The Captives

CHAPTER IX

SOUL OF PAUL

Nothing so horrible had ever happened to Paul before, nothing ...

He felt as though he had committed a murder; it was as though he expected arrest and started at every knock on the door. Nothing so horrible ...

It was, of course, in all the Skeaton papers. At the inquest it appeared that Mathew Cardinal had imitated the signature of a prosperous City friend; had he not chosen his own way out he would have discovered the arduous delights of hard labour. But he had chosen suicide and not "while of unsound mind." Yes, the uncle of the Rector's wife ... Yes, The Rector's Wife's Uncle ... Yes, The Rector's Wife's Uncle!

Sho discovered him, bumped right into him in the dark. What a queer story—like a novel. Oh, but she had always been queer—Trenchard had picked her up somewhere in a London slum; well, perhaps not a slum exactly but something very like it. Why did he marry her? Perhaps he had to. Who knows? These clergymen are sly dogs. Always the worst if the truth were known ...

So it went on. For nine whole days (and nights) it was the only topic in Skeaton. Paul caught the fringe of it. He had never known very much about his fellow-beings. He had always taken the things that they said to him as the true things, when they smiled he had thought that they meant their smiles. And why not? ... since he always meant his. He had always been too lazy to dislike people, and his digestion had been too good and his ambition too slender to urge him towards spite and malice. He had believed that he was on excellent terms with all the world.

Now that was changed. He was watched, he knew, with curious, inquisitive, critical glances. Through no fault of his own he was soiled and smirched. That hearty confident laugh of his must be checked. He was afraid. Yes, he was afraid. He sat in his study and trembled at the thought of meeting his congregation. He had done nothing and yet his reputation was no longer clean. But he was afraid, also, of something else. He saw, desperately against his will, the central picture. He saw the body hanging in the dark room, Maggie tumbling against it, the cries, the lights, the crowd ... He saw it all, hour after hour. He was not an imaginative man, but it seemed to him that he had actually been present at this scene. He had to attend the inquest. That had been horrible. With all eyes upon him he stood up and answered their detestable questions. He had trembled before those eyes. Suddenly the self-confidence of all his life had left him. He had stammered in his replies, his hands had trembled and he had been forced to press them close to his sides. He had given his answers as though he were a guilty man.

He came then slowly, in the silence of his study, to the consideration of Grace and Maggie. This would kill Grace. She had altered, in a few days, amazingly; she would meet nobody, but shut herself into her bedroom. She would not see the servants. She looked at Paul as though she, like the rest of the world, blamed him. Paul loved Grace. He had not known before how much. They had been together all their lives and he had taken her protection and care of him too much for granted. How good she had been to him and for how many years! When they were happy it seemed natural that she should look after him, but now, in the middle of this scandal he saw that it should have been he who looked after her. He had not looked after her. Of course, now they would have to leave Skeaton and he knew what that departure would mean to Grace. She was suspicious of new places and new people. Strange to think now that almost the only person of whom she had not been suspicious was Maggie.

Maggie! His mind slowly wheeled round to her. He rose from his chair and began clumsily to parade the room. He walked up and down the study as though with closed eyes, his large body bumping against corners of tables and chairs. Maggie! He looked back, as of late he had often done, to those days in his cousin's house in London. What had happened to the Maggie whom he had known there?

He saw her again, so quiet, so ready to listen and learn, so modest, and yet with a humour and sense of appreciation that had promised well for the future. A child—an ignorant, charming, uneducated child, that is what she had seemed. He admitted now that his heart, always too soft and too gentle perhaps, had been touched beyond wisdom. She had seemed to need just the protection and advice that he had been fitted to give her. Then, as though in the darkness of the night, the change had been made; from the moment of entering into Skeaton there had been a new Maggie. He could not tell himself, because he was not a man clever at psychology, in what the change consisted. Had he been pressed he would have said perhaps that he had known the old Maggie intimately, that nothing that she could say or do astonished him, but that this new Maggie was altogether a stranger. Time had not altered that; with the passing months he had known her less and less. Why, at their first meeting long ago in Katherine's house he had known her better than he knew her now. He traced the steps of their history in Skeaton; she had eluded him always, never allowing him to hold her for more than a moment, vanishing and appearing again, fantastic, in some strange lighted distance, hurting him and disappointing him ... He stopped in his walk, bewildered. He saw, with a sudden flash, that she had never appeared so fascinating to him as when she had been strangest. He saw it now at the moment when she seemed more darkly strange, more sinister and dangerous than ever before.

