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Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Love
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Love

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim

Release date: April 1, 2024 [eBook #73308]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1925

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE ***

 PART I
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV,
XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII.

PART II
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV,
XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX.

LOVE
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN”

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1925

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

 PART I

I
The first time they met, though they didn’t know it, for they were
unconscious of each other, was at The Immortal Hour, then playing to
almost empty houses away at King’s Cross; but they both went so often,
and the audience at that time was so conspicuous because there was so little
of it and so much room to put it in, that quite soon people who went
frequently got to know each other by sight, and felt friendly and inclined to
nod and smile, and this happened too to Christopher and Catherine.
She first became aware of him on the evening of her fifth visit, when she
heard two people talking just behind her before the curtain went up, and one
said, sounding proud, ‘This is my eleventh time’; and the other answered
carelessly, ‘This is my thirty-secondth’—upon which the first one
exclaimed, ‘Oh, I say!’ with much the sound of a pricked balloon wailing
itself flat, and she couldn’t resist turning her face, lit up with interest and
amusement, to look. Thus she saw Christopher consciously for the first
time, and he saw her.
After that they noticed each other’s presence for three more
performances, and then, when it was her ninth and his thirty-sixth—for the
enthusiasts of The Immortal Hour kept jealous count of their visits—and
they found themselves sitting in the same row with only twelve empty seats
between them, he moved up six nearer to her when the curtain went down
between the two scenes of the first act, and when it went down at the end of
the first act, after that love scene which invariably roused the small band of
the faithful to a kind of mystic frenzy of delight, he moved up the other six
and sat down boldly beside her.
She smiled at him, a friendly and welcoming smile.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said apologetically, as if this explained his coming
over to her.
‘Perfectly beautiful,’ she said; and added, ‘This is my ninth time.’
And he said, ‘This is my thirty-sixth.’
And she said, ‘I know.’
 And he said, ‘How do you know?’
And she said, ‘Because I heard you tell someone when it was your
thirty-secondth, and I’ve been counting since.’
So they made friends, and Christopher thought he had never seen
anybody with such a sweet way of smiling, or heard anybody with such a
funny little coo of a voice.
She was little altogether; a little thing, in a little hat which she never had
to take off because hardly ever was there anybody behind her, and, anyhow,
even in a big hat she was not of the size that obstructs views. Always the
same hat; never a different one, or different clothes. Although the clothes
were pretty, very pretty, he somehow felt, perhaps because they were never
different, that she wasn’t very well off; and he also somehow felt she was
older than he was—just a little older, nothing at all to matter; and presently
he began somehow also to feel that she was married.
The night he got this feeling he was surprised how much he disliked it.
What was happening to him? Was he falling in love? And he didn’t even
know her name. It was the night of her fourteenth visit and his forty-eighth
—for since they had made friends he went oftener than ever in the hope of
seeing her, and the very programme young women looked at him as though
they had known him all their lives—that this cold feeling first filtered into
his warm and comfortable heart, and nipped its comfort; and it wasn’t that
he had seen a wedding ring, for she never took off her absurd, small gloves
—it was something indescribably not a girl about her.
He tried to pin it down into words, but he couldn’t; it remained
indescribable. And whether it had to do with the lines of her figure, which
were rounder than most girls’ figures in these flat days, or with the things
she said, for the life of him he couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was her composure,
her air of settled safety, of being able to make friends with any number of
strange young men, pick them up and leave them, exactly when and how
she chose.
Still, it might not be true. She was always alone. Sooner or later, if there
were husbands they appeared. No husband of a wife so sweet would let her
come out at night like this by herself, he thought. Yes, he probably was
mistaken. He didn’t know much about women. Up to this he had only had
highly unsatisfactory, rough and tumble relations with them, and he
couldn’t compare. And though he and she had now sat together several
times, they had talked entirely about The Immortal Hour—they were both
so very enthusiastic—and its music, and its singers, and Celtic legends
generally, and at the end she always smiled the smile that enchanted him,
and nodded and slipped away, so that they had never really got any further
than the first night.
