The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Condition/Chapter 4
IV
Henry Chilver remained for a much longer time than he would have expected in ignorance of the effect of that admonition; two full months elapsed without bringing him news. Something, he meanwhile reasoned, he should know—ought to know: it was due to him assuredly that Bertram Braddle shouldn't—quite apart from the distance travelled in the company of Mrs. Damerel—go so far even with him without recognising the propriety of going further. But at last, as the weeks passed, he arrived at his own estimate of a situation which had clearly nothing more to give him. It was a situation that had simply ceased to be one. Braddle was afraid and had remained afraid, just as he was ashamed and had remained ashamed. He had bolted, in his embarrassment, to Australia or the Cape; unless indeed he had dashed off once more to America, this time perhaps in quest of his so invidious 'references.' Was he looking for tracks in the great West or listening to twaddle in the Sandwich Islands? In any case Mrs. Damerel would be alone, and the point of honour, for Chilver himself, would have had its day. The sharpest thing in his life at present was the desire to see her again, and he considered that every hour without information made a difference for the question of avoiding her from delicacy. Finally, one morning, with the first faint winter light, it became vivid to him that the dictate of delicacy was positively the other way—was that, on the basis of Braddle's disappearance, he should make her some sign of recollection. He had not forgotten the address observed on one of her luggage-labels the day he had seen her up from Liverpool. Mightn't he, for instance, run down to her place that very morning? Braddle couldn't expect———! What Braddle couldn't expect, however, was lost in the suppressed sound with which, on passing into his sitting-room and taking up his fresh letters, he greeted the superscription of the last of the half-dozen just placed on his table. The envelope bore the postmark of Brighton, and if he had languished for information the very first lines—the note was only of a page—were charged with it. Braddle announced his engagement to Mrs. Damerel, spoke briefly, but with emphasis, of their great happiness and their early nuptials, and hoped very much his correspondent would be able to come down and see them for a day.
Henry Chilver, it may be stated, had, for reasons of feeling—he felt somehow so deeply refuted—to wait a certain time to answer. What had Mrs. Damerel's lover, he wondered, succeeded at last in extracting from her? She had made up her mind as to what she could safely do—she had let him know the worst and he had swallowed it down? What was it, the queer suppressed chapter; what was the awkward page they had agreed to tear out together? Chilver found himself envying his friend the romance of having been sustained in the special effort, the extreme sacrifice, involved in such an understanding. But he had for many days, on the whole vision, odd impatiences that were followed by odder recoveries. One of these variations was a sudden drop of the desire to be in presence of the woman for the sight of whom he had all winter consistently been yearning. What was most marked, however, was the shake he had vigorously to give himself on perceiving his thoughts again and again take the direction that poor Braddle had too successfully imparted to them. His curiosity about the concession she might have made to Braddle's was an assumption—without Braddle's excuses—that she had really had something to conceal till she was sure of her man. This was idiotic, because the idea was one that never would have originated with himself.
He did at last fix a day, none the less, and went down; but there, on the spot, his imagination was, to his surprise, freshly excited by the very fact that there were no apparent signs of a drama. It was as if he could see, after all, even face to face with her, what had stirred within the man she had for a time only imperfectly subdued. Why should she have tried to be so simple—too simple? She overdid it, she ignored too much. Clear, soft, sweet, yet not a bit silly, she might well strike a fellow as having had more history than she—what should one call it?—owned up to. There were moments when Chilver thought he got hold of it in saying to himself that she was too clever to be merely what she was. There was something in her that, more than anything ever in any one, gratified his taste and seemed to him to testify to the happiest exercise of her own; and such things brought up the puzzle of how so much taste could have landed her simply where she was. Where she was—well, was doubtless where she would find comfort, for the man she had accepted was now visibly at peace, even though he had not yet, as appeared, introduced her to his people. The fact of which Chilver was at last as at first most conscious was the way she succeeded in withholding from his own penetration every trace of the great question she had had out with her intended, who yet couldn't have failed—one would quite have defied him—to give it to her somehow that he had on two occasions allowed his tongue to betray him to the other person he most trusted. Braddle, whose taste was not his strong point, had probably mentioned this indiscretion to her as a drollery; or else she had simply questioned him, got it out of him. This made their guest a participant, but there was something beautiful and final in the curtain that, on her side, she had dropped. It never gave, all day, the faintest stir. That affected Chilver as the mark of what there might be behind.
