Fortitude (Walpole)/Book 4/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
NORAH MONOGUE
I
PETER founds next morning. Miss Monogue sitting by her window. She gave him at once the impression of something kept alive by will-power so determined that Death himself could only stand aside and wait until it might waver.
She was so thin that sitting there in the clear white colours of the sky beyond her window she seemed like fine silk, something that, at an instant's breath, would be swept like a shadow, into the air. She wore something loose and white and over her shoulders there was a grey shawl. Her grey hair was as untidy as of old, escaping from the order that it had been intended to keep and falling over her beautiful eyes, so that continually she moved her hand—so thin and white with its deep purple veins—to push it back. In this still white figure the eyes burnt with an amazing fire. What eves they were!
One seemed, in the old days, to have denied them their proper splendour, but now in this swiftly fading body they had gathered more life and vigour, showing the soul that triumphed over so slender a mortality.
She seemed to Peter, as he came into the room, to stand for so much more than he had ever hitherto allowed her. Here, in her last furious struggle to keep a life that had given to her nothing worth having, he saw suddenly emblazoned about him, the part that she had played in his life, always from the first moment that he had known her—a part that had been, by him, so frequently neglected, so frequently denied.
As she turned and saw him he was ashamed at the joy that his coming so obviously brought her. He felt her purity, her unselfishness, her single-heartedness, her courage, her nobility in that triumphant welcome that she gave him. That she should care so much for any one so worthless, so fruitless as he had proved himself to be!
He had come to her with some dim sense that it was kind of him to visit her; he advanced to her now across the room with a consciousness that she was honouring him by receiving him at all.
That joy, with which she had at first greeted him, had in it also something of surprise. He had forgotten how greatly these last terrible days must have altered his appearance—he told much more than he knew, and the little sad attempt that he made, as he came to her, to present as careless and happy an appearance as he had presented in the old Brockett days was more pathetic and betraying than anything he could have done.
But she just closed both her burning hands about his cold one, made him sit down in a chair by her side and, trembling with the excited joy of having him with her, forced him to determine that, whatever came of it, he would keep his troubles from her, would let her know nothing of his old chuckling father and the shadowy welcome that Scaw House had flung over him, would be still the Peter that he had been when he had seen her last in London.
“Peter! How splendid to have you here! When Mr. Bannister told me last night I could have cried for happiness, and he, dear little man, was surely as pleased to see me happy as though I'd been his own sister.”
“I'd just come down—”Peter began, trying to smile and conscious with an alarm that surprised him, of her fragility and the way that her hand went now and again to her breast, as though to relieve some pain there. “Are 'you sure—” he broke off, “that I'm not doing yon harm coming like this—not agitating you too much, not exciting you?”
“Harm! Why, Peter,” she was smiling but he noticed too that her eyes were searching his face, as though to find some clue to the change that they saw there—“Why it's all the good in the world. It's what I've been wanting all this time. Some change, a little excitement, for I've been here, you know, quite a number of weeks alone—and that it should be you—you! of all people in this lovely exciting surprising world.”
“How did it happen?” he asked, “your coming down?”
“After I saw you last—I was very bad. My stupid old heart. . . . And the doctor said that I must get away, to the sea or somewhere. Then—what do you think?—the dears, all of them in Brockett's put their heads together and got me quite a lot of money. . . . Oh! the darlings, and they just as poor as church mice themselves. Of course I couldn't insult them by not taking it. They'd have been hurt for ever—so I just pocketed my pride and came down here.”
“Why Treliss?” asked Peter.
“Well, hadn't you so often talked about it? Always, I'd connected you with it in my mind and thought that one day I'd come down and see it. I suggested it to the doctor—he said it was the very place. I used to hope that one day you'd be with me here to explain it, but I never expected it . . . not so soon . . . not like this.”
Her voice faltered a little and her hand held his more tightly.
They were silent. The sounds of the world came, muffled, up to their window, but they were only conscious of one another.
Peter knew that, in another instant, he would tell her everything. He had always told her everything—that is what she had been there for, some one, like an elder sister, to whom he might go and confess.
At last it came. Very softly she asked him:
“Peter, what's the matter? Why are you here? What's happened?”
Staring before him out of the window, seeing nothing but the high white light of the upper sky, his heart, as it seemed to him, lying in his hands like a stone to be tossed lightly out there into space, he told her:
“Everything's happened. Clare has run off with my best friend. . . . It has just happened like that. I don't blame her, she liked him better—but I—didn't know—it was going . . . to happen.”