‘Look here,’ he said, or rather blurted, the next time he saw her there—
he now went as a matter of course to sit next to her—‘you might tell me
your name. Mine’s Monckton. Christopher Monckton.’
‘But of course,’ she said. ‘Mine is Cumfrit.’
Cumfrit? He thought it a funny little name; but somehow like her.
‘Just’—he held his breath—‘Cumfrit?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, there’s Catherine as well,’ she said.
‘I like that. It’s pretty. They’re sweet and pretty, said together. They’re—
well, extraordinarily like you.’
She laughed again. ‘But they’re not both like me,’ she said. ‘I owe the
Cumfrit part to George.’
‘To George?’ he faltered.
‘He provided the Cumfrit. All I did was the Catherine bit.’
‘Then—you’re married?’
‘Isn’t everybody?’
‘Good God, no,’ he cried. ‘It’s a disgusting thing to be. It’s hateful. It’s
ridiculous. Tying oneself up to somebody for good and all. Everybody! I
should think not. I’m not.’
‘Oh, but you’re too young,’ she said, amused.
‘Too young? And what about you?’
She looked at him quickly, a doubt on her face; but the doubt changed to
real surprise when she saw how completely he had meant it. She had a
three-cornered face, like a pansy, like a kitten, he thought. He wanted to
stroke her. He was sure she was exquisitely smooth and soft. And now there
was George.
‘Does he—does your husband not like music?’ he asked, saying the first
thing that came into his head, not really wanting in the least to know what
that damned George liked or didn’t like.
She hesitated. ‘I—don’t know,’ she said. ‘He—usedn’t to.’
 ‘But he doesn’t come here?’
‘How can he?’ She stopped, and then said softly, ‘The poor darling’s
dead.’
His heart gave a bound. A widow. The beastly war had done one good
thing, then,—it had removed George.
‘I say, I’m most frightfully sorry,’ he exclaimed with immense
earnestness, and trying to look solemn.
‘Oh, it’s a long while ago,’ she said, bowing her head a little at the
remembrance.
‘It can’t be so very long ago.’
‘Why can’t it?’
‘Because you haven’t had time.’
She again looked quickly at him, and again saw nothing but sincerity.
Then she was silent a moment. She was thinking, ‘This is rather sweet’—
and the ghost of a wistful little smile passed across her face. How old was
he? Twenty-five or six; not more, she was sure. What a charming thing
youth was,—so headlong, so generous and whole-hearted in its admirations
and beliefs. He was a great, loosely built young man, with flame-coloured
hair, and freckles, and bony red wrists that came a long way out of his
sleeves when he sat supporting his head in his hands during the love scene,
clutching it tighter and tighter as there was more and more of love. He had
deep-set eyes, and a beautifully shaped broad forehead, and a wide, kindly
mouth, and he radiated youth, and the discontents and quick angers and
quicker appreciations of youth.
She suppressed a small sigh, and laughed as she said, ‘You’ve only seen
me at night. Wait till you see me in broad daylight.’
‘Am I ever to be allowed to?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Don’t you ever come to the matinées?’
She knew he didn’t.
‘Oh—matinées. No, of course I can’t come to matinées. I have to grind
all the week in my beastly office, and on Saturdays I go and play golf with
an uncle who is supposed to be going to leave me all his money.’
‘You should cherish him.’
 ‘I do. And I haven’t minded till now. But it’s an infernal tie-up directly
one wants to do anything else.’
He looked at her ruefully. Then his face lit up. ‘Sundays,’ he said
eagerly. ‘Sundays I’m free. He’s religious, and won’t play on Sundays.
Couldn’t I——?’
‘There aren’t any matinées on Sunday,’ she said.
‘No but couldn’t I come and see you? Come and call?’
‘Hush,’ she said, lifting her hand as the music of the second act began.
And at the end this time too, before he could say a word, while he was
still struggling with his coat, she slipped away as usual after nodding good
night.
