Restless Earth/Chapter 2

Harley continued to stall for time. He changed his mind about posting the letter before lunch. He argued that any time before midnight would do. Besides, the Langham woman was watching, and he would feel like a murderer running the gauntlet of suspicious eyes. After all, what else did it amount to but murder—murder of a woman’s happiness and faith? The letter would strike to the heart as surely as a knife.

He wandered into the bedroom before he remembered that he had decided to lunch. He seemed to have developed a habit of wandering aimlessly about the house of late. Lunch. He would have lunch.

Lunch was a miserable affair.

Even before the earthquake the kitchenette had been hard to endure; now, with broken crockery and salt superimposed upon the stale breadcrumbs on the floor, the place was positively repulsive. Soiled saucepans and a frying-pan half-filled with congealed fat occupied the top of the gas stove in company with the ruined kettle. A three-weeks-old sheet of newspaper did duty as a table cover upon which had rested for days a pot of jam with its paper cover hanging in tatters from its rim, a bread board, three butter dishes, a tin of condensed milk and an accumulation of crumbs.

Cupboard doors were half-open, the dust of weeks throwing their panelling into bold relief; the dishes in the sink and on the board were an unlovely sight; the cleanliness of the tea-towels hanging on the rail behind the door was a reproach; and the lingering ​odour of the burnt kettle, added to the mingled odours of stale and forgotten viands, strangled appetite.

Harley sniffed disgustedly as he entered the room. It had been a picture of white neatness when Grace had worked here; now it was a hole. Time it was cleaned up.

He had grown accustomed to the absence of clean cups. He rinsed his breakfast cup beneath the tap, scuffling the broken crockery aside with his feet. The tea-pot had not been emptied since breakfast, and he scuffled the broken crockery in other directions as he made his way to the back door. It did not occur to him to use a broom.

He used four matches in lighting the gas-jet beneath the kettle, and swore whole-heartedly when the kettle leaked as he attempted to fill it. He was compelled to rinse a saucepan, and he handled the dishcloth with a respect engendered by its age. When he had set the water to boil he sorted out the least stale half-loaf in the bread-bin, and carved a thick slice which he coated liberally with butter and jam.

When the saucepan commenced to hiss Harley commenced to search for tea. When the water had been boiling for three minutes Harley was convinced that there was no tea in the house. He had used the last of it for breakfast. He scuffled salt and crockery under the stove as he turned out the gas. The bread-and-jam was dotted with enthusiastic house-flies, while a swarm of others hovered above it. Harley’s appetite departed utterly.

He threw the slice of bread-and-jam into the long grass of the back lawn.

Lunch was finished.

“What an unholy mess!” he exclaimed aloud as he poured some of the hot water into his shaving-mug.

With the steaming mug in his hand he stood and surveyed the kitchenette.

​No good. A man could not continue to live like this. No real or regular meals, no order, no anything. Every bed in the house unmade and unaired. Dust everywhere.

Something would have to be done.

One o’clock, and he had not shaved! Two days’ growth, too—or was it three? Not a clean collar in the place! He couldn’t remember to get the things from the laundry now that Grace was not here to jog his memory. And the bulges in the knees of his trousers! Terrible! How many more clean shirts were left in the drawer? One, or two? Or none?

Something would have to be done—now that Grace would not be coming back.

Grace not coming back! Why the devil couldn’t he be pleased about it, instead of wanting to howl? Idiot! He didn’t know his own mind!

As he made his way to the bathroom he planned to boil a copperful of water that very evening and make a clean-up of all the crockery. Perhaps he might wash a few sheets and things, too. The obvious thing to do was to look round for diggings. No sense in keeping a whole house for himself. Better to let it, or sell it. The place was too full with memories. He could never work here again.

****

He dropped the letter into the post-box which hung upon a telegraph-pole at the corner of the street. He heard it fall, and for a moment, felt a violent desire to recall it.

