Speaker 1: The second wife by merry, heat and force, more poignant
than the facts of life, with as much power as
the elemental needs of the body, The unseen still shapes
the lives of vast peoples. In some black corners of
the earth, strange demons still call out for human sacrifice.
Mysterious and powerful are these voiceless companions of men. We alone,
of all ages and peoples, have denied them. We have
cut away our shadows from our spirits. And perhaps that
is why the spirits of modern men seem unsubstantial, as
a body would, which could cast no dark silhouette behind
it around the paths of men. The unseen exists always,
and it may come to anyone and at any moment,
as it did to Beta and to Graham. The mellow
afternoon light shone through the quiet spaces of the room, which,
simple as it was, bare, almost some would have said,
had the supreme beauty of proportion. It had an air
about it, a gracious gravity, which proclaimed it of the
honorable lineage of lovingly built houses. It gave the effect
of space, even of elegance, if for no other reason
than that its three dimensions were in harmony for the
first time, its charms failed with beta, its beneficent dignity
mocked at her, affecting her with the same anger that
the unthinking beauty of a glorious day does to one
in deep trouble. This room, her room, her creature, How
dare it breathes peace while she suffered with unrest? If
there had been any reason for it, she could have
borne it. She had stood up with gallantry to all
the blows that fate had handed out to her. No
matter what had happened, her inner self had been serene
and unshaken. And now, for no reason, with all the
surfaces of life fair and smiling before her, a horror, unspeakable, reasonless,
invaded the secret places of her being. She sat there
saying to herself, I will not, I will not. I
will not. They can't make me. They can't make me.
They can't make me. And with the words once spoken,
it was as though her spirit cried out against something unknown,
as though she fought for her own self and for
something very dear to her, and yet she didn't know
what she was fighting. The outward symbol of this struggle
was so trivial, so meaningless, that she shivered at herself,
as though her reason was failing her. There was a
bowl of yellow jonquills gleaming out of a dark corner
of the room, reflecting themselves on the dark floor in
a splash of color. Beda had been moved with an
impulse to take these flowers and place them between the windows,
where the light would shine through them, on a small
round table on which was inlaid a landscape in mother
of pearl, a table that might have been hideous, but
had turned out to be only a charming indiscretion of
some cabinet maker. This whim so harmless in its outer meaning,
had come over her like an overpowering wave. Yet it
had come not as her own wish. It was as
though it arose from the passionate desire of some will
outside her own to steady herself. Bada sat down in
the rosewood chair and said to herself, I will not,
I will not, as though fighting for her own individuality.
This impulse, with its meaningless madness, had come as suddenly,
as shatteringly as some explosion. Dread shook her through and through,
a dread that left her tense and expectant. Why she
hadn't felt that way for three years, not since she
had waited for one of Elaine's terrible, meaningless, heartrending scenes,
scenes that Graham and she knew were caused by Elaine's illness,
and yet scenes that gave the effect of wantonness, as
if Elaine wanted to make them suffer too. Since her
nerves were diseased, since her soul was poisoned, and god
knows what mysterious fashion, she couldn't let them off, the
two creatures dearest to her, but must encompass them also
in the hell where she lived. In spite of bade
us care and Graham's devotion, Elaine had got worse and worse,
until it seemed to them that madness stared from her eyes.
She had died from an overdose of her sleeping potion,
an accidental death, the doctor had insisted. This had been
three years ago. After Elaine's death, Graham had gone abroad,
and for a year Beta hadn't seen him. Just when
after his return she had begun to care for him,
She couldn't now tell. They had drifted into it, gone
in step by step. She couldn't even remember when he
had asked her to marry him, so well had they understood.
She had been married six months now, and until this moment,
she had been happier than she had ever been in
her life, happier than she had known it was possible
to be. The eighteen months that she had spent nursing
a Lane and the final catastrophe had left her stunned,
asking of life only quiet. She had had peace and rest,
and then happiness, and now was broken for no reason.
Broken for so absurd a thing. It was especially hard
for Beta to bear. She didn't know how to meet
moods she had never had any. It was almost her
first experience with any unhappiness from within, her first experience
of that overwhelming misery that comes unreasoning from the inner
recesses of the spirit, something more full of anguish than pain,
something that makes grief seem God's compassion and sorrow as
sweet as a gray day in midsummer. She sought for
some cause of such disturbance, her trained mind running rapidly
through the events of the last few days as an
expert might riffle a deck of cards. There was no
explanatory spot or fleck on the fair surface of the
kindly and familiar events. I must be sick, she thought,
and again sought for some symptom that might satisfy her.
