The Heat of the Day (24 page)

carrying sky about in them, the raw earth lip of Cousin Francis's grave and the pink-stamened flowers of that day alight on the chestnuts in May gloom, the asphalt pathway near Roderick's camp thrust up and cracked by the swell of ground, mapped by seeded grass. She could remember nothing before everything had had this poignancy--and yet they had only been in love for two years. She could not believe they had not, in those two years, drawn on the virtue of what was round them, _the__ virtue peculiar to where they were--nor had this been less to be felt when she was without him, was where he was not, had not been ever, might never be: a perpetual possible illumination for her, because of him, of everything to be seen or be heard by joy. Inside the ring of war, how peaceably little they had moved--never crossed the sea together, seldom left London--so, there had come to be the nature of Nature, thousands of fluctuations, in their stone own country. Impossible that the population, the other people, should at least be less to be honoured than trees walking. All that time, all the same, the current _had__ been against his face? The war-warmed impulse of people to be a people had been derisory; he had hated the bloodstream of the crowds, the curious animal psychic oneness, the human lava-flow. Even the leaden unenthusiasm, by its being so common, so deeply shared, had provoked him--and as for the impatiences, the hopes, the reiteration of unanswerable questions and the spurts of rumour, he must have been measuring them with a calculating eye. The half-sentence of the announcer's voice coming out of a window at News hour, the flopping rippling headlines of Late Night Final at the newsvendor's corner--what nerve, what nerve in reverse, had they struck on in him? Knowing what he knew, doing what he did. Idly, more idly than all the others doing the same thing, in the streets with her he had thieved the headline out of the corner of his eye, without a break in their talk, with a hiatus in his long pitching step so slight as to be registered by her only through their being arm-in-arm in the falling evening. She now saw his smile as the smile of one who has the laugh. It seemed to her it was Robert who had been the Harrison. "This is some malady of yours," she said. "How dare you say I have been in what you have done? The more I understand it the more I hate it. You're determined, then, to be on the winning side?" "You're thinking of your brothers? Thinking what was good enough for them, honour, ought to be good enough for me? I love your laughing photographs. They were lucky to die before the illusion had broken down--_this__ is not a troubadours' war, Stella. They took what they had with them: they were the finish. But, face it--we're left to go on living in a world which, where all _that's__ concerned, is as dead as the moon. In you there may persist some spark of what's everywhere else gone out: who knows why else I've loved you? Through love you've lit me--don't quarrel now with which way the fire blows. There've never been such winds as there are today, or from such directions." "Roderick may be killed." He said automatically: "I don't expect so." "Oh, then it's to be over as soon as _that__? The end, as soon as _that__?" He looked at the luminous dial of his watch, then said: "I shan't have any part in it--I suppose, now?" "Why do you ask me?" she asked. "I was only wondering." "You and I met the year France fell.--For us here, for everyone here, _what__--if everything goes to plan? By now not, evidently, invasion. So what worse, what instead? What end?" "Who am I to say?" "You say you know what you know." "But that's all I do know.--Where are you going?" She had got out of bed, had drawn up her heavy quilted dressing-gown from the floor and was unsteadily binding it with the cord round her. Without answering, she was groping over the panels of the door: having as an afterthought turned the handle she followed the opening door through into the other room, in which he was not. She switched on a lamp, but then stood recoiling from it, fingers over her eyes. She had then to turn and shut the door behind her, so that lamplight from here should not travel through to the bedroom window Robert had uncurtained. In her infestation by all ideas of delinquency, any offence against the black-out seemed to her punishable by death: it could be the signal for which Harrison had been waiting--posted as he could be, as she pictured him, by some multiplication of his personality, all round the house. Since Robert _was__ what Harrison had said, Harrison must be what he said himself--it was something to be _sure__, she thought, pacing about the room, chafing together the icy palms of her hands. The room had the look of no hour: she contemplated everything in it round her in an insupportable nervous blank-ness of mind. It was as impossible to be away from Robert as to be with him: she came to a stop in front of