The Helpmate | Page 2

back to bed; you'll catch cold."
He waited.

"How long are you going to sit there in that draught?"
She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the
keen air of the dawn. Majendie raised himself on his elbow. He could
just see her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled,
hanging to her waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and
ashamed, but something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude
appealed to the devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and
disastrous humour. The right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry
as he was. He sat up on his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial
informality.
"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think
we'd better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk
seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,
you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."
(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine
I'm ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on
my pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you
suppose I'm going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a
blessed Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument
of all the Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you
not?"
She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,
sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and
married had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie
believing him to be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that
nothing but his own words or his own silence could have cast it out.
She had loved Walter Majendie; but it was another man who called to
her, and she would not listen to him. She felt that she could never go
back to that man, never sit in the same room, or live in the same house
with him again. She would have to make up her mind what she would
do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get away from him, to sit there in the
cold, inflexible, insensitive, to obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from
him, while she martyrised her body which was wedded to him, that was
the young, despotic instinct she obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."
He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it
tenderly about her shoulders.
"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."
He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back
and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered
that Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an
insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable
nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless
humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had
insulted her. Her heart grew harder.
"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before
her with his hand on the window sill.
She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it
seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that
maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the
dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved his
slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the strong
jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she divined
only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved his eyes,
the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had loved best of
all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they smiled even now.
"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.
You shall have the whole place to yourself."
And with that he left her.
She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to
hide the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting
herself by the bedside.
Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in

turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to
some holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that,
even in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with
breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself
marshalling the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled