Restless Earth/Chapter 8

The tete-a-tete meal in the gently deepening twilight of that perfect summer day was a rather hysterical affair. The world-defying lovers laughed self-consciously at small mishaps and childish innuendo, and professed to doubt each other’s love because of the rapid disappearance of the chops and tomatoes. They passed viands to each other with exaggerated courtesy, and found unflagging amusement in addressing each other by their surnames. When he spilled a little salt upon the tablecloth she insisted that he throw a little over his left shoulder to appease the god of luck. He charged her with ignoring the butter-knife on two occasions. They repeatedly told each other that this was the most satisfying meal of their whole lives.

They quarrelled laughingly over the number of ​cups of tea he had drunk. He said two—she insisted it was three.

“We’ll split the difference,” he said at last, passing his empty cup. “Fill it again and we’ll call it two-and-a-half.”

As she refilled the cup he said gravely———

“Do you know that Grace and I never quarrelled?”

“I can quite believe it, Jimmy,” she answered evenly. “It’s a pity you didn’t. Both of you have a lot to learn.”

“You think quarrels are necessary to married happiness?”

“I know they are,” she answered with decision, looking straightly at him as she passed his cup. “Do you know of anything more soul-shattering, more deadly, than monotony? Monotony is the worst punishment we have been able to devise for our most hardened criminals. It’s worse than death by hanging. What chance has connubial bliss against such a thing? A good quarrel between a man and his wife is as beneficial to their marriage system as an occasional pill is to their physical system.”

“That’s not a very romantic simile,” he smiled.

“We’re not discussing romance, my dear, but marriage.”

“Might not the two be synonymous occasionally?”

“Adam propounded that question after he had lost Eden. What makes you think that I am the first with sufficient wisdom to answer it? You have made a business of writing about these things—what do you think?”

Harley studied her gravely for a moment.

“My case—our case—is rather an exception, don’t you think?” he retorted.

Patricia laughed shortly.

“We musn’t let our conceit blind us to the fact that all this—our love, our eating together here, everything about the present situation—is just another of those illicit love-affairs which sound so ​sordid when told in a divorce court. This is romance only to us, Jimmy.”

“And we are all who matter,” he replied stoutly.

“At the moment,” she agreed.

He reached across the table and squeezed her hand, and she smiled wistfully.

“Let’s change the subject. Can you darn socks?” he asked.

“Romance, as we understand it, can never be synonymous with marriage,” she went on, ignoring his persiflage.

“So you really have the wisdom to answer Adam’s question?” he laughed. “And how do we understand romance?”

“How?” she asked, with quaint bitterness. “As a thrilling whirlpool of hopes, longings, difficulties, theatrical posturings and a persistent belief in earthbound angels. Hm! Hymeneal propinquity would strip the wings from the noblest angel in all the Heavens!”

“You don’t believe in marriage, then?”

“For sane people, for those who are content to realise that Love’s chrysanthemum is merely a glorified daisy, I think marriage the ideal state. But for half—tamed animals, like you and me, I think it is hell.”

“Pat!”

“What else are we?’ she insisted. “You may write of soul-mates, Divine purpose, the Great Ultimate, the fulfilment of the ages; but in your heart of hearts you know, and I know, that all this—this tete-a-tete, my paraphernalia in the other room—are the results of a naked physical attraction—the identical motive which actuated Adam and Eve and all their ancestors. At this very moment we are regretting Eden and looking forward, with idiotic avidity, to the difficulties of to-morrow and all the other to-morrows. We are fools, Jimmy—just Nature’s fools!”

He smiled at her indulgently as he stirred his ​tea. Never had he seen her so beautiful as now, when passionate self-analysis laid bare her soul.

“I have sinned with Eve and have left the Garden of Eden in company with Lilith, my rightful mate,” he said softly.

“With no regret for Eve or the Garden of Eden?” she asked.

“None,” he declared with conviction.

Patricia softened. She smiled at him tenderly.

“You’re a liar, Jimmy,” she said gently, “and I love you because of it.”

