第73章 XXIII(3)

He nodded, without turning toward her.

"Not often ... sometimes ...."

"If you do, for God's sake tell her I'm happy ... happy as a king ... tell her you could see for yourself that I was ...."

His voice broke in a little gasp. "I ... I'll be damned if ... if she shall ever be unhappy about me ... if I can help it ...."

The cigarette dropped from his fingers, and with a sob he covered his face.

"Oh, poor Nelson--poor Nelson, " Susy breathed. While their cab rattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he continued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled out a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped for another cigarette.

"I'm all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn't know it would be so, beforehand--but it is .... And now the thing's settled I'm as right as a trivet, and you can tell her so ....

Look here, Susy ..." he caught her by the arm as the taxi drew up at her hotel .... "Tell her I understand, will you? I'd rather like her to know that .... "

"I'll tell her, Nelson," she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to her dreary room.

Susy's one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of "nerves" to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.

But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity.

And she wanted above all--and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn--to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to Strefford--and the letter was only a little less painful to write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she remembered Vanderlyn's words about his wife:

"There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget--" and a phrase of Grace Fulmer's that she had but half grasped at the time: "You haven't been married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one's memories."

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

"The real reason is that you're not Nick" was what she would have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it.

"He'll think it's because I'm still in love with Nick ... and perhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn't seem to lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we've shared that seem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into something different." If she could have hoped to make Strefford understand that, the letter would have been easy enough to write--but she knew just at what point his imagination would fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest "Poor Streff--poor me!" she thought as she sealed the letter.

After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death--before one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it--felt so horribly alive! How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson--well, he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer--she suddenly remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.