I shall not forget that dinner. I hardly spoke to her, and I do not believe she looked at me once, but I was aware only of her—and the wordless dialogue between us. She sat motionless and silent, rather like a solitary child at a grown-up party, telling me about herself in a language more subtle than speech.
When she said good-bye, she did not look at me.
The next afternoon I rang her up. I recognised her voice, and said:
“Is that you, Rosalie?’’
“But—who is it?”
“Ivor.”
I heard an odd little sound like a gasp.
“Ivor,” I repeated. “I want you to come to my flat—now.”
“But-but——”
“Now!”
I gave her the address, then added:
“I am waiting for you.”
Half an hour later she arrived.
She made no excuse for coming and gave no explanations. It was some moments before she spoke. On entering the sitting-room, she paused and looked round as if to convince herself that it was real.
I made her rest on a sofa, then she began to talk—rather as if she were continuing an interrupted conversation—and I learned about her parents and the circumstances in which she had married Vivian. Also she told me that she had had two nervous collapses.
I watched rather than listened. Her history was in her appearance—just as her husband’s was in his. The difference between those histories was the gulf which separated them. He was unaware of that gulf. She was poised precariously on the brink of it.
Her gifts were those of an emotional genius. She responded to every nuance of feeling, every vibration in the atmosphere, every fleeting mood. It was because she had the potentiality of a great artist that she utterly failed to be a minor one. But she lacked one quality essential to a great creative synthesis—that of Will. For her to attempt an orthodox life was equivalent to a butterfly attempting the work of a bee.
She had lightning transitions from hysteria to inertia; an amazing gift for surrendering to each emotion that welled up in her. In recounting her history, she isolated with unerring flair the one significant detail which made a scene flash into life. Her descriptions were not catalogues of facts. They were impressionistic evocations. You did not hear them. You saw them.
Her beauty was that of a fey child, mysteriously become a woman. The spirit that inhabited her body seemed remote from it. When she was absent, it was her smile, or a gesture, or her rippling laugh which stabbed your memory—never the line of her figure.
After she had been with me for an hour, she suddenly leaped to her feet.
“I must go!”
“Why?”
“He will be back soon.”
“You will come to-morrow?”
“Yes.”
She came the next day, and the next, and the next.
Within a week we were lovers. Nevertheless, when she was not with me, it was her smile, or a gesture, or her rippling laugh which stabbed my memory—never the white beauty of her body.
Again and again she would lie in my arms sobbing. She clung to me like a child who, till now, had been too frightened to cry.
Endlessly, however, her ever-active imagination tortured her.
Once, when she was dressing, she paused suddenly and pointed to her clothes.
“He paid for these! He’s at his office now—working—getting money for me!”
Instantly she identified herself with him. She saw our relations as he would see them. She became hysterical.
“Ivor! Ivor! Him—think of him! I shall kill myself! I can’t sleep by him, night after night, knowing——”
“Listen to me!”
She stared at me with terrified eyes, her breasts rising and falling as if she had just run a race.
“Our being lovers has saved your marriage. You know that is true.”
“Yes, but—him!”
“It doesn’t matter about him. It matters about you.”
“But if—if I tell him!”
“You won’t tell him.”
“But I may! I may, Ivor! Suddenly—without being able to help it. I shall scream—and tell him!”
“You won’t tell him.”
She came nearer me.
“How can you know?—how can you be so certain?”
“I’ll lend you my will.”
“Can you do that?” she asked, quite seriously, her voice a child-like blend of surprise and curiosity.
“Yes. If, suddenly, you feel you must tell him, you will say to yourself—I will see Ivor to-morrow and then both of us will tell him. That’s what you’ll say.”
She accepted this as a heaven-sent solution. A moment later she had forgotten Vivian’s existence and was laughing at her reflection in the mirror.
But that night at ten o’clock my telephone bell rang.
“Ivor!”
“Yes.”
(I had to be monosyllabic, for Vera Thornton was in the room.)
“I’m in a public telephone-box. He had to go out. It was inevitable about us, wasn’t it? You said it was inevitable.”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“I knew you were, but I had to hear you say it. I’m certain, too—now. To-morrow?”
“To-morrow.”
What Vivian would suffer if he knew! That was the rock round which her imagination seethed. She made his values hers; saw the situation with his eyes. This was her rack, and again and again she stretched herself upon it.
She would devise the most fantastic solutions in order to ease her suffering.
“Ivor! Listen! Perhaps, if he knew, he wouldn’t mind. Yes, yes! Wait! If he knew that you had saved our marriage, he—might—don’t you think?”
I would calm her with a word. It was only necessary to make an entirely definite statement in a tone of authority for her to accept it as if God had spoken.
“If only you would teach me to be strong, like you! Do you know, last night, I laughed in my sleep. He told me so this morning.”
“Well, don’t let it go any further,” I began, but she clutched my arm.
“Ivor!”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps I’ve told everything in my sleep! And perhaps he heard—and doesn’t mind. Is that possible, do you think?”
Every other day she imagined a new solution. It was curious how, having no consciousness of guilt herself, she suffered agonies of remorse through accepting his standards. Nevertheless, despite this vicarious suffering, the improvement in her health was astonishing. She looked years younger than the woman I had met at the Laidlaws.
One afternoon, when we had been lovers for some months, she made a new suggestion—and a startling one.
“I want you to meet him, Ivor. I want you to come to the flat—often!”
“Why?”
“It—it will seem more—more regular.”
She was looking at me with great, serious eyes.
“You will do that for me?” she added.
“Yes, if you like.”
She seized my hands impulsively.
“Why do you love me, Ivor?”
“Because you give me a sense of power.”
She laughed and began to talk about something else, but—a week later—I was asked to dine at the Vivians.
Vivian knew I had met Rosalie since the night at the Laidlaws. She had told him that she had run into me somewhere else, and that we had become friends. Consequently the suggestion that I should dine with them was more likely to allay suspicion than to provoke it.
The flat was an extension of Vivian. He had lived in it as a bachelor and, with one exception, it was now what it had been then. Rosalie had merely been imported into it. The exception was her own intimate room which, before Vivian married, had not been used, the flat being a large one. To cross the threshold was to leave one world and enter another.