“Don’t be a fool, Harley,” he admonished himself, and blushed as he realised that loneliness had bred a habit of speaking aloud to himself. He felt extremely foolish as he walked away, although he was alone in the street.

It was done. His decision was made irrevocably. He had chosen Patricia Weybourn and had discarded the little woman whom he had sworn to love and cherish and who was the mother of his child.

He was free to go to Patricia, free to take what ​he wanted so passionately He should be happy. Why wasn’t he?

Why wasn’t he?

“Because it is a vile thing to do, James Harley,” he answered himself aloud. “You have cast off the little woman who has been unswervingly faithful to you—the woman whose every desire has been for your happiness—the woman who has made you what you are; who made you ‘James Harley, author of this, that, and the other,’—who put you on the literary map. Where would you have been without her?—you, with plenty of language and not a damn plot in the whole of your miserable carcase? Where are you going to be now that you have ditched her? Ass! Idiot! There are not enough epithets in the language to adequately describe you! What is the matter with you? Throwing away a wife and child, a career, a home, everything! For whom? For a woman of whom the whole town speaks uncleanly! For a—a—Oh, hell!”

A doctor, strolling across the footpath to his car after paying a professional visit, failed to recognise James Harley, the gifted writer of scented romances in many journals, in the man who hurried past with hands thrust deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched, hair long and untidy, clothes hanging baggily upon him, and who talked loudly to himself.

The James Harley whom the doctor knew—the man with whom the doctor had played bridge only six weeks since—was a tall man with a fine breadth of shoulder and a deep chest; a man with an easy carriage and a refined taste in clothes; a handsome man whom the gods had designed in the mould of a hero and to whom they had given the gift of tongues; a man destined to go far in his career as a writer of love-stories, but who could whack a golf-ball and put the gloves on with any man in the district.

“Great fellow, Harley!” was the doctor’s way of describing him to his acquaintances. “Heaven alone ​knows how he manages to think of all the rubbish he writes. Must be money in it, or such a man wouldn’t write it.”

James Harley was thirty-two. The doctor casually judged the hurrying man who talked to himself to be in his forties.

The doctor stepped into his car and drove away.

James Harley did not see him or the car which almost ran him down at the next street-intersection. James Harley had too much to say to himself to bother about his friends at the moment. He was going over all the old arguments, reviewing the whole position for The thousandth time, searching, searching for self-justification and failing to find it.

****

Harley had been interested when Grace had first mentioned that Patricia Weybourn had arrived in New Plymouth to establish a branch of Picotarde’s, the Auckland modistes, and had been curious to see the girl of whom Grace spoke so warmly.

“You’ll like her, Jimmy,” Grace had said. “All men do—and so do most women, when they know her. I warn you, she’s a flirt of the first water, but she has a heart of gold. There is no real harm in her. Pat, Buzzy Tennyson, Vera Lucas and I were known as the Live Wire quartette in Auckland in our young and giddy days———”

“You’re growing so old, aren’t you?” Harley had laughed. “But I can’t imagine you a Live Wire.”

“Why not? Am I so domesticated and subdued? Jimmy, one of these days I’ll break out and surprise you. Wait until you see Pat! ‘Birds of a feather,’ you know.”

“I know all about you, young lady. You’re such a fast young thing; and if this Pat of yours is of your feather I can hardly wait to see her. When is she coming up?”

“I’ve asked her to dinner on Thursday.”

“Fine! I must climb into a dinner suit for the occasion.”

​He had climbed into the dinner suit, and when he had first seen Patricia Weybourn he had felt that the effort of dressing had been wasted. He had expected to see a laughing-eyed, flirtatious tom-boy at whom he could talk after the manner of an eminent author; not the sleek, graceful, blonde mannequin, who flowed rather than walked, and whose artificially-beautiful eyes insolently expressed cold surprise that such an obvious man’s man should demean himself by writing ridiculous love-stories for silly women.

