Adelaide got up from her bed. She felt bruised and stiff and her face ached with crying. She thought, I’ll kill myself. She looked in the mirror and the sight of her terrible face brought on more tears. She leaned against the wall gasping with sobs.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning and Danby had not come back. Or perhaps he had come back and gone out again. During the first two or three hours after his departure Adelaide had been crying too frenziedly into her pillow to be at all conscious of her surroundings. Later she thought that she heard Bruno calling. Now there was only the rain.
She could not yet understand what had happened or why it had happened. She had been mad to take the stamp. She had known that even before she gave it to Will. She had gone over to Camden Town with the stamp in her handbag, still un decided about whether to give it to him or to return it. After Auntie had gone to bed they had started quarrelling as usual. Adelaide had made some sarcastic remarks about Will’s flirtation with Mrs. Greensleave. The memory of this scene had begun to torment Adelaide. She particularly resented the ease with which Mrs. Greensleave had got into conversation with Will. For Adelaide to converse with Will was difficult, even flirting with Will was awkward, inarticulate, perilous. Mrs. Greensleave had seemed to find it all very easy. Adelaide told Will he had behaved like a flattered servant and simpered like a petted boy. Will had been extremely angry. Adelaide declared that if Will telephoned Mrs. Greensleave she would not see him again. Will professed himself quite unmoved by this threat and announced his intention of telephoning Mrs. Greensleave forthwith. Reduced at last to tears of rage and helpless misery Adelaide had thrown the stamp onto the table. The scene had ended with Will delighted, attentive, loving, promising never to communicate with Mrs. Greensleave again.
It was all unworthy, horrible, muddled, nasty to look back upon. Oh she had cried so much in these last days. And it had ended in this insanity, which must have broken Danby’s love for her forever. Even if he was kind to her now he must regard her as a mad person. He would always be nervous of her, watching for a recurrence of that awful fury. Indeed she had frightened herself. Yet Adelaide knew that she was not mad, she was just driven somehow beyond the bounds of her en durance.
She opened the door of her room. Danby’s door opposite was still open and the room was dark. She walked across and turned the light on. The bed was still made up, not slept in, the curtains were not drawn across the black shiny rainy window, the room was desolate. More tears came to Adelaide. She went across and pulled the curtains. Then she took the Welsh counterpane off the bed and turned back the blankets neatly, dropping her tears onto the sheets. She stood looking about the room.
Then she saw that there was a letter lying on top of the chest of drawers. Her first thought was that Danby had come back while she was still weeping hysterically and had left a message for her. She moved over and pushed Danby’s electric razor aside. The envelope was addressed to Miss Lisa Watkin.
It was unsealed. Adelaide listened for a moment. Only rain. Then after another moment’s hesitation she pulled the letter out of the envelope.
My dear Lisa,
I am sorry to have behaved so badly in Brompton Cemetery and perhaps startled you. I am not much good at writing letters but I must write this one. I want you to know it’s serious. Not that I have any hope anyway, why should I have. But it’s not a light thing. You may find this incomprehensible. I’ve only seen you a few times. But oh God Lisa, please believe it’s serious, it’s terrible. I do love you and I do want to see you and get to know you and I ask you please to consider this as a serious possibility. I will behave very well and do anything you want. Don’t just blankly say there’s no point. How do you know there’s no point until you try? I know I’m nothing compared with you, but I love you terribly and one is not mistaken about something like this. I have only loved like this once before. It is quite different from ordinary trifling affections and just wanting to get into bed with people. I feel a sense of destiny here. You must listen to me, Lisa. That you may think badly of me (for instance because of what you saw that first time) and think I am a frivolous person somehow doesn’t matter. I am a frivolous person, but not about you, and if you attended to me at all you might be able to forgive me and you have already changed me. Don’t regard all this as drunken babbling or something. It is the heart speaking and one knows when that is happening. Please recognize and I dare to say respect the fact that I love you, and see me again, Lisa. You have got to. There is no way round this. I will write again and suggest a meeting. Please think of me seriously. I love you, Lisa, and everything else is utterly blotted out.
Your slave,
Danby
Adelaide put the letter back into the envelope and put the envelope back under the electric razor. She switched out the light and returned to her own room and locked the door. She lay rigid and tearless until the window began to lighten with the dawn.
19
Very quietly Miles opened the door of Lisa’s room in the darkness.
It was about two o’clock on Saturday morning. During the two previous days Miles had taken his meals, gone to the office, done his work, talked in an ordinary way to the two women. He had made his usual pithy comments on the morning news papers and departed punctually to catch his train returning equally punctually in the evening. But amid the old machinery of his life his inner heart was in a boiling seething ferment. He had watched Lisa closely. The physical space between them had taken on a new and terrifying significance. The near approach of hands at the breakfast table, the exchange of a book, the movement of a cup, an encounter on the stairs, these things were passages of anguish. The familiar house which he had called his home had disappeared. In its stead there was a structure of movements and views and distances which racked his body like an instrument of torture.
It was also impossible not to look and look. He stared at her compulsively and it seemed to him that she stared back. A magnetism which it would have been blinding agony to resist drew his eyes towards hers, compelled her eyes by his. He could not forgo these looks which were now so appallingly weighted with meaning. With a slightly giddy deliberation he refrained from varying the ordinary routine of his day. He made no attempt to be alone with her, and since they usually left home and returned at different times, and as Diana was always about in the house, where doors were left open to be called through and looked through, he had not been alone with her.
However there are communications which can be made and certainly made without speech. By the time Friday evening had been reached Miles knew that Lisa knew and he knew that she knew that he knew. He had still absolutely no idea of what she thought about it, and indeed, absorbed in observing the painful evolution of his own feelings, he had not yet very much considered this. He was moreover not yet prepared to admit that he had entered a disastrous situation. The experience of falling in love, or as it seemed here to Miles, of realizing that one is in love, is itself, however painful, also a preoccupying joy. It increases vitality and sense of self. And this rather black joy was still preventing Miles from looking ahead or indeed from making any plan whatsoever. He did reflect: she did not want to tell Diana about Danby. But that might be and doubtless was, just an effect of her general discretion and tactful reserve, since she could hardly have fore seen what the witnessing of that little drama was going to do to the sanity of her brother-in-law.
Late on Friday evening, just as the women, who went to bed earlier than Miles, were in course of retiring something did happen. Diana was talking to Lisa at the foot of the stairs. Miles was still in the drawing room, standing near the window which he had just been fastening. Lisa came back into the drawing room to fetch a book, and for a moment they were both out of sight from the hall. Miles stared at her. Lisa picked up the book and arrested her movement for just a second to look back at him. Miles made a gesture with his hands, a gesture of entreaty and surrender, whose meaning was quite unmistakable. Lisa looked at him blankly and returned back into the hall, answering a question of Diana’s.