William John Locke

“ She had come through the ordeal of an unhappy marriage, pure and childlike, her heart unruffled by passion and her soul unclouded by disillusion.
There are some women born to be loved by many men, yielding, trustful, appealing irresistibly to the masculine instincts of protection and possession. Sometimes they are carried off by one successful owner and bear him children, and hear nothing of the hopeless loves that they inspire. Sometimes, like Yvonne, they are at the mercy of every gust of passion that stirs the hearts of the men around them. ”

“ The reaction from the most poignant despair he had known since his freedom, to sudden hope, had set working many springs of resolution. He would banish all thoughts of the past from his mind, forget Stephen Chisely in the new man Stephen Joyce, take up the new threads fate had spun for him, and weave them into a new life without allowing any of them to cross the old: a resolution which would be laughable, were it not so eternal, and so pathetic in its futility. The world will never know the enormous expenditure of will-power by its weak men. ”

“ Joyce brought Yvonne down to the back-parlour. The wine came out of the dirt-encrusted bottle like sunshine breaking through a cloud, and gladdened their hearts. And that was their marriage feast. Thus began the wedded life of these two. Years of struggle, poverty, and ostracism lay before them. They faced it all fearlessly. To each of them the long-denied love had come, at last, new and vivifying, changing the meaning of existence. Yet the final word of mutual revelation awaited the loosening touch. It came with tragic unexpectedness. ”

“ In his heart was the same mingling of anxiety and apathy, the same ineradicable sense of pariahdom. He had thought that the sight of England once more would have brought him a throb of gladness. It only intensified his depressing fears for the future.
The circumstances reproduced themselves with startling actuality. One of the men in charge of the tender had a great ugly seam across his face. Joyce remembered having seen him before, in just the same attitude, with a coil of rope in his hand. Had he not awakened from a minute’s dream that had covered an illusory four years of his life? ”

“ But a grown man’s sobbing is not to be checked, like a child’s. It is a terrible thing, which comes from the soul’s depths and convulses flesh and spirit to their foundations; and it is horrible to hear. The shuddering heaves came into his throat and forced their way in sound through his lips. And the utterances of pain came from him, inarticulate prayers to God to help him, and half-stifled cries for his love and for Yvonne. ”

“ It would be bliss to be idle, not to think of earning money and just to sing when you wanted. She turned her head and caught a chance glimpse of her hostess’s face. The morning light streaming full upon it showed up pitilessly the network of lines beneath her eyes and the fallen contours of her lips and the roughness of her skin. Yvonne was startled at seeing her look so old and faded—a letter to a sister-in-law detailing Everard’s folly did not conduce to sweetness of expression—and she wondered whether she, Yvonne, would be happy when she came to look like that. ”

“ It was the day after. Miss Vicary and Vandeleur had returned to town by an early train and Yvonne was spending an idle morning over the fire. She had wandered round the shelves of the morning-room in search of a novel, and had selected “Corinne” because it was French. But Yvonne was a child of the age, and children of the age do not appreciate Madame de Staël. One can understand a dear old lady in curls and cap sighing lovingly over “Corinne,” bringing back as it does memories of inky fingers and eternal friendships; but not—well, not Yvonne. ”

“ The smell of the prison floated over the footlights and filled his nostrils. All his overwrought nerves quivering with repulsion, he broke through the crowd hemming him in against the partition, and rushed down into the street.
How long and whither he walked he did not know. At last he found himself within familiar latitudes, outside the Angel Tavern. He was wet through from the fine, penetrating rain, tired, cold, and utterly miserable. The revulsion of feeling in the music-hall had thrown him back years in his self-esteem. The soil of the gaol had never seemed so ineffaceable. ”

“ Joyce walked away moodily. His cousin’s cut brought back the old familiar sense of degradation which Yvonne had charmed away. Again he realised that he was an outcast, a blot upon society, an object of scorn for men of good repute. No one but Yvonne could have befriended him and forgotten what he was. And Yvonne herself,—was her friendship not perhaps solely due to her childlike incapacity to appreciate the depths of his disgrace? He would have given anything not to have met the Canon on the stairs. ”

“ Canon Chisely stood up by his seat near the platform and looked around at the great mass of the audience, which included the flower and influence of the county, and then, turning, scanned the serried hedgerow of the orchestra, the crowding terraces of the choir, and the thin line of professionals in front, among whom Yvonne’s tiny figure had just come to make a spot of grace; and he felt a glow of pride. It was all his doing. The dream of many years was in process of being realised—the completion of the Abbey Restoration Fund. ”

“ Outside was the ceaseless hum and hurry of the street: within, the flare of the gas-jets and the sound of his own purposeless tread. And so for two hours he waited, running the gamut of his emotions with maddening iteration. The terror of losing Yvonne brought at times the perspiration to his forehead. With feverish intensity he argued out his claim upon her. She could not throw him over to go and live with that proud, unsympathetic man who must for ever be to her a stranger. Then his jealous wrath burst forth again, and again came the old hated shiver of degradation. ”