He realised, too, at the same sharp moment the conflict in which he was engaged. On the one side was all his life, his sloth and ease and comfort, his religion, his good name, his easy intercourse with his fellow-men, Grace, intellectual laziness, acceptance of things as they most easily are, Skeaton, regular meals, good drainage, moral, physical and spiritual, a good funeral and a favourable obituary in The Skeaton Times. On the other hand unrest, ill-health, separation from Grace, an elusive and never-to-be-satisfied pursuit, scandal and possible loss of religion, unhappiness ... At least it was to his credit that he realised the conflict; it is even further to his credit that he grasped and admitted the hopelessness of it. He knew which way he would go; even now he was tired with the thought of the struggle; he sank into his shabby chair with a sigh of weariness; his hand stretched out instinctively for an easy volume. But oh, Maggie! how strange and fascinating at that moment she appeared to him, with her odd silences, her flashes of startled surprise, her sense of being half the day in another world, her kindness to him and then her sudden terror of him, her ignorance and then the conviction that she gave suddenly to him that she knew more than he would ever know, above all, the way that some dark spirit deep down in him supported her wild rebellions, her irreverences, her irreligion, her scorn of tradition. Oh! she was a witch! Grace's word for her was right, but not Grace's sense of it. The more Grace was shocked the more tempting to him the witch became. It had seemed to him, that day in Katherine's drawing-room, so slight a thing when she had said that she did not love him, he had no doubt but that he could change that. How could a child, so raw and ignorant, resist such a man? And yet she had resisted. That resistance had been at the root of the trouble. Whichever way things went now, he was a defeated man.

The door opened and Grace came in. Looking at her he realised that she would never understand the struggle through which he had been timorously wading, and saw that she was further away from him than she had ever been before. He blamed her too. She had had no right to refuse that man to Maggie. Had she allowed Maggie to see him none of this might have occurred. The man was a forger and would, had he lived, have gone to prison, but there would not then have been the same open scandal. No, he blamed Grace. It might be that their old absolutely confident intimacy would never be renewed. He felt cold and lonely. He bent forward, putting some coal on the fire, breaking it up into a cheerful blaze. Then he looked up at her, and his heart was touched. She looked to-day an old woman. Her hair was untidy and her face was dull grey in colour. Her eyes moved restlessly round the room, wandering from picture to picture, from the mantelpiece to the chairs, from the chairs to the book-shelves, as though she sought in the sight of these well-remembered things some defence and security.

"Is your head better?" he asked her, not meeting her eyes, because the dull pain in them disturbed him.

"Not much," she said. "It's very bad, my head. I've taken aspirin. I didn't eat anything yesterday. Nothing at all except some bread and milk, and very little of that ... I couldn't finish it. I felt I'd be sick. I said to Emily, 'Emily, if I eat any more of that I'll be sick,' and Emily advised me not to touch it. What I mean is that if I'd eaten any more I'd have been really sick—at least that's what I felt like."

Her restless eyes came suddenly to a jerking pause as though some one had caught and gripped them. She was suddenly dramatic. "Oh. Paul, what are we going to do?" she cried.

Paul was irritated by that. He hated to be asked direct questions as to policy.

"What do you mean what are we going to do?" he asked.

"Why, about this—about everything. We shall have to leave Skeaton, you know. Fancy what people are saying!"

Suddenly, as though the thought of the scandal was too much for her, her knees gave way and she flopped into a chair.