the photograph. He was right: there could be no family likeness here--her brothers had left no trace. They had been made heroes while things were simple: heroes were the creatures of a simplicity now gone, he said. But had they left _no__ trace--the revulsion in her against his act? The sale of the country.... She looked at this photograph, on this chimney-piece, of the man in the other room, at the black-and-white of what was forever dissolved for her into the features of love--at the same time, they were the mould of what? Twisted inspiration, a sort of recalcitrance in the energy, romanticism fired once too often. The face of a latecomer. He had been right: time makes the only fatal differences of birth. He was right: it was not for her brothers or their sister to judge him. She turned the photograph to the wall, in order to try to picture life without him. At the look of that blank white back of the mount the ice broke; she had to hold on to the chimneypiece while she steadied her body against the beating of her heart--so violent that it seemed to begin again with cruel accumulated force. She tried to say "Robert!" but had no voice. She looked at the door: it was incredible that anyone loved so much should be still behind it. The door opened: he stood against the darkness, in the dressing-gown Roderick had worn. "Yes?" he said--then, when she did not answer: "I thought you called me." They were in each other's arms. If there were any step in the street of sleeping houses, it was impossible it should now be heard by the two blotted out. To anyone silently posted down there in the street, the ranks of windows reflecting the paling sky would have all looked the same; it was in this room that an eyelid came down over the world. Behind their heads the photograph, bent into unaccustomed reverse, at last fell forward, then fell to the floor; but it was some time before Stella started. Her hands slipped from his shoulders slowly down his arms. "I should never have let you come here." "I should have come." "This would be the first place they--" "I should still have come. Last night at Holme Dene I was in terror--terror of never seeing you again. That began to come over me the minute I was in the house; began to come to a head the first time the telephone rang. Till then I'd only known I was in danger: I'd never felt it. Must have been the effect of that house, them? What a place to be taken in, to be taken away from--_theirs__ to be the last faces I saw! I never had pictured arrest before: then all at once I pictured it only that way--it not only seemed the one way it could happen, equally it seemed absolutely impossible it should not happen, because here the scene was, set. My mother had been waiting for this; she wished it! It would be they who had got me into the trap, so that I should never see you again. It never suited them that I should be a man." "Then they noticed?" "I don't know. I gave Anne the jitters." "Anne? But I thought it was late at night." "She came downstairs." "Poor Anne. But when you did get back to London, why didn't you come to me? It would have been no madder last night than this." "How could I? Look what I'd done to Anne. How could I come to you in that state? I wore it off by walking--if I _was__ tailed I gave somebody quite a run, but I don't think so." "All night?" "No; I thought 'Oh, the hell!,' got back I don't know when, slept it out, must have slept it off; because again this morning, having my bath, drinking coffee, shaving, the whole thing looked like a hallucination." "You knew it wasn't; you knew it couldn't be." Robert walked down the room and threw himself on to the sofa on which Roderick had slept. Driving one hand down into the pocket of the dressing-gown, the pocket in which Roderick had found the paper, he dropped back his head and stared at the ceiling. "What I've been doing's not mad," he said, "but it may breed a madness of one kind: you feel secure. Somehow you feel encased. Quite soon danger loses the smell it had for you--you know it's there, but only because you know it must be there. You know it's its business to shift its angle, and you watch; but it does not seem to renew itself or to renew its hold on you, like love does. Before you know what's happened it's an abstraction.--And again, too, when danger's inherent in what one's doing it comes to seem an attribute of one's own--a sort of secret peculiarity one can keep in play. To be a man in secret gets to be like being a sort of celebrity in reverse: being set apart from people becomes familiar.... Yes, of course in theory I've known there _were__ other brains, brains against me--the essential of what I've done has been to have to be careful; and I have been careful. Careful?--the thing has come to be second nature with me: never let up, night or day. I've never been off my guard--have I?" "As far as I know," she said, sitting down on a chair in the middle of the room, "no." "So I thought, And yet at the same time, all this time, it's been becoming more and more inconceivable to me that this _could__ happen.