“ She was learning his humbled pride, his lacerated self-respect, his ingrained sense of degradation, his crying need of sympathy and encouragement and ennobling object in life. The strong man came to her, Yvonne, to be healed and strengthened; and, from some fresh-discovered fountain within her, she was finding remedy for maladies and sustaining draughts for weakness. A new conception of herself was dawning before her, in a great, quiet happiness; and her nature unconsciously expanded.
Thus a twofold instinct urged her to throw in her lot with Joyce. ”

“ And so, in that dingy billiard-room, unknown to the moulting Bohemians huddled up in somnolent attitudes close by on the divan and unheeded by the shirt-sleeved men passing around the table intent on their game, was struck the strangest bargain of a friendship ever made between two outcast men; a friendship that was to last through want and sickness and despair and hope, and to leave behind it the ineffaceable stamp of nobler feeling.
But at first there was much admixture of cynicism on Joyce’s side. ”

“ Before this sudden calamity the man was powerless for comfort.
“My poor little woman!” he said.
“It is worse than losing a limb,” moaned Yvonne. “I have been dreading it—hoping against hope all along. I wished I had died instead of Dina. I wish I could die now.” The tears came again. She drew away her hand and dabbed her eyes with a miserable little wet rag of a handkerchief.
“Don’t,” said Joyce, helplessly. “If you give way you will make yourself worse. They may be mistaken. Perhaps it will come again after a year or two.” ”

“ He stared at it stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt.
As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. ”

“ In a strange, imperious need of expansion, Joyce threw himself down on the wet earth and clutched the grasses and cried aloud:—
“Oh, God! I have suffered enough for my sin. Take this stain and degradation from my soul.”
After a while he arose, ashamed of his weakness, the futility of his appeal. Relighting his pipe, he clambered into the waggon, and sitting on the floor against the back, watched the portion of starry sky framed by the hood, until the first streaks of dawn announced the hour for inspanning the oxen again and continuing his journey. ”

“ A creature so yielding, so simple, so unaffected by experience or the obvious external lessons of the world, and yet standing serenely in the midst of the turmoil, seemed an incongruity—gave a sense of shock, a prompting to rescue, such as would arise from the sight of a child in the middle of a roadway clashing with traffic. She was made for protection, tenderness, all the sheltering luxuries and amenities of life. It was a flaw in the eternal fitness of things that she was alone, earning her livelihood, with nothing but her sweetness and innocence to guard her from buffeting and downfall. ”

“ A strong man would not have clung for comfort and moral support to the poor ridiculous creature, his own protection of whom was that of the woman rather than that of the man. A strong man would not have yielded to the numbing despair of the after solitude in Africa, nor writhed that night in agony of spirit upon the lonely star-lit veldt And lastly, a strong man would not have had that terror of loneliness which had made him in the first place cling to Yvonne much as a child, afraid of the dark, clings to the hand of another child weaker than itself. ”

“ Three or four young roughs, in Sunday clothes, with coarse, animal faces and discordant speech passed by below on the pavement, and noisily greeted a couple of quiet-looking girls, evidently acquaintances.
“These seem cheerful enough,” said Yvonne.
Joyce shrugged his shoulders.
“Did it ever occur to you what misery men of that type work in the world? By the laws of their class they will all marry—and marry young. Fancy a woman’s life in the hands of any of those fellows.” ”

“ The climate, the hard manual labour for which he was physically unfit were telling upon him heavily. He yearned for home, for civilised life, for the lost heritage of honour. Yvonne’s letter, telling of the little commonplaces of the lost sweet life of decent living, had revived the ever dormant longing. He began to dream of her, of that last day he had seen her, of her voice singing Gounod’s serenade.
It was difficult to picture her as married to his cousin Everard, whom, in the days of his vanity, he had despised as a prig and now dreaded as a scornful benefactor. ”

“ With a draft on a Cape Town bank for the remainder of his capital, and a last regretful letter from Yvonne in his pocket, he left Southampton. And as they steamed down Channel, in the mizzling rain of a grey November day, he leaned over the taffrail and stared at the land of his brilliant hopes, his crime, his punishment, his struggles and his dishonour, with a man’s agony of unshed tears. ”

“ Yvonne interested herself in the patients and gossiped about their progress and their eccentricities. Often her artless candour and innate love of laughter gave him details unfit perhaps for ears masculine. Then she would catch herself up, while a faint tinge of colour came into her cheek, and with still smiling eyes, say:
“I always forget that you’re a man. You ought to remind me.”
Joyce, for his part, strove to amuse her with whatever gleams of brightness he could find in his colonial adventures. Noakes grew to be the hero of an Arthurian cycle. ”

“ It awoke new and delicious stirrings of pride to feel her influence over him, to find herself of use to a man. Once she could sing, amuse—yield her lips with kind passivity to satisfy strange unknown needs. She had regarded herself with wistful seriousness in her relations with men, as a poor little instrument for men to play on. They fingered the stops, extracted what music they could, and then laid the pipe aside while they devoted themselves to the business of the world. But Stephen approached her differently from other men. ”

