Joan had never met anything like it, but she knew it was a passionate experience; everything else dropped away, and her heart bled for him. For she could feel that it came from the depth of his nature; it was a portent that nothing could exorcise or soften. While the remembrance haunted him, he could not believe.
She called on all she knew to save him from that experience. She pressed love upon him, surrounded him with love (too much, I sometimes thought, for she did not understand the claustrophobia of being loved). She examined her own heart to find some particle of his despair. If she could know it herself, only a vestige, only for a moment, perhaps she could help him more. She asked others about the torments of doubt and faith — loyally, sturdily and unconvincingly keeping out Roy’s name. She talked to me: it cost her an effort, for, though she had with difficulty come to believe that I admired her and wished her well, she was never at ease with me as Rosalind was. Rosalind had confided in me when she was wildly unhappy over Roy — but it had been second nature to her to flatter me, to make me feel that in happier days she might not have been indifferent to me. With Joan, there was not a ray of flirtatiousness, not the faintest aura of love to spare. Except as a source of information, I did not exist. Each heart beat served him, and him alone.
She came to a decision which took her right outside herself. Wise or unwise, it showed how she was spending her imagination in his life. Herself, she stayed in her solid twentieth-century radical unbelief: but him she tried to persuade to act as though he had found faith, in the hope that faith would come.
It was bold and devoted of her. And there were a few weeks, unknown at the time to anyone but themselves, when he took her guidance. He acted to her as though his search was over. He went through the gestures of belief, not in ritual but in his own mind. He struggled to hypnotise himself.
He could not keep it up. Sadness attacked him, and he was afraid that the melancholy was returning. Even so, he knew that his acts of faith were false; he felt ashamed, hollow, contemptible, and gave them up. Inexplicably, his spirits rose. The attempt was at an end.
Joan did not know what to do next. The failure left its mark on her. She was seized with an increased, an unrestrainable passion to marry him. Even her pride could not hold down a sign.
It became obvious as one saw them together in the late autumn. Often she was happy, flushing at his teasing, breaking out into her charming laugh, which was richer now that she had been loved. But more than once I saw them in a party, when she thought herself unobserved: she looked at him with a glance that was heavy, brooding, possessive, consumed with her need to be sure of him.
I was anxious for her, for about that time I got the impression that something had broken. She did not seem to know, except that she was becoming more hungry for marriage; but I felt sure that for him the light had gone out. Why, I could not tell or even guess. It did not show itself in any word he spoke to her, for he was loving, attentive, insistent on giving her some respite from the Lodge, always ready to sit with her there in the last weeks of her father’s life.
He was good at dissimulating, though he did it seldom; yet I was certain that I was right. For lack of ease in a love affair is one of the hardest things to conceal — and this was particularly true for Roy, who in love or intimacy moved as freely as through the evening air.
I was anxious and puzzled. One night in late November I heard him make a remark which sounded entirely strange, coming from him. It was said in fun, but I felt that it was forced out, endowed with an emotion he could not control. The occasion was quite trivial. The three of us had been to a theatre, and Roy had mislaid the tickets for our coats. It took us some time, and a little explanation, to redeem them. Joan scolded him as we walked to the college along the narrow street.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said.
“You’re quite absurd,” said Joan. “It was very careless.”
Then Roy said: “Think as well of me as you can.” He was smiling, and so was she, but his voice rang out clear. “Think as well of me as you can.”
I had never before heard him, either in play or earnest, show that kind of concern. He was the least self-conscious of men. It was a playful cry, and she hugged his arm and laughed. Yet it came back to my ears, clear and thrilling, long after outbursts of open feeling had gone dead.
Through November the Master became weaker and more drowsy. He was eating very little, he was always near the borderline of sleep. Joan said that she thought he was now dying. The end came suddenly. On December 2nd the doctor told Lady Muriel and Joan that he had pneumonia, and that it would soon be over. Two days later, just as we were going into hall for dinner, the news came that the Master had died.
After hall, I went to see Roy, who had not been dining. I found him alone in his rooms, sitting at a low desk with a page of proofs. He had already heard the news.
He spoke, sadly and gently, of Joan and her mother. He said that he would complete the “little book” on heresies as soon as he was clear of the liturgy. He would bring it out as a joint publication by Royce and himself. “Would that have pleased him?” said Roy. “Perhaps it would please them a little.”
A woman’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Joan came in. She looked at me, upset to see me there. Without a word, Roy took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment she rested with her head against his shoulder, but she heard me get up to go.
“Don’t bother, Lewis,” she said. She was quite dry-eyed. “I’ve come to take Roy away, if he will. Won’t you come to mother?” she asked him, her eyes candid with love. “You’re the only person who can be any use to her tonight.”
“I was coming anyway,” said Roy.
“You’re very tired yourself,” I said to Joan. “Hadn’t you better take a rest?”
“Let me do what’s got to be done before I think about it,” she said.
She was staunch right through. Roy went to eat and sleep in the Lodge until after the funeral. Joan made no claims on him; she asked him to look after her mother, who needed him more.
Lady Muriel was inarticulately glad of his presence. She could not say that she was grateful, she could not speak of loss or grief or any regret. She could not even cry. She sat up until dawn each night before the funeral, with Roy beside her. And each night, as she went at last to bed, she visited the room where lay her husband’s body.
At the funeral service in the chapel, she and Joan sat in the stalls nearest the altar. Their faces were white but tearless, their backs rigid, their heads erect.
And, after we had returned from the cemetery to the college, word came that Lady Muriel wished to see all the fellows in the Lodge. The blinds of the drawing-room were drawn back now; we filed in and stood about while Lady Muriel shook hands with us one by one. Her neck was still unbent, her eyes pitiably bold. She spoke to each of us in her firm, unyielding voice, and her formula varied little. She said to me: “I should like to thank you for joining us on this sad occasion. I appreciate your sign of respect to my husband’s memory. I am personally grateful for your kindness during his illness. My daughter and I are going to my brother, and our present intention is to stay there in our house. We may be paying a visit to Cambridge next year, and I hope you will be able to visit us.”
Roy and I walked away together.
“Poor thing,” he said gently.
He went back to the Lodge to see them through another night. At last Lady Muriel broke down. “I shall never see him again,” she cried. “I shall never see him again.” In the drawing-room, where she had bidden us goodbye so formally, that wild, animal cry burst out; and then she wept passionately in Roy’s arms, until she was worn out.