The Moon and Sixpence
a certain hour next day, should Blanche be better, it might be possible
for her husband to see her.
Chapter XXXV
I scarcely know how we got through that day. Stroeve could not bear to
be alone, and I exhausted myself in efforts to distract him. I took him
to the Louvre, and he pretended to look at pictures, but I saw that his
thoughts were constantly with his wife. I forced him to eat, and after
luncheon I induced him to lie down, but he could not sleep. He accepted
willingly my invitation to remain for a few days in my apartment. I
gave him books to read, but after a page or two he would put the book
down and stare miserably into space. During the evening we played
innumerable games of piquet, and bravely, not to disappoint my efforts,
he tried to appear interested. Finally I gave him a draught, and he
sank into uneasy slumber.
When we went again to the hospital we saw a nursing sister. She told us
that Blanche seemed a little better, and she went in to ask if she
would see her husband. We heard voices in the room in which she lay,
and presently the nurse returned to say that the patient refused to see
anyone. We had told her that if she refused to see Dirk the nurse was
to ask if she would see me, but this she refused also. Dirk’s lips
trembled.
“I dare not insist,” said the nurse. “She is too ill. Perhaps in a day
or two she may change her mind.”
“Is there anyone else she wants to see?” asked Dirk, in a voice so low
it was almost a whisper.
“She says she only wants to be left in peace.”
Dirk’s hands moved strangely, as though they had nothing to do with his
body, with a movement of their own.
“Will you tell her that if there is anyone else she wishes to see I
will bring him? I only want her to be happy.”
The nurse looked at him with her calm, kind eyes, which had seen all
the horror and pain of the world, and yet, filled with the vision of a
world without sin, remained serene.
“I will tell her when she is a little calmer.”
Dirk, filled with compassion, begged her to take the message at once.
“It may cure her. I beseech you to ask her now.”
With a faint smile of pity, the nurse went back into the room. We heard
her low voice, and then, in a voice I did not recognise the answer:
“No. No. No.”
The nurse came out again and shook her head.
“Was that she who spoke then?” I asked. “Her voice sounded so strange.”
“It appears that her vocal cords have been burnt by the acid.”
Dirk gave a low cry of distress. I asked him to go on and wait for me
at the entrance, for I wanted to say something to the nurse. He did not
ask what it was, but went silently. He seemed to have lost all power of
will; he was like an obedient child.
“Has she told you why she did it?” I asked.
“No. She won’t speak. She lies on her back quite quietly. She doesn’t
move for hours at a time. But she cries always. Her pillow is all wet.
She’s too weak to use a handkerchief, and the tears just run down her
face.”
It gave me a sudden wrench of the heart-strings. I could have killed
Strickland then, and I knew that my voice was trembling when I bade the
nurse good-bye.
I found Dirk waiting for me on the steps. He seemed to see nothing, and
did not notice that I had joined him till I touched him on the arm. We
walked along in silence. I tried to imagine what had happened to drive
the poor creature to that dreadful step. I presumed that Strickland
knew what had happened, for someone must have been to see him from the
police, and he must have made his statement. I did not know where he
was. I supposed he had gone back to the shabby attic which served him
as a studio. It was curious that she should not wish to see him.
Perhaps she refused to have him sent for because she knew he would
refuse to come. I wondered what an abyss of cruelty she must have
looked into that in horror she refused to live.
Chapter XXXVI
The next week was dreadful. Stroeve went twice a day to the hospital to
enquire after his wife, who still declined to see him; and came away at
first relieved and hopeful because he was told that she seemed to be
growing better, and then in despair because, the complication which the
doctor had feared having ensued, recovery was impossible. The nurse was
pitiful to his distress, but she had little to say that could console
him. The poor woman lay quite still, refusing to speak, with her eyes
intent, as though she watched for the coming of death. It could now be
only the question of a day or two; and when, late one evening, Stroeve
came to see me I knew it was to tell me she was dead. He was absolutely
exhausted. His volubility had left him at last, and he sank down
wearily on my sofa. I felt that no words of condolence availed, and I
let him lie there quietly. I feared he would think it heartless if I
read, so I sat by the window, smoking a pipe, till he felt inclined to
speak.
“You’ve been very kind to me,” he said at last. “Everyone’s been very
kind.”
“Nonsense,” I said, a little embarrassed.
“At the hospital they told me I might wait. They gave me a chair, and I
sat outside the door. When she became unconscious they said I might go
in. Her mouth and chin were all burnt by the acid. It was awful to see
her lovely skin all wounded. She died very peacefully, so that I didn’t
know she was dead till the sister told me.”
He was too tired to weep. He lay on his back limply, as though all the
strength had gone out of his limbs, and presently I saw that he had
fallen asleep. It was the first natural sleep he had had for a week.
