Encounters (Bowen)/The Evil that Men do—
At the corner by the fire-station, where Southampton Row is joined by Theobalds Road, a little man, hurrying back to his office after the lunch hour, was run over by a motor-lorry. He had been stepping backward to avoid a taxi when worse befell him. What was left of him was taken to hospital and remained for some days unidentified, as no papers of any sort were to be found in his pockets.
The morning after this occurrence a lady living on the outskirts of a country town received a letter in an unfamiliar writing. The appearance of the envelope startled her; it was so exactly what she had been expecting for the last four days. She turned it over, biting her lip. The dining-room was darker than usual, it was a dull, still morning, and she had risen and dressed with growing apprehension. Her husband was away, and the windows seemed further than ever now that she occupied his place and breakfasted alone. She poured out a cup of tea and raised the plated cover of a dish. The sight of a lonely sausage decided her. She opened the letter.
Before she had read to the end she leant forward to think, with her knuckles doubled under her chin. Other people have that sinister advantage over one of being able to see the back of one's head. For the first time in her life she had the uncomfortable sense that somebody had done so, that somebody had not only glanced but was continuously staring. Her husband did not make her feel like this.
"Fancy," she thought. "Just an hour and ten minutes exactly. Just that little time, and all these years I never knew. Think of living among all these people and never knowing how I was different."
She folded up the letter for a moment, and began betting against herself on his Christian name. "Evelyn," she thought, "or possibly Arthur, or Philip." As a matter of fact it was Charles.
"I know you so well," the letter continued. "Before you drew your gloves off I knew that you were married. You have been living on the defensive for years. I know the books you read, and what you see in the streets you walk in of that town with the terrible name. You live in a dark house looking over a highway. Very often you stand in the light of the windows, leaning your head against the frame, and trees with dull leaves send the sunshine and shadow shivering over your face. Footsteps startle you, you start back into the crowded room. The morning you get this letter, go out bare-headed into your garden and let the wind blow the sunshine through your hair. I shall be thinking of you then.
"Your husband and your children have intruded on you. Even your children hurt you with their little soft hands, and yet you are as you always were, untouched and lonely. You came slowly out of yourself at that poetry-reading, like a nymph coming out of a wood. You came towards me like a white thing between trees, and I snatched at you as you turned to go back———"
Her cheeks burnt.
"My goodness," she cried, biting her thumbnail. "Fancy anybody being able to write like that! Fancy living at 28, Abiram Road, West Kensington. I wonder if he's got a wife, I do wonder." Delicious warmth crept down her. "Poetry! I thought he wrote poetry. Fancy him having guessed I read it!"
"I am going to send you my poetry. It is not published yet, but I am having it typewritten. When it is published there shall be just your one initial on the dedication page. I cannot bear the thought of your living alone among those strange people who hurt you—familiar, unfamiliar faces and cold eyes. I know it all; the numb mornings, the feverish afternoons; the intolerable lamplit evenings, night———"
"Now," she thought, "I'm sure he has a wife."
"—and your wan, dazed face turning without hope to the first gleams at the window———"
Ah, guilty, guilty, that she slept so well!
The cook came in.
When the meals for the day were ordered and her breakfast half-surreptitiously eaten with the letter tucked inside the tea-cosy, she went upstairs to her room and tried on the hat she had worn in London, folding the side-flaps of the mirror round her so that she could see her profile. She leant forward gazing at a point in space represented by the prismatic stopper of a scent bottle. With a long, slow breath she went slowly through the action of drawing off a glove.
"Living," she said aloud, "for years and years on the defensive." She looked into the mirror at the neat quiet room behind her, with the reflected pinkness from curtains and carpet over its white wall, and the two mahogany bedsteads with their dappled eiderdowns. There were photographs of her aunts, her children and her brother-in-law's wife along the mantelpiece, a print of the Good Shepherd above the washstand, and "Love among the Ruins" over the beds. On a bracket were some pretty vases of French china Harold had given her at Dieppe, and a photogravure of the Luxemburg gardens she had given Harold. In a bookcase were several selections from the poets, beautifully bound in coloured suède, and another book, white with gold roses, called "The Joy of Living." She got up and slipped a novel from the local library into the bottom of a drawer.
