Maurice E. Forster (best novels for students TXT) 📖

was saying about character—the real tie between human beings. You can't build a house on the sand, and passion's sand. We want bed rock . . ."

"Ada!" he called, suddenly deliberate.

Clive shouted in horror. "What for?"

"Ada! Ada!"

He rushed at the door and locked it. "Maurice, it mustn't end like this—not a row," he implored. But as Maurice approached he pulled out the key and clenched it, for chivalry had awoken at last. "You can't drag in a woman," he breathed; "I won't have it."

"Give that up."

"I mustn't. Don't make it worse. No—no."

Maurice bore down on him. He escaped: they dodged round the big chair, arguing for the key in whispers.

They touched with hostility, then parted for ever, the key falling between them.

"Clive, did I hurt you?"

"No."

"My darling, I didn't mean to."

"I'm all right."

They looked at one another for a moment before beginning new lives. "What an ending," he sobbed, "what an ending."

"I do rather love her," said Clive, very pale.

"What's going to happen?" said Maurice, sitting down and wiping his mouth. "Arrange . . . I'm done for."

Since Ada was in the passage Clive went out to her: to Woman was his first duty. Having appeased her with vague words, he returned to the smoking-room, but the door was now locked between them. He heard Maurice turn out the electric light and sit down with a thud.

"Don't be an ass anyway," he called nervously. There was no reply. Clive scarcely knew what to do. At any rate he could not stop in the house. Asserting a man's prerogative, he announced that he must sleep in town after all, in which the women acquiesced. He left the darkness within for that without: the leaves fell as he went to the station, the owls hooted, the mist enveloped him. It was so late that the lamps had been extinguished in the suburban roads, and total night without compromise weighed on him, as on his friend. He too suffered and exclaimed, "What an ending!" but he was promised a dawn. The love of women would rise as certainly as the sun, scorching up immaturity and ushering the full human day, and even in his pain he knew this. He would not marry Ada—she had been transitional—but some goddess of the new universe that had opened to him in London, someone utterly unlike Maurice Hall.

PART

26 For three years Maurice had been so fit and happy

that he went on automatically for a day longer. He woke with the feeling that it must be all right soon. Clive would come back, apologizing or not as he chose, and he would apologize to Clive. Clive must love him, because his whole life was dependent on love and here it was going on as usual. How could he sleep and rest if he had no friend? When he returned from town to find no news, he remained for a little calm, and allowed his family to speculate on Clive's departure. But he began to watch Ada. She looked sad—even their mother noticed it. Shading his eyes, he watched her. Save for her, he would have dismissed the scene as "one of Clive's long speeches", but she came into that speech as an example. He wondered why she was sad.

"I say—" he called when they were alone; he had no idea what he was going to say, though a sudden blackness should have warned him. She replied, but he could not hear her voice. "What's wrong with you?" he asked, trembling.

"Nothing."

"There is—I can see it. You can't take me in."

"Oh no—really, Maurice, nothing."

"Why did—what did he say?"

"Nothing."

"Who said nothing?" he yelled, crashing both fists on the table. He had caught her.

"Nothing—only Clive."

The name on her lips opened Hell. He suffered hideously and before he could stop himself had spoken words that neither ever forgot. He accused his sister of corrupting his friend. He let her suppose that Clive had complained of her conduct and gone back to town on that account. Her gentle nature was so outraged that she could not defend herself, but sobbed and sobbed, and implored him not to speak to her mother, just as if she were guilty. He assented: jealousy had maddened him.

"But when you see him—Mr Durham—tell him I didn't mean —say there's no one whom I'd rather—"

"—go wrong with," he supplied: not till later did he understand his own blackguardism.

Hiding her face, Ada collapsed.

"I shall not tell him. I shall never see Durham again to tell. You've the satisfaction of breaking up that friendship."

She sobbed, "I don't mind that—you've always been so unkind to us, always." He drew up at last. Kitty had said that sort of thing to him, but never Ada. He saw that beneath their obsequious surface his sisters disliked him: he had not even succeeded at home. Muttering "It's not my fault," he left her.

A refined nature would have behaved better and perhaps have suffered less. Maurice was not intellectual, nor religious, nor had he that strange solace of self-pity that is granted to some. Except on one point his temperament was normal, and he behaved as would the average man who after two years of happiness had been betrayed by his wife. It was nothing to him that Nature had caught up this dropped stitch in order to continue her pattern. While he had love he had kept reason. Now he saw Clive's change as treachery and Ada as its cause, and returned in a few hours to the abyss where he had wandered as a boy.

After this explosion his career went forward. He caught the

usual train to town, to earn and spend money in the old manner; he read the old papers and discussed strikes and the divorce laws with his friends. At first he was proud of his self-control: did not he hold Clive's reputation in the hollow of his hand? But he grew more bitter, he wished that he had shouted while he had the strength and smashed down