Nature, sometimes so cruel, is sometimes merciful. I covered him and
turned down the light. In the morning when I awoke he was still asleep.
He had not moved. His gold-rimmed spectacles were still on his nose.
Chapter XXXVII
The circumstances of Blanche Stroeve’s death necessitated all manner of
dreadful formalities, but at last we were allowed to bury her. Dirk and
I alone followed the hearse to the cemetery. We went at a foot-pace,
but on the way back we trotted, and there was something to my mind
singularly horrible in the way the driver of the hearse whipped up his
horses. It seemed to dismiss the dead with a shrug of the shoulders.
Now and then I caught sight of the swaying hearse in front of us, and
our own driver urged his pair so that we might not remain behind. I
felt in myself, too, the desire to get the whole thing out of my mind.
I was beginning to be bored with a tragedy that did not really concern
me, and pretending to myself that I spoke in order to distract Stroeve,
I turned with relief to other subjects.
“Don’t you think you’d better go away for a bit?” I said. “There can be
no object in your staying in Paris now.”
He did not answer, but I went on ruthlessly:
“Have you made any plans for the immediate future?”
“No.”
“You must try and gather together the threads again. Why don’t you go
down to Italy and start working?”
Again he made no reply, but the driver of our carriage came to my
rescue. Slackening his pace for a moment, he leaned over and spoke. I
could not hear what he said, so I put my head out of the window. He
wanted to know where we wished to be set down. I told him to wait a
minute.
“You’d better come and have lunch with me,” I said to Dirk. “I’ll tell
him to drop us in the Place Pigalle.”
“I’d rather not. I want to go to the studio.”
I hesitated a moment.
“Would you like me to come with you?” I asked then.
“No; I should prefer to be alone.”
“All right.”
I gave the driver the necessary direction, and in renewed silence we
drove on. Dirk had not been to the studio since the wretched morning on
which they had taken Blanche to the hospital. I was glad he did not
want me to accompany him, and when I left him at the door I walked away
with relief. I took a new pleasure in the streets of Paris, and I
looked with smiling eyes at the people who hurried to and fro. The day
was fine and sunny, and I felt in myself a more acute delight in life.
I could not help it; I put Stroeve and his sorrows out of my mind. I
wanted to enjoy.
Chapter XXXVIII
I did not see him again for nearly a week. Then he fetched me soon
after seven one evening and took me out to dinner. He was dressed in
the deepest mourning, and on his bowler was a broad black band. He had
even a black border to his handkerchief. His garb of woe suggested that
he had lost in one catastrophe every relation he had in the world, even
to cousins by marriage twice removed. His plumpness and his red, fat
cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous. It was cruel that
his extreme unhappiness should have in it something of buffoonery.
He told me he had made up his mind to go away, though not to Italy, as
I had suggested, but to Holland.
“I’m starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we shall ever
meet.”
I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly.
“I haven’t been home for five years. I think I’d forgotten it all; I
seemed to have come so far away from my father’s house that I was shy
at the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel it’s my only refuge.”
He was sore and bruised, and his thoughts went back to the tenderness
of his mother’s love. The ridicule he had endured for years seemed now
to weigh him down, and the final blow of Blanche’s treachery had robbed
him of the resiliency which had made him take it so gaily. He could no
longer laugh with those who laughed at him. He was an outcast. He told
me of his childhood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother’s
passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean brightness.
Everything was always in its place, and no where could you see a speck
of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her. I saw a neat little
old woman, with cheeks like apples, toiling away from morning to night,
through the long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father
was a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime,
silent and upright; in the evening he read the paper aloud, while his
wife and daughter (now married to the captain of a fishing smack),
unwilling to lose a moment, bent over their sewing. Nothing ever
happened in that little town, left behind by the advance of
civilisation, and one year followed the next till death came, like a
friend, to give rest to those who had laboured so diligently.
“My father wished me to become a carpenter like himself. For five
generations we’ve carried on the same trade, from father to son.
Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father’s steps,
and look neither to the right nor to the left. When I was a little boy
I said I would marry the daughter of the harness-maker who lived next
door. She was a little girl with blue eyes and a flaxen pigtail. She
would have kept my house like a new pin, and I should have had a son to
carry on the business after me.”
Stroeve sighed a little and was silent. His thoughts dwelt among
pictures of what might have been, and the safety of the life he had
refused filled him with longing.
“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go
none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of
quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does
not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people.
Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent,
content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the
wisdom of life.”
To me it was his broken spirit that expressed itself, and I rebelled
against his renunciation. But I kept my own counsel.
“What made you think of being a painter?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“It happened that I had a knack for drawing. I got prizes for it at