He didn't look at her, but he heard her catch her breath sharply and he felt her hand tighten on his. They were silent for a long time and he was dimly aware in some unanalysed way that this was what she had expected ever since he had come into the room.
“Oh!” she said at last, holding his hand very tightly, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry—”
He had seen, of course, from the beginning that this business must be told her, but his one desire was to hurry through it, to get it done and banished, once and for all, from their conversation.
“It happened,” he went on gruffly, “quite suddenly. I wasn't in any way prepared for it. She just went off to Paris, after leaving a letter. With the death of the boy and the failure of my book—it just seemed the last blow—the end.”
“The end—at thirty?” she said softly, almost to herself, “surely, no—with the pluck that you've got—and the health. What are you going to do—about it all?”
“To do?” he smiled bitterly. “Do you suppose that I will ask her to come back to me? Do you suppose that I want her back? No, that's all done with. All that life's finished.” Then he added slowly, not looking at her as he spoke—“I'm going to live with my father.”
He remembered, clearly enough, that he had told her many things about his early life at Scaw House. He knew that she must now, as he flung that piece of information at her, have recalled to herself all those things that he had told her. He felt rather than perceived, the agitation that seized her at those last words of his. Her hand slowly withdrew from his, it fell back on to her lap and he felt her whole body draw, as it were, into itself, as though it had come into contact with some terror, some unexplained alarm.
But she only said:
“And what will you do at home, Peter?”
He answered her with a kind of bravado—“Oh, write, I suppose. I went up to see the old man yesterday. Changed enormously since the old days. I found him quite genial, seemed very anxious that I should come. I expect he's a bit lonely.”
She did not answer this and there was a long awkward pause. He knew, as they sat there, in troubled silence that his conscience was awake. It had seemed to be so quiescent through his visit yesterday; it had been drugged and dimmed all these last restless days. But now it was up again. He was conscious that it was not, after all, going to be so easy a thing to abandon all his energies, his militancies, the dominant vigorous panoply of his soul. He knew as he sat there, that this sick shadow of a woman would not let him go like that.
He said good-bye to her for the moment, but, as he left the room he knew that Scaw House would not see him again until he had done everything for her that there was to be done.
II
That evening he saw the doctor who attended on her. He was a nice young fellow, intelligent, eager, with a very real individual liking for his patient. “Ah! she's splendid—brave and plucky beyond anything I've ever seen; so full of fun that you'd think that she'd an idea that another three weeks would see her as well as ever again—whereas she knows as well as I do that another three weeks may easily see her out of the world altogether!”
“There's no hope then?” asked Peter.
“None whatever. There's every kind of complication. She must have always had something the matter with her, and if she'd been cared for and nursed when she was younger she might have pulled out of it. Instead of that she's always worn herself to a thread—you can see that. She isn't one of those who take life easily. She ought to have gone before this, but she holds on with her pluck and her love of it all. . . . Lord! when one thinks of the millions of people who just ‘slug’ through life—not valuing it, doing nothing with it—one grudges the waste of their hours when a woman like Miss Monogue could have done so much with them.”
“Am I doing her any harm, going in to see her?”
“No—doing her good. Don't excite her too much—otherwise the company's the best thing in the world for her.”
The days then, were to be dedicated to her service. He knew, of course, that at the end of it—and the end could not be far distant—he would go to Scaw House and remain there; meanwhile the thing was postponed. He would not think about it.
But on his second meeting with Norah Monogue he saw that he was not to be allowed to dismiss it. He found her sitting still by her window; she was flushed now with a little colour, her eyes burning with a more determined fire than ever, her whole body expressing a dauntless energy.
The sight of her showed him that there was to be battle and, strangely enough, he found that there was something in himself that almost welcomed it. Before he knew where he was he found that he was “out” to defend his whole life.
The first thing that she did was to draw from him a minute, particular account of all that had happened during these last months. It developed into a defence of his whole married life, as though he had been pleading before a jury of Clare's friends and must fight to prove himself no black-guard.
“Ah! don't I know that I've made a mess of it all? Do you think that I'm proud of myself?” he pleaded with her. “Honestly I cannot see where, as far as Clare is concerned, I'm to blame. She didn't understand—how could she ever have understood?—the way that my work mattered to me. I wanted to keep it and I wanted to keep her too, and every time I tried to keep her it got in the way and every time I tried to keep it she got in the way. I wasn't clever enough to run both together.”
Norah nodded her head.
