The Good Soldier

Nancy had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes.  She had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent beside her aunt’s bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward.  And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her.  And gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward.  Several things contributed to form and to harden this conviction.  She was allowed to read the papers in those days—­or, rather, since Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers.  One day, in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well.  Beneath it she read the words:  “The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case reported on p. 8.”  Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was.  She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce.  I don’t know how Leonora had done it exactly.  I suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy’s mind that nice women did not read these things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce case—­principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it.  She imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well.  The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day.  Edward, however, kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun-room, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read.  It seemed to her to be a queer affair.  She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court.  She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door was locked.  It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters.  It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton.  Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood very well—­a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white fetlocks.  Mr Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton. . . .  Well, of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man.  You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving . . . loving anybody but Leonora.  When people were married there was an end of loving.  There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved—­but they were poor people—­or people not like those she knew.  So these matters presented themselves to Nancy’s mind.  But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a “guilty intimacy” with some one or other.  Nancy imagined that he must have been telling some one his wife’s secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence.  Of course it was not very gentlemanly—­it lessened her opinion of Mrs Brand.  But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told.  And then, suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr Brand—­the mild Mr Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing “Blind Man’s Buff” with his children and kissing his wife when he caught her—­Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst possible terms.  That was incredible.

Yet there it was—­in black and white.  Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk.  Mr Brand was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton.  The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy—­nothing real, that is to say.  She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery—­but why, she thought, should one?  It was probably something like catching salmon out of season—­a thing one did not do.  She gathered it had something to do with kissing, or holding some one in your arms. . . .

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious, terrifying and evil.  She felt a sickness—­a sickness that grew as she read.  Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry.  She asked God how He could permit such things to be.  And she was more certain that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward.  Perhaps, then, Edward loved some one else.  It was unthinkable.

If he could love some one else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself?  And he did not love her. . . .  This had occurred about a month before she got the letter from her mother.  She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went off; it did that in a day or two.  Then, finding that Leonora’s headaches had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced her husband.  She asked what, exactly, it all meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak that she could hardly find the words.  She answered just: 

“It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again.”

Nancy said: 

“But . . . but . . .” and then:  “He will be able to marry Miss Lupton.”  Leonora just moved a hand in assent.  Her eyes were shut.

“Then . . .”  Nancy began.  Her blue eyes were full of horror:  her brows were tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct.  In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great hall had a changed aspect.  The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life.  The flame fluttered before the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep.  Outside the winter rain fell and fell.  And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry some one else; and she nearly screamed.

Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the black and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the great fireplace.

“I thought,” Nancy said, “I never imagined. . . .  Aren’t marriages sacraments?  Aren’t they indissoluble?  I thought you were married . . . and . . .”  She was sobbing.  “I thought you were married or not married as you are alive or dead.”  “That,” Leonora said, “is the law of the church.  It is not the law of the land. . . .”

“Oh yes,” Nancy said, “the Brands are Protestants.”  She felt a sudden safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind was at rest.  It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry VIII and the basis upon which Protestantism rests.  She almost laughed at herself.

The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the maid made up the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away towards the kitchen.  And then Leonora opened her eyes and said almost coldly: 

“And you?  Don’t you think you will get married?”

It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was frightened in the dusk.  But then, again, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.  “I don’t know,” she answered.  “I don’t know that anyone wants to marry me.”

“Several people want to marry you,” Leonora said.

“But I don’t want to marry,” Nancy answered.  “I should like to go on living with you and Edward.  I don’t think I am in the way or that I am really an expense.  If I went you would have to have a companion.  Or, perhaps, I ought to earn my living. . . .”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” Leonora answered in the same dull tone.  “You will have money enough from your father.  But most people want to be married.”

I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry me, and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were told to; but that she wanted to go on living there.  She added: 

“If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward.”

She was frightened out of her life.  Leonora writhed on her couch and called out:  “Oh, God! . . .”

Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet handkerchiefs.  It never occurred to her that Leonora’s expression of agony was for anything else than physical pain.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night.  I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it.  It is so difficult to keep all these people going.  I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind.  And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind.  I wish I could put it down in diary form.  Thus:  On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim.  Leonora at once took to her bed.  By the 1st of October they were all going to meets together.  Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner.  About the 6th of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle.  On the 20th she read the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the 18th and the two following days.  On the 23rd she had the conversation with her aunt in the hall—­about marriage in general and about her own possible marriage, her aunt’s coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November. . . .

Thus she had three weeks for introspection—­for introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows.  It was not a good situation for a girl.  She began thinking about love, she who had never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter.  She remembered chance passages in chance books—­things that had not really affected her at all at the time.  She remembered someone’s love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals—­though she did not know what the vitals were.  She had a vague recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover’s eyes hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers’ existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs.  Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play.  It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn for music.  Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing.  She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day.  Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spinney.  Thus she found herself playing on the old piano.  She did not know how she came to be doing it.  A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk—­a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths.  Well, it was a silly old tune. . . .

It goes with the words—­they are about a willow tree, I think:  Thou art to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.

—­That sort of thing.  It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing—­a mere glow amongst white ashes, . . .  It was a sentimental sort of place and light and hour. . . .

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying.  She was crying quietly; she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs.  It seemed to her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone out of life.  Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her.  She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing. . . .

She remembered that Edward’s eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply.  He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals.  Then, the torturing conviction came to her—­the conviction that had visited her again and again—­that Edward must love some one other than Leonora.  With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing.  But Edward was a Protestant.  Then Edward loved somebody. . . .

And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old St Bernard beside her did.  At meals she would feel an intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third.  Then she would find herself grow gay. . . .  But in half an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals.  One evening she went into Edward’s gun-room—­he had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve Committee.  On the table beside his chair was a decanter of whisky.  She poured out a wineglassful and drank it off.  Flame then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew feverish.  She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the dark.  The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that she was in Edward’s arms; that he was kissing her on her face that burned; on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire.

She never touched alcohol again.  Not once after that did she have such thoughts.  They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and they vanished.  She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward’s love for another person was solely sympathy for Leonora; she determined that the rest of her life must be spent in acting as Leonora’s handmaiden—­sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint—­I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology.  But I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face and tightly closed lips, in a clear white room, watering flowers or tending an embroidery frame.  Or, she desired to go with Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so that Edward might be saved for Leonora at the cost of her life.  Well, along with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones.  She knew nothing—­nothing of life, except that one must live sadly.  That she now knew.  What happened to her on the night when she received at once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in India and the blow of the letter from her mother was this.  She called first upon her sweet Saviour—­and she thought of Our Lord as her sweet Saviour!—­that He might make it impossible that she should go to India.  Then she realized from Edward’s demeanour that he was determined that she should go to India.  It must then be right that she should go.  Edward was always right in his determinations.  He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the Chevalier Bayard.

Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted.  She could not leave that house.  She imagined that he wished her gone that she might not witness his amours with another girl.  Well, she was prepared to tell him that she was ready to witness his amours with another young girl.  She would stay there —­to comfort Leonora.

Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother.  Her mother said, I believe, something like:  “You have no right to go on living your life of prosperity and respect.  You ought to be on the streets with me.  How do you know that you are even Colonel Rufford’s daughter?” She did not know what these words meant.  She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst the snow fell.  That was the impression conveyed to her mind by the words “on the streets”.  A Platonic sense of duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother—­the mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant.  At the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another man—­therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible in herself that she trembled at the sound of her father’s voice.  If her mother was that sort of woman it was natural that her father should have had accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground.  And the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her parents.  It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she took off.  Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter about the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora, tall, clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her doorway, and told her that Edward was dying of love for her.  She knew then with her conscious mind what she had known within herself for months—­that Edward was dying—­actually and physically dying—­of love for her.  It seemed to her that for one short moment her spirit could say:  “Domine, nunc dimittis, . . .  Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”  She imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her fallen mother.