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Page 53
CHAPTER XVII
THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen
up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful
flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her
journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal
was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.
"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.
He examined the heart.
"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of
medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.
So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to
study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he
too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent
schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with
excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an
open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course
of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and
upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express
trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been
appeased by a telegram.
Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory,
ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.
Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate
he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked
like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which
seemed to be a feature of the New Life.
The New Life was not exhausting. He had an idea that he could keep it up
indefinitely. But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he
was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming,
stagnant calm. Before long he would be given over to dullness and
immitigable ennui.
A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly. He would have
pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got
something to do. And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson
would have done. Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant
husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions.
Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious
there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest
source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that
flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an
extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful
activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed indoors, lounging
in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he
hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife's
bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by
her side. In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness' sake, and get
some fresh air. Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned
through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he
left before the end of the first act. Hereditary conscience rose up and
thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist
minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar
and dragged him home. Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into
shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that
would "suit my wife." Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he
brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally
extravagant tastes. The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped
with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful
eyes.
She was perpetually thinking now; she lay there weaving long chains of
reasoning from the flowers of her innocent fancy, chains so brittle and
insubstantial, they would have offered no support to any creature less
light than she. If Tyson was more than usually sulky, that was the
serious side of him coming out; if he was silent, well, everybody knows
that the deepest feelings are seldom expressed in words; if he was
atrociously irritable, it was no wonder, considering the strain he had
undergone, poor fellow. She reminded herself how he had cried over her
like a child; she rehearsed that other scene of confession and
forgiveness--the tender, sacred words, the promises and vows. Already
the New Life was passing into the life of memory, while she told herself
that it could not pass. It takes so much to make a strong man cry, you
know. When doubts came, she always fell back on the argument from tears.
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