“But there was more than that. Life has always been rough for me. Rough from the beginning when my father used to whip me, rough at school, rough when I starved in London, roughest of all when young Stephen died. I'd wanted to make something out of it and I suppose the easiest way seemed to me to make it romantic. This place, you know, was always in my bones. That Tower down in the Market Place, old Tan's curiosity shop, the sea—these were the things that kept me going. Afterwards in London it was the same. Things were hard so I made them into a story—I coloured them up. Nothing hurt when everything was romance. I made Clare romance too—that was the way, you see, that all my life was bound up so closely together. She was an adventure just as everything else had been. And she didn't like it. She couldn't understand the Adventure point of view. It was, to her, immoral, indecent. I went easily along and then, one day, all the romance went out of it—clean—like a pricked bubble. When young Stephen died I suddenly saw that life was real—naked—ugly, not romantic a bit. Then it all fell to pieces like a house of cards. It's easy enough to be brave when you're attacking a cardboard castle—it's when you're up against iron that your courage is wanted. It failed me. I've funked it. I'm going to run away.”
He could see that Norah Monogue's whole life was in the vigour with which she opposed him—
“No, no, no. To give it up now. Why, you're only thirty—everything's in front of you. Listen. I know you took Clare crookedly, I saw it in the beginning. In the first place you loved her, but you loved her wrong. You've been a boy, Peter, all the time, and you've always loved like a boy. Don't you know that there's nothing drives a woman who loves a man more to desperation than that that man should give her a boy's love? She'd rather he hated her. Clare could have been dealt with. To begin with she loved you—all the time. Oh! yes, I'm as certain of it as I can be of anything. I know her so well. But the unhappiness, the discomfort—all the things, the ugly things, that her mother was emphasising to her all the time—frightened her. Knowing nothing about life she just felt that things as they were were as bad as things could be. It seems extraordinary that any one so timid as she should dare to take so dangerous a plunge as running off to another man.
“But it was just because she knew so little about Life that she could do it. This other man persuaded her that he could give her the peace and comfort that you couldn't. She doesn't know—poor thing, poor thing—what it will mean, that plunge. So, out of very terror, she took it. And now—Oh! Peter, I'm as certain as though I could see her, she's already longing for you—would give anything to get back to you. This has taught her more than all the rest of her life put together. She was difficult—selfish, frightened at any trouble, supersensitive—but a man would have understood her. You wanted affection, Peter—from her, from me, from a lot of people—but it was always because of the things that it was going to bring to you, never because of the things that you were going to give out. You'd never grown up—never. And now, when suddenly the real world has come to you, you're going to give it up.”
“I don't give it up,” he said to her—“I shall write—I shall do things—”
She shook her head. “You've told me. I know what that means.” Then almost below her breath—“It's horrible—It's horrible. You mustn't do it—you must go back to London—you must go back—”
But at that he rose and faced her.
“No,” he said, “I will not. I've given the other things a chance—all these years I've given them a chance. I've stood everything and at the end everything's taken away from me. What shall I go back to? Who wants me? Who cares? God!” he cried, standing there, white-faced, dry-eyed, almost defying her—“Why should I go? Just to fail again—to suffer all that again—to have them take everything I love from me again—to be broken again! No, let them break the others—I'm done with it. . . .”
“And the others?“ she answered him. “Is it to be always yourself? You've fought for your own hand and they've beaten you to your knees—fight now for something finer—”
She seemed as she appealed to him to be shining with some great conquering purpose. Here, with her poor body broken and torn, her spirit, the purer for her physical pain, confronted him, shamed him, stretched like a flaming sword before the mean paths that his own soul would follow.
But he beat her down. “I will not go back—you don't know—you don't understand—I will not go.”
III
The little dusty Minstrels' Gallery saw a good deal of him during these days. It was a lonely place at the top of the hotel, once intended to be picturesque and romantic for London visitors, but ultimately left to its own company with its magnificent view appreciated by no one.
Here Peter came. Every part of him now seemed to be at war with every other part. Had he gone straight to Scaw House with bag and baggage and never left it again, then the Westcott tradition might have caught him when he was in that numbed condition—caught him and held him.
Now he had stayed away just long enough for all the old Peter to have become alive and active again.
He looked back upon London with a great shuddering. The torment that he had suffered there he must never undergo again. Norah was now the one friend left to him in the world. He would cut himself into pieces to make these last days of hers happy, and yet the one thing that could give her happiness was that he should promise to go back.
She did not understand—no one could understand—the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift—to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive—all this had come to him.
