A Tragic End

by Gilbert Cannan

A TRAGIC END

BY GILBERT CANNAN

I

THE end was tragic because nothing happened or ever could happen. Once again life had moved too fast for Digby Tissand, who was one of those people whom everybody likes because they expect nothing and get what they expect. He was in nobody's way except his own, but fortunately he was on good terms with himself and had inherited a comfortable income. He could do what he liked but he very rarely liked anything enough to wish to do it. Yet he was affectionate, though when the affection of others came his way it hurt him because he knew he did not deserve it. He suffered from an incurable modesty.

He was a Barrister: that is, he had chambers in the Temple into which he could take refuge when the idea of entering his club became insupportable, but nobody ever briefed him except his own family, because he was incapable of speaking with authority and was always convinced by his opponent's argument. It has to be added that he was capable of the most passionate admiration but could never express it, because it seemed to him to be an intrusion upon the object of it.

Pleasant to look upon, he was good at games and in spite of his French name was almost overwhelmingly English. He had many acquaintances but no friends; and he lived in a tiny box of a flat in Westminster, because that was the place to which he had drifted when he came to London, for no particular reason except that his "set" at Oxford had all gone to London. They had succeeded, married, become important; but he remained unimportant and thereby enjoyed a certain distinction. There were times, however, when he longed for some woman to take him seriously, but that never happened and by the time he was thirty he had put that hope from him, and found consolation in adoring the heroines in books. Occasionally he met women who were like those heroines, but they were nearly always married or engaged or terrifyingly intelligent, and anyhow, in their presence, Digby could not utter a sound. In fact, their and life's refusal to take any notice of him had become a joke to which he attached all that he was capable of in the way of religious worship. When people discussed him, which was seldom, they said that he had a sense of humour.

He had a little brown moustache and absurd steady brown eyes, and he was always good-natured, never speaking unkindly of anyone and not knowing enough of what was going on about him to carry tales or gossip. It was positively indecent how people flirted in his presence. He saw nothing, because everything was too quick for him.

No woman ever decided that he ought to be married until Stella met him, and Stella made up her mind at once. She was young enough to find everybody as charming as herself, and she found Digby perfectly delightful. She saw at once that he suffered from an excessive slowness and keyed herself down to him, took the most touching pains to reveal to him what was going on in the life about them, and interpreted for him the people in the house where they were staying by means of her brilliant gift of caricature. When their characters were distorted and blown out to grotesque proportions, he could see them and laughed till he cried at Stella's sallies. In return, for the benefit of the house-party, she dressed him up and turned him into a caricature of himself at which they laughed until they cried and said that dear Mr. Tissand had such a sense of humour.

Stella was like a dancing sprite of mischief. She was eighteen, very young at that, most slender, most graceful, pale, and full of a childish dignity, and to Digby, dressed up as he was one-night in woman's clothes, there came a moment of revelation. She was the first human being he had ever seen. He smiled all over from top to toe and she seemed to him a better joke even than himself and all the worship that for years had been centred upon the joke of himself went out to her. From that moment on he knew nothing at all except that there was a moon and some pine trees and Stella in blue and himself babbling of love and beauty and Stella's lips, and her hands were in his and he was kissing them and somehow she seemed immensely large and her face was very remote, very lovely, with her head thrown back and a puzzled expression of pain in her eyes. She said nothing and he went on kissing her hands, long-fingered and lovely, because he did not know what to do next. His brain throbbed as he laboured to find what to say or do and at last, with an astounding emphasis, he said:

"The next thing is to get married."

"O! I couldn't," said Stella quietly.

"By God, you shall!" replied Digby with a violence that almost laid him flat, because he had never had a will before and he felt uncomfortably and unaccountably that this will was not his own.

She broke into a peal of happy laughter and Digby said:

"Of course you will."

"Of course I will," she said, tucking her hand into arm.

He trembled and whispered to himself:

"This is happiness. I am happy."

He wanted terribly to say it out loud but he knew that although Stella was only a child she knew far more about it than he did. It was quite extraordinary how, when she had stood with her head thrown back, there was in her eyes an expression of having gained something which she had almost lost.

