This Was Ivor Trent полностью

“I’ll lend you my will.”

“Can you do that?” she asked, quite seriously, her voice a child-like blend of surprise and curiosity.

“Yes. If, suddenly, you feel you must tell him, you will say to yourself—I will see Ivor to-morrow and then both of us will tell him. That’s what you’ll say.”

She accepted this as a heaven-sent solution. A moment later she had forgotten Vivian’s existence and was laughing at her reflection in the mirror.

But that night at ten o’clock my telephone bell rang.

“Ivor!”

“Yes.”

(I had to be monosyllabic, for Vera Thornton was in the room.)

“I’m in a public telephone-box. He had to go out. It was inevitable about us, wasn’t it? You said it was inevitable.”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“I knew you were, but I had to hear you say it. I’m certain, too—now. To-morrow?”

“To-morrow.”

What Vivian would suffer if he knew! That was the rock round which her imagination seethed. She made his values hers; saw the situation with his eyes. This was her rack, and again and again she stretched herself upon it.

She would devise the most fantastic solutions in order to ease her suffering.

“Ivor! Listen! Perhaps, if he knew, he wouldn’t mind. Yes, yes! Wait! If he knew that you had saved our marriage, he—might—don’t you think?”

I would calm her with a word. It was only necessary to make an entirely definite statement in a tone of authority for her to accept it as if God had spoken.

“If only you would teach me to be strong, like you! Do you know, last night, I laughed in my sleep. He told me so this morning.”

“Well, don’t let it go any further,” I began, but she clutched my arm.

“Ivor!”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I’ve told everything in my sleep! And perhaps he heard—and doesn’t mind. Is that possible, do you think?”

Every other day she imagined a new solution. It was curious how, having no consciousness of guilt herself, she suffered agonies of remorse through accepting his standards. Nevertheless, despite this vicarious suffering, the improvement in her health was astonishing. She looked years younger than the woman I had met at the Laidlaws.

One afternoon, when we had been lovers for some months, she made a new suggestion—and a startling one.

“I want you to meet him, Ivor. I want you to come to the flat—often!”

“Why?”

“It—it will seem more—more regular.”

She was looking at me with great, serious eyes.

“You will do that for me?” she added.

“Yes, if you like.”

She seized my hands impulsively.

“Why do you love me, Ivor?”

“Because you give me a sense of power.”

She laughed and began to talk about something else, but—a week later—I was asked to dine at the Vivians.

Vivian knew I had met Rosalie since the night at the Laidlaws. She had told him that she had run into me somewhere else, and that we had become friends. Consequently the suggestion that I should dine with them was more likely to allay suspicion than to provoke it.

The flat was an extension of Vivian. He had lived in it as a bachelor and, with one exception, it was now what it had been then. Rosalie had merely been imported into it. The exception was her own intimate room which, before Vivian married, had not been used, the flat being a large one. To cross the threshold was to leave one world and enter another.

Vivian’s furniture was solid, handsome, heavy. It regarded you with the dull pride of immutability. You were transitory: it was permanent. Each piece had its place and would remain in it. There it stood—a symbol of its owner’s virtues.

Vivian regarded other people, not as individuals, but as types. To discover to which type a man belonged, all that was necessary was to know what he did. I was a writer. Very well, then! I was the “artist” type.

Now, with Vivian and his friends, art would have been dismissed as a piece of foolishness had it not been for the fact that certain pictures sold for stupendous sums of money, and certain writers made incomes which were not to be denied. Also, eccentric members of the aristocracy were genuinely interested in art and showed clearly that they did not regard it as ingenious tomfoolery. Vivian, therefore, feigned respect for it while privately regarding it as super-nonsense.

My opinion of him was wholly at variance with Rosalie’s, though I did not tell her so. She regarded him as kind, indulgent, unselfish. To me, he possessed none of those qualities. He was a man who was quite certain that certain things could never happen to him. They happened to others, of course—but not to him.

What convinced me of this was the manner in which he referred to Rosalie’s illnesses. His attitude implied that his wife ought not to have had nervous collapses. (He always referred to her as “my wife.”) He could find no explanation of these breakdowns. She had every comfort, every attention. They went away frequently and she did not lack amusement. Why, then, nervous collapses?

It was plain that he regarded them as disturbances in an otherwise satisfactory and well-organised life. They were the only contact he had ever had with Failure.