That first evening had not been a success for him. Grace and her visitor had occupied the chesterfield all the evening and had apparently forgotten him in their mutual reminiscences; so that he had had plenty of opportunity to compare the “birds of a feather.” He had found the descriptive phrase inapposite, for the two women were of strikingly dissimilar feather, and his fancy then had been for the quieter plumage of Grace.

Then he had seen Grace as petite, neat and eminently lovable. The mother-light had given her a beauty which the other woman, for all her physical perfection, had lacked. A softness in her eyes and voice, the winning tact and practical sense of which he knew her possessed, her imagination, everything—created to make and grace a real home for a lucky man. He had known himself for that lucky man and had loved her whole-heartedly then.

Patricia Weybourn he had mentally labelled ‘ultra’—ultra-smart in attire, ultra-blonde, ultra-languid, ultra-graceful, ultra-beautiful in a hard fashion, ultra-surprised and disappointed that her friend should have married a man who would have made a sword appear mightier than a pen. Ultra-uninteresting he had found her when he escorted her to the tramcar at the corner of the next street, and he had considered the tales of her conquests to be fairy tales, or her victims half-wits. He would have ​been ashamed to have been seen abroad in her company then.

“How do you like her?” Grace had asked him later in the evening.

“Not my style, sweetheart,” he had replied, somewhat loftily. “Too much polish and not enough brains.”

“Didn’t she take enough interest in your work, Jimmy.”

“It’s not that—not at all. Why should she? It’s just that—that—well, it’s another of these natural antipathies, I suppose.”

“Oh, I think she likes you, Jimmy, although she did seem rather more stand-offish than I ever remember her with a strange man. Perhaps she is determined to take no risks with my handsome husband.”

He had grinned at that.

“A lot she knows about love,” he had scoffed. “That sort of woman doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

“Perhaps she thinks similarly about you, Jimmy. After all, you only write about it.”

“Is that so? Come here, young lady, and I’ll show you whether I only write about it. Come over here.”

She had come to him obediently; and in neither of their hearts had there been any fear that any person on earth could ever alter the course of their love.

For some time after that he had excused himself on the plea of work whenever Patricia Weybourn called to spend an evening, and had listened to the two women in the next room chattering like magpies as he smoked and made leisurely notes for further love-stories.

“It’s rude to run away every time Pat comes,” Grace had protested one afternoon.

“I know. It’s how she makes me feel.”

“But you mustn’t offend her, for my sake, Jimmy.”

​“Can’t offend that sort of woman, my dear. Besides, I’m out of danger when I’m alone. You don’t want me to fall in love with this blonde siren?”

“She’s too much of a sportswoman to allow you to do that. I’d trust Pat with you anywhere.”

“Is that meant as a compliment to her or to me?”

“To both of you. Jimmy, please be nice to her.”

“I am nice to her.”

“I mean, come and be sociable. She is coming this evening, and I want you to play for her. She sings very well.”

“Don’t you think she despises me enough now? What will she think when she knows that, besides writing love-stories, I tinkle the piano?”

“Do you care?”

“Eh? Not a bit!”

“Then why argue about it? Promise me, Jimmy, you’ll have no urgent work to do this evening?”

“I can’t do that———”

“You can!”

“I can’t.”

“You can!”

Grace had taken advantage of his sitting position to throw her arms tightly about his neck from behind and had fastened her teeth in his right ear.

“Promise?” she had growled ferociously. “Promise?”

He yelled in mock dismay.

“Let go!”

“Promise, you big bully?”

“I promise.”

She had released him then. They had been very happy.

“Next time I’ll take a piece right out of you, young man,” she had threatened laughingly.

“I’ll be good,” he had replied. “But, if I fall in love with this svelte vampire of yours, remember you will have brought it on yourself.”

“I’ll remember to be sorry for you if you do, my dear.”

​Grace had remembered. That was one of the worst features of the whole business. And he remembered that he had warned her—that was another.