After his startling revelation of will Digby was perfectly helpless. The vision of Stella that he had had was completely gone, and he began to see her as a heroine. That was disconcerting because he could not see himself as a hero, and he stood foolishly fumbling with finger and thumb at his moustache.

"O! you darling! darling little man!" cried Stella, flinging her arms round him suddenly. "You are mine, mine, mine."

Digby melted into a delicious sense of being a darling, but through it there came stabbing the knowledge that the charm he had for her was her own, and that it had all happened because she was so very young, and so vital, and so unaware of what she was: a lovely thing, no longer child and not yet woman. He mumbled:

"I don't think we quite know—?"

But she pressed her hand over his lips and would not let him speak, and tears trickled down his cheek and he knew that he was not a man or anything like one: just a joke, just an oddity. So he broke into blubbering:

"I adore you. I adore you."

Stella hugged him for that, took him firmly by the hand and led him back to the house.

II

All night long he lay sweating with horror at what he had done. The idea that he had taken a positive step was a terror to him, but directly he thought of Stella he was helpless. Her charm oozed over him, made him glow, stiffen into an unwonted and intoxicating virility which collapsed at the most inconvenient moments, just, for instance, when he saw himself as heroic, making a career for himself for her sake, or writing that comic book he had often thought of to make her laugh. Not a wink of sleep did he get all night, and he thought, as the greyest of grey dawns came slinking up the sky:

"This is going to be horrible, horrible."

He felt that he had not a friend in the world. Not the slightest desire did he have to get up and face a new day. Once he was with Stella he knew that he would be safe. She was so strong, so vividly alive, so quick, but he would have to see her at breakfast with other people and after breakfast, some time or other, he would have to tell them. And then of course Stella had a father and mother: and brothers no doubt, brilliant fellows, who did things and understood everything that was going on around them: sisters possibly, like Stella but different, with cleverness instead of knowledge. Astounding how easy it was to construct a whole family out of Stella.

At last, gloomily staring out of the window, Digby reached the conclusion:

"I wish I wasn't such a damn fool."

That was the best he could do in the circumstances, and it was enough to get him out of bed and downstairs without further tremor.

Stella had been up for hours. She was waiting for him downstairs with a basket of mushrooms.

"You like them, don't you?" she said. "I'm not going to let anybody else eat them."

Her charm this morning was cool and dewy and less than ever could Digby resist it.

"I didn't expect," he said, "I didn't expect you to begin at once to think of feeding me."

"That is the very first thing I thought of when I woke up," she replied. "Do let us always live in the country. You look so nice in flannels."

"Anywhere you like," said Digby, "only we ought always to live in the summer, because you—well —you know—you look—" He became inarticulate with love of her.

At breakfast there was no need to explain. Everybody was delighted. Digby was "such a dear" and the general feeling was that Stella was safer married, and there was not the slightest tinge of jealousy to mar the general happiness, because the idea of marrying Digby had never before crossed any female mind. High spirits prevailed, and Digby found, as other men have found, that once the idea of his marriage was accepted he had very little to do with it. He liked that because he was used to living automatically, but he resented Stella's being taken away from him and transformed out of being Stella into a bride. She escaped every now and then but never for very long. It seemed that the whole wisdom of her sex had to be imparted to her. Digby found that life was moving faster than ever before and gave it up as hopeless. Only with and through. Stella could he cope with it.

She was the first to leave the party, and after she had gone he found that he could not endure either the place or the people. This was strange, because he had never before disliked anything or anyone. So he escaped and found even his adored London; London of the Temple and the Club and Piccadilly shining like a river on a wet night, even that home of homes, dull, but acutely, torturingly dull, and his only occupation in it was and could be to tell his friends that he was going to be married to Stella. That he loathed doing, because it made him realize for the first time in his life that no one had ever taken him seriously. And, without Stella, they would not do so now.

He was just getting into his tail-coat when he remembered Mrs. Marwood. He sat down heavily and pulled at his collar.

