«Do you know, Doris, you look like the pictures of Louise de Kerouaille.» He passed his fingers through a mass of curly hair.
«Who’s Louise de Kera-whatever-it-is?» Doris spoke from remote distances.
«She was, alas! Fuit. We shall all be ‘was’ one of these days. Meanwhile….»
Mr. Hutton covered the babyish face with kisses. The car rushed smoothly along. McNab’s back, through the front window was stonily impassive, the back of a statue.
«Your hands,» Doris whispered. «Oh, you mustn’t touch me. They give me electric shocks.»
Mr. Hutton adored her for the virgin imbecility of the words. How late in one’s existence one makes the discovery of one’s body!
«The electricity isn’t in me, it’s in you.» He kissed her again, whispering her name several times: Doris, Doris, Doris. The scientific appellation of the sea-mouse, he was thinking as he kissed the throat, she offered him, white and extended like the throat of a victim awaiting the sacrificial knife. The sea-mouse was a sausage with iridescent fur: very peculiar.
Or was Doris the sea cucumber, which turns itself inside out in moments of alarm? He would really have to go to Naples again, just to see the aquarium. These sea creatures were fabulous, unbelievably fantastic.
«Oh, Teddy Bear!» (More zoology; but he was only a land animal. His poor little jokes!) «Teddy Bear, I’m so happy.»
«So am I,» said Mr. Hutton. Was it true?
«But I wish I knew if it were right. Tell me, Teddy Bear, is it right or wrong?»
«Ah, my dear, that’s just what I’ve been wondering for the last thirty years.»
«Be serious, Teddy Bear. I want to know if this is right; if it’s right that I should be here with you and that we should love one another, and that it should give me electric shocks when you touch me.»
«Right? Well, it’s certainly good that you should have electric shocks rather than sexual repressions. Read Freud; repressions are the devil.»
«Oh, you don’t help me. Why aren’t you ever serious? If only you knew how miserable I am sometimes, thinking it’s not right. Perhaps, you know, there is a hell, and all that. I don t know what to do. Sometimes I think I ought to stop loving you.»
«But could you?» asked Mr. Hutton, confident in the powers of his seduction and his moustache.
«No, Teddy Bear, you know I couldn’t. But I could run away, I could hide from you, I could lock myself up and force myself not to come to you.»
«Silly little thing!» He tightened his embrace.
«Oh, dear, I hope it isn’t wrong. And there are times when I don’t care if it is.»
Mr. Hutton was touched. He had a certain protective affection for this little creature. He laid his cheek against her hair and so, interlaced, they sat in silence, while the car, swaying and pitching a little as it hastened along, seemed to draw in the white road and the dusty hedges towards it devouringly.
«Good-bye, good-bye.»
The car moved on, gathered speed, vanished round a curve, and Doris was left standing by the sign-post at the cross-roads, still dizzy and weak with the languor born of those kisses and the electrical touch of those gentle hands. She had to take a deep breath, to draw herself up deliberately, before she was strong enough to start her homeward walk. She had half a mile in which to invent the necessary lies.
Alone, Mr. Hutton suddenly found himself the prey of an appalling boredom.
II
Mrs. Hutton was lying on the sofa in her boudoir, playing Patience. In spite of the warmth of the July evening a wood fire was burning on the hearth. A black Pomeranian, extenuated by the heat and the fatigues of digestion, slept before the blaze.
«Phew! Isn’t it rather hot in here?» Mr. Hutton asked as he entered the room.
«You know I have to keep warm, dear.» The voice seemed breaking on the verge of tears. «I get so shivery.»
«I hope you’re better this evening.»
«Not much, I’m afraid.»
The conversation stagnated. Mr. Hutton stood leaning his back against the mantelpiece. He looked down at the Pomeranian lying at his feet, and with the toe of his right boot he rolled the little dog over and rubbed its white-flecked chest and belly. The creature lay in an inert ecstasy. Mrs. Hutton continued to play Patience. Arrived at an impasse, she altered the position of one card, took back another, and went on playing. Her Patiences always came out.
«Dr. Libbard thinks I ought to go to Llandrindod Wells this summer.»