Harley leaned forward eagerly, his elbows upon the table and his hands reaching for hers.

“But you will marry me—eventually?” he asked earnestly.

Her answer was prompt and decided.

“If I cannot hold a man without the assistance of the law, Jimmy, it is because he doesn’t want me. That is a very good reason why I should not be held.”

“But the marriage laws are the woman’s protection, Pat.”

“Such a poor weak thing has woman become since God first gave her the shackles wherewith to make man captive!” she replied with a mild sneer. “Don’t be foolish, Jimmy,” she added, patting his cheek. If—and when—you desire to protect me no longer, be assured that I shall desire no further protection. I am different from Grace. What I lose I forget.”

She rose and commenced to clear the table. Harley swallowed his tea and rose to assist her.

“By the way,” she said, as she shook the tablecloth beside the back-door, “what are you doing about Grace—financially, Jimmy?”

“Grace is all right,” he answered shortly, piling the crockery neatly on the sink-board. “She has money of her own. And, of course, I’ll do my duty by her in that direction.”

“You will make her an allowance?”

“Alimony? Yes, if she’ll take it—which I doubt.”

​“You must make her take it, Jimmy; if not for herself, for Joan.”

“Just as you say, sweetheart. But Grace can be wonderfully obstinate———”

“It isn’t just as I say. You’ll do it because it is the right thing to do.”

“I being such a righteous person,” he mocked.

“Being that pitiful anomaly, a primitive man with a modern conscience,” she corrected him.

He watched her as she prepared to wash up with the natural economy of effort of the experienced housewife. He wondered where she had learned all these wifely tricks.

“But, sweetheart,” he baited her, “I have to support you now.”

“Who said so?” she flung at him.

“Well—it’s the usual thing,” he pointed out.

“Well, forget it, Jimmy. I will support me, and I shall pay my fair share of the—the alimony.”

“Nonsense!” he exploded.

“Is it?” she asked defiantly. “Why are you so arrogant that you assume all credit and responsibility for this situation, Jimmy?”

“If I do,” he answered, taking her by the shoulders and jutting his handsome head at her, “it’s proof that I am a man, anyhow. Make your mind easy about Grace. I’ll pay the alimony for the hurt I have done her in mistaking my liking for her for love. Some submerged part of me is bitterly ashamed that the rest of me should rejoice to see you here in her place. That is something in the nature of soul-alimony which I must pay until the end of things———”

He shook his head angrily as though to shake off useless thought. He gathered her in his arms.

“Girl, I’ve searched for you subconsciously since first I realised that women were women; and now that I’ve found you I refuse to believe that I would have been happier had I not. What is past is past. Let us forget it. Let’s forget everything but our happiness———”

​“And when we part———?” she asked softly, with something of mild derision in her voice,

“It will be at death———”

“Or when we recover sufficiently to be able to see each other clearly.”

“Pat! Please!”

She wriggled from his arms and laughed.

“One of us must remain with feet upon the ground,” she said. “There is the washing-up to be done, and Romance scorns such a humble task.”

Harley sighed comically and reached for a clean tea-towel.

“We must educate Romance,” he said.

****

When the dishes had been washed and put away, James Harley seated himself at the window of the breakfast-room and gazed at the slate-grey mass of Mount Egmont, rearing itself into the darkening sky, visible through a gap in the row of stately pohutukawas which sheltered the old-fashioned house on the sloping ground to the south. Patricia Weybourn silently swept up the few crumbs which had fallen upon the floor, and arranged the bowl of flowers upon the table.

It was the hour of dusk; the quiet hour when birds and little children fall asleep; and the ghostly presence of Grace and Joan in this, their proper environment, imposed an awkward silence upon the lovers. Both had expected such a moment, knowing that it must pass with the coming of darkness.

It passed more quickly than either had dared to hope.

A motor-cycle roared past the house.

“The paper-boy’s late to-night,” said Harley, rising by force of habit at the sound. Then he laughed. “But, of course, you wouldn’t know that.”