There was nothing. It was as ghostly to have her
spirit so disturbed as for doors to slam and windows rattle,
when the trees remain quiet without and while her heart beat,
and while the tortured nerves of her cry out the
more torturingly that she did not know the source of
her pain, her tranquil head thought, I must treat this
mood as I used to Elanes. At this thought, her
heart stood still, then leaped, like a frightened animal in
fear for its very life, and as though in actual
physical terror of some unseen menace. She fled toward the
sunshine of the garden, glancing apprehensively behind her, not for
fear of what she might see, but from a feeling
as inexplicable as all the rest, that she wished no
one to see her go, not the servants, not Graham,
especially not Graham. She heard his voice call to her Beta,
dear Beda. So happy it was so reassuring that suddenly
her fear vanished, as though it had wakened her from
torturing nightmare. She felt her actual body coming back to
life as one breathes easily for the first time again
after one has been overwhelmed by a crashing wave. Her
heart beat freely again, the intolerable racking of her spirit
passed by color returned to her cheeks. Only as she
saw Graham coming toward her through the open door. She
repressed an impulse to throw herself about his neck, as
though he had really delivered her from herself. That evening,
the idea of telling Graham flitted through her mind, coming
and going like a shadow cast by a flickering flame.
In the end, she decided not to, and as she did,
a sadness fell over her spirit, while her mind argued,
poor Graham, why should I tell him anything so vague
and at the same time so fantastic. Hasn't he had
enough of the inexplicable in his life? Then, at this
thought of Elaine, it seemed as if Elaine was there.
Veda had all the sensation of seeing her without the
actual visualization Elaine. Sitting her dark rimmed eyes on Graham.
She watched them fill slowly with tears, watched Elaine's face
quiver like that of a hurt child that asks, oh,
why do you so wound me? Beta had sat there
often enough through what seemed a long lifetime of vicarious pain,
pretending not to notice Graham's irrepressible discomfort, pretending not to
notice Elaine's gathering nerve storm which sometimes threatened and threatened,
poisoning their lives, poisoning the very air, sometimes passing over,
leaving sunlight behind. Recalling these things, Beta let her eyes
rest on vacancy. What prevented one, she wondered, from seeing
with one's actual eyes, anyone whom one could see with
what is called the mind's eye. There have always been people,
sick and well, who could project their inner vision into
space and thus behold their own imaginings and realities. Beta
dwelt in this way on the image of Elane, absorbed
as a devotee is absorbed in the contemplation of the
attributes of deity. After a time, it was as though
her visualization of Elaine had been projected into space, and
that this thought of her was there, clothed in form
and invisible, but existing somehow in another medium. She wondered
if it were true that the things seen by dreamers
have their real existence in some fluid which we may
not perceive. Here Graham's voice broke in upon her, asking
what are you thinking of beta? So intensely She had
been plunged so profoundly in her train of thought, The
crystal mirror of her reflection had been shattered so unexpectedly
that she jumped nervously. It seemed as if her spirit
had come swimming up from some far depth in which
it had plunged itself. She realized, too, that she had
been looking directly at Graham that threw him and beyond him,
as if she had penetrated far enough into this land
which she had so fantastically imagined, so that the things
of this world had become for the moment nonexistent, as
are usually the things we cannot see. For a moment,
her mind and eyes and all of her had dwelt
in some almost luminous vacancy which had been cleared of
so called actuality for a new creation of her own.
Her return to the physical world, to Graham and to
familiar things in the room was a shock, as of
physical pain. She had been awakened too abruptly. She looked
at him, dazed, frowning, at the same time, registering the
troubled and anxious look on his face, a look of doubt,
a look of wonder a look of some deeper trouble. Also,
in answer to his question, came unbidden the words why
do you look at me like that? Graham? He arose
and put his arms around her, But before he spoke,
he swallowed, as though speech came to him. With an effort.
With his arms around her, his face close to hers,
something snapped in Beta's mind, like a joint coming back
into place. She had yet the impression of having been
away a very great distance. What were you thinking of
just now? He repeated? She answered, with absolute truthfulness, I
don't know. I almost seemed to be hypnotized. The shock
of his voice had, for the second obliterated the object
of her deep absorption. Graham shook her roughly. Well, don't
do it again, please, he said, I don't like your looks?
