第83章

There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast-tray.'Father is going to London this week,and I shall call for you on Thursday week,June 17th.

You must be ready so that we can go at once.I don't want to waste time at Wragby,it's an awful place.I shall probably stay the night at Retford with the Colemans,so I should be with you for lunch,Thursday.Then we could start at teatime,and sleep perhaps in Grantham.It is no use our spending an evening with Clifford.If he hates your going,it would be no pleasure to him.'

So!She was being pushed round on the chess-board again.

Clifford hated her going,but it was only because he didn't feel safe in her absence.Her presence,for some reason,made him feel safe,and free to do the things he was occupied with.He was a great deal at the pits,and wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he'd got it out.He knew he ought to find some way of using it,or converting it,so that he needn't sell it,or needn't have the chagrin of failing to sell it.But if he made electric power,could he sell that or use it?

And to convert into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate.To keep industry alive there must be more industry,like a madness.

It was a madness,and it required a madman to succeed in it.Well,he was a little mad.Connie thought so.His very intensity and acumen in the affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her,his very inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.

He talked to her of all his serious schemes,and she listened in a kind of wonder,and let him talk.Then the flow ceased,and he turned on the loudspeaker,and became a blank,while apparently his schemes coiled on inside him like a kind of dream.

And every night now he played pontoon,that game of the Tommies,with Mrs Bolton,gambling with sixpences.And again,in the gambling he was gone in a kind of unconsciousness,or blank intoxication,or intoxication of blankness,whatever it was.Connie could not bear to see him.But when she had gone to bed,he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the morning,safely,and with strange lust.Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as much as Clifford:the more so,as she nearly always lost.

She told Connie one day:'I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.'

'And did he take the money from you?'asked Connie aghast.

'Why of course,my Lady!Debt of honour!'

Connie expostulated roundly,and was angry with both of them.The upshot was,Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton's wages a hundred a year,and she could gamble on that.Meanwhile,it seemed to Connie,Clifford was really going deader.

She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.

'Seventeenth!'he said.'And when will you be back?'

'By the twentieth of July at the latest.'

'Yes!the twentieth of July.'

Strangely and blankly he looked at her,with the vagueness of a child,but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.

'You won't let me down,now,will you?'he said.

'How?'

'While you're away,I mean,you're sure to come back?'

'I'm as sure as I can be of anything,that I shall come back.'

'Yes!Well!Twentieth of July!'

He looked at her so strangely.

Yet he really wanted her to go.That was so curious.He wanted her to go,positively,to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant,and all that.At the same time,he was afraid of her going.

She was quivering,watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether,waiting till the time,herself himself should be ripe.

She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.

'And then when I come back,'she said,'I can tell Clifford I must leave him.And you and I can go away.They never need even know it is you.We can go to another country,shall we?To Africa or Australia.Shall we?'

She was quite thrilled by her plan.

'You've never been to the Colonies,have you?'he asked her.

'No!Have you?'

'I've been in India,and South Africa,and Egypt.'

'Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'

'We might!'he said slowly.

'Or don't you want to?'she asked.

'I don't care.I don't much care what I do.'

'Doesn't it make you happy?Why not?We shan't be poor.I have about six hundred a year,I wrote and asked.It's not much,but it's enough,isn't it?'

'It's riches to me.'

'Oh,how lovely it will be!'

'But I ought to get divorced,and so ought you,unless we're going to have complications.'

There was plenty to think about.

Another day she asked him about himself.They were in the hut,and there was a thunderstorm.

'And weren't you happy,when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?'

'Happy?All right.I liked my Colonel.'

'Did you love him?'

'Yes!I loved him.'

'And did he love you?'

'Yes!In a way,he loved me.'

'Tell me about him.'

'What is there to tell?He had risen from the ranks.He loved the army.

And he had never married.He was twenty years older than me.He was a very intelligent man:and alone in the army,as such a man is:a passionate man in his way:and a very clever officer.I lived under his spell while I was with him.I sort of let him run my life.And I never regret it.'

'And did you mind very much when he died?'

'I was as near death myself.But when I came to,I knew another part of me was finished.But then I had always known it would finish in death.

All things do,as far as that goes.'

She sat and ruminated.The thunder crashed outside.It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.

'You seem to have such a lot behind you,'she said.

'Do I?It seems to me I've died once or twice already.Yet here I am,pegging on,and in for more trouble.'

She was thinking hard,yet listening to the storm.

'And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman,when your Colonel was dead?'