"Well, let them say!" he answered vigorously. "Grace, you're making too much of all this. You'll be ill if you aren't careful. Pull yourself together." "Of course we've got to go," she answered. "If you think that we can go on living here after all that's happened—"

"Well, why not?" he interrupted. "We haven't done anything. It's only—"

"I know what you're going to say." (It was one of Grace's most irritating habits that she finished other people's sentences for them in a way that they had not intended) "that if they look at it properly they'll see that it wasn't our fault. But will they look at it properly? Of course they won't. You know what cats they are. They're only waiting for a chance. What I mean is that this is just the chance they've been waiting for."

"How can you go on and every time you preach they'll be looking up at you and saying 'There's a brother of a murderer'? Why, fancy what you'd feel!"

Paul jumped in his chair. "What do you mean, Grace? The brother of a murderer?"

"What else am I?" Grace began to warm her podgy hands. "It came out at the inquest that I wouldn't see the man, didn't it? Maggie thinks me a murderer. I see it in her eyes every time. What I mean to say, Paul, is, What are you going to do about Maggie?"

Grace's voice changed at that question. It was as though that other trouble of the scandal were nothing to her compared with this matter of Maggie's presence. Paul turned and looked at her. She dropped her voice to a whisper and went on:

"I won't stay with Maggie any more. No, no, no! You must choose, Paul, between Maggie and me. What I mean is that it simply isn't safe in the same house with her. You may not have noticed it yourself, but I've seen it coming on a long time. I have indeed. She isn't right in her head, and she hates me. She's always hated me. She'd like to do me an injury. She follows me round the house. She's always watching me, and now that she thinks that I killed her uncle it's worse. I'm not safe, Paul, and that's the truth. She hides in my room behind the curtains waiting for me. It's my safety you've got to consider. It's me or her. I know she's your wife, but what I mean is that there'll be something awful happening if you aren't careful."

Grace, as she spoke, was a woman in the very heart of a desperate panic. Her whole body trembled; her face was transfixed as though she saw Maggie standing in front of her there with a knife. No one looking at her could deny that she was in mortal terror—no affectation here. And Paul loved her. He came over to her and put his arm round her; she caught hold of his hand, clutched it desperately. When he felt the trembling of her body beneath his hand his love for her and protective care of her overwhelmed him.

"Grace, dear, it's all right," he said. "You're exaggerating all this. Maggie wouldn't hurt a fly—indeed, she wouldn't. She has her faults, perhaps, but cruelty isn't one of them. You must remember that she's had a bad time lately losing her aunt and then finding her uncle in that horrible way. After all, she's only a child. I know that you two haven't got on well together, and I daresay that it has been very largely my fault; but you mustn't be frightened like that. No harm shall come to you so long as I am alive—no harm whatever."

But she stared in front of her, like a woman in a dream, repeating—

"No, no, Paul. Either she goes or I go. She's your wife. She must stay. Then I must go. I can't stand it; I can't indeed. I'm not sleeping; I'm not indeed. It isn't fair to ask it. What I mean is that it isn't fair to me."

Although he had known Grace for years he still believed her threats and promises. "My sister's an obstinate woman," he would say, although had he looked truly into his experience he must have seen that she changed her mind more frequently by far than she changed her clothes. He thought that now she meant what she said; indeed, on his own side he really did not see how in the future Maggie and Grace could continue to live in the same house. But, as Grace had said, he was married to Maggie and therefore it was Grace that must go. Then when he confronted the fact of Grace's departure he could not endure it. No, he could not. Had Maggie been everything to him that she might have been, bad she been his true wife, had she loved him, had she—oh! a thousand things she might have been!—then perhaps life would be possible without Grace. But now! ... at the thought of being alone for ever with Maggie a strange passion, mingled of fascination and fear, affection and sensuality, cowardice and excitement, pervaded him. What would their life together be? Then he turned to Grace as the very rock of his safety.

"Oh, Grace, you mustn't go—you mustn't think of going. Whatever should I do without you?"

A dull flush of gratification coloured her cheeks.

