The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
perfume--the perfume of Aliette's womanhood.
She had been in this very room! The essence of her still pervaded every
nook of it. His imagination conjured up the image of her: Aliette
dimpling to laughter: Aliette's brown eyes, now bright with joy, now
dimmed with tears: the vivid of Aliette's hair: the little gestures of
Aliette's hands. All these he saw, and possessed again in memory.
Again she lay in his arms. Again she let him kiss the tears from her
eyes. Again she yielded him her hands, her hair. But she had yielded him
more than these; she had yielded him her very thoughts: she had said,
"I'm very weak; you're the only person who can help me."
Remembering those words, he grew ashamed. He must not think for himself:
he must think for her. She had said that she would marry him if she were
free. But there was only one way to freedom--unless Brunton let her
divorce him. And that alternative she had refused to contemplate.
No! There was only one path to her freedom, to their happiness--the path
of scandal. Dared he demand that sacrifice from her?
After all, why not? The scandal would be short-lived--the happiness
enduring. She was Brunton's merely in name. She had no children.
Legally, they might have to put themselves in the wrong; but morally
they would be justified. Between them and happiness stood only the
shibboleths.
Nevertheless, the shibboleths mattered. Shibboleths were the basis of
all society.
Certain people, too--people like his mother,--hated divorce, believed it
wicked. His mother still clung to the old faith. His mother would say:
"God joined Aliette and Hector in holy matrimony. You have no right to
sunder God's joining."
As though humanity were any deity's stud-farm!
CHAPTER IX
1
By that strange perversity which is peculiar to loving womanhood,
Aliette's first thoughts--as the taxi rattled her away from Jermyn
Street--were for her husband.
For the second time in three years her mood relented. "Poor Hector!" she
thought. "He'll be home when I get back. It isn't much of a home for
him--ours."
Yet, even relenting, she knew that she could never forgive. The physical
Hector was dead, killed by her knowledge of his infidelities--as dead to
her as the physical Ronnie was alive.
Then she forgot Hector, remembered only Ronnie. Her memory thrilled to
his caresses. She began to yearn for him with a bodily yearning so acute
that--had he been beside her in the taxi--she would have thrown her arms
round his neck.
Her mind whirled. This way. That way. She, Aliette Brunton, who had
always thought "that sort of thing" the prerogative of shop-girls and
chorus-ladies, was yearning, physically, for a man. It was all wrong.
She should never have gone to his rooms. They must part. She would never
be parted from him. He ought never to have made love to her. She would
have died if he had not made love to her!
She tried to blame herself for her weakness; she tried to think: "I made
no struggle. I yielded everything. I virtually threw myself at his head.
I should have been strong. I should have denied him my hands, my lips."
But her heart refused to be blamed; her heart said: "He loves you. You
love him. Nothing else matters."
The taxi swung into Bayswater Road; and instinctively Aliette opened her
vanity-bag. Glancing at her face in the mirrored lid, she remembered
Hector again. Hector mustn't see her as Ronnie had seen her. Hector
mustn't find out!
Once more, she felt abased. Once more her fastidiousness revolted--this
time from concealment. The commonplace impulse--to confess--appeared,
disappeared. What was there to confess? Nothing!
Nevertheless, paying her driver, mounting the pillared door-step,
ringing as she let herself into the square tessellated hall, Aliette
felt guilty. In thought, if not in act, she was little better than the
husband whom Lennard, appearing from his lower regions, announced to be
in the library.
Caroline Staley joined Lennard in the hall. Aliette handed her gloves,
her bag and parasol to the maid; asked Lennard the time; heard it was a
quarter past seven; hesitated the fraction of a second; and pushed open
the library door.
Hector sat in his big leather armchair by the bow-window--the "Evening
Standard" on his knees, and a glass of whisky and water at his elbow.
His gray eyes lit pleasurably at sight of her. As he came across the
room with a smiled "My dear, how well you're looking," Aliette realized
with the shock of a sudden revelation the cruelty latent in those thin
lips.
(She _was_ looking well, thought Hector; her very best. This evening,
that subtle incomprehensible process, process alike mental and physical,
which he had divined at work in her for so long, seemed to have attained
its completion. Her very complexion showed it.)
"Am I?" she answered.
He gave her the cheek-kiss of connubial compromise; and she schooled
herself not to shudder. "This is the price I must pay," she thought,
"for those other kisses."
The front-door bell rang; and, a minute afterwards, Mollie rustled in.
"Hello, Hector," said Mollie. "So you've got back."
The girl's eyes were all luminous, subtly afire with happiness. Kissing
Aliette, she whispered, "I must talk to you."
To Brunton, watching the sisters go arm in arm through the door, came a
sharp pang of sex-consciousness. As Aliette, so Mollie: from each there
radiated that same incomprehensible aura of physical and mental
completion. The aura excited Brunton, stimulated him, roused his
imagination almost to mania. All the way home in the car--and usually
the car distracted him--he had been thinking of his wife, goading his
mind with the mirage of the past. Now the prongs of the goad penetrated
through the mind to the very flesh.