She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once more. To go back a failure—to be pointed out as the man whose wife left him because she found him so dull—to hear men like young Percival Galleon laughing at his book—to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a living—to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world—to break out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of debauch . . . how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody knew nor cared!
And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance that Norah Monogue had held in his life.
Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He'd just do anything in the world for her!—anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down he paced the little Minstrels' room, with its dusty green chair and its shining floor—“I just can't stand it all over again!”
But every time that he went in to see her—and he was with her continually—made his resistance harder. She didn't speak about it again but he knew that she was always thinking about it.
“She's worrying over something, Westcott—do you happen to know what it is?” the doctor asked him. “It's bad for her. If you can help her about it in any way—”
The strain between them was becoming unbearable. Every day, when he went in to sit with her, they would talk about other things—about everything—but he knew that before her eyes there was that picture of himself up at Scaw House, and of the years passing—and his soul and everything that was fine in him, dying.
He saw her growing daily weaker. Sometimes he felt that he must run away altogether, go up to Scaw House and leave her to die alone; then he knew that that cruelty at any rate was not in him. One day he thought her brutal and interfering, another day it seemed that it was he who was the tyrant. He reminded himself of all the things that she had done for him—all the things, and he could not grant her this one request.
Then he would ask himself what the devil her right was that she should order his life in this way. . . . every day the struggle grew harder.
The tension could not hold any longer—at last it broke.
IV
One evening they were sitting in silence beside her window. The room was in dusk and he could just see her white shadow against the dim blue light beyond the window.
Suddenly she broke down. He could hear her crying, behind her hands. The sound in that grey, silent room was more than he could bear. He went over to her and put his arms round her.
“Norah, Norah, please, please. It's so awfully bad for you, I oughtn't to come if I—”
She pulled herself together. Her voice was quite calm and controlled.
“Sit over there, Peter. I've got to talk to you.”
He went back to his chair.
“I've only got a few more weeks to live. I know it. Perhaps only a few more days. I must make the very utmost of my time. I've got to save you. . . .”
He said nothing.
“Oh! I know that it must all have seemed to you abominable—as though I were making use of this illness of mine to extort a promise from you, as though just because I'm weak and feeble I can hold an advantage over you. Oh! I know it's all abominable!—but I'll use everything—yes, simply everything—if I can get you to leave this place and go back!”
He could feel that she was pulling herself together for some tremendous effort.
“Peter, I want you now just to think of me, to put yourself out of everything, absolutely, just for this half-hour. After all as I've only a few half-hours left I've got that right.”
Her laugh as she said it was one of the saddest things he'd ever heard.
“Now I'm going to tell you something—something that I'd never thought I'd tell a soul.
“I've not had a very cheerful life. It hasn't had very much to make it bright and interesting. I'm not complaining but it's just been that way—” She broke off for a moment. “I don't want you to interrupt or say anything. It'll make it easier for me if I can just talk out into the night air, as it were—just as though no one were here.”
She went on: “The one thing that's made it possible, made it bearable, made it alive, has been my love for you. Always from the first moment I saw you I have loved you. Oh! I haven't been foolish about it. I knew that you'd never care for me in that kind of way. I knew from the very first that we should be pals but that you'd never dream of anything more romantic. I've never had any one in love with me—I'm not the kind of woman who draws the romance out of men.
“No, I knew you'd never love me, but I just determined that I'd make you, your career, your success, the pivot, the centre of my life.
"I wasn't blind about you—not a bit. I knew that you were selfish, weak, incredibly young about the world. I knew that you were the last person in existence to marry Clare—all the more reason it seemed to me why I should be behind you. I was behind you so much more than you ever knew. I wonder if you've the least idea what most women's lives are like. They come into the world with the finest ideals, the most tremendous energies, with a desire for self-sacrifice that a man can't even begin to understand. Then they discover slowly that none of those things, those ideals, those energies, those sacrifices, are wanted. The world just doesn't need them—they might as well never have been born. Do you suppose I enjoyed slaving for my mother, day and night for years? Do you suppose that I gladly yielded up all my best blood, my vitality, to the pleasure of some one who never valued it, never even knew that such things were being given her? Before you came I was slowly falling into despair. Think of all the women who are haunted by the awful thought—‘The time will come when death will be facing me and I shall be forced to own that for any place that I have ever filled in the world I might never have been born.’ How many women are there who do not pray every day of their lives, ‘God, give me something to do before I die—some place to fill, some work to carry out, something to save my self-respect.’