"Either she goes or I," she repeated. "It can't go on. You must see that it can't. Fancy what people must be thinking!"

As always, he postponed the issue. "We'll settle something. Don't you worry, dear. You go and lie down. That's what you want—a thorough good rest."

She plodded off. For himself he decided that fresh air was what he needed. He went for a stroll. As soon as he was in the Charleston Road that led to the High Street he was pleased with the day. Early spring; mild, faint haze, trees dimly purple, a bird clucking, the whisper of the sea stirring the warm puddles and rivulets across the damp dim road. Warm, yes, warm and promising. Lent ... tiresome. Long services, gloomy sermons. Rebuking people, scolding them—made them angry, did them no good. Then Easter. That was better. Jolly hymns. "Christ is risen! Christ is risen!" Jolly flowers—primroses, crocuses—(no, they were earlier). They'll have forgotten about Maggie's uncle by then. Live it down—that's the thing. Give them a good genial sermon this Sunday. Show them he wasn't caring ... If only the women would get on together. Women—women. How difficult they were! Yes, Sunday would be difficult—facing them all. He knew what they'd be thinking. He wanted to be jolly again. Jolly. That was the thing. Joking with Grace, jolly even with Maggie. Jolly with his congregation. Jolly with God. Why wasn't he left alone? Had been until Maggie came. Maggie like a stone flung into a frosty pool! Broke everything up, simply because she was unlike other people. He'd married her because he thought he could make her into what he pleased. Well, it had been the other way. Oh, she was queer, queer, queer.

He stopped, his large boots in a warm puddle. He felt the warm sun hot through the damp mist. He wanted to take her into his arms, to hug her, above all to feel her response. To feel her response, that was what, for years now, he had been wanting, and never once had she responded. Never once. She let him do as he pleased, but she was passive. She didn't love him. Grace loved him, but how dull Grace was! Dull—it was all dull! Grace was dull, Skeaton was dull, the church was dull—God was dull! God? Where was God? He looked around. There was no God. To what had he been praying all these years? He had not been praying. His congregation had not been praying. They were all dead and God was dead too.

He looked up and saw that his boots were in a puddle. He walked on. For a moment, the mists of sloth and self-indulgence that had for years obscured his vision had shifted and cleared, but even as he moved they settled down and resolved themselves once more. The muscles of Paul's soul were stiff with disuse. Training is a lengthy affair and a tiresome business to the stout and middle-aged.

The hedges gave way to houses; he was in the High Street. He saw then, plastered at intervals on the hoardings, strange phenomena. It was the colour that first attracted him—a bright indecent pink with huge black lettering. Because it was the offseason in Skeaton other announcements were few. All the more prominent then the following:

THE KINGSCOTE BEETHEEN WILL HOLD A RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL IN THE TOWN
OF SKEATON-ON-SEA FROM APRIL 10 TO 16.——-SERVICES 10 A.M., 3 P.M. SPECIAL SONG SERVICE, 7.30 P.M. DAILY All are Cordially Invited. ADDRESSES BY REV. JOHN THURSTON. REV. WILLIAM CRASHAW. SISTER AVIES.

Paul stared at this placard with horror and disgust in his soul. For the moment Maggie and Grace and all the scandal connected with them was forgotten. This was terrible. By temperament, tradition, training, he loathed and feared every phase of religion known to him as "Methodistic." Under this term he included everything that was noisy, demonstrative, ill-bred and melodramatic. Once when an undergraduate at Cambridge he had gone to some meeting of the kind. There had been impromptu prayers, ghastly pictures of hell-fire, appeals to the undergraduates to save themselves at once lest it be too late, confessions and appeals for mercy. The memory of that evening still filled him with physical nausea. It was to him as though he had seen some gross indecent act in public or witnessed some horrible cruelty.

Maggie had told him very little about the Chapel and its doings, and he had shrunk from asking her any questions, but everything that was odd and unusual in her behaviour he attributed to her months under that influence. As he stared at the flaunting pink sheet he felt as though it were a direct personal assault on himself and his church.