The next time, however, he was more determined, and began at once. It
seemed to him that he had been thinking of her without stopping, and it was
absurd not to know anything at all about a person one thinks of as much as
that, except her name and that her husband was dead. It was of course a
great stride from blank knowing nothing; and that her husband should be
dead was such a relief to him that he couldn’t help thinking he must be
falling in love. All husbands should be dead, he considered,—nuisances,
complicators. What would have happened if George had been alive? Why,
he simply would have lost her, had to give up at once,—before, almost,
beginning. And he was so lonely, and she was—well, what wasn’t she? She
was so like what he had been dreaming of for years,—a little ball of
sweetness, and warmth, and comfort, and reassurance and love.
The next time she came, then, the minute she appeared he went over to
where she sat and began. He was going to ask her straight out if he might
come and see her, fix that up, get her address; but she chanced to be late
that night, and hardly had he opened his mouth when the lights were
lowered and she put up her hand and said ‘Hush.’
It was no use trying to say what he wanted to say in a whisper, because
the faithful, though few, were fierce, and would tolerate nothing but total
silence. Also he was much afraid she herself preferred the music to
anything he might have to say.
He sat with his arms folded and waited. He had to wait till the very end
of the act, because though he tried again when the curtain went down
between its two scenes, and only the orchestra was playing, he was shoo’d
quiet at once by the outraged faithful.
 She, too, said, putting up her hand, ‘Oh, hush.’
He began to feel slightly off The Immortal Hour. But at last the whole
act was over and the lights were up again. She turned her flushed face to
him, the music still shining in her eyes. She was always flushed and her
eyes always shone at the end of the love scene; nor could he ever see that
lovely headlong embrace of the lovers without feeling extraordinarily
stirred up. God, to be embraced like that.... He was starving for love.
‘Isn’t it marvellous,’ she breathed.
‘Are you ever going to let me come and see you?’ he asked, without
losing another second.
She looked at him a moment, collecting her thoughts, a little surprised.
‘Of course,’ she then said. ‘Do. Though——’ She stopped.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I was going to say, Don’t you see me as it is?’
‘But what is this?’
‘Well, it’s two or three times every week,’ she said.
‘Yes, but what is it? Just a casual picking up. You come—you happen to
come—and then you disappear. At any time you might happen not to come,
and then——’
‘Why then,’ she finished for him as he paused, ‘you’d have all this
beautiful stuff to yourself. I don’t think they ever did that last bit more
wonderfully, do you?’ And off she went again, cooing on as usual about
The Immortal Hour, and he hadn’t a chance to get in another word before
the confounded music began again and the faithful with one accord called
out ‘Sh—sh.’
Enthusiasm, thought Christopher, should have its bounds. He forgot that,
to begin with, his enthusiasm had far outdone hers. He folded his arms once
more, a sign with him of determined and grim patience, and when it was
over and she bade him her smiling good night and hurried off without any
more words, he lost no time bothering about putting on his coat but simply
seized it and went after her.
It was difficult to keep her in sight. She could slip through gaps he
couldn’t, and he very nearly lost her at the turn of the stairs. He caught her
up, however, on the steps outside, just as she was about to plunge out into
the rain, and laid his hand on her arm.
 She looked round surprised. In the glare of the peculiarly searching light
theatres turn on to their departing and arriving patrons he was struck by the
fatigue on her face. The music was too much for her—she looked worn out.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘don’t run away like this. It’s pouring. You wait
here and I’ll get you a taxi.’
‘Oh, but I always go by tube,’ she said, clutching at him a moment as
some people pushing past threw her against him.
‘You can’t go by tube to-night. Not in this rain. And you look frightfully
tired.’
She glanced up at him oddly and laughed a little. ‘Do I?’ she said. ‘Well,
I’m not. Not a bit tired. And I can quite well go by tube. It’s quite close.’
‘You can’t do anything of the sort. Stand here out of the rain while I get
a taxi.’ And off he ran.
For a moment she was on the verge of running off herself, going to the
tube as usual and getting home her own way, for why should she be forced
into an expensive taxi? Then she thought: ‘No—it would be low of me,
simply low. I must try and behave like a little gentleman——’ and waited.
