O, These Men, These Men! Read online

  “Poor child,” said Hugh.

  “Look here, I’m going for a walk,” said Francis. “I’ll go mad if I stay indoors. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  For an hour or more, Francis walked quickly through the empty streets, reliving every moment of the eventful day. In vain did he try to consider Caroline’s case as a lawyer should. He could only see Caroline as she sat, intensely self-controlled, telling him with painful reluctance the ignominy of her story, defying him silently to say a word against the husband who had almost destroyed her sanity, making it very clear that she asked for no sympathy and only wanted to be allowed to hide her grief in some safe place. When she had finished, she obediently and politely did as he told her, put on a hat and a coat, found her gloves and bag, and came with him to Beechwood. He had never had to make a decision more quickly and he prayed that it had been the right one. He believed that it was. Then he saw her again, white and drained of strength, lying in Anna’s bed, unable to respond to word or touch, and his angiy exclamation started another solitary walker whom he was passing at the moment. He saw Caroline as she was when she married James. He remembered how Caroline had grown quieter and often looked afraid, how she had tried to conceal her husband’s downfall from him and Hugh till the day when James had turned them both out of the house and gone back to his wife to inflict no one knew what humiliations upon her. He and Hugh had been such friends of their cousin Caroline from childhood that they had accepted James with the affectionate jealousy that brothers may feel for a sister’s choice. And there was no doubt that James had been infinitely charming. No wonder that Caroline had adored him with his good looks and his gifts. No wonder that everyone believed in a brilliant future for him, that his friends, and they were many, looked upon his newspaper work as only a step to an important career. Well, all that was gone now. There was no career for a man who couldn’t keep sober to do his job. If only he had waited a few years, Francis reflected bitterly. A man who had arrived could afford to get drunk and even have a very successful career if his constitution were good; one could think of many men who had done it. But to be known as a hopeless drinker and slacker before one was thirty meant the end of everything. Poor, poor Caroline.

  Then with a fresh surge of indignation he thought of James’ letter to Hugh. It was obviously written when he was pretty tight, but nonetheless it stung by some of the crude truth in it. Francis knew now that he cared for Caroline more than for any living creature, but James’ gibe was only a devilish shot in the dark. No one, not Hugh, not Caroline, knew what Francis hardly knew himself, so determinedly had he worked at not knowing. To think of Caroline took his breath away, so he would not let himself think of her. Now it seemed a profanation to think of her at all except as the object of any sheltering care that could be given. He saw her again lying almost speechless, using her last strength in words of polite deprecation, sending her love to Hugh.

  As he remembered this, Francis again uttered an angry exclamation. If James had made another devilish and certain shot in the dark, matters would be more difficult than before. Twice had Caroline sent a message to Hugh from the cold darkness where her spirit was holding its last defenses. If James conceivably was right, what hope for him, what hope for Caroline? So utterly had the revelation of James’ brutality wiped him out of Francis’ consideration that he found himself hoping and fearing for Caroline, for Hugh, for himself, as if she were a free creature, ready and able to choose, not the ghost of Caroline whom he had lately touched and seen, the wife of James Danvers. Realizing at last that he was very tired, and that the spectacle of a gentleman in evening dress striding along the Hampstead Road uttering ferocious words to the universe was becoming of excessive interest to policemen on point duty, he hailed a belated taxi and went home. Hugh had long since gone to bed, furious at James’ letter, but in no way disconcerted by an implication, which he treated as the ravings of the madman that James had become.

  Meanwhile at Beechwood, Mr. and Mrs. Danvers were dealing with life as best they could. After a constrained dinner, at which, Wilfred and George were simply told that Caroline was ill and asked to be quiet, a request which they both resented deeply as savoring of unnecessary parental interference, Anna went up to sit with Caroline. Wilfred and George, who at twenty-two and twenty found home life cheap and useful but cramping to the style, went off to spend the evening with Dr. Herbert and his wife, so Mr. and Mrs. Danvers were left alone. There had been neither time nor opportunity for them to face the wreckage of happiness that James had made. Caroline’s almost desperate state, Dr. Herbert’s visit, a nurse to be got, carefully constructed half-truths to be told to callers – “Poor Caroline had a kind of breakdown and as James is away we thought she had better come here” – evasions of the truth to be prepared for the benefit of the servants – “Mrs. James has been quite unwell and the doctor said she had better come here for a little rest,” an evasion which everyone knew the servants would not for a moment believe, and indeed at that very moment, they were happily discussing it all in their sitting room, tremendously enjoying the fuss and gloating on the increased attraction which first hand contact with a scandal would give them in their social circles, what to say to George and Wilfred, all these things had so occupied the afternoon that this was the first time that they had been able to meet in peace. Both would have been only too thankful to shirk all discussion of the subject, but time and circumstances pressed.