What do I look like? She was perfectly natural. Now
The whole phantasmagoria had vanished out of her spirit, as
though it had not been. I don't like your looks,
he repeated, That's all. He had, the evasive and uneasy
air of a man who doesn't like to tell what
is in his mind. The following day, Bada succeeded in
overcoming the feeling of distrust with the whole universe, which
the inexplicable breeds in a direct and common sense temperament,
she overcame herself. Yet she didn't go into the drawing room,
and the drawing room was as much lived in by
her as was Graham's library by him. For the effect
of that terrible and spectral battle remained with her, as
though some shadow had been cast across her spirit. Pushed
into the farthest recesses of her mind, was the question why,
why why? Nor could she rid herself of the idea
that there was more to come, nor of a nameless
and reasonless spear, that in some strange way she had
given up some of her personality. With the passing of
the days, the shadow dwindled, until one day Beta went
again into her room. Yellow flowers, picked freshly, stood in
a bowl upon her secretary. At the sight of them,
there hot anger surged up within her, making her tingle
from head to toe swiftly, and yet with a certain furtiveness,
as though she were being watched. She picked them up
and carried them back to their place in the window,
and placed them on the little inlaid table between the windows,
where the light would shine through them. As she did so,
there came over her a very agony of desire to
see Graham. She wanted him to come home. She wondered
where he was and with whom, and impatience to go
out and find him wherever he was plucked at her feet.
She looked at her watch. It was almost time for
his return to luncheon, and she posted herself at the
window before which the flowers stood, and which commanded a
view of the elm shaded street, to wait for him.
As she stood there in a fever of impatience and
longing and affection, she felt as though her whole personality
had been invaded by an emotion foreign to her own temperament.
Her love had been from the first deep and profound,
the surface of it radiant, but without anguish of spirit.
They knew each other too well for uncertainties or surprises.
They had been friends so long before they had become lovers.
The knowledge that he would soon come, that he would
come when he said he would, had been enough for her.
Why this impatience, she wondered, where did it come from?
This passionate agony of longing for the sight of his face.
She stood there peering out from the window. She was
so sure he must come down that road, her gaze
so lost in the distance for the first glimpse of him,
that she did not hear his step behind her. His words,
in a tone through which a sharp anxiety pierced Beda,
what are you doing there? Made her turn upon him,
her nervous hand clutching the heavy, old gold drapery of
the curtain. For a moment, they stood gazing at each other, startled.
Then she laughed with attempted lightness. What's the matter, Graham?
You look frightened. What were you doing in the window?
He insisted, why just waiting for you? Come? Let's get
out of here. If you wait staring like that, waiting
for me, good God, one would have thought that you
expected me to be brought home on a stretcher. You'll
be getting yourself hypnotized again, Beda. Before you know it,
he put his arm around her and drew her out
on the piazza. I've just got a letter from mother,
he told her. She's coming back. Oh I am glad,
Beda cried for some time. During her son's first marriage,
missus Yates had made her home with the young people,
and then on. Under the pressure of Elaine's nervous disorder
and her final illness, she had left their home to
live with her sister. The pressure was too much for
her gentle spirit. She couldn't weather the storms which swept
and devastated the household. She suffered too, with a keen
inner shame that she hadn't strength enough to help this
tormented daughter of hers, whose peculiar loveliness and charm she
had so cared for before illness blighted it. After Graham's
second marriage, she had again made his house her headquarters,
finding in Beda's tranquility something more akin to her own nature,
something nearer to what her own daughter might have been
than Elaine's more fascinating personality had ever been able to
give her to Beda's heart felt Oh, I'm glad, Graham echoed,
you can believe I am. There was an unmistakable passion
of relief in his tone, as if Bada's cry had
voiced the hope of deliverance, as if the presence of
this beloved older woman would dispelled a shadow that was
drifting in upon them, shutting out the sun from their lives.
It was their first recognition of the nameless fear that
had come over them. Now Beta was sure that never
for a moment had Graham failed to recognize this awful
something which was crawling upon them like some dark spiritual tide.
If only he would help her, if he would ask
her what was the matter. She felt his anxious look
resting on her. Then he made some excuse and left her.