‘Where shall I tell him to go to?’ asked Christopher, having got his taxi
and put her inside it and simply not had the courage to declare it was his
duty to see her safely home.
She told him the address—90A Hertford Street—and he wondered a
moment why, living in such a street with the very air of Park Lane wafted
down it from just round the corner, she should not only not have a car but
want to go in tubes.
‘Can I give you a lift?’ she asked, leaning forward at the last moment.
He was in the taxi in a flash. ‘I was so hoping you’d say that,’ he said,
pulling the door to with such vigour that a shower of raindrops jerked off
the top of the window-frame on to her dress.
These he had to wipe off, which he did with immense care, and a
handkerchief that deplorably was not one of his new ones. She sat passive
while he did it, going over the evening’s performance, pointing out,
describing, reminding, and he, as he dried, told himself definitely that he
had had enough of The Immortal Hour. She must stop, she must stop. He
must talk to her, must find out more about her. He was burning to know
more about her before the infernally fast taxi arrived at her home. And she
would do nothing, as they bumped furiously along, but quote and ecstasise.
That was a good word, he thought, as it came into his head; and he was
so much pleased with it that he said it out loud. ‘I wish you wouldn’t
ecstasise,’ he said. ‘Not now. Not for the next few minutes.’
‘Ecstasise?’ she repeated, wondering.
‘Aren’t your shoes wet? Crossing that soaking pavement? I’m sure they
must be wet——’
And he reached down and began to wipe their soles too with his
handkerchief.
She watched him a little surprised, but still passive. This was what it was
to be young. One squandered a beautiful clean handkerchief on a woman’s
dirty shoes without thinking twice. She observed the thickness of his hair as
he bent over her shoes. She had forgotten how thick the hair of the young
could be, having now for so long only contemplated heads that were
elderly.
To him in the half darkness of the taxi she looked really exactly like the
dream, the warm, round, cosy, delicious dream lonely devils like himself
were always dreaming, forlornly hugging their pillows. And as for her feet
—he abruptly left off drying them. The next thing he felt he would be doing
would be kneeling down and kissing them, and he was afraid she mightn’t
like that, and be angry with him, and never let him see her again.
‘You’ve spoilt your handkerchief,’ she remarked, as he put it, all muddy,
into his pocket.
‘I don’t look at it like that,’ he said, staring straight out of the front
windows, and sitting up very stiff and away in his corner because he didn’t
trust himself, and was mortally afraid of not behaving.
It was now quite evident to Christopher that he was in love, deeply in
love. He felt very happy about it, because for the first time he was, as he put
it, in love properly. All the other times had been so odious, leaving him
making such wry faces. And he had longed and longed to be in love—
properly, with somebody intelligent and educated as well as adorable. These
three: but the greatest of these was the being adorable.
Out of the corners of his eyes he stole a glance at her. She didn’t look
tired any more. What ideal things these dark taxis were, if only the other
person happened to be in love as well. Would she ever be? Would she ever
be again, or was all that buried with that scoundrel George? She had been
fond of George; she had called him poor darling; but then one easily called
the dead poor darlings, and grew fond of them in proportion as the time
grew long since they had left off being alive and obstructive.
‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ she asked.
‘We’ve passed it,’ he said. ‘At least, he hasn’t gone anywhere near it. I
live in Wyndham Place. I’ll see you safely home and then take him on.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to let me pay my
share.’
‘And I say,’ he went on quickly, waving whatever she was doing with
her purse impatiently aside, for by now they were careering across Berkeley
Square and he knew the time was short, ‘you haven’t said if I may come
and see you. I would like so frightfully to come and see you. There are such
a lot of things I want to say—I mean, hear you say. And we do nothing but
talk about that infernal Immortal Hour.’
‘What? Why, I thought you loved it.’
‘Of course I love it, but it isn’t everything. And we’ve given it a fairly
good innings, haven’t we. Do let me come and see you. I shall’—he was
going to say ‘die if you don’t,’ but he was afraid that might put her off,
though he’d be hanged, he said to himself, if it wasn’t very likely perfectly
true, so he quickly substituted ‘I shall be in London all next Sunday.’
They were at the bottom of Hertford Street. They were rushing along it.
Even while he was speaking they were there at 90A. With a grinding of the
brakes the taxi pulled up,—a violent taxi, the most violent he had ever met;
and he might just as easily have had the luck to get one of those slow,
cautious ancient ones, driven by bearded patriarchs who always came to his
call when he had to catch a train or was late for a dinner, and always at
every cross street drew back with an old-world courtesy and encouraged
even horse-traffic to pass along first.
‘May I come next Sunday?’ he asked, obliged to lean across her and
open the door, because she was preparing, as he didn’t move and merely sat
there, to open it herself. ‘No—don’t get out,’ he said quickly, as she showed
signs of going to. ‘It’s no use standing in the wet. Wait here while I go and
ring——’
 ‘But look—I have a latchkey,’ she said. ‘Besides, the night porter is
there.’
The night porter was; and hearing a taxi stop he opened the door at that
moment.
‘And about Sunday?’ asked Christopher, with a desperate persistence, as
he helped her out.
‘Yes—do come and see me,’ she said, smiling up at him her friendly, her
adorable smile; and his spirits leapt up to heaven. ‘Only not this Sunday,’
she added; and his spirits banged down to earth.
‘Why not this Sunday?’ he asked. ‘I shall be free the whole day.’
‘Yes, but I won’t,’ she said, laughing, for he amused her. ‘At least, I feel
sure there is something——’
She knitted her brows, trying to remember. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘Stephen.
I’ve promised to go out with him.’
‘Stephen?’
His heart stood still. George was settled, completely, felicitously, and
now here was Stephen.
Then, just as the door was going to shut on her, leaving him out there
alone, a warm and comforting light flooded his understanding: Stephen was
her son; her little son, her only little son. Hateful as it was to reflect upon—
really marriage was most horrible—George had perpetuated himself, and
this delicate small thing, this exquisite soft little creature, had been the
vehicle for his idiotic wish to carry on his silly name.
‘I suppose,’ he said, detaining her, his hat still in his hand, the rain
falling on his bare head, the porter holding the door open and looking on,
‘you’re taking him to the Zoo?’
He could think of no place so likely as the Zoo on Sunday for Stephen,
and to the Zoo he also would go, and have a look at those jolly little
monkeys again.
‘The Zoo?’ she repeated, puzzled.
Then she began to laugh. ‘I wonder,’ she said, her face brimming over
with laughter, ‘why you think Stephen wants to be taken to the Zoo. Poor
darling’—another poor darling, and this time a live one—‘why, he’s as old
as I am.’
As old as she was. Stephen.
 She waved her hand. ‘Come some other Sunday,’ she called out as the
door shut.
He stood for a moment staring at it. Then he turned away slowly, putting
his hat on as he went down the steps, and he was walking away through the
rain lost in the most painful thought, mechanically heading for home, when
the taxi-driver, realising with amazed indignation what his fare was doing,
jerked him back to his obligations by vigorously and rudely shouting ‘Hi!’

II
Ten days to wait till the Sunday after. It was only Friday night. He would
see her in between, of course, at The Immortal Hour, and might perhaps
manage to take her home again, but would he be able in these snippets of
time, these snatches, these beginnings interrupted by the curtain going up or
the lights going down, to find out from her who and what was Stephen? It
was intolerable to have at last come across her and instantly to find oneself
up against Stephen.
Dismal were his conjectures as he was rattled home by the taxi so lately
made sweet by her presence. Stephen couldn’t be her brother, for nobody
made appointments ahead and carried them out so conscientiously with
brothers; and he couldn’t be her uncle or her nephew, the only two
remaining satisfactory relationships, because she had said he was as old as
she was. Who, then, and what was Stephen?
A faint hope flickered for an instant in the darkness of his mind:
sometimes uncles were young; sometimes nephews were old. But the thing
was too feeble to give warmth, and almost immediately went out. All
Stephens should be stoned, he thought. It was what was done with the first
one he had ever heard of; pity the practice hadn’t been kept up. How happy
he now would have been except for Stephen. How happy, going to see her
the next Sunday but one, going really to see her and sit down squarely with
her by himself in a quiet room and look at her frontways instead of for ever
only sideways, and she without the hat that extinguished such a lot of what
anyhow was such a little. He might even, he thought, after a bit, after they
had got really natural with each other—and he felt he could be more natural
with her, more happily himself than with any one he had ever met—he
might even after a bit have sat on the floor at her feet, as near as possible to
her little shoes. And then he would have told her all about everything. God,
how he wanted to tell somebody all about everything—somebody who
understood. There wasn’t anybody really for understanding except a
woman. It didn’t need brains to understand; it didn’t need learning, and a
grind of education and logic and scientific detachment, and all the
confounded rig-out Lewes, who shared his rooms with him, had. Such
things were all right as part of a whole, and were more important, he was
ready to admit, than any other part of it if one had the whole; but a man
starved if that was all—just starved. Life without a woman in it, a woman
of one’s own, was intolerable.
His face as he opened the door with his latchkey was gloomy. Lewes
would be sitting in there; Lewes with his brains. Brains, brains....
Christopher had no mother or sister, and as long as he could remember
seemed to have been by himself with males—uncles who brought him up,
clerics who prepared him for school, again uncles with whom he played
golf and spent the festivals of the year, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide;
and here in his rooms Lewes was waiting, always Lewes, making profound
and idiotic comments on everything, and wanting to sit up half the night
and reason. Reason! He was sick of reason. He wanted some one he could
be romantic with, and sentimental with, and poetic, and—yes, religious
with, if he felt like it, without having to feel ashamed. And how
extraordinarily he wanted to touch—to touch lovely soft surfaces, to feel, to
be warm and close up. He had had enough of this sterile, starved life with
Lewes. Three years of it he had had, ever since he left Balliol,—three years
of coming back in the evenings and finding Lewes, who hardly ever went
out at night, sunk deep in his chair, smoking in the same changeless
position, his feet up on the chimney-piece, lean, dry, horribly intelligent;
and they would talk and talk, and inquire and inquire, and when they talked
of love and women—and of course they sometimes talked of love and
women—Lewes would bring out views which Christopher, whose views
they used to be too, only he had forgotten that, considered, now that he had
come to know Catherine, as so much—the word was his—tripe.
He shut the door as quietly as possible, intending to go straight to bed
and avoid Lewes for that evening at least. He had been injudicious enough
after the first time he sat next to Catherine and made friends with her to tell
Lewes about it when he got back, and to tell him with what he quickly
realised was unnecessary warmth; and naturally after that Lewes asked him
from time to time how things were developing. Christopher almost
immediately left off liking this, and liked it less and less as he liked
Catherine more and more; and among many other things he afterwards
regretted having told Lewes in the excitement of that first discovery, was
that she was the woman one dreams of.
‘No woman is ever the woman one dreams of,’ said Lewes, who was
thirty, so knew.
‘You wait till you’ve seen her, old man,’ Christopher said, nettled;
though it was just the sort of thing he had freely said himself up to the day
before.
‘My dear chap—see her? I?’
Lewes made a fatigued gesture with his pipe. ‘I thought you long ago
realised that I’m through with women,’ he said.
‘That’s because you don’t know any,’ said Christopher, who wasn’t
liking Lewes at that moment.
Lewes gazed at him with mild surprise. ‘Not know any?’ he repeated.
‘Not intimately. Not any decent ones intimately.’
Lewes continued to gaze.
‘I thought,’ he said presently, with patient mildness, ‘you knew I have a
mother and sisters.’
‘Mothers and sisters aren’t women—they’re merely relations,’ said
Christopher; and from that time Lewes’s inquiries were less frequent and
more gingerly, and mixed with anxiety. He was fond of his friend. He
disliked the idea of possibly losing him. He seemed to him to be well on the
way to being in love seriously; and love, as he had observed it, was a great
sunderer of friendships.
