This was a typical sloven’s room—dirty plates on the table, a torn cloth, rags of garments lying about on the chairs, and dust everywhere. But, though he had often railed at his wife for such matters, today he was scarcely aware of them. The present held him in too light a grasp; beyond lay the glittering future, and to that he looked forward, as a traveller, solacing himself with the thought of the sea round the next bend of the road, can face with courage the wind, the heat, and the grit in the air because they will so soon belong to the past.
Eleanor came back, saying her mother was just coming down.
“Wasn’t she dressed?” asked Brand indifferently.
The child shook her head. “She said, ‘God knows there’ll be no peace when he comes back, so we’ll take it while we can.’”
He looked at her for the first time with curiosity; she had spoken with a certain defiance and spirit, as though to assert herself, not to him, but to her own heart. A momentary sense of fellowship for her loneliness and determination moved him.
He said, smiling faintly, “Manners aren’t your strong suit, are they? In fact, in a properly constituted household, you’d probably be beaten for that. But, of course, those tests don’t apply here.”
She folded her hands behind her back, and regarded him steadily. He returned her gaze, and suddenly he saw her tremble. In an instant she had recovered her self-control, but the fear remained in her mind, though her flesh denied it. Observing her more closely, and with a growing sympathy, he realised that she feared he might put that careless threat into action and was resolved to withstand his power, though she could not evade the consequences of it. Even at her age, he thought, she commanded attention, even a kind of respect. Already her personality was forming, and he reflected, “Courage; that’s the answer to her attitude. It’s the one thing that matters. That and knowing the only thing in your life that counts and never letting go.”
Sophy came in, dragging a shapeless coat over her shoulders; her dark hair straggled from its untidy knot down her back. Her features were sharp, inquisitive, and acquisitive; she had the look of some horrible bird of prey, agape for carrion, and in the very stoop of her shoulders, the curve of her hands, the malevolent gleam of her eyes, she expressed a cruelty innate in her temperament. So shabby did she seem, so poor and ugly and unclean, that Brand was smitten with a feeling compounded of disgust, compassion, amazement, and awe.
“Can it be true that I was so low, so stripped of all decency, that I was compelled to take any pleasure I could get even from that?” he thought. “My God, I’ve been down. It takes a thing like this to open one’s eyes. Well, this is the end.”
Sophy said in a harsh voice, “What’s this bastard been telling you? You know what you can expect, you ——, if you’ve been opening your mouth. I never knew such a bloody little liar in all my days,” she added to her husband. “They fall out of her like water out of a tap.”
Eleanor watched her, pale, defensive, guarded. Brand knew now why the woman had been in bed when he returned. Those prolonged drinking-bouts had been one of the horrors of his married life. Even now she was not sober, and he felt her as some loathsome disease touching and defiling his own life.
“So you’ve come back?” she said, slumping into a chair.
“You didn’t expect to see me?”
She shrugged. “How could I tell?”
“You thought, like everyone else, that I’d done it?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you’re very sorry, anyway.”
Brand asked, “It wouldn’t trouble you, would it, if I were guilty?”
“Why the hell should it? We weren’t good enough to know him. He’s no loss to us.” And then, leaning forward, her stupid animal face twisted into a leer of mingled greed and coaxing, “How did you get the money, Brand? Don’t tell me he gave it you.”
Brand replied callously, “Oh, you won’t see a penny of that.”
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean that cheque’s not worth the paper it’s written on. He’s broke, like the rest of us.”
“And what are you going to do about that?”
“Clear out, of course.”
“You haven’t the money. I know that.”
Brand’s laughter jarred. “Been through my pockets, have you? God, you’re a decent wife for any man. Anyway, I’m going. What’s it to you where I get my money from?”
“You mean that? You’re going to desert us?” Her face was dreadful.
A nerve of brutality in Brand was rasped by her voice, her appearance, the recognition of the havoc she had already wrought in his life, all that she might mean, her frustration of his hopes. He exclaimed bitterly, “Yes, and thank God for the chance.”
“And we’re to starve, I suppose?”
They argued furiously, hurling abuse at one another. Sophy shouted that she had five children to maintain. Brand retorted that she had worked before and could work again, and had, doubtless, other money-making devices at her finger-tips.
“For instance, you might try Ferdinand’s father,” he suggested brutally.
Sophy became so abusive that even the child, accustomed though she was to such scenes, shivered and withdrew behind the ragged tapestry chair near the fireplace. It was a dreadful scene, not so much on account of the language in which their ugly conversation was couched as in their frank and shameless revelation of themselves one to the other, unconcealed even by the barest of draperies of decency and self-respect. Towards this woman, who invariably aroused all the most bestial passions in his nature, Brand felt himself incapable of pity. Every past occasion of infidelity or ill-usage, every head under which complaints could be lodged, every instant of mutual surrender to a base instinct that neither attempted to