--You'd say, loss of sense of reality? You could be in one way right--I could only do what I've done so intensively that outside it there came to be nothing else--it _could__ be done, is being done, better in other ways; but not by me. To be done as it should, it may be this thing should be done for money--ought they to mistrust the man they don't find it necessary to buy? I acted, _I__ thought I acted, in cold blood--but not, not cold enough, apparently; or it warmed. No fascination, absolute incapacity to _be__ fascinated--that ought to be the test. Yes, and they ought to bar the man who's looking for an answer. Bound to be something rocky about the man who touches a thing like this for its own sake, _his__ own sake. If he were only a danger to himself it wouldn't matter; but it does matter. They'll know another time.... I wonder what I did; what I did not think of. "It could be some other mistake, somewhere. A mistake of one of the others'--you tell me there are the others? Somebody you were seen with." "I ought never to have been seen.--How's Harrison?" "If I had slept with him, _could__ he have kept you out of this?" "What, did he say so? Naturally he would say so. You didn't try?" "I thought I would, last night, but he sent me home." "You left it pretty late," was his comment, abstractedly looking at her. "I couldn't believe him." "Couldn't you?" "I couldn't make up my mind to, till last night. Why _then__ should I? Because last night he accused me of having done what he'd warned me not to, for your sake: spoken to you. Knowing I had, and when, I asked, what made him think so? Oh, he didn't think so, he said; he could be certain. How? From his having watched you do exactly what he had said you'd do, and do instantaneously, if I warned you--give yourself away. Apparently the day after we'd talked you made some specific change in your movements; some change you would only make from momentary loss of nerve. So, to watch you was to see you'd learned you were watched. He volunteered to tell me the night I spoke. So I took him up. He said, the night I got back from Ireland. So then I saw." "I see. He's not so stupid, is he? One might have thought he knew me.--What's _he__ like?" "I have less and less idea." "And gets I wonder what money? Considering, not so much; they none of them get so much; as against which they're on the safer side.--But, again, look, considering what we know--after all, _is__ he worth to them what he does get? He sounds to me crazy, riding for a fall. I mean to say, coming to you like that. What a chance to take! What was to stop you turning the story in?" "He knew me, too, I imagine." "Still, you conceivably might have, which would have been the end of _him__." "Yes; but he told me that would be the end of you." "Any cigarettes in here?" he said abruptly. "I left mine on your bed." She got up to look unexpectantly in the box: usually she kept no cigarettes in it, but tonight a packet of Players was wedged inside--she could only think the Players must have been left behind by Harrison when he came to call for her, and stowed in here by the charwoman next morning. Having shaken the packet to make certain it was not a deception, she brought the spoils to the sofa: Robert lit one for her, one for himself. They inhaled, looking at one another calmly, and said nothing. Extended at full length, narrow and Byzantine in the dressing-gown, he let one hand fall on her knee as she sat on the sofa by him. Once he rolled his head round in the direction of the curtained window overlooking the street; however, nothing gave any sign. "What is it you are, then," she said at last, "a revolutionary? No, counter-revolutionary? You think revolutions are coming down in the world? Once, they used to seem an advance, each time--you think _not__ that, any more, now? After each, first the loss of what had been gained, then the loss of more? So that now revolution coming could only be the greatest convulsion so far, with the least meaning of all? Yet nobody can rid themselves of the idea that _something's__ coming. What is this present state of the world, then--a false pregnancy?" "No." "No, I see you couldn't think that, or you wouldn't have... You know, Robert, for anybody _doing__ anything so definite, you talk vaguely. Wildness and images. That may have been my bringing my feeling in. But to me it's as though there still were something you'd never formulated." "This is the first time I've ever talked." "Never talked to the others--the others you're in this with?" "You imagine we meet to swap ideas?" "But then in that case, all the more you've thought." "All the more I've thought. More and more the outcome of thinking because you never can talk is never _to__ talk. The thing isolating you isolates itself. It sets up a tension you hope may somehow break itself, but that you can't break. You don't know where thought began; it goes