It was as though he had deserted her in a
moment of great peril. Scorn for his cowardice and for
his stupidity flashed over her. Then a darkness settled over
her spirit. Perhaps she was going mad, Perhaps her nerves
were only shaken. This was what her intelligence kept telling
her with irritating, ineffectual persistency, while her heart cried out
that the very springs of life in her had been poisoned,
the very depths of her personality shaken. At any rate,
she was adrift in a strange and unfamiliar world, and
there was no one anywhere to help her. A great
pity for the stricken soul of Elaine poured over her.
Elaine had put out her hands and had pleaded to
be saved from herself, and no one had helped her. Now,
at the first touch of her own distress, Graham turned
from her. Graham wasn't going to help her. This thought
walked through her mind. Both of us together, we could
have fought it alone. I cannot. She heard the gate
click and saw Graham walking down the street. No doubt
he was going to meet his mother, going without her.
He is running away from me. She thought. They had
always gone to meet missus Yates together. How many times
they had walked down this street side by side, long
before Elaine died. Whenever Graham's mother came, they would go
down and tell her the news and how a Lane
was at that moment. Now she was left behind while
Graham walked down alone to the station to see his
mother first, to warn her, no doubt that Beda was
not quite well. She went into the house and began
shoving around the ornaments, re arranging them with a sort
of bitter satisfaction, an inward glow quite out of keeping
with her trivial occupation. The noise of carriage wheels checked her.
Suddenly she stopped a little dazed, like a person who
has forgotten what he came into a room for. As
an actor searches for a cue. Now she remembered Graham's
mother was coming, and she must run out to meet her.
For the next few days, the house was as though
bathed in sunshine. Calm returned to it. Beda was continued
with the older woman, sheltering herself in her loving presence.
It was as though all around with some fog which
concealed menacing and terrible shapes, some terror that walked in
the darkness. But for the moment Beda could escape from it.
Though she felt as insecure as if she were living
in a soap bubble. In a moment, the force of
the invading shadows or whatever they were, might come upon her,
and the agony of her rent personality would begin again.
They were all touchingly happy, Beda as from a relief
from pain, Graham in his recovered peace, until one day,
when the two women sat sewing in the drawing room,
Graham was lounging near them, breathing. Then Missus Yeates raised
her head toward the window and said, there's something different
about this room since I've been away. You haven't moved things,
have you. Beda didn't answer her. Her spirit it seemed
ceased to breathe the same shock that she had felt
communicated itself to Graham, and he arose and walked around restlessly.
I don't quite make out what's changed, she pursued with serenity.
I see you keep yellow flowers in the window the
way poor Olaine did. Why Beda? What ails you? Child?
For Beda had let her sewing fall and was gazing
at Graham's mother in fascinated horror. Never once to herself
had she clothed her thoughts in any words. At her
fixed look and hopeless gesture, Missus Yates stared, and for
a moment the two women looked one at the other,
horror in the eyes of each Missus Yates broke the
silence with are you ill, Beda? What is it? I'm faint,
a sudden pain. The words came without her volition. Her
hand sought her heart. There was a second of taut silence,
when the very air of the room seemed to share
the suspense while mother and son looked at each other.
Then Beda arose, I'm better now, I'm going to lie down.
For several days, she remained on a couch in Graham's
library on a pretext of illness, hiding from life by
her inactivity, trying by her very quietness to put off
the next move in the drama, which came like an
unexpected verdict of a physician. When Missus Yates announced, after
the mail had come one day, Ella wants me to
visit her. I think I shall go. When does she
want you? Beda inquired with that command of herself, which
guileless older woman knows so well how to use. Missus
Yates answered, in an irreproachably natural tone, why right away?
I shall go tomorrow, my dear, If you are feeling better, Beda, oh, yes,
she replied, I'm perfectly well now. I think I've just
been a little run down for some reason. It's very
natural with this heat, Missus Yates replied tranquility. There was
not a break in her surface anywhere. After her departure,
they both took her to the train. Beda and Graham
turned into the garden. Suddenly she stopped. Why did mother go?
She asked him? Why to see Ella? Of course, Graham replied,
you know what I mean. What was her real reason? Oh?
How she waited for his answer, how she prayed for
it In his one little second of indecision, You've had
a lot of odd little streaks lately, Beda, he said.
Beda wanted to cry aloud to him. You know she
won't come back. You know I've driven her away. But
she couldn't speak. She waited for him to help her.