He heard him come in on the Friday night, and he heard him go, so
unusually, into his room after that careful shutting of the front door, and he
wondered. What was the woman doing to his friend? Making him unhappy
already? She had made him more cautious already, and more silent; she had
already come down between them like a deadening curtain.
Lewes moved slightly in his chair, and went on with Donne, whom he
was reading just then with intelligent appreciation tinged with surprise at
the lasting quality of his passion for his wife; but he couldn’t, he found,
attend to Donne as whole-heartedly as usual, for he was listening for any
sounds from the next room, and his thoughts, even as his eyes read steadily
down the page, were going round and round in a circle something like this:
Poor Chris. A widow. Got him in her clutches. And what a name. Cumfrit.
Good God. Poor Chris. ...
From the next room there came sounds of walking up and down—
careful walkings up and down, as of one desiring not to attract attention and
yet impelled to walk—and Lewes’s thoughts went round in their circle
faster and more emphatically than ever: Poor Chris. A widow. Cumfrit.
Good God. ...
The worst of it was, he thought, shutting up Donne with a bang and
throwing him on the table, that on these occasions friends could only look
on. There was nothing to be done whatever, except to watch as helplessly as
at a death-bed. And without even, he said to himself, the hope, which
sometimes supports such watchers, of a sure and glorious resurrection. His
friend had to go through with it, and disappear out of his, Lewes’s, life; for
never, he had observed, was any one the same friend exactly afterwards as
before, whether the results of the adventure were happy or unhappy. Poor
Chris. A widow. Clutches. ...
The sounds of walking about presently left off. Lewes would have liked
to have been able to look in and see for himself that his unfortunate and
probably doomed friend was safely asleep, but he couldn’t do that; so he lit
his pipe again and reached over for Donne and had another go at him, able
to concentrate better, now that the footsteps had left off, but still with a
slightly cocked ear.
What was his surprise at breakfast next morning to see Christopher
looking happy, and eating eggs and bacon with his usual simple relish.
‘Hullo,’ he couldn’t help saying, ‘you seem rather pleased with life.’
‘I am. It’s raining,’ said Christopher.
‘So it is,’ said Lewes, glancing at the window; and he poured out his
coffee in silence, because he was unable to see any connection.
‘I can chuck that beastly golf,’ Christopher explained in a moment, his
mouth full.
‘So you can,’ said Lewes, well aware that up to now Christopher had
looked forward with almost childish eagerness to his Saturdays.
‘I’ve been out already and sent a telegram to my uncle,’ said
Christopher.
 ‘But I thought on occasions like this,’ said Lewes, ‘when the weather
prevented golf, you still went down and played chess with him.’
‘Damn chess,’ said Christopher.
And in Lewes’s head once more began to revolve, Poor Chris. Cumfrit.
Clutches. ...

III
Christopher had had an inspiration—sudden, as are all inspirations—the
night before, after walking up and down his room for the best part of an
hour: he would throw over his uncle and golf the next day, and devote the
afternoon to calling on Catherine, thus getting in ahead, anyhow, of
Stephen. How simple. Let his uncle be offended and disappointed as much
as he liked, let him leave his thousands to the boot-boy for all he cared. He
would go and see Catherine; and keep on going and seeing her, the whole
afternoon if needs be, if she were out at the first shot. Whereupon, having
arrived at this decision, peace enfolded him, and he went to bed and slept
like a contented baby.
He began calling in Hertford Street at three.
She was out. The porter told him she was out when he inquired which
floor she was on.
‘When will she be in?’ he asked.
The porter said he couldn’t say; and Christopher disliked the porter.
He went away and walked about in the park, on wet earth and with
heavy drops falling on him in showers from the trees.
At half-past four he was back again. Tea time. She would be in to tea,
unless she had it in some one else’s house; in which case he would call
again when she had had time to finish it.
She was still out.
‘I’ll go up and ask for myself,’ said Christopher, who disliked the porter
more than ever; and at this the porter began to dislike Christopher.
‘There’s only this one way in,’ said the porter, his manner hardening.
‘I’d be bound to have seen her.’
‘Which floor?’ said Christopher briefly.
‘First,’ said the porter, still more briefly.