"What on earth would be the good," she reasoned, "of going out into the garden when there is no sun and no wind and practically no garden?" She considered her reflection.
"I don't feel I could go down the High Street in this hat. There must be something queer about it. Half-past nine: Harold will be back at half-past eleven. I wonder if he's bringing me anything from London."
She put a good deal of powder on her face, changed her hat and earrings, selected a pair of half-soiled gloves from a drawer and went downstairs. Then she ran quickly up again and wiped off all the powder.
"Like a wood nymph," she murmured, "coming out of a wood."
When she was half-way down the High Street she found that she had forgotten her shopping-basket and her purse.
Harold came home at half-past eleven and found his wife still out.
He whistled for some minutes in the hall, looked vainly into her bedroom, the kitchen and the nursery, then went round to the office to put in some work. Harold was a solicitor. Coming in again at lunch-time he met her crossing the hall. She looked at him vaguely.
"Why, you are back early!"
"I was back two hours ago," said he.
"Did you have a nice time in London?"
He explained, with his usual patience, that one does not expect to have a nice time when one goes up to London on business.
"Of course," he said, "we're all out to get what we can out of London. We all, as you might say, 'pick it over.' Only what I'm out for isn't pleasure—I leave that to you, don't I?—I'm out for other pickings."
"Yes, Harold."
"This is very good beef."
"Yes, isn't it," she cried, much gratified. "I got it at Hoskins'—Mrs. Peck deals there, she told me about it. It is much cheaper than at Biddle's, tuppence less in the pound. I have to cross over to the other side of the street now when I pass Biddle's. I haven't been there for three days, and he looks as though he were beginning to suspect———"
She sighed sharply; her interest flagged.
"Ah, yes?" said Harold encouragingly.
"I'm tired of buying beef," she said resentfully.
"Oh, come, tired of going down the High Street! Why what else would you———"
She felt that Harold was odious. He had not even brought her anything from London.
"All my day," she cried, "messed up with little things!"
Harold laid down his knife and fork.
"Oh, do please go on eating!"
"Yes," said Harold. "I was only looking for the mustard. What were you saying?"
"Got any plans this afternoon?" he said after luncheon, according to precedent.
"I'm going to write letters," she said, pushing past him into the drawing-room.
She shut the door behind her, leaving Harold in the hall. There was something in doing that, "living on the defensive." But were there any corners, any moments of her life for the last eight years which Harold had not pervaded? And, horrible, she had not only lived with him but liked him. At what date, in fact, had she ceased liking Harold? Had she ever———?
She put her fingers quickly in her ears as though somebody had uttered the guilty thing aloud.
Seating herself at the writing-table, she shut her eyes and thoughtfully stroked her eyebrows with the pink feather at the tip of a synthetic quill pen. She drew the feather slowly down the line of one cheek and tickled herself under the chin with it, a delightful sensation productive of shivers.
"Oh," she sighed, with a shuddering breath, "how beautiful, beautiful you are."
The top of a bus, lurching and rattling through obscurer London, the cold air blowing on her throat, moments under lighted windows when their faces had been mutually discernible, the sudden apparition of the conductor which had made him withdraw his hands from her wrist, their conversation—which she had forgotten. . . . "Ride, ride together, for ever ride." . . . When the bus stopped they had got down and got on to another. She did not remember where they had said good-bye. Fancy, all that from going to a poetry-reading instead of a picture-house. Fancy! And she hadn't even understood the poetry.