“I tell you that there is a time coming when women will force those things that are in them upon the world. God help all poor women who are not wanted!
“I wasn't wanted. There was nothing for me to do, no place for me to fill . . . then you came. At once I seized upon that—God seemed to have sent it to me. I believed that if I turned all those energies, those desires, those ambitions upon you that it would help you to do the things that you were meant to do. I was with you always—I slaved for you—you became the end in life to which I had been called.
“All the time you were only a boy—that was partly I think why I loved you. You were so gauche, so ignorant, so violent, so confident one moment, so plunged into despair the next. For a while everything seemed to go well. I had thought that Clare was going to be good for you, was going to make you unselfish. I thought that you'd got the better of all that part of you that was your inheritance. Even when I came down here I thought that all was well. I knew that I had come down to die and I had thanked God because He had, after all, allowed me to make something of my life, that I'd been able to see you lifted into success, that I'd seen you start a splendid career. . . . Then you came and I knew that your life was broken into pieces. I knew that what had happened to you might be the most splendid thing in the world for you and might be the most terrible. If you stay down here now with your father then you are done for—you are done for and my life has, after all, gone for nothing.”
Her voice broke, then she leaned forward, catching his hands:
“Peter, I'm dying—I'm going. If you will only have it you can take me, and when I am gone I shall still live on in you. Let me give you everything that is best in me—let me feel that I have sent you back to London, sent you with my dying breath—and that you go back, not because of yourself but because of everything that you can do for every one else.
“Believe me, Peter dear, it all matters so little, this trouble and unhappiness that you've had, if you take it bravely. The courage that you've wanted before is nothing to the courage that you want now if you're going back. Let me die knowing that we're both going back.
“Think of what your life, if it's fine enough, can mean to other people. Go back to be battered—never mind what happens to your body—any one can stand that. There's London waiting for you, there's life and adventure and hardship. There are people to be helped. You'll go, with all that I can give you, behind you . . . you'll go, Peter?”
He sat with his teeth set, staring out into the world. He had known from the first sentence of her appeal to him that she had named the one thing that could give him courage to fight his cowardice. Some one had once said: “If any one soul of us is all the world, this world and the next, to any other soul, then whoever it may be that thus loves us, the inadequacy of our return, the hopeless debt of us, must strike us to our knees with an utter humility.”
So did he feel now. Out of the wreck there had survived this one thing. He remembered what Henry Galleon had once said about Fortitude, that the hardest trial of all to bear was the consciousness of having missed the Finest Thing. All these years she had been there by the side of him and he had scarcely thought of her—now, even as he watched her, she was slipping away from him, and soon he would be left alone with the consciousness of missing the greatest chance of his life.
The one thing that he could do in return was to give her what she asked. But it was hard—he was under no illusion as to the desperate determination that it would demand. The supreme moment of his life had come. For the first time he was going to fling away the old Peter Westcott altogether. He could feel it clinging to him. About him, in the air, spirits were fighting. He had never before needed Courage as he was needing it now. It seemed to him that he had to stand up to all the devils in the world —they were thick on every side of him.
Then, with a great uplifting of strength, with a courage that he had never known before, he picked up Peter Westcott in his hands, held him, that miserable figure, high in air, raised him, then flung him with all his strength, out, away, far into space, never to return, never to encumber the earth again.
“I'll go back,” Peter said—and as he said it, there was no elation in him, only a clear-sighted vision of a life of struggle, toil, torment, defeat, in front of him, something so hard and arduous that the new Peter Westcott that had now been born seemed small indeed to face it.
But nevertheless he knew that at the moment that he said those words he had broken into pieces the spell that had been over him for so many years. That Beast in him that had troubled him for so long, all the dark shadows of Scaw House . . . these were at an end.
He felt tired, discouraged, no fine creature, as he turned to her, but he knew that, from that moment, a new life had begun for him.
He put his arms round Norah Monogue and kissed her.
V
He got up very early next morning and went down to the Harbour. The fishing-boats were coming in; great flocks of gulls, waiting for the spoil that was soon to be theirs, were wheeling in clouds about the brown sails.
The boats stole, one after another, around the pier. The air was filled with shrill cries—the only other sound was the lapping of the water as it curled up the little beach.
As Peter stood there there crept upon him a sensation of awe. He took off his hat. The gulls seemed to cease their cries.
As another brown sail stole round the white point, gleaming now in the sun, he knew, with absolute certainty, that Norah Monogue was dead.