She was sure that if she could drag the obscure
events out into the light of day and clothed them
with commonplace speech, it would kill their horror. But what
to say? Where to begin, her heart cried out. Now,
now her whole being urged her into her vague confession,
while her obstinate common sense leagued itself with a shadowy
impulse from without, which placed itself in the way of
her desire. Again, Beda fought the unknown force as of
an awful, voiceless conflict of wills, common sense by paradox,
fighting on the side of the unseen. Only now Beta
knew she was fighting for her very existence. She no
longer struggled with something that was no more than some
strange and shattering nervous attack herself. Her own personality was
her battle. Some mysterious door had been opened that allowed
to flow through it emotions and acts not her own.
She guessed that the very gestures of her hands, the
look of her eyes had been used. She had seen
it mirrored in Graham's face. She had seen it in
the momentary leaping horror of his glance. But while their
troubled eyes looked into each others with comprehension, their obstinate
tongues refused to voice their fear of this lurking peril.
Peril was what it was, and Beta knew it, peril
of their happiness, peril of her own sanity. She looked
at him, tears swimming in her eyes, longing to throw
herself on his beloved heart and to lie there as
in a safe haven, and to beg him to say
her or at least to give her relief from pain.
But he was gazing at her speculatively. To her racked mind,
it seemed that his gaze was hostile. She turned and
fled to her room, to give herself up for the
first time in her life, to the sort of weeping
that made her feel that she had wept forth all
the strength of her body. That with her weeping some
virtue had gone out of her. She said out loud,
there was no use fighting anymore. A melancholy sense of
rest enveloped her. No one would help her, and she
wouldn't fight anymore. She relaxed the muscles of her spirit.
Now let the flood overwhelm her. If it would, let
it drown her utterly. She didn't care. As the last
shred of her resistance died, the enveloping shadow receded. She
had expected some sort of cataclysm. Had been fighting the unseen,
whatever it was, Madness visions with all her strength, opposing
her puny might to its force. At times it seemed
to her coming near victory with Graham's help, almost sure victory.
But now it stood aloof days passed and nothing happened.
The outer surfaces of life were serene, and yet all
of life was altered, and beta must go through her
miserable treadmill of thought. She would sit long hours staring
into vacancy, thinking over the minutest details of the events
of the day. She dwelt on, each small, meaningless act,
half of whose torment lay in its very insignificance, the
fact that there was nothing to tell. That you couldn't
touch or taste or explain, not to anybody, not even
to yourself, without seeming to talk in terms of medness.
Such things she would say to herself didn't happen. And
yet while nothing happened from one day to another, there
was a steady onflow of small details. Whatever it was,
this nameless and faceless thing, was crawling upon her. Beta
realized like some dark tide, unseizing, unresting, while she slept,
while she walked without let up, without rest. Oh, that
something would happen to hasten it. Oh, that some tangible
event would happen, so that she could cry out, I've seen,
I know. The only thing to be seen with the
eyes was that the house her creature, was changing an
aspect under her hand. Her own hand eagerly obliterated the
changes she had made when she had become Graham's wife.
Yet the changes came with terrible and relentless slowness. One day,
a shade pulled down, a window shut a picture of
her choosing suppressed. The order of some books changed, nothing more,
but each change accomplished by her hand, and with a
sense of fierce inner joy. She would walk up and down,
up and down, absorbed in her own emotions, unconscious of
the flight of time, and obscurely conscious that time dragged,
that time stood still, that the hours whirled around her,
unnoticed and that she and her sick fear alone stood
still in the swirling, shifting universe. Sometimes she would fill
hours with balancing up which she would prefer, this nameless horror,
this thing that couldn't be, that was poisoning her, perhaps
killing her, or madness. She would laugh, long, silent laughter,
on the irony of fate that put such a choice
before her. Of all people, she who had been praised
always for her sanity, she to whom Elaine had turned
in her first illness of the spirit as a friend. Meantime,
her life with Graham went on with unbroken surface, so
unbroken that she could have screamed at him. Yet she
knew with the sickening certainty that he watched her covertly
from around some doors, as it were, that he was
always pretending to be doing something else, and yet was
watching her. He too, with smiling face and frozen heart,
was living in an obscure hell, spying upon her, watching
for a look of the eye, for a gesture of
the hand, while he had let the whole change in
the house pass by unnoticed. Anyway, if he watched her,
then she watched him forever. Growing in her was a
curious distrust of him distrust of what she couldn't tell
She didn't trust him. That was all her logical mind
that rejected the whole situation, had to go through its
torment and had to ask questions of her tormented heart.