She opened her eyes and the practical difficulties of correspondence presented themselves. One could not write that sort of letter on Azure Bond; the notepaper he had used had been so indefinably right, somehow. She did not know how to address him. He had not begun with a "Dear" anything, but that did seem rather abrupt. One could not call him "Dear Mr. Simmonds" after an hour and ten minutes of such bus-riding; how could you call a person Mr. Simmonds when he said you were a nymph? Yet she couldn't take to "Charles." Everything practical, she found, had been crowded into the postscript of his letter—people said that women did that. He said he thought it would be better if she were to write to him at his office in Southampton Row; it was an insurance office, which somehow gave her confidence. "Dear Charles," she began.
It was a stiff little letter.
"I know it is," she sighed, distressfully re-reading it. "It doesn't sound abandoned, but how can I sound abandoned in this drawing-room?" She stood up, self-consciously. "The cage that it is," she said aloud, "the intolerable cage!" and began to walk about among the furniture. "—Those chintzes are pretty, I am glad I chose them. And those sweet ruched satin cushions . . . If he came to tea I would sit over here by the window, with the curtains drawn a little behind me—no, over here by the fireplace, it would be in winter and there would be nothing but firelight. But people of that sort never come to tea; he would come later on in the evening and the curtains would be drawn, and I should be wearing my—Oh, 'like a nymph.' How trivial it all seems."
And Harold had wondered what there would be left for her to do if she didn't go down the High Street. She would show him. But if she went through with this to the end Harold must never know, and what would be the good of anything without Harold for an audience?
She again re-read the letter she had written:
"—Of course my husband has never entered into my inner life———" and underlined the "of course" with short definite lines. It was quite true; she left books of poetry about and Harold never glanced at them; she sat for hours gazing at the fire or (as Charles said) out of the window and Harold never asked her what she was thinking about; when she was playing with the children she would break off suddenly and turn away her face and sigh, and Harold never asked her what was the matter. He would go away for days and leave her alone in the house with nobody to talk to but the children and the servants and the people next door. But of course solitude was her only escape and solace; she added this as a postscript.
Harold entered.
"I left this," he said, "down at the office this morning by mistake. I thought I had forgotten it in London—I should not like to have done so. I was very much worried. I did not mention the matter as I did not want you to be disappointed." He extended a parcel. "I don't know whether it is pretty, but I thought you might like it."
It was the most beautiful handbag, silver-grey, with the delicate bloom on it of perfect suède—darker when one stroked it one way, lighter the other. The clasp was real gold and the straps by which one carried it of exactly the right length. Inside it had three divisions; drawing out the pads of tissue paper one revealed a lining of ivory moiré, down which the light shot into the shadows of the sumptuously scented interior in little trickles like water. Among the silk folds of the centre compartment were a purse with a gold clasp, a gold case that might be used for either cigarettes or visiting cards, and a darling little gold-backed mirror. There was a memorandum-tablet in an outer pocket, and a little book of papier poudré.
They sat down on the sofa to examine it, their heads close together.
"Oh," she cried, "you don't mind, Harold? Papier poudré?"
"Not," said Harold, "if you don't put on too much."
"And look—the little wee mirror. Doesn't it make me have a little wee face?"
Harold breathed magnanimously over the mirror.
"Harold," she said "you are wonderful. Just what I wanted. . . ."
"You can take it out shopping to-morrow morning, down the High Street."
She shut the bag with a click, brushed away the marks of her finger-tips, and swung it by the straps from her wrist, watching it through half-closed eyes.
"Harold," she sighed ineffably.
They kissed.
"Shall I post your letters?" he inquired.
She glanced towards the writing-table. "Would you wait a moment? Just a moment; there's an address I must write, and a postscript."
"My little wee wife," said Harold contentedly.
"P.P.S.," she added. "You must not think that I do not love my husband. There are moments when he touches very closely my exterior life."
She and Harold and the handbag went as far as the post together, and she watched the letter swallowed up in the maw of the pillar-box.
"Another of your insurance policies?" asked Harold.
"Only just to know the general particulars," she said.
She wondered for some time what Charles would think when he came to the last postscript, and never knew that Fate had spared him this.