He went out by the back door to search for the paper. Patricia made no move to stop him. She shrugged her shoulders and sighed as she watched him glance over the unkempt front lawn and move ​towards the hedge. Unwittingly she had thrown the paper where most often it was to be found after delivery by the boy who roared past on six evenings of the week.

“Perhaps we had better have a light,” Harley said, as he re-entered the room.

“Excellent idea,” agreed the girl, as he depressed the switch. “This room is haunted, and I’m as nervous as a cat.”

Harley looked at her keenly as she pretended to be absorbed in adjusting the angle of the clock on the mantel. He saw the blood’s swift ebb and flow under the velvety skin of her throat and cheek. He saw that she was trembling, and his sympathy was quickened.

“Pat,” he said softly, moving close to her as she bowed her head upon the mantel with overmastering emotion, “this is a pretty fierce business altogether. Say the word, and I’ll get your things. You don’t have to go in deeper, my dear. Perhaps to-morrow may———.”

She flung up her head and turned upon him swiftly.

“I’ve seen too many to-morrows, Jimmy,” she cried passionately, “and none ever proved as exciting as the to-days. To-morrow I may be afflicted with cowardice or another outbreak of self-sacrifice. To-day I don’t care what happens. I don’t care if the ghosts of forty Graces plead with me in this room to go and leave you in peace. I’m staying!”

She left the room swiftly, leaving him standing there exultant. He did not follow her to the drawing-room, as she half hoped he would. The paper-reading habit of years, and a sudden shyness—which he told himself was “delicacy,” held him where he was.

He was mildly surprised when he heard her throw back the key-fall of the piano. He had not expected her to go to the drawing-room.

​Mechanically removing the wrapping from the paper he held, he listened to the music which leaped under the girl’s inspired fingers. It was her own peculiar rendering of one of Ring’s African Dances, and reflected her mood, the pulsating bass movement becoming ever faster until it reminded him of weird tales of Voodoo drums. The beat of it stirred his blood strangely. His eyes narrowed cunningly, and his smile was not pleasant. He glanced at the clock lustfully.

As mechanically as he had removed its wrapping, he opened the paper at the “cable” page, doubling it back with a shake for ease of perusal, his thoughts still upon the girl and the music.

He read the huge headlines twice before he realised their import, then all thoughts of the girl and the music fled. He stiffened in horror.

“God!” he whispered.

He scanned the crowded columns rapidly, appalled by their tale of disaster and death. And somewhere in Napier—Grace and Joan!

Grace and Joan!

The drumming of the African Dance, frenzied and insistent, forced itself upon his staggering mind. It roused him to fury.

“Pat!” he yelled.

The music ceased instantly.

“Pat!”

“Yes?”

“Come here, for God’s sake!”

He heard her coming through the hall without haste.

“Come here!”

She opened the door and entered with deliberation. She was steeled against his disillusionment and regarded him calmly.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

​“Look!” he cried, holding the paper towards her with shaking hands. “Look! The earthquake! Napier and Hastings have been shaken down and burned!”

Patricia raised her pencilled brows in cleverly-assumed surprise.

“Well?” she asked. Then she smiled and affected to understand. “No, that’s too transparent, Jimmy. I refuse to be saved from myself at this late hour.”

Harley stared at her wildly.

“Napier and Hastings—shaken down and burned!” he repeated. “Can’t you understand? That earthquake———”

Patricia became grave.

“Didn’t you know?” she asked, frowning at him with feigned incredulity.

“Didn’t I know?” he echoed, looking at her as though she were bereft of her senses. “Didn’t I know?”

“I thought we were tacitly agreed not to mention it—to-night, Jimmy. I thought you knew———” she lied.

Harley caught his breath. Horrified amazement drove him back a pace.

“Pat!” he gasped. “You can’t think like that? You can’t think that I would have allowed this—this———” he swept his arms wide to include the house and all that it held, “if I had known? If I had known that Grace was—lying over there—dead?”

She moved towards him, her hands held before her in pleading, her eyes tender.

