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cockatoo, then by the arrival of a visitor.'
The comment would be enormous and derisive laughter. His confession would
have been a smokingroom joke. And yet he could not be suffering more if he had lost his
mother.
He wandered for an hour through the streets, in Regent's Park. The light gradually
faded out of the white and misty afternoon; he became calmer. It was a lesson, he
thought, a punishment; he had broken his promise. For his own good as well as for
Marjorie's, never again. He looked at his watch and seeing that it was after seven, turned
homewards. He arrived at the house tired and determinedly repentant. Marjorie was
sewing; the lamplight was bright on her thin fatigued face. She too was wearing a
dressing-gown. It was mauve and hideous; he had always thought her taste bad. The flat
was pervaded with a smell of cooking. He hated kitchen smells, but that was yet another
reason why he should be faithful. It was a question of honour and duty. It was not
because he preferred gardenia to cabbage that he had a right to make Marjorie suffer.
'You're late,' she said.
'There was a lot to do,' Walter explained. 'And I walked home.' That at least was
true. 'How are you feeling?' He laid his hand on her shoulder and bent down. Dropping
her sewing, Marjorie threw her hands round his neck. What a happiness, she was
thinking, to have him again! Hers once more. What a comfort! But even as she pressed
herself against him, she realized that she was once more betrayed. She broke away from
him.
'Walter, how could you?'
The blood rushed to his face; but he tried to keep up the pretence. 'How could I
what? ' he asked.
'You've been to see that woman again.'
'But what _are_ you talking about?' He knew it was useless; but he went on
pretending all the same.
'It's no use lying.' She got up so suddenly that her work basket overturned and
scattered its contents on the floor. Unheeding, she walked across the room. 'Go away!'
she cried, when he tried to follow her. Walter shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. 'How
could you?' she went on. 'Coming home reeking of her perfume.' So it was the gardenias.
What a fool he was not to have foreseen....'After all you said last night. How could you?'
'But if you'd let me explain,' he protested in the tone of a victim--an exasperated
victim.
'Explain why you lied,' she said bitterly. 'Explain why you broke your promise.'
Her contemptuous anger evoked an answering anger in Walter. 'Merely explain,'
he said with hard and dangerous politeness. What a bore she was with her scenes and
jealousies! What an intolerable, infuriating _bore_!
'Merely go on lying,' she mocked.
Again he shrugged his shoulders. 'If you like to put it like that,' he said politely.
'Just a despicable liar--that's what you are.' And turning away from him, she
covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and
bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.
'Go away,' she cried through her tears, 'go away.' She did not want him to be
there, triumphing over her, while she cried. 'Go away.'
'Do you really want me to go?' he asked with the same cool, aggravating
politeness.
'Yes, go, go.'
'Very well,' he said and opening the door, he went.
At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy
on the point of going out to dinner.
'You're coming out with me,' he announced very calmly.
'Alas!'
'Yes, you are.'
She looked at him curiously and he looked back at her, with steady eyes, smiling,
with a queer look of amused triumph and invincible obstinate power, which she had
never seen on his face before. 'All right,' she said at last and, ringing for the maid,
'Telephone to Lady Sturlett, will you,' she ordered, 'and say I'm sorry, but I've got a very
bad headache and can't come to-night.' The maid retired. 'Well, are you grateful now?'
'I'm beginning to be,' he answered.
'Beginning?' She assumed indignation. 'I like your damned impertinence.'
'I know you do,' said Walter, laughing. And she did. That night Lucy became his
mistress.
* * * *
It was between three and four in the afternoon. Spandrell had only just got out of
bed. He was still unshaved; over his pyjamas he wore a dressing-gown of rough brown
cloth, like a monk's cassock. (The monastic note was studied; he liked to remind himself
of the ascetics. He liked, rather childishly, to play the part of the anchorite of diabolism.)
He had filled the kettle and was waiting for it to boil on the gas ring. It seemed to be
taking an unconscionably long time about it. His mouth was dry and haunted by a taste
like the fumes of heated brass. The brandy was having its usual effects.
'Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,' he said to himself,'so longeth my
soul...With a morningafter thirst. If only Grace could be bottled like Perrier water.'
He walked to the window. Outside a radius of fifty yards everything in the
universe had been abolished by the white mist. But how insistently that lamp-post thrust
itself up in front of the next house on the right, how significantly! The world had been
destroyed and only the lamp-post, like Noah, preserved from the universal cataclysm.
And he had never even noticed there was a lamp-post there; it simply hadn't existed until
this moment. And now it was the only thing that existed. Spandrell looked at it with a
fixed and breathless attention. This lamp-post alone in the mist--hadn't he seen something
like it before? This queer sensation of being with the sole survivor of the Deluge was
somehow familiar. Staring at the lamp-post, he tried to remember. Or rather he
breathlessly didn't try; he held back his will and his conscious thoughts, as a policeman
might hold back the crowd round a woman who had fainted in the street; he held back his
consciousness to give the stunned memory a place to stretch itself, to breathe, to come to
life. Staring at the lamp-post, Spandrell waited, agonized and patient, like a man who
feels he is just going to sneeze, tremulously awaiting the anticipated paroxysm; waited
for the long-dead memory to revive. And suddenly it sprang up, broad awake, out of its
catalepsy and, with a sense of enormous relief, Spandrell saw himself walking up the
steep hard-trodden snow of the road leading from Cortina towards the pass of Falzarego.
A cold white cloud had descended on to the valley. There were no more mountains. The
fantastic coral pinnacles of the Dolomites had been abolished. There were no more
heights and depths. The world was only fifty paces wide, white snow on the ground,
white cloud around and above. And every now and then, against the whiteness appeared
some dark shape of house or telegraph pole, of tree or man or sledge, portentous in its
isolation and uniqueness, each one a solitary survivor from the general wreck. It was
uncanny, but how thrillingly new and how beautiful in a strange way! The walk was an
adventure; he felt excited and a kind of anxiety intensified his happiness till he could
hardly bear it.
'But look at that little chalet on the left,' he cried to his mother. 'That wasn't here
when I came up last. I swear it wasn't here.'
He knew the road perfectly, he had been up and down it a hundred times and
never seen that little chalet. And now it loomed up almost appallingly, the only dark and
definite thing in a vague world of whiteness.
'Yes, I've never noticed it, either,' said his mother. 'Which only shows,' she added
with that note of tenderness which always came into her voice when she mentioned her
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