  “I think, Evelyn,” said Mr. Danvers, “that when that poor child is a little stronger we must see a lawyer. It is partly my fault perhaps that James has behaved so unspeakably. I shall never forgive myself for shirking my duty and not speaking to him earlier. I might have done some good.”

  “Not your fault, Cecil dear. Really no one’s fault I think. Not James’ fault. It is like being possessed. He can’t know what he is doing. And must we have a lawyer? Can’t Francis do anything that needs doing?”

  “Francis is Caroline’s cousin. It might be painful and embarrassing for them both if he had to arrange a divorce. It would be better to have an outsider.”

  “Divorce, Cecil? Oh, no. James could never bear it. Oh, Cecil, you couldn’t think of such a thing.”

  “My dear, James is my son too. If I could spare him anything by my own suffering I would, just as you would. God knows I would. But you heard what Caroline told Francis, you heard what James had written to Caroline, you heard what Anna, his own sister, said about James. It may be possession, but nonetheless Caroline must be protected against it forever. We might have had a grandchild, Evelyn, but for this.”

  “But, Cecil, it can’t be all true. Perhaps Caroline was a little hysterical, perhaps Anna exaggerated, perhaps—”

  “No, my dear. It is all very dark and very hopeless. We can only do our best. I can’t cast James off any more than you would, but our present duty is to Caroline. She must be protected and she must stay with us, then no one can say a word against her. Don’t cry, Evelyn. James may have broken life for you and me, but Caroline is young and has a right to live and to mend her broken life. Hasn’t she?”

  “I suppose so, Cecil. Oh, why must people be wicked?”

  “A question which a great many people have asked in vain, my dear. Will you see if Caroline is all right for the night now?”

  Mrs. Danvers put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head. As she left the room, Anna came in.

  “Stay with father,” said Mrs. Danvers. “I’m going up to Caroline. Is she still asleep?”

  “Yes, Mother. Nurse is with her. And I rang up Francis to tell him. He sounded so tired, Father. He has had a frightful day. What a mercy that Caroline had him to bring her to Beechwood. I think Francis is a very safe kind of person to have for a cousin. I should think he would always be a help in difficulties. Father, what are you going to do?”

  “I wish I knew, my dear. But I am very tired tonight and can’t see clearly. Caroline will have to decide.”

  “Father,” said Anna a
fter a pause, “I am sorry I was so beastly about James this morning. I apologize. But it is every word of it true. I suppose if I had been more brave and told you and Mother you might have stopped him. I’ll never forgive myself for being a coward. But Father, James did so promise to be reformed, and I thought you would be so unhappy if you knew. Please say I wasn’t too cowardly.”

  “No, my dear,” said her father, “you weren’t. And in any case don’t blame yourself. We are all trying to blame ourselves, so that we may think better of James, but it isn’t much good. I have blamed myself too, I knew James was wild and extravagant. I thought no worse of it than that – and because I loved him so much I was afraid to speak to him. God help us all.”

