Chapter 19

When Christopher arrived in Hertford Street from Scotland a week later, Mrs. Mitcham met him in the hall of the flat. He knew nothing of what had happened at Chickover. Catherine had written him a brief scribble the day she left, telling him she was going to Virginia, and as he hadn’t had a word since, and found his holiday, which he anyhow hated, completely intolerable directly she cut him off from her by silence, he decided it was no longer to be endured; and flinging his things together, and remarking to Lewes that he was fed up, he started for London, getting there hard on the heels of a telegram he had sent Mrs. Mitcham.

She came into the hall when she heard his latchkey in the door. Her face looked longer than ever, and her clothes seemed blacker.

‘Oh, sir,’ she began at once, taking his coat from him, ‘isn’t it dreadful.’

‘What is?’ asked Christopher, twisting round and looking at her, quick fear in his heart.

‘Miss Virginia——’

He breathed again. For a terrible moment he had thought——

‘What has she been doing?’ he asked, suddenly indifferent, for the having of babies hadn’t entered his consciousness as anything dangerous; if it were, the whole place wouldn’t be littered with them.

Mrs. Mitcham stared at him out of red-rimmed eyes.

‘Doing, sir?’ she repeated, stung by the careless way he spoke; and for the first and last time in her life sarcastic, she said with dignified rebuke, ‘Only dying, sir.’

It was his turn to stare, his eyes very wide open, while dismay, as all that this dying meant became clear to him, stole into them. ‘Dying? That girl? Do you mean——’

‘Dead, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, her head well up, her gaze, full of rebuke and dignity, on his.

Too late to go down that night. No trains any more that night. But there was the motor-bicycle. Catherine—Catherine in grief—he must get to her somehow...

And once again Christopher rushed westwards to Catherine. Through the night he rushed in what seemed great jerks of speed interrupted by things going wrong, every conceivable thing going wrong, as if all hell and all its devils were in league to trip him up and force him each few miles to stand aside and look on impotently while the hours, not he, flew past.

She hadn’t sent for him. She was suffering and away, and hadn’t sent for him. But he knew why. It was because she couldn’t bear, after all the things he had said about Virginia, to smite him with the fact of her death. Or else she herself was so violently hit that she had been stunned into that strange state people got into when death was about, and thought no longer of what was left, of all the warmth and happiness life still went on being full of, but only of what was gone.

But whatever she was feeling or not able to feel, she was his, his wife, to help and comfort; and if she was so much numbed that help and comfort couldn’t reach her, he would wait by her side till she woke up again. What could it be like down there, he asked himself as the black trees and hedges streamed past him, what could it possibly be like for Catherine, shut up in that unhappy house, with young Virginia dead? That girl dead. Younger by years than himself. And her husband... ‘Oh, Lord—my Catherine,’ he thought, tearing along faster and faster, ‘I must get her out of it—get her home—love her back to life——’

Pictures of her flashed vivid in his mind, lovely little pictures, such as had haunted him with increasing frequency the longer his holiday without her dragged on; and he saw her in them with the eye of starved passion, a most lovely little Catherine, far, far prettier than she had ever been in her prettiest days, —so sweet with her soft white skin, so sweet with her soft dark hair, so sweet with her soft grey eyes, and her face lit up with love, —love all and only for him. And he who had thought, those last days before Scotland, that there was too much love about! He all but swerved into a ditch when he remembered this piece of incredible folly. Well, he knew now what life was like for him away from her: it was like being lost in the frozen dark.