He poured himself another drink, and stood for a long while in
contemplation of a photograph on his desk; a photograph of Aliette,
taken just before they became engaged. He remembered how then, as
always, her fastidiousness had lured him; how then, as now, he had ached
to conquer her fastidiousness, to make her desires one with his own. And
always, from the very outset to this very day, he had failed. Against
the refinement in her, even when she yielded, his will to sex-mastery
beat in vain; till finally there came the break.
The break, as Hector saw it, had been of her making. The things he most
desired of her, the unfastidious intimacies, she either could not or
would not endure. Those intimacies she had driven him elsewhere to seek.
And he had sought them for three years; sought them, he now realized,
without assuaging his desire.
Dressing for dinner, he heard--from the room she had barred against
him--his wife's voice. His wife and her sister were talking, talking.
The incomprehensible talk maddened Hector, even as the incomprehensible
physical aura of them had maddened him. Surely--surely it was high time
to put an end to this--this nonsensical chastity.
2
Her sister's dressing-hour confidences seemed to Aliette the final
complication. Mollie had met James Wilberforce, by accident, in Bond
Street. Although too late for tea, he had insisted on her eating an ice
at Rumpelmayer's. At Rumpelmayer's they ran into the admiral and
Hermione. The admiral had spoken of his meeting with Alie.
"Where did _you_ have tea?" asked the girl.
"Never mind about my tea," retorted her sister. "Tell me _your_ news."
Whereupon Mollie, not in the least hesitantly, told it. Jimmy had asked
her to marry him! That is to say, he had spoken about marriage in such a
way as to leave no doubt about his intention to propose. That was one of
the admirable things about Jimmy. He never beat around the bush. She, of
course, had "choked him off." Jimmy must be taught that these things
couldn't be fixed up over an ice in a tea-shop.
"Still," concluded the modern young, "I'm very fond of James. The
chances are that I shall marry him in the autumn."
"And James Wilberforce," thought Aliette, as she went down to dinner,
"is just _the_ person whose wife's family must be _sans reproche_!"
Dinner completed her mental _bouleversement_. Hector--she divined even
before they sat down--was in a difficult mood. Hector insisted on
champagne, insisted on their sharing it. He grew boisterous on the first
glass. "They would have a cheery evening," said Hector. "They would get
the car round after dinner, and drive to Roehampton." But on Aliette's
suggesting that he and Mollie should go alone, he dropped both the
scheme and his pose of boisterousness. Catching the look in his eyes,
she began to be frightened.
Only twice before--once after her first discovery of his infidelities,
and once a year later--had Aliette seen that particular look in Hector's
eyes. It betokened contest. Not the casual entreaties of recent months,
but contest--contest almost physical! Formerly, though resenting the
indignity of such a contest, she had never dreaded it. But
to-night--to-night was different.
When Lennard brought in the port, Hector refused to be left alone. They
stayed with him while he drank two glasses; and again, watching him,
Aliette's mood relented. The look in his eyes had grown soft, almost
pleading. "Poor old Hector," she thought; "so many women could have
given him all that he requires from a wife. Only I--I can't. I'm
Ronnie's--Ronnie's."
Once more her mind whirled. This way. That way. Guilt, fear, love,
uncertainty drove the wheels of her mind.
Yet both mind and body possessed one certainty: that the physical Hector
had died three years since.
3
It was late, nearly midnight; but Mollie still sat strumming on the
piano in the big balconied drawing-room.
Ever since dinner began the girl had been conscious of domestic tension.
She could see, over the shining instrument, that neither husband nor
wife listened to the music. They sat, either side the fireplace,
avoiding speech, avoiding each other's eyes.
Occasionally, when he thought himself unobserved, Hector would glance at
Alie. Mollie knew, of course, that Alie didn't get on very well with
Hector. On more than one of her visits to them there had been such
periods of tension. But this--to the girl's intuition--seemed far more
serious, far nearer definite crisis than anything before. Somehow the
situation frightened her; somehow she felt averse to leaving Alie alone
with Hector. All the same, one couldn't go on playing ragtimes till
dawn.
Mollie fired a final rafale on the bass keys, and closed the piano.
"I'm going to bed," she announced. "You too, Alie?"
"Not just yet." Aliette kissed her sister good night. During the last
two hours her relenting mood had almost evaporated under the fire of
Hector's covert glances. Her mind no longer whirled. She knew
now--definitely--that contest between them was unavoidable; and, though
she still dreaded it, her courage refused to postpone the ordeal.
The door closed behind Mollie; and, after a moment's hesitancy, Hector
leaned forward from his chair. Aliette saw that there were pearls of
sweat on his forehead. His hands gripped the blue grapes of the cretonne
chair-cover as though he would squeeze them dry.
"I'm glad she's gone to bed," he said hoarsely.
"Are you? Why?"
"Because it's time that you and I had things out with one another."
"What things?" Her voice sounded a little shy, but she no longer averted
her eyes. They met his--brown cold and resolute, against gray kindling
to passion.
"Everything. Aliette," he began to plead with her, "we can't go on like
this for ever."
"Why not?"
"Because the whole position's intolerable. Either you're my wife, or
you're not. I--I can't stand this sort of life."