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In operas and romances one goes from such a parting in a splendid dignity of gloom. But I am no hero, and I went down the big staircase of Tarvrille's house the empty shuck of an abandoned desire. I was acutely ashamed of my recent tears. In the centre of the hall was a marble figure swathed about with yellow muslin. "On account of the flies," I said, breaking our silence.
Tarvrille's notes recorded his repeated attempts to see me, I felt that he alone was capable of clearing up things for me, and I went out again at once and telegraphed to him for an appointment. He wired to me from that same house in Mayfair in which I had first met Mary after my return.
When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of unspoken intimacies. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's flowers and the Cape Flora and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called them.
The best thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad " "Yes, but does Mary think so?" "Look here!" said Philip in a voice thick with rage. "I won't have Mary divorced. I won't. See? I won't." "What the devil's it got to do with you?" I asked with an answering flash of fury. Tarvrille's arm ran through mine. "Nobody's going to divorce Mary," he said reassuringly. "Not even Justin.
It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit.... I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it, and it is not easy even to describe.
"Glazebrook told me of one flushed like a woman at a bargain sale, he said and when he pointed out to her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother! and threw it aside and went back...." We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to seem to listen. "Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord." "Upstairs, m'lord."
There was a triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all she imagined Isabel had given me. When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would meet my homecoming.
Then Guy was opening the door for her and she stood in the doorway. She was in dark furs wrapped about her, but in the instant I could see how ill she was and how broken. She came a step or so towards me and then stopped short, and so we stood, shyly and awkwardly under Guy and Tarvrille's eyes, two yards apart. "You see," she said, and stopped lamely. "You and I," I said, "have to part, Mary.
In the daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead upstairs. I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in that stripped my soul bare.
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