  Anna, finding no comfort anywhere for herself or her father, sat silently stroking his hand, determining to make up for her own cowardice, her too easy belief in James’ promises of amendment, by devotion to Caroline. She and Caroline, nearly the same age, had been more like fond sisters than sisters-in-law. The glimpse – more terrifying to her from her happy life at Beechwood – of a brutal and debased James had increased her protecting love for Caroline. She felt, rightly or wrongly, that if she had a husband like James she would have battered him morally, if not actually physically, into decent behavior, and had no doubt of her ability to do so. She saw that her sister-in-law was too gentle and afraid to stand up to James and would have liked to take her under her wing and fight her battles. What she did not understand was the passive strength that Caroline had, a strength to suffer and endure though not a strength to fight or conquer. She had come to know Francis and Hugh since Caroline’s marriage and felt for Francis some of the protective affection she felt for Caroline. In her romantic head, Caroline pale and fainting, Francis as the desperate rescuer, were all jumbled up together, and she was already more than half in love with Francis because he had saved Caroline, as she put it to herself. She sat thinking of him till Wilfred and George came in.

  “Hullo, you are home early,” she said.

  “Dr. Herbert was called off to a case and we all felt a bit depressed, so we came back,” said George. “How’s Caroline?”

  “Asleep or as near as. Go up quietly if you can. Was anyone else there?”

  “Colonel Beaton that has come to live at Whitelands, and his daughter. She is called Julia and she is nineteen and very jolly. Colonel Beaton is a widower, though he doesn’t look old enough,” said Wilfred, whose ideas of the right age for a widower appeared to have strict limitations.

  “He must be the Beaton who wrote that extremely able book about Alexander the Great’s campaigns,” said Mr. Danvers, who had a way, disconcerting to outsiders, of knowing a great deal about subjects entirely unconnected with his merchanting business. His family accepted his wide knowledge as a matter of course and treated him as a combined Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dictionary of National and Foreign Biography, and authority on Modern English Usage. It was a family saying “Look it up in father” instead of “Look it up in the dictionary.” One evening at a dinner party in London he had, to his wife and daughters intense admiration and delight, held his own brilliantly against a politician, a painter, an authority on astronomy in the classical world, and a very affected French literary lady. After this, Anna had fondly christened him Universal Intellect, a name which had subsequently been shortened to Intellect, or by his irreverent younger sons, Old Intellect.

  Mr. Danvers asked Wilfred, the elder of the two, who was in charge of a department at the office, a few questions about business. Having satisfied himself on one or two points he went off to bed, leaving Anna and her young brothers together.

  “I say, Anna, what really is wrong?” asked George, as soon as he had shut the door behind their father. “Dr. Herbert gave us a hint that something was up, but wouldn’t say what. Old Intellect looks as if the world had come to an end. Or is he just enjoying himself being pessimistic?”

  Mr. Danvers’ attacks of world pessimism were rather dreaded by his family, but they gave him such intense pleasure that no one grudged him his occasional fits of depression.

  “No, it’s not the world this time,” said Anna. “It’s even more depressing. Did either of you know how much James was drinking?”

  Wilfred and George exchanged glances expressive of despair at the narrow-mindedness of women.

  “Oh, come,” said Wilfred, “I wouldn’t call it drinking. I’ve seen James pretty tight once or twice in town, but nothing to worry about. You do take everything so seriously, Anna.”

  Anna, who was quite aware how much her affectionate young brothers despised her, and was privately amused by them, began to feel her temper rise. Both the boys adored James, partly because of the glamor of his being on the staff of a newspaper, and partly because he treated them as contemporaries and gave them such an amusing time in town when he remembered their existence. An elder brother who leads an idyllic existence of lunching at restaurants, frequenting cocktail parties, always meeting really important people like film stars and actresses, and then suddenly has to dash off to his newspaper in an aura of importance, is naturally a hero to young men who go to their fathers office every day and work for regular hours.

  “I wouldn’t worry if it was only for ourselves,” said Anna, “but Caroline had to live with him.”

  “Well, that’s her job, and if she doesn’t complain I don’t see why you should,” said Wilfred, not very kindly.

  At this, Anna completely lost her temper and let loose on her brothers the accumulated nerve strain of the day. She described Caroline’s arrival, what Francis had told them, what she herself had seen of James in London, what James had written to Caroline, how Dr. Herbert took a serious view of Caroline’s condition. When she had finished speaking, flushed and almost in tears of rage, there was an unnatural silence. Both young men were a little shocked and, what they deeply resented, made distinctly uncomfortable by their sister’s outburst. These were things, they felt, which should be discussed without fuss by their parents, who would then vaguely do something which would make everything all right again. They were sorry if James had been a bit of a nuisance to Caroline, but women do exaggerate so dreadfully. Anna had probably seen James when he was a bit jolly and had invented the rest.