Mrs. Marwood was a lady some years his senior on whom he had been in the habit of calling every Sunday since he was eighteen, and every Sunday he had aired his opinions in her drawing-room, an apartment sacred to that rite. In no other place was Digby aware that he had an opinion, but Mrs. Marwood had created the habit in him and because his experience with her was unique he had liked her. Occasionally he took her to the theatre or to concerts, but he knew nothing about her except that she was beautiful and dined with eminent persons and entertained distinguished foreigners when they came to London. Perhaps, at bottom, that was why Digby liked her flat, because what pleased him most in London was the number of people who were doing terribly important things the necessity for which he could never understand. For over twelve years he had been going to her house, but the things that went on there were no more intelligible to him than they had been in the beginning, and Mrs. Marwood remained an admirable mystery.

And now suddenly she had become a menace, the nature of which Digby could not fathom. Dressed for calling, he called on her—patent-leather boots, chamois gloves, yellow cane, silk' hat. He stared distastefully at the door of her flat and when it was opened handed in his card and bolted breathlessly, saying to himself:

"I will write."

He found it difficult to write, but at last squeezed out of himself a bare statement that he was going to be married, though the words he used did not in the least describe the process through which he was passing. They had seemed well enough with his friends and relations, but with Mrs. Marwood they were inadequate; but when he looked back on it he found that he had always felt that life itself was just a little inadequate for the lady, whose tragedy it was that, in her own eyes, she had been born twenty years before her time. Digby had admired her for being tragic, and when he was very young he used to sit for hours while she talked about it, and told him the things that great men had said about her: "A woman in stone watching Time go by." That was one of the phrases, but the best were in French, a language which Digby did not understand.

All these things trickled through his brain as he wrote, and filled him with an increasing distaste and uneasiness. Even writing long silly letters to Stella did not relieve him, because the more he wrote the more incredible seemed the thing that had happened to him.

At last the day came when, armed with his solicitor's statement of his unimpeachable financial condition, he was to visit Stella's parents. He was received at the door of the modern Jacobean suburban country house by Stella with her arm round Mrs. Marwood's waist. Stella beamed, Mrs. Marwood beamed. Digby reeled.

"I am so delighted," said Mrs. Marwood. "I have known Stella since she was a baby."

That was a shock too. Digby had never thought of Stella as a baby. She was a thing that shone in beauty under pine-trees and the moon.

He bowed but could find nothing to say. The situation was overwhelmingly unexpected, and he had never been in a situation before. That indeed had been the cardinal fact of his existence until Stella came to displace it. "I'm—I'm glad," he muttered, "very glad."

Mrs. Marwood tactfully left the young people.

"I think she's wonderful," said Stella enthusiastically."And she speaks so warmly about you. Her knowing you has made all the difference in the world Dad thought you were just an ordinary house-party young man."

Those words rang dismally in Digby's heart. He knew that described him exactly, and he stood stupidly wondering if situations always forced out the truth and if that was why people avoided them.

"You don't look pleased," said Stella.

"O! yes. I'm pleased. Only I didn't expect—"

"What?"

"Mrs. Marwood."

III

How he got married Digby never knew. He had painful flashes and glimmerings through the whirl of women and clothes and house-agents' catalogues which a wedding seemed to entail. It was all very painful and humiliating and whenever a decision had to be made it was referred to Mrs. Marwood, until at last by familiarity it began to be forced upon Digby’s sluggish memory that there was nothing new in all this and that Mrs. Marwood had interfered in his existence before, had indeed always done so ever since he had known her, though he could not exactly say how: a subtle process that had been spread out over so many years that he had no more suspected it than he had the connection between his income and what the newspapers called social injustice. For the first time in his life he was filled with a feeling of active dislike, and as he stood in his flat, pulling his moustache and slowly cogitating this new sensation of his, he was astonished to hear himself say:

"Yes. By Jove. That's it. There are too many women in the world."