Yet when in the evening his friend went with him to the station—for the visitor had declined to sleep and was taking the last train back—he had, after they had walked two or three times up and down the platform, the greatest mystification of all. They were smoking; there were ten minutes to spare, and they moved to and fro in silence. They had been talking all day—mainly in Mrs. Damerel's company, but the circumstance that neither spoke at present was not the less marked. Yet if Chilver was waiting for something on his host's part he could scarcely have said for what. He was aware now that if Mrs. Damerel had, as he privately phrased it, 'spoken,' it was scarcely to be expected that the man with a standpoint altered by a definite engagement would—at the present stage at least—repeat to him her words. He felt, however, as the fruitless moments ebbed, a trifle wronged, at all events disappointed: since he had been dragged into the business, as he always for himself expressed it, it would only have been fair to throw a sop to his conjecture. What, moreover, was Braddle himself so perversely and persistently mum for—without an allusion that should even serve as a penance—unless to draw out some advance which might help him to revert with an approach to grace? Chilver nevertheless made no advance, and at last as, ceasing to stroll, they stood at the open door of an empty compartment, the train was almost immediately to start. At this moment they exchanged a long, queer stare.
'Well, good-bye,' said the elder man.
'Good-bye.' Chilver still waited before entering the carriage, but just as he was about to give up his companion added: 'You see I followed your advice. I took the risk.'
'Oh—about the question we discussed?' Chilver broke now, on the instant, into friendly response. 'See then how right I was.'
Braddle looked up and down the train. 'I don't know.'
'You're not satisfied?'
'Satisfied?' Still Braddle looked away.
'With what she has told you.'
Braddle faced him again. 'She has told me nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'Nothing. She has accepted me—that's all. Not a bit else. So you see you weren't so right.'
'Oh—oh!' exclaimed Chilver, protestingly. The guard at this moment interposing with, a 'Take your seats, please!' and sharply, on his entering the carriage, shutting the door on him, he continued the conversation from the window, on which he rested his elbows. During the movement his protest had changed to something else. 'Ah, but won't she yet———?'
'Let me have it? I'm sure I don't know. All I can say is that nothing has come from her.'
'Then it's because there is nothing.'
'I hope so,' said Braddle from the platform.
'So you see,' Chilver called out as the train moved, 'I was right!' And he leaned forth as the distance grew and Braddle stood motionless and grave, gaily insisting and taking leave with his waving hand. But when he drew in his head and dropped into a seat he rather collapsed, tossing his hat across the compartment and sinking back into a corner and an attitude from which, staring before him and not even lighting another cigarette, he never budged till he reached Victoria.
A fortnight later the footfall of Mrs. Damerel's intended was loud on the old staircase in the Temple and the knob of his stick louder still on the old door. 'It's only that it has rather stuck in my crop,' he presently explained, 'that I let you leave Brighton the other day with the pretension that you had been "right," as you called it, about the risk—attending the particular step—that I took. I can't help it if I want you to know—for it bores me that you're so pleased—that you weren't in the least right. You were most uncommonly wrong.'
'Wrong?'
'Wrong.'
Chilver looked vaguely about as if suddenly in search of something, then moved with an odd general inconsequence to the window. 'As the day's so fine, do you mind our getting out of this beastly stuffy place into the Gardens? We can talk there.' His hat was apparently what he had been looking for, and he took it up, and with it some cigarettes. Braddle, though seemingly disconcerted by what threatened to be practically a change of subject, replied that he didn't care a hang; so that, leaving the room, they passed together down to the court and through other battered courts and crooked ways. The dim London sunshine in the great surrounded garden had a kindness, and the hum of the town was as hindered and yet as present as the faint sense of spring. The two men stopped together before a bench, but neither for the moment sat down. 'Do you mean she has told you?' Chilver at last brought out.
'No—it's just what she hasn't done.'
'Then how the deuce am I wrong?'
'She has admitted that there is something.'
Chilver markedly wondered. 'Something? What?'
'That's just what I want to know.'
'Then you have asked her?'
Braddle hesitated. 'I couldn't resist my curiosity, my anxiety—call it what you will. I've been too worried. I put it to her the day after you were down there.'
'And how did you put it?'
'Oh, just simply, brutally, disgustingly. I said: "Isn't there something about yourself—something or other that has happened to you—that you're keeping back?"
Chilver was attentive, but not solemn. 'Well?'
'Oh, she admitted it.'
'And in what terms?'
'"Well, since you really drive me to the wall, there is something."'
Chilver continued to consider. 'And is that all she says?'
'No—she says she will tell me.'
'Ah well, then!' And Chilver spoke with a curious—in fact, a slightly ambiguous—little renewed sound of superiority.
'Yes,' his friend ruefully returned, 'but not, you see, for six months.'
'Oh, I see! I see!' Chilver thoughtfully repeated. 'So you've got to wait—which I admit perfectly that you must find rather a bore. Yet if she's willing,' he went on with more cheer and as if still seeking a justification of his original judgment—if she's willing, you see, I wasn't so much out.'
Bertram Braddle demurred. 'But she isn't willing.'
His interlocutor stared. 'I thought you said she proposed it.'
'Proposed what?'
'Why, the six months' wait—to make sure of you.'
'Ah, but she'll be sure of me, after she has married me. The delay she asks for is not for our marriage,' Braddle explained, 'but only—from the date of our marriage—for the information.'
'A-ah!' Chilver murmured, as if only now with a full view. 'She means she'll speak when you are married.'
'When we are. And then only on a great condition.'
'How great?'
'Well, that if after the six months I still want it very much. She argues, you know, that I shan't want it.'
'You won't then—you won't!' cried Chilver with a laugh at the odd word and passing his arm into his friend's to make him walk again. They talked and they talked; Chilver kept his companion's arm and they quite had the matter out.
'What's that, you know,' Braddle asked, 'but a way to get off altogether?'
'You mean for you to get off from knowing?'
'Ah no, for her———'
'To get off from telling? It is that, rather, of course,' Chilver conceded. 'But why shouldn't she get off—if you should be ready to let her?'
'Oh, but if I shouldn't be?' Braddle broke in.
'Why then, if she promises, she'll tell you.'
'Yes, but by that time the knot will be tight.'
'And what difference will that make if you don't mind? She argues, as you say, that after that amount of marriage, of experience of her, you won't care———!'
'What she does tell me may be?' Braddle smoked a moment in silence. 'But suppose it should be one of those things———' He dropped again.
'Well, what things?'
'That a man can't like in any state of satisfaction.'
'I don't know what things you mean.'
'Come, I say—you do! Suppose it should be something really awful.'
'Well, her calculation is that, awful or not,' Chilver said, 'she'll have sufficiently attached you to make you willing either totally to forego her disclosure or else easily to bear it.'
'Oh, I know her calculation—which is very charming as well as very clever and very brave. But my danger———'
'Oh, you think too much of your danger!'
Braddle stopped short. 'You don't!'
Chilver, however, who had coloured, spent much of the rest of the time they remained together in assuring him that he allowed this element all its weight. Only he came back at the last to what, practically, he had come back to in their other talks. 'I don't quite see why she doesn't strike you as worth almost any risk.'
'Do you mean that that's the way she strikes you?'
'Oh, I've not to tell you at this time of day,' said Chilver, 'how well I think of her.'
His companion was now seated on a bench from which he himself had shortly before risen. 'Ah, but I don't suppose you pretend to know her.'
'No—certainly not, I admit. But I don't see how you should either, if you come to that.'
'I don't; but it's exactly what I'm trying for, confound it! Besides,' Braddle pursued, 'she doesn't put you the great condition.'
Chilver took a few steps away; then as he came back, 'No; she doesn't!'
'Wait till some woman does,' Braddle went on. 'Then you'll see how you feel under it—then you can talk. If I wasn't so infernally fond of her,' he gloomily added, 'I wouldn't mind.'
'Wouldn't mind what?'
'Why, what she has been. What she has done.'
'Oh!' Chilver vaguely ejaculated.
'And I only mind now to the extent of wanting to know.' On which Braddle rose from his seat with a heavy sigh. 'Hang it, I've got to know, you know!' he declared as they walked on together.