  George, whose affections, nice though he was, were not deep or extensive, then more or less told Anna what he thought, taking a lofty man of the world attitude which she did her best not to resent, or at least only to resent inside herself. Wilfred, whose kinder heart was touched, though his feelings as a man bade him discount much of Anna’s outburst, sat in embarrassed silence.

  “All right,” said Anna getting up, “I won’t say any more. Divorce is bad enough without having family rows.”

  “Oh, that’s too thick,” said Wilfred, startled. “Divorce? But why? I’ll see James myself.”

  “You can’t,” said Anna, with some satisfaction. “He has gone off with a woman leaving a lot of debts behind at the office, and no one knows where he is. Anyway a divorce will be much worse for Father and Mother than for us. They still mind that sort of thing. I must say I mind it myself too,” she added, “though all in favor of it.”

  Wilfred found it quite impossible to explain that while he thought absolutely nothing of divorce, and indeed thought but poorly of any establishment in which at least one partner had not been divorced, yet he did not at all wish his elder brother to be associated with that necessary and sordid business. So he let his annoyance boil over onto the absent.

  “I must say Father and Mother are the most maddening people,” he said resentfully. “If it isn’t one idea it’s another. I should have thought they’d have been on James’ side. Well, anyway, I shan’t be here much longer. I loathe business and I know a man who wants me to go to Kenya. That’s more the life. Well, I’m off.”

  He went rather blusteringly out of the room, but Anna noticed that though he made a parade of flinging the door open and closing it violently behind him, he took considerable pains to shut it noiselessly,
and she felt comforted and able to laugh.

  “Is it really as bad as that, Anna?” asked George, who had been silent for a long time.

  “Worse if anything.”

  “Well, I’m terribly sorry for Caroline. I expect she nagged a bit. That often makes married chaps take to drink, you know,” he said wisely. “As for James he’s a bit of a rotter, but I dare say he hasn’t any idea what he’s doing. Lots of fellows haven’t when they’re a bit tight. Of course Mother and Old Intellect are angels, but they don’t begin to understand the first thing, and Wilfred gets all hot and bothered when there’s no need. You’re a bit hot and bothered yourself, Anna. I must say there’s one person that no one seems to think of, and that’s me. It won’t be much fun for me at the office if Wilfred is going off to Kenya and James is getting divorced. But I expect Caroline will come round. Ill have a talk to her myself. Anyway, thank God the Russian ballet will be here next year.”

  Knowing well that her mother and the efficient Scotch nurse would deal with George’s well-meant suggestion, Anna said nothing, but kissed him good night. She remained alone for a little longer by the dying fire, thinking of Caroline and Francis, and then, more satisfactorily, of Francis and herself. But when she went upstairs, it was only like her parents and Francis to find sleep fugitive and remote. Hugh, Wilfred and George had gone to sleep in various stages of indignation. Caroline, drugged to unconsciousness, lay still, her body quiescent, though no one could know through what abyss of cold horror her mind passed that night.

  To such a pass had James brought the people who had loved him most.

  Chapter II

  Picking Up The Threads

  Caroline Danvers had slept badly, as she often did. Not till nearly six o’clock did she fall into a sleep which though full of terrifying and exhausting dreams was at least unbroken till eight, when the noise of Wilfred and George banging their way from bedroom to bathroom and from bathroom via bedroom downstairs to breakfast roused her for good. She lay for a few moments, still immobile with fear of her last dream, till returning consciousness of the difficulties of daily life drowned the terrors of the night in a wave of sick apprehension. She sometimes looked back with incredulous longing to the first year of her married life, to nights of refreshing dreamless sleep, to a waking that was a daily miracle of happiness, to days that were full of the joy and excitement of James, his friends, his writing, his delightful irresponsibility, his passionate worship of herself. After that first year, darkness had fallen upon her world. James had vanished and a stranger had taken his place, unstable and unfaithful, turning his worship of her to something from the memory of which her mind shudderingly withdrew, losing friends, work, honor, self-respect.