“When a man is in love, Jimmy———” she began.

Harley backed away from her, staring wildly, striking the reaching hands from him with sudden loathing.

“Don’t touch me!” he snarled, realising the degradation she imputed to him and instantly crediting the unpleasant tales he had heard about this ​physically-glorious and morally-rotten woman. “Don’t touch me!”

Patricia smiled.

“Don’t be an ass, Jimmy,” she begged. “What difference can it make to us if half the country is shaken to pieces?”

“But Grace—Grace is in Napier! Can’t you understand ?” he raved.

Patricia pretended to an unwelcome conviction that he really had not known of the disaster until now. Her lip curled in a slow sneer.

“So you are making this an excuse to back out?” she asked coldly. “You’ve decided to make this a plausible excuse to go back to Grace? You’re afraid.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, be decent!”

“What has decency to do with it?” she flared. “Grace left you to me. Talk to her of decency.”

“Think! Think!” he cried, in impassioned self-reproach, ignoring her taunt. “Grace, and little Joan, crushed!—buried!—burned! And you—we—behaving like animals! Like beasts!”

“And when you and I are both dead people will still behave like animals, Jimmy. What else are we? Five minutes ago you hoped never to see Grace and Joan again. They were then, as they are now,—crushed, buried and burned.”

“But, I didn’t know! I didn’t know!”

Again Patricia became the softly pleading, seductive woman.

“What does it matter, Jimmy?” she asked approaching him where he stood with his back to the wall and placing her hands timidly upon his breast. “Have they not been dead to you for weeks? Have you not hated them, deep in your heart, because they stood in the path to your real happiness, your path to me? Have you not felt unclean in the caresses you gave to Grace since you knew that they were rightly mine? And if Grace is dead, do ​you think she minds my being here? Wouldn’t she want you to be happy? Jimmy! Kiss me!”

She held up her lips invitingly and leaned against him. One hand crept slowly around his neck. She pressed her body against his, her eyes luminous with promise of surrender.

Harley looked into her upturned face, fascinated, seeing her clearly for the first time, revolted that he could ever have loved this courtesan. Slow fury kindled in his face.

He stiffened, and struck her cheek with his open hand viciously, calling her a vile name.

Patricia reeled against the wall with the force of the blow, and the frame of a small etching cut her lip slightly. As she pressed the back of her hand to the hurt she heard the front door slam.

Harley had fled the house.

She looked at the smear of blood on her hand with whimsical philosophy, and smiled rather wistfully.

“And that’s that,” she said to the clock on the mantel. “If he had kissed me, instead of doing what he did, I might have strangled him.”

She went into the bedroom in search of a handkerchief; and, having found one, she dabbed her lip in the intervals between the packing of her gowns into the portmanteau and the cabin trunk. She laughed as she packed the pyjamas.

“Crushed! Buried! Burned!” she said, kneeling on the trunk in order to fasten it. “His imagination is still sound. Please God he finds the little things alive and unhurt. If he doesn’t—well, we shall see; although I doubt his stomach will endure me after this exhibition.”

She adjusted her hat carefully at the mirror, and smoothed her collar with light, deft touches. A close examination of her injured lip assured her that the hurt was negligible. A few expert dabs with the tiny puff from her bag and it was invisible. She took a final look around the room to make sure that ​she had overlooked nothing, and her gaze rested upon a framed photograph of Grace and Joan which hung near the door.

“Well, Grace,” she said, “I've done my best to give him back to you. It’s up to you, now. I never meant to take him, old thing. The whole business was the sheerest accident. The full moon and everything combined. You’re a lucky girl. He’s no hero. my dear; he’s just a man—the sort of man I’ve never found for myself. Mine have all been heroes, damn em!”

She shook her head, and her eyes were wet.

“And, if you’re dead, old thing, put in a word with God for me. I’m going to need it.”

She carried the portmanteau and the cabin trunk out on to the verandah where the carter would see them. She locked the front door carefully and placed the key under the mat.

When she went down the path she was sobbing, thankful for the darkness.