that evening at the railway station, when under the glare of the arc-lights she had danced up to a ticket-collector—she in her little travelling hat and her furs and the soft luxury that always seemed to surround her: “When does the next train start?” “Where for, miss?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter where for—just the next train?” And they had gone to Stroud.

“This Patience never seems to come out,” said the voice proceeding from under the lamp.

“No, dear?”

“No. I think I shall have to give it up for an easier one. It’s so irritating when things won’t go right.”

“I should try an easier one to-morrow.”

“To-morrow? Oh, I see, you want to go to bed. I must say, I should rather have liked to try it this evening, but if you want to go to bed....”

“No, dear, of course not; try your Patience by all means.”

“No, dear; I wouldn’t dream of it, as you want to go to bed. Besides, to-morrow will do just as well. You will go round, won’t you, and see that everything is properly locked up?”

“But I am dragging you to bed when you don’t want to go.”

“Not a bit, Paul, I assure you; it is quite all right. I am really quite sleepy myself. I should have liked to try the Patience, perhaps, but to-morrow will do just as well.”

He held the door open gravely for her, but there were several things she must attend to before leaving the room: the fire must be poked down so that no spark could be spat out on to the hearth-rug; the drawer of her writing-table must be locked so that the housemaid should not read her letters or examine her bills when dusting the room before breakfast on the following morning; and the book which she had been reading must be replaced in the bookcase. He endured all this ritual without betraying any irritation, watching even the final pats which she gave to the cushions of his chair.

“It’s quite all right, Paul, dear; of course one can’t help crumpling cushions when one sits on them, and what are they there for but to be sat on?”

She bustled out of the room, calling back to him as she mounted the stairs: “You won’t forget to lock up, will you?”

He had remembered to lock up now for twenty years. He went methodically about the business, looking behind curtains to see whether the shutters were closed, testing the chain on the front door. All that paraphernalia of security! He felt sometimes that the cold, the poor, and the hungry were welcome to the embers of his drawing-room fire, to the silver off his sideboard, and to the remains of the wine in his decanters. And as he stood for a moment at the garden door, looking up the gravel path of his trim little garden, and felt the biting cold beneath the slip of new moon, he wondered with a sort of anguish where she was, whether she was sheltered and cared for, or whether in her gay improvident way she had gone down and under, until on such a winter’s night as this there remained no comfort for her but such as she might find among the mirrors and garish lights of a bar, in such fortuitous company as she might charm with a vivacious manner and an affectation of laughter. She had from time to time been haunted by a premonition of such things, he remembered; a mocking wistfulness had come into her voice when she said, “You’ll always be all right, Paul, you were born prosperous; but as for me, I’ll end my days among the dregs of the world—I know it, so think of me sometimes when you sit over your Madeira and your cigar, won’t you? and wonder whether my nose isn’t pushed against your window in the hopes that the smell of your cooking might drift out to me,” and when she had said these things he had put his hand over her mouth to stop the words he couldn’t bear to hear, and she had laughed and had repeated, “Well, well, we’ll see.”

He shut the door carefully and shot the bolt into its socket. Very cold it was—silly of him to stand at the open door like that—hoped he hadn’t got a chill. Lighting his candle in the hall, he switched off all the electric lights and climbed the stairs to bed; a nice fire warmed his dressing-room, and his pyjamas were put out for him over the back of a chair in front of the fire; he undressed, thinking that he was glad he wasn’t a poor devil out in the cold. His wife was already in bed, and by the light of her reading-lamp he saw the curlers that framed her forehead, and the feather-stitching in white floss-silk round the collar of her flannel nightgown.

“What a long time you’ve been, Paul. I was just thinking, I shan’t be able to try that Patience to-morrow evening, because we’ve got the Howard-Ellises coming to dinner.”

“So we have. I’d quite forgotten. We must give them champagne,” he said mechanically; “they’ll expect it.”

He got into bed, turned out the lamp, and lay down beside his wife, staring into the dark.