«Well—go, my dear—go, most certainly.»
Mr. Hutton was thinking of the events of the afternoon: how they had driven, Doris and he, up to the hanging wood, had left the car to wait for them under the shade of the trees, and walked together out into the windless sunshine of the chalk down.
«I’m to drink the waters for my liver, and he thinks I ought to have massage and electric treatment, too.»
Hat in hand, Doris had stalked four blue butterflies that were dancing together round a scabious flower with a motion that was like the flickering of blue fire. The blue fire burst and scattered into whirling sparks; she had given chase, laughing and shouting like a child.
«I’m sure it will do you good, my dear.»
«I was wondering if you’d come with me, dear.»
«But you know I’m going to Scotland at the end of the month.»
Mrs. Hutton looked up at him entreatingly. «It’s the journey,» she said. «The thought of it is such a nightmare. I don’t know if I can manage it. And you know I can’t sleep in hotels. And then there’s the luggage and all the worries. I can’t go alone.
«But you won’t be alone. You’ll have your maid with you.» He spoke impatiently. The sick woman was usurping the place of the healthy one. He was being dragged back from the memory of the sunlit down and the quick, laughing girl, back to this unhealthy, overheated room and its complaining occupant.
«I don’t think I shall be able to go.»
«But you must, my dear, if the doctor tells you to. And, besides, a change will do you good.»
«I don’t think so.»
«But Libbard thinks so, and he knows what he’s talking about.»
«No, I can’t face it. I’m too weak. I can’t go alone.» Mrs. Hutton pulled a handkerchief out of her black silk bag, and put it to her eyes.
«Nonsense, my dear, you must make the effort.»
«I had rather be left in peace to die here.» She was crying in earnest now.
«O Lord! Now do be reasonable. Listen now, please.» Mrs. Hutton only sobbed more violently. «Oh, what is one to do?» He shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room.
Mr. Hutton was aware that he had not behaved with proper patience; but he could not help it. Very early in his manhood he had discovered that not only did he not feel sympathy for the poor, the weak, the diseased, and deformed; he actually hated them.
Once, as an undergraduate, he spent three days at a mission in the East End. He had returned, filled with a profound and ineradicable disgust. Instead of pitying, he loathed the unfortunate. It was not, he knew, a very comely emotion; and he had been ashamed of it at first. In the end he had decided that it was temperamental, inevitable, and had felt no further qualms. Emily had been healthy and beautiful when he married her. He had loved her then. But now—was it his fault that she was like this?
Mr. Hutton dined alone. Food and drink left him more benevolent than he had been before dinner. To make amends for his show of exasperation he went up to his wife’s room and offered to read to her. She was touched, gratefully accepted the offer, and Mr. Hutton, who was particularly proud of his accent, suggested a little light reading in French.
«French? I am so fond of French.» Mrs. Hutton spoke of the language of Racine as though it were a dish of green peas.
Mr. Hutton ran down to the library and returned with a yellow volume. He began reading. The effort of pronouncing perfectly absorbed his whole attention. But how good his accent was! The fact of its goodness seemed to improve the quality of the novel he was reading.
At the end of fifteen pages an unmistakable sound aroused him. He looked up; Mrs. Hutton had gone to sleep. He sat still for a little while, looking with a dispassionate curiosity at the sleeping face. Once it had been beautiful; once, long ago, the sight of it, the recollection of it, had moved him with an emotion profounder, perhaps, than any he had felt before or since. Now it was lined and cadaverous. The skin was stretched tightly over the cheekbones, across the bridge of the sharp, bird-like nose. The closed eyes were set in profound bone-rimmed sockets. The lamplight striking on the face from the side emphasised with light and shade its cavities and projections. It was the face of a dead Christ by Morales.
Le squelette était invisible
Au temps heureux de l’art païen.
He shivered a little, and tiptoed out of the room.
On the following day Mrs. Hutton came down to luncheon. She had had some unpleasant palpitations during the night, but she was feeling better now. Besides, she wanted to do honour to her guest. Miss Spence listened to her complaints about Llandrindod Wells, and was loud in sympathy, lavish with advice. Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed
