The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Condition/Chapter 6
VI
It was at his club, one day of the following year, that he next came upon his old friend, whom he had believed, turning the matter often round, he should—in time, though the time might be long—inevitably meet again on some ground socially workable. That the time might be long had been indicated by a circumstance that came up again as soon as, fairly face to face, they fell, in spite of everything, to talking together. 'Ah, you will speak to me then.' said Chilver, 'though you don't answer my letters!'
Braddle showed a strange countenance, partly accounted for by the fact that he was brown, seasoned, a trifle battered, and had almost grown thin. But he had still his good monocular scowl, on the strength of which—it was really so much less a threat than a positive appeal from a supersubtle world—any old friend, recognising it again, would take almost anything from him. Yes indeed, quite anything, Chilver felt after they had been a few minutes together: he had become so quickly conscious of pity, of all sorts of allowances, and this had already operated as such a quickener of his private happiness. He had immediately proposed that they should look for a quiet corner, and they had found one in the smoking-room, always empty in the middle of the afternoon. Here it seemed to him that Braddle showed him what he himself had escaped. He had escaped being as he was—that was it: 'as he was' was a state that covered now, to Chilver's sense, such vast spaces of exclusion and privation. It wasn't exactly that he was haggard or ill; his case was perhaps even not wholly clear to him, and he had still all the rest of his resources; but he was miserably afloat, and he could only be for Chilver the big, sore, stupid monument of his irretrievable mistake. 'Did you write me more than once?' he finally asked.
'No—but once. But I thought it, I'm bound to say, an awfully good letter, and you took no notice of it, you know, whatever. You never returned me a word.'
'I know,' said Braddle, smoking hard and looking away; 'it reached me at Hawaii. It was, I dare say, as good a letter as such a letter could be. I remember—I remember: all right; thanks. But I couldn't answer it. I didn't like it, and yet I couldn't trust myself to tell you so in the right way. So I let it alone.'
'And we've therefore known nothing whatever about you.'
Braddle sat jogging his long foot. 'What is it you've wanted to know?'
The question made Chilver feel a little foolish. What was it, after all? 'Well, what had become of you, and that sort of thing. I supposed,' he added, 'that you might be feeling as you say, and there was a lot, in connection with you, of course I myself felt, for me to think about. I even hesitated a good deal to write to you at all, and I waited, you remember, don't you? till after my marriage. I don't know what your state of mind may be to-day, but you'll never, my dear chap, get a "rise" out of me. I bear you no grudge.'
His companion, at this, looked at him again. 'Do you mean for what I said———?'
'What you said———?'
'About her.'
'Oh no—I mean for the way you've treated us.'
'How do you know how I've treated you?' Braddle asked.
'Ah, I only pretend to speak of what I do know! Your not coming near us. You've been in the Sandwich Islands?' Chilver went on after a pause.
'Oh yes.'
'And in California?'
'Yes—all over the place.'
'All the while you've been gone?'
'No, after a time I gave it up. I've been round the world—in extraordinary holes.'
'And have you come back to England,' Chilver asked, 'to stay awhile?'
'I don't know—I don't know!' his friend replied with some impatience.
They kept it up, but with pauses—pauses during which, as they listened, in the big, stale, empty room, always dreary in the absence of talk and the silence of the billiard-balls just beyond—the loud tick of the clock gave their position almost as much an air of awkward penance as if they had had lines to do or were staying after school. Chilver wondered if it would after all practically fail, his desire that they should remain friends. His wife—beautiful creature!—would give every help, so that it would really depend on Braddle himself. It might indeed have been as an issue to the ponderation of some such question on his own part that poor Bertram suddenly exclaimed: 'I see you're happy—I can make that out!'
He had said it in a way suggesting that it might make with him a difference for the worse, but Chilver answered none the less good-humouredly. 'I'm afraid I can't pretend that I'm in the least miserable. But is it impossible you should come and see us?—come and judge, as it were, for yourself?'
Braddle looked graver than ever. 'Would it suit your wife?'
'Oh, she's not afraid, I think!' his companion laughed. 'You spoke just now,' he after a moment continued, 'of something that in your absence, in your travels, you "gave up." Let me ask you frankly if you meant that you had undertaken inquiries———'
'Yes; I "nosed round," as they say out there; I looked about and tried to pick something.' Braddle spoke on a drop of his interlocutor, checked evidently by a certain hardness of defiance in his good eyes; but he couldn't know that Chilver wished to draw him out only to be more sorry for him, hesitating simply because of the desire not to put his proceeding to him otherwise than gracefully. 'Awfully low-minded, as well as idiotic, I dare say you'll think it—but I'm not prepared to allow that it was not quite my own affair.'
'Oh, she knew!' said Chilver, comfortably enough.
'Knew I shouldn't find out anything? Well, I didn't. So she was right.'
Thus they sat for a moment and seemed to smoke at her infallibility. 'Do you mean anything objectionable?' Chilver presently inquired.
'Anything at all. Not a scrap. Not a trace of her passage—not an echo of her name. That, however—that I wouldn't, that I couldn't,' Braddle added, 'you'll have known for yourself.'
'No, I wasn't sure.'
'Then she was.'
'Perhaps,' said Chilver. 'But she didn't tell me.'
His friend hesitated. 'Then what has she told you?'
'She has told me nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'Nothing,' said Henry Chilver, smiling as with the enjoy ment of his companion's surprise. 'But do come and see us,' he pursued as Braddle abruptly rose and stood—now with a gravity that was almost portentous—looking down at him.
'I'm horribly nervous. Excuse me. You make me so,' the younger man declared after a pause.
Chilver, who with this had got up soothingly and still laughingly, laid a reassuring hand upon him. 'Dear old man—take it easy!'
'Thanks about coming to see you,' Braddle went on. 'I must think of it. Give me time.'
'Time? Haven't you had months?'
Braddle turned it over. 'Yes; but not on seeing you this way. I'm abominably nervous, at all events. There have been things—my silence among them—which I haven't known how you'd take.'
'Well, you see how.'
Braddle's stare was after all rather sightless. 'I see—but I don't understand. I'll tell you what you might do—you might come to me.'
'Oh, delighted. The old place?'
'The old place.' Braddle had taken out his eyeglass to wipe it, and he cocked it characteristically back. 'Our relation's rather rum, you know.'
'Yours and my wife's? Oh, most unconventional; you may depend on it she feels that herself.'
Braddle kept fixing him. 'Then does she want to crow over me?'
'To crow?' Chilver was vague. 'About what?'
His interlocutor hesitated. 'About having at least got you.'
'Oh, she's naturally pleased at that; but her satisfaction's after all a thing she can keep within bounds; and to see you again can only, I think, remind her more than anything else of what she did lose and now misses: your general situation, your personal advantages, your connections, expectations, magnificence.'
Braddle, on this, after a lingering frown, turned away, looking at his watch and moving for a minute to the window. 'When will you come? To-night?'
Chilver thought. 'Rather late—yes. With pleasure.'
His friend presently came back with an expression rather changed. 'What I meant just now was what it all makes of my relation and yours—the way we go into it.'
'Ah, well, that was extraordinary—the way we went into it—from the first. It was you, permit me to remark,' Chilver pleasantly said, 'who originally began going into it. Since you broke the ice I don't in the least mind its remaining broken.'
'Ah, but at that time,' Braddle returned, 'I didn't know in the least what you were up to.'
'And do I now know any more what you are? However,' Chilver went on, 'if you imply that I haven't acted with most scrupulous fairness, we shall, my dear fellow, quarrel as much as you please. I pressed you hard for your own interest.'
'Oh, my "interest"!' his companion threw off with another move to some distance; coming back, however, as quickly and before Chilver had time to take this up. 'It's all right—I've nothing to say. Your letter was very clever and very handsome.' Then, 'I'm not "up to" anything,' Braddle added with simplicity.
The simplicity just renewed his interlocutor's mirth. 'In that case why shouldn't we manage?'
'Manage?'
'To make the best, all round, of the situation.'
'I've no difficulty whatever,' said Braddle, 'in doing that. If I'm nervous I'm still much less so than I was before I went away. And as to my having broken off, I feel more and more how impossible it was I should have done anything else.'
'I'm sure of it—so we will manage.'
It was as if this prospect, none the less, was still not clear to Braddle. 'Then as you've so much confidence I can ask you why—if what you said just now of me is true—she shouldn't have paid for me a price that she was going, after all, to find herself ready to pay for you.'
'A price? What price?'
'Why, the one we've been talking about. That of waiving her great condition.' On which, as Chilver was, a moment—though without embarrassment—silent for this explanation, his interlocutor pursued: 'The condition of your waiting———'
'Ah,' said Chilver, 'it remained. She didn't waive it.'
Oh, how Braddle looked at him! 'You accepted it?'
Chilver gave a laugh at his friend's stare. 'Why are you so surprised when all my urgency to you was to accept it and when I thought you were going to?' Bertram had flushed, and he was really astonished. 'Hadn't you then known?'
'Your letter didn't say that.'
'Oh, I didn't go into our terms.'
'No,' said Braddle with some severity, 'you slurred them over. I know what you urged on me and what you thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to do it too. But at the scratch I couldn't.'
'So you believed I wouldn't?'
Poor Braddle was, after all, candid enough. 'At the scratch, yes; when it came—the question—to yourself, and in spite of your extraordinary preaching. I think I took for granted that she must have done for you what she didn't do for me—that, liking you all for yourself, don't you see? and therefore so much better, she must have come round.'
'For myself, better or worse, I grant you, was the only way she could like me,' Chilver replied. 'But she didn't come round.'
'You married her with it?'
'This was a question, however—it was in particular an emphasis—as to the interpretation of which he showed a certain reserve. 'With what?'
'Why, damn it, with the condition.'
'Oh, yes—with the condition.' It sounded, on Chilver's lips, positively gay.
'You waited?'
'I waited.'
This answer produced between them for the time—and, as might be said, by its visible effect on the recipient—a hush during which poor Bertram did two or three pointless things: took up an ash-tray that was near them and vaguely examined it, then looked at the clock and at his watch, then again restlessly moved off a few steps and came back. At his watch he gave a second glare. 'I say, after all—don't come to-night.'
'You can't stand me?'
'Well, I don't mind telling you you've rather upset me. It's my abject nerves; but they'll settle down in a few days, and then I'll make you a sign. Good-bye.'
'Good-bye.' Chilver held a minute the hand he had put out. 'Don't be too long. My secondary effect on you may perhaps be better.'
'Oh, it isn't really you. I mean it's her.'
'Talking about her? Then we'll talk of something else. You'll give me the account———'
'Oh, as I told you, there was no account!' Braddle quite artlessly broke in. Chilver laughed out again at this, and his interlocutor went on: 'What's the matter is that, though it's none of my business, I can't resist a brutal curiosity—a kind of suspense.'
'Suspense?' Chilver echoed with good-humoured deprecation.
'Of course I do see you're thoroughly happy.'
'Thoroughly.'
Braddle still waited. 'Then it isn't anything———?'
'Anything?'
'To make a row about. I mean what you know.'
'But I don't know.'
'Not yet? She hasn't told you?'
'I haven't asked.'
Braddle wondered. 'But it's six months.'
'It's seven. I've let it pass.'
'Pass?' Braddle repeated with a strange sound.
'So would you in my place.'
'Oh, no, I beg your pardon!' Braddle almost exultantly declared. 'But I give you a year.'
'That's what I've given,' said Chilver, serenely.
His companion had a gasp. 'Given her?'
'I bettered even, in accepting it, the great condition. I allowed her double the time.'
Braddle wondered till he turned almost pale. 'Then it's because you're afraid.'
'To spoil my happiness?'
'Yes—and hers.'
'Well, my dear boy,' said Chilver, cheerfully, 'it may be that.'
'Unless,' his friend went on, 'you're—in the interest of every one, if you'll permit me the expression?—magnificently lying.' Chilver's slow, good-humoured headshake was so clearly, however, the next moment, a sufficient answer to this that the younger man could only add as drily as he might: 'You'll know when you want to.'
'I shall know, doubtless, when I ask. But I feel at present that I shall never ask.'
'Never?'
'Never.'
Braddle waited a moment. 'Then how the devil shall I know?'
Something in the tone of it renewed his companion's laughter. 'Have you supposed I'd tell you?'
'Well, you ought to, you know. And—yes—I've believed it.'
'But, my good man, I can't ask for you.'
Braddle turned it over. 'Why not, when one thinks of it? You know you owe me something.'
'But—good heavens!—what?'
'Well, some kindness. You know you've all the fun of being awfully sorry for me.'
'My dear chap!' Chilver murmured, patting his shoulder. 'Well, give me time!' he easily added.
'To the end of your year? I'll come back then,' said Braddie, going off.