And yet he knew that he could do nothing. Once before there had been something of the kind in Skeaton and he had tried with others to stop it. He had failed utterly; the civic authorities in Skeaton seemed almost to approve of these horrors. He looked at the thing once more and then turned back towards home. Something must be done... Something must be done ... but, as on so many earlier occasions in his life, he could face no clear course of action.

That Saturday evening he tried to change his sermon. He had determined to deliver a very fine address on "Brotherly Love" and then, most fortunately, he had discovered a five-years' old sermon that would, with a little adaptation, exactly fit the situation.

To-night he was sick of his adaptation. The sermon had not been a good one at the first, and now it was a tattered thing of shreds and patches. He tried to add to it some sentences about the approaching "Revival." No sentences would come. What a horrible fortnight it had been! He looked back upon his district visiting, his meetings, his choir-practices with disgust. Something had come in between himself and his people. Perhaps the relationship had never been very real? Founded on jollity. An eagerness to accept anybody's mood for one's own if only that meant jollity. What had he thought, standing in the puddle that afternoon? That they were all dead, he and his congregation and God, all dead together? He sank into his chair, picked up the Church Times, and fell asleep.

Next morning as he walked into the choir this extraordinary impression that his congregation was dead persisted. As he recited the "Confession" he looked about him. There was Mr. Maxse, and there Miss Purves. Every one was in his and her appointed place; old Colonel Rideout with the purple gills not kneeling because of his gout; young Edward Walter, heir to the sugar factory, not kneeling because he was lazy; sporting Mr. Harper, whose golf handicap was +3, not kneeling because to do so would spoil the crease of his trousers; old Mrs. Dean with her bonnet and bugles, the worst gossip in Skeaton, her eyes raised to heaven; the Quiller girls with their hard red colour and their hard bright eyes; Mr. Fortinum, senior, with his County Council stomach and his J.P. neck; the dear old Miss Fursleis who believed in God and lived accordingly; young Captain Trent, who believed in his moustache and lived accordingly ... Oh yes, there they all were—and there, too, were Grace and Maggie kneeling side by side.

Maggie! His eyes rested upon her. Her face suddenly struck him as being of extraordinary beauty. He had never thought her beautiful before; very plain, of course. Every one knew that she was plain. But to-day her face and profile had the simplicity, the purity, the courage of a Madonna in one of the old pictures—or, rather, of one of those St. John the Baptist boys gazing up into the face of the Christ—child as it lay in its mother's arms. He finished the "Confession" hurriedly—Maggie's face faded from his view; he saw now only a garden of hats and heads, the bright varnished colour of the church around and about them all.

He gave out the psalms; there was a rustle of leaves, and soon shrill, untrained voices of the choir-boys were screaming the chant like a number of baby steam-whistles in competition.

When he climbed into the pulpit he tried again to discover Maggie's face as he had already seen it. He could not; it had been, perhaps, a trick of light and, in any case, she was hidden now behind the stout stolidity of Grace. He looked around at the other faces beneath him and saw them settle themselves into their customary expressions of torpor, vacuity and expectation. Very little expectation! They knew well enough, by this time, the kind of thing to expect from him, the turn of phrase, the rise and fall of the voice, the pause dramatic, the whisper expostulatory, the thrust imperative, the smile seductive.

He had often been told, as a curate, that he was a wonderful preacher. His round jolly face, his beaming smile, a certain dramatic gift, had helped him. "He is so human," he had heard people say. For many years he had lived on that phrase. For the first time in his life, this morning he distrusted his gift. He was out of touch with them all—because they were dead, killed by forms and repetitions and monotony. "We're all dead, you know, and I'm dead too. Let's close the doors and seal this church up. Our day is over." He said of course nothing of the kind. His sermon was stupid, halting and ineffective.

"Naturally," as Colonel Rideout said over his port at lunch, "when a feller's wife's uncle has just hung himself in public, so to speak, it does take the wind out of you. He usen't to preach badly once. Got stale. They all do."