As America to Columbus was this discovery to him. He stepped upon the firm but inhospitable land of thought, and was instantly afraid. His brain twinged in protest, but the adventure was begun, and he saw himself in a flash of vision as isolated in the wilderness with Stella and Mrs. Marwood, Stella young and radiant, Mrs. Marwood faded and worn, and it seemed to him that life had stopped still, indeed had always been still and that he had been wrong to think of it as moving too fast for him. He had been right to sit still and everybody else had been wrong to try and overtake life. It never moved. It just took shape and slowly emerged, and the only thing to do was to watch life—just that. How could one do thing else? After all, there was he, there was Stella, and there was Mrs. Marwood, Stella like a wood in primrose-time and Mrs. Marwood like the same wood when the leaves have fallen.

"By Jove," said Digby, gasping with excitement. "By Jove, I'm a philosopher, and . . . damn it all, I'm a . . . I'm a poet."

That exaltation did not last long, and he admitted frankly that he was after all only a man on the point of being married.

Married he was. Stella was a perfectly adorable bride, and she revelled in her honeymoon. Not again was Digby troubled with thought. He smoked, read, talked, boasted, laughed, kissed, wept, and was the normal husband. Stella teased, cajoled, explored his temper, his tastes, his humour, his appetites, and put on womanhood as gracefully as she did her clothes.

When they returned to the world, they had a small house in town, a larger house in the country, a motor car—and Mrs. Marwood, whom, curiously enough, they never discussed, though nothing was done without her being consulted. Digby remembered occasionally that this, in the small matters of every-day existence, had been his habit, but it irritated him to see Stella emulating him. Yet he could say nothing. Stella was happy. That was the chief, the only consideration. Sometimes she lost her temper with him for his reiteration of the question:

"Are you happy?"

Once indeed she lost her temper so violently that when she asked him why he couldn't assume that she was happy he replied with the touching frankness which sometimes overcame him:

"I've nothing else to do."

He was filled with a sense of disaster when Mrs. Marwood offered him a job in a political organisation. He knew perfectly well that Stella had consulted Mrs. Marwood, and though his soul protested against it, he accepted. It meant seeing Mrs. Marwood continually, and he began to understand the meaning of her mysterious activities and the atmosphere of importance with which she was surrounded. He also saw that Mrs. Marwood had been trying to get him to do this very thing for a dozen years. The glow of triumph in the woman forced him to see that and he marvelled at the tenacity of purpose in women. . . .

Stella grew every day more beautiful and more lovable, and Digby felt himself growing every day more commonplace and helpless. Sometimes he was terrified. Here was he living, a solitary male, in a house with five females, his wife, Mrs. Marwood, a cook, and two maids. That was an awful thought to him, and it drove him into a mood of violent hostility which lasted for some weeks and at last produced the thing for which he had been hungering—another situation, even though it might be fatal, as, granted his ill-equipment, it probably would be.

It came one night at dinner. Stella had just told him that she thought she was going to have a baby. He should have been happy but was utterly miserable. He wanted a son and was quite certain the baby would be a girl. Mrs. Marwood dropped in at the last moment. She looked tired and really old, a woman who had lost her capacity for physical sympathy. The government was not doing what she thought it ought to do.

"To hell with the government!" said Digby.

"Digby!" cried Stella.

"To hell with politics!" he continued, and he wanted to send a good many things after them, but once again he began to think. His temper vanished. He was filled with a strange clear ecstasy, and he saw the two women sitting there on either side of him as terrible monsters who hated and loathed each other and were bound together in their hatred and in their common concentration upon himself, both demanding of him something that was not there, that could not be there, something that had existed that night under the moon and the pine-trees, something that was not in him or in any man, something perhaps that only women of all things created can perceive in life, something that turns the terror of existence into charm. His lips twitched into a ghastly smile, and he was just about to speak his thought the ecstasy snapped, and he knew that he would never think again.

He laughed a little hysterically, and Stella said:

"Is anything the matter, darling?"

"Oh! no," he replied. "Oh! no. I was just—er—a—" He became apologetic. "A—thinking, what a joke life is.”

"I always did say," murmured Mrs. Marwood in her sweet low tone, "I always did say that Digby had a delightful sense of humour."

Digby sank into silence. It was over. Everything was over. Never again for him would there be another situation. Life might be good to Stella: he hoped to God it might be; but life, which had never troubled much about him, had finished with him for ever. Nothing had happened. Nothing ever could happen. He had expected nothing and had got what he expected.