He scrambled to his feet and, as he did so, heard the knock repeated.
“Come in!”
The door opened. “Mr. Illidge to see you, madam,” said the maid.
Walter was standing by the window, as though profoundly interested in the delivery van drawn up in front of the opposite house.
“Show him up,” said Lucy.
He turned round as the door closed behind the maid. His face was very pale, his lips were trembling.
“I quite forgot,” she explained. “I asked him last night; this morning rather.”
He averted his face, and without saying a word, crossed the room, opened the door, and was gone.
“Walter!” she called after him. “Walter!” But he did not return.
On the stairs he met Illidge ascending behind the maid.
Walter responded to his greetings with a vague salute and hurried past. He could not trust himself to speak.
“Our friend Bidlake seemed to be in a great hurry,” said Illidge, when the preliminary greetings were over. He felt exultantly certain that he had driven the other fellow away.
She observed the triumph on his face. Like a little ginger cock, she was thinking. “He’d forgotten something,” she vaguely explained.
“Not himself, I hope,” he questioned waggishly. And when she laughed, more at the fatuous masculinity of his expression than at his joke, he swelled with self-confidence and satisfaction. This social business was as easy as playing skittles. Feeling entirely at his ease, he stretched his legs, he looked round the room. Its richly sober elegance impressed him at once as the right thing. He sniffed the perfumed air appreciatively.
“What’s under that mysterious red cloth there?” he asked, pointing at the mobled cage.
“That’s a cockatoo,” Lucy answered. “A cock-a-doodle-doo,” she amended, breaking out into a sudden disquieting and inexplicable laughter.
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world’s sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example. That was the anguish which Walter carried with him into the street. It was pain, anger, disappointment, shame, misery, all in one. He felt as though his soul were dying in torture. And yet the cause was unavowable, low, even ludicrous. Suppose a friend were now to meet him and to ask why he looked so unhappy.
“I was making love to a woman when I was interrupted, first by the screaming of a cockatoo, then by the arrival of a visitor.”
The comment would be enormous and derisive laughter. His confession would have been a smoking-room joke. And yet he could not be suffering more if he had lost his mother.
He wandered for an hour through the streets, in Regent’s Park. The light gradually faded out of the white and misty afternoon; he became calmer. It was a lesson, he thought, a punishment; he had broken his promise. For his own good as well as for Marjorie’s, never again. He looked at his watch, and seeing that it was after seven, turned homeward. He arrived at the house tired and determinedly repentant. Marjorie was sewing; the lamplight was bright on her thin, fatigued face. She too was wearing a dressing gown. It was mauve and hideous; he had always thought her taste bad. The flat was pervaded with a smell of cooking. He hated kitchen smells, but that was yet another reason why he should be faithful. It was a question of honour and duty. It was not because he preferred gardenia to cabbage that he had a right to make Marjorie suffer.
“You’re late,” she said.
“There was a lot to do,” Walter explained. “And I walked home.” That at least was true. “How are you feeling?” He laid his hand on her shoulder and bent down. Dropping her sewing, Marjorie threw her hands round his neck. What a happiness, she was thinking, to have him again! Hers once more. What a comfort! But even as she pressed herself against him, she realized that she was once more betrayed. She broke away from him.
“Walter, how could you?”
The blood rushed to his face; but he tried to keep up the pretence. “How could I what?” he asked.
“You’ve been to see that woman again.”
“But what are you talking about?” He knew it was useless, but he went on pretending all the same.
“It’s no use lying.” She got up so suddenly that her work basket overturned and scattered its contents on the floor. Unheeding, she walked across the room. “Go away!” she cried, when he tried to follow her. Walter shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. “How could you?” she went on. “Coming home reeking of her perfume.” So it was the gardenias. What a fool he was not to have foreseen … “After all you said last night. How could you?”
“But if you’d let me explain,” he protested in the tone of a victim—an exasperated victim.
“Explain why you lied,” she said bitterly. “Explain why you broke your promise.”
Her contemptuous anger evoked an answering anger in Walter. “Merely explain,” he said with hard and dangerous politeness. What a bore she was with her scenes and jealousies! What an intolerable, infuriating bore!
“Merely go on lying,” she mocked.
Again he shrugged his shoulders. “If you like to put it like that,” he said politely.
“Just a despicable liar—that’s what you are.” And turning away from him, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.
“Go away,”