“ There seemed no reason why it should not continue for ever. Indeed, he scarcely thought of change. Now that his small earnings seemed practically assured and Yvonne could contribute from her singing lessons something to the household expenses, the wolf was kept pretty far from the door.
He was in one of his lighter moods, when Yvonne’s sunshine “scattered the ghosts of the past,” and illuminated the dark places in his heart. He hummed a song, forgetful of the gaol and his pariahdom, and thought of Yvonne’s face awaiting him at the tea-table, as soon as he had completed his task. ”

“ Try and love your husband, dear—give him your soul and passion. It is the only thing I can tell you to help you, dear. Then all the troubles will go. Oh, darling, to love a man vehemently—they say it is a woman’s greatest curse. It is n’t; it is the greatest blessing of God on her.”
“You are speaking as men have spoken,” replied Yvonne, in a whisper, holding her friend’s hand tightly. ”

“ On another occasion he met a troop of his cousins from Holland Park on the terrace of the British Museum. He noticed a girl recognize him and turn round another way, with a start, as he sprang hurriedly by through the folding doors. After such encounters, he cowered under the sense of everlasting disgrace. The old longing that always had lain dormant within him revived with intense poignancy; the longing to redeem his self-respect by some wild heroic deed of atonement. Sometimes he thought of realising all his capital, including the publisher’s eighty pounds and giving it to Yvonne. ”

“ When Yvonne did enter the gloom, she made it very dark indeed, and summoned every available bogey. What should she do in her old age, when she could no longer earn her living? Geraldine was always preaching thrift, but she had put nothing by as yet. If she became incapacitated to-morrow, she did not know how she would live. She looked at the fire wistfully, her brow knitted in faint lines, and found her position very pathetic. But just then Bruce, Mrs. Winstanley’s collie, rose from the rug and came and laid his chin on her knees, looking at her with great, mournful eyes. ”

“ Signs had not been wanting of a change coming over Yvonne, but he had never heard a saying on her lips of such perceptive earnestness. It was strange, too, that she had hit upon a parallel that had been in his mind since the night he had met Annie Stevens.
“Nothing can wipe it away, Yvonne. It is like a woman’s sense of degradation—just as you say.” ”

“ What do I care? When one lives, one amuses oneself. And I have well amused myself, eh, Yvonne? For the rest, je m’en fiche!”
He went on talking with airy cynicism. To Yvonne it seemed some horrible dream. The husband she had looked upon as dead was before her, gay, mocking, just as she had known him of old. And he greeted her after all these years with the-same lightness as he had bidden her farewell.
“Et toi, Yvonne?” said he at length. “Ça roule toujours? You look as if you were brewing money. Ravishing costume. ”

“ Joyce, blinded and dazed by his misery, was unperceptive of her joylessness. At the most, he was conscious of a seriousness that, under the circumstances, was not unnatural. His own pain he hid with anxious effort.
The afternoon hours passed. He lit the gas in the shop, and proceeded with whatever mechanical employment he could find. It was a relief to be alone. The old man’s gossip would have jarred upon him, driven him up to the sitting-room where the ordeal was fiercest, or out into the hard-featured streets. He would have two or three days of solitude before Runcle returned from Exeter. ”

“ If she had carried her own charming insouciance into working homes, she would have won all hearts. But, morbidly conscious of the responsibilities of her position, she judged it her duty to cast frivolity from her and to put on the serious dignity of the Rector’s wife, which fitted her as easily as a suit of armour. As for theology, she read with a zeal only equalled by her incapacity of appreciating the drift of the science. To the end of her days Yvonne could see no other difference between a Churchman and a Dissenter, except that one had a pretty service and the other a dull one. ”

“ She sat down at the piano and sang Gounod’s Serenade. Something in its yearning tenderness touched the man in his softened mood. The pure passion of Yvonne’s voice pierced through the thick layers of shame and dead hopes and deadening memories that had encrusted round his heart, and met it in a tiny thrill. ”

“ Sophia Wilmington, for whom she had called, had already gone out. The Canon, who was engaged over his correspondence, she was to meet later at the Kursaal. It was a lovely morning. The line of white hotels, with their al fresco breakfast tables spread temptingly on the terraces, gleamed in the sun. The digue was bright with summer dresses. The sands below alive with tennis players, children making sand-castles, and loungers, and bathers, and horses moving among the bathing-machines. Yvonne tripped along with careless tread. ”

“ A man of sensitive, emotional temperament, however, cannot pass through such an ordeal unchanged. Some fibres must be shrivelled up, whilst others are toughened. Joyce rose in the morning with aching head and exhausted nerves, but still with a dull sense of calm. Fallacy or not, at any rate he had chosen the man’s part. The consciousness of it was an element of strength. He dressed and went downstairs.
Yvonne was already in the room, neat and dainty as usual, making the toast for breakfast. She was pale and had the faint rings below the eyes that ever tell tales on a woman’s face. ”