As Paul dismissed the congregation with the Blessing he felt that everything was over. He was more completely miserable than he had ever been. He had in fact never before been really miserable except when he had the toothache. And now, also, the custom of years made it impossible for him to be miserable for long. He had had no real talk with Maggie since the inquest. Maggie came into his study that afternoon. Their conversation was very quiet and undemonstrative; it happened to be one of the most important conversations in both their lives, and, often afterwards, Paul looked back to it, trying to retrace in it the sentences and movements with which it had been built up. He could never recover anything very much. He could see Maggie sitting in a way that she had on the edge of her chair, looking at him and looking also far beyond him. He knew afterwards that this was the last moment in his life that he had any contact with her. Like a witch, like a ghost, she had come into his life; like a witch, like a ghost, she went out of it, leaving him, for the remainder of his days, a haunted man.

As he looked at her he realised that she had aged in this last fortnight. Yes, that horrible affair had taken it out of her. She seemed to have recovered self-control at some strange and unnatural cost—as though she had taken some potion or drug.

She began by asking Grace's question:

"Paul, what are we going to do?"

But she did not irritate him as Grace had done. His one idea was to help her; unfortunately he had himself thought out nothing clearly.

"Well, Maggie," he answered, smiling, "I thought you might help me about that. I want your advice. I thought—well, as a matter of fact I hadn't settled anything—but I thought that I might get a locum for a month or two and we might go abroad for a trip perhaps. To Paris, or Venice, or somewhere."

"And then come back?" she asked.

"For a time—yes—certainly," he answered.

"I don't think I can ever come back to Skeaton," she said in a whisper, as though speaking to herself. He could see that she was controlling herself and steadying her voice with the greatest difficulty. "Of course I must come, Paul, if you want me to. It's been all my fault from the very beginning——"

"Oh no," he broke in, "it hasn't."

"Yes, it has. I've just spoilt your life and Grace's. You were both very happy until I came. I had no right to marry you when I didn't love you. I didn't know then all I know now. But that's no excuse. I should have known. I was younger than most girls are, though."

Paul said:

"But Maggie, you're not to blame yourself at all. I think if we were somewhere else than Skeaton it would be easier. And now after what has happened—"

Maggie broke in: "You couldn't leave Skeaton, Paul. You know you couldn't. It would just break your heart. All the work of your life has been here—everything you've ever done. And Grace too."

"No, no, you're wrong," said Paul vigorously. "A change is probably what I need. I've been too long in the same place. Time goes so fast that one doesn't realise. And for Grace, too, I expect a change will be better."

"And do you think," said Maggie, "that Grace will ever live with me now in the same house when she knows that I've driven you from Skeaton? Grace is quite right. She's just to feel as she does about me."

"Then Grace must go," said Paul firmly, looking at Maggie and feeling that the one thing that he needed was that she should be in his arms and he kissing her. "Maggie, if we go away, you and I, right away from all of this, perhaps then you can—you will—" he stopped.

She shook her head. "Never, Paul. Never. Do you know what I've seen this last week? That I've left all those who really wanted me. My aunts, very much they needed me, and I was selfish and wouldn't give them what they wanted, and tried to escape from them. You and Grace don't need me. Nobody wants anything here in Skeaton. You're all full. It isn't my fault, Paul, but everything seems to me dead here. They don't mean anything they say in Church, and the Church doesn't mean anything either. The Chapel was wrong in London too, but it was more right than the Church here is. I don't know what religion is or where it is: I don't know anything now except that one ought to be with the people who want one and not with the people who don't. Aunt wanted me and I failed her. Uncle wanted me and I—I—I—"

She broke down, crying, her head in her arms. He went over to her and put his arms around her. At his touch she shrank a little, and when he felt that he went away from her and stood, silently, not knowing what to do.

"Maggie, don't—don't, Maggie. I can't bear to hear you cry."

"I've done all wrong—I've done all wrong," she answered him. "I've been wrong always."

His helplessness was intolerable. He knew that she would not allow him to touch her. He went out closing the door softly behind him.