A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) 📖

MURCHISON sat for a while before the open window

after his wife had gone to bed. He could hear her

moving to and fro in the room above him, the only sound

in the silence of the night. He was at rest, and happy,

her very nearness filling him with a sense of peace and

strength. The tenderness of her love breathed in the

air, and he still seemed to hear her radiant singing.

We mortals are often in greater peril of a fail when we

trust in the cheerful temerity of an imagined strength.

To a man standing upon the edge of a precipice the lands

beneath seem faint and insignificant, and yet but a depth

of air lies between him and the plain. Our frailties may

seem pitiful, nay, impossible to us when we listen to

noble music, or watch the sunrise on the mountains.

The man who is exalted in the spirit lives in a clearer

atmosphere, and wonders at the fog that may have drifted

round him yesterday. He may even laugh at the alter

ego framed of clay, and ask whether this soft-bodied,

cringing thing could ever have answered to the name of

“self.”

Some such feeling of optimism took possession of Murchison that night. The words of his wife’s songs were in

his brain; he heard her moving in the room above, and

felt the dearness of her presence in the place. Everywhere he beheld the work of her hands the curtains at

the windows, the flowers in the bowls. Her photograph

stood on the mantelshelf, and he rose and looked at it,

smiling at the eyes that smiled at him. Could he, the

husband of such a woman, and the father of her children,

be the mere creature of the juice of the grape? Was he

no stronger than some sot at a street corner? He gazed

at his own photograph that stood before the mirror,

gazed at it critically, as though studying a strange face.

The eyes looked straight at him, the mouth was firm, the

jaw crossed by a deep shadow that betrayed no degenerate

sloping of the chin. Was this the face of a man who was

the victim of a lust? He smiled at the memory of his

weaker self as a man smiles at a rival whom he can magnanimously pity.

The pride of strength suggested the thought of proof.

Old Porteus Carmagee had sent him this choice wine,

and was he afraid of six bottles in a basket? Why not

challenge this alter ego, this mean and treacherous caricature of his manhood, and prove in the grapple that he

was the master of his earthly self? There was a combative stimulus in the thought that appealed to a man

who had been an athlete. It fired the element of action

in him, made him knit his muscles and expand his chest.

Murchison looked at himself steadily in the mirror,

held up his hand, and saw not the slightest tremor. He

crossed the hall, entered the diningroom, and dragged the

hamper from under the window-seat with something of

the spirit of a Greek hero dragging some classic monster

from its lair. Coolly and without flurry he carried the

thing into the drawingroom and set it down on the little

gate-legged table. He cut the cord, raised the lid, and

let the musty fragrance of the lawyer’s cellar float out

into the room. The simile of Pandora’s box did not

occur to him. He put the straw aside, and pulled out a

cobwebbed bottle from its case. His knife served him

to break up the cork; he sniffed the wine’s bouquet, and

looked round him for a glass.

He found one among Catherine’s curios, an old Venetian goblet of quaint shape. Half filling it, he tossed

Porteus Carmagee’s letter on to the straw, and standing

before his wife’s portrait, looked steadily into the smiling

eyes.

** Kate, I drink to you. One glass to prove it, and the

open bottle left untouched.”

Deliberately he raised the glass and drank, looking at

his wife’s face in its framing of silver on the mantelshelf.

More than two hours had passed since she had left

him, and Catherine was lying awake, watching the moonlight glimmering on the moor. Her heart was tranquil

in her, her thoughts free from all unrest as she lay in the

oak bed, happily lethargic, waiting for her husband’s step

upon the stairs. The day had been very sweet to her,

and there was no shadow across the moon. She lay

thinking of her children, and her childhood, and of the

near past, when she had first sung the songs that she had

sung to the man that night.

The crash of broken glass and the sound of some heavy

body falling startled Catherine from her land of dreams.

She sat up, listening, like one roused from a first sleep.

Murchison must have turned out the lamp and then

blundered against some piece of furniture in the dark.

If it were her treasured and much-sought china! She

slipped out of bed, opened the door, and went out on to

the landing.

“James, what is it?”

The narrow hall lay dark below her, and she won no

answer from her husband.

“Are you hurt, dear?”

Still no reply; the door was shut.

“James, what has happened?”

She crept down the stairs, and stepped on the last step.

A curious, “gaggling” laugh came from the room across

the hall. At the sound she stiffened, one hand holding

the bosom of her laced night-gear, the other gripping the

oak rail. A sudden blind dread smote her till she seemed

conscious of nothing save the dark.

“James, are you coming?”

Again she heard that mockery of a laugh, and a kind

of senseless jabbering like the babbling of a drunken man.

A rush of anguish caught her heart, the anguish of one

who feels the horror of the stifling sea. She tottered,

groped her way back