Did she distrust his love? There was no reason for it,
and yet he never left the house, But suspicion, nameless
and groundless, filled her whole being with an ever increasing anguish.
She suffered when he was with her, suffered from the
suspicion of his suspicion that he must read into her
heart and hate and despise her for her ever growing distrust,
a distrust that didn't even seek to pin itself to anything.
If she could only have accused him of something, if
only for one little moment, there was some real complaint
against him, she herself would cry, even if she watched,
even if she peered from behind a closed blind at him.
Oh my dear, I know you are good and true.
It isn't I watching you, It isn't I accusing you,
And yet I must suffer, as though I knew you
were waiting a knife in your hand to stab me
when my back is turned, beta waited as loving women wait,
who know that their hour is come when the beloved
is gone from them, and worse than that that he lies,
they must wait with loving and beating hearts for the
death of their spirits to be dealt out to them
shamefully and coward wise. And since they cannot believe their
lover's cowards as well as traitors, they still believe in
the face of unbelief. This was Beta's torment. Believing him upright,
believing him true, She must suffer for an unbelief, knowing
that he loved her alone. She must watch each mood
as it passed by for corroboration of what she knew
was not. She must watch all his comings and goings.
She must read dislike and suspicion in his gaze, the
dislike that a man has for a woman whose claims
sever him from the beloved. Then, as to thousands of
women before her, came the need of knowing certainty. Certainty
was what she wanted, for good or bad, to know
the torment in which she lived. Oh, she would think
to herself, if I could only know, But her mind
would answer know what She lived continually, as though on
the eve of some discovery. A little further, and she
would know what the monstrous certainty was of which she
wished to be sure. If she looked into the black
pool of her uncertainty long enough, she felt the answer
would come. There must be an answer to all this
that she suffered, and somehow she felt it lay in
Graham somehow, and Graham she must find it. His very
dumbness was to her the corroboration of his blameless guilt.
She hated his smiling face, She hated his pretense. She
wanted with all her strength to cry out, say what
you think, Say what you suspect. Then one night, as
she sat in his room, and while their lips talked
the pleasant commonplaces of happily married people, she realized that
the answer to the riddle lay in his desk. She
knew it was there there, intangible form, was the answer
of all her torment and all her suspicion, if she
could only look. She waited, frozen in her own impatience,
for the slow moments to drag past on their leaden feet.
She sat waiting until Graham go upstairs and go to
sleep beside her, so she could come down and find
out what lay there. There was no fight now, She
Beta Beta with honor like a man's honor, waited with
beating heart, her breath coming short, for the evening to
pass and for Graham to sleep, that she might commit
the one unforgivable crime he slept at last Beda got
out of bed, put on her dressing gown and slippers,
and went noiselessly down the stairs. She made no sound,
not a stair creaked. It was as though she went
through each of the little acts like some highly trained mechanism,
as though all her life had been one rehearsal for
this moment. It was as though she had been rehearsing
all her life for this, that without noise she might
get up, dress herself, go downstairs, without noise, and light
her candle in the library. Then walked swiftly and with
the directness of a homing pigeon to Graham's desk, to
Graham's desk, where the answer of everything lay. In the
strange and painful universe in which Beta had been living,
the only certainty that she had was that there was
the answer, the explanation of the riddle, and that she
was about to find it, that she must find it,
even at the price of her own honor. At the
breaking down of the things most essential in her nature
meant nothing. She went unfalteringly to where the desk stood,
with the candle in her hand. Unfalteringly, she pulled out
a little drawer and took from it a bundle of letters.
They were tied neatly. Graham was exact and methodical in
all his ways. As she opened them, a little picture
fluttered down, a snapshot of herself, sent to Graham long ago.
And then she recognized in the letters her own head,
writing nothing else. Her letters were what she had come
to find. Her letters written to Graham long ago, written
during his brief absences from Elaine, telling of Elaine's change
from day to day, written to him when she was away,
Letters for all the world to read, Letters without one
word of affection beyond that of a kindly friendship. Her
own letters. That was the answer, her friendship and Graham's
That was the keynote of this mystery. For a second
she stood there, not willing to understand. Then came crowding
on her memories of Elaine's looks and her sudden appearances
in the room where she and Graham sat, talking innocently,
so innocently that no thought of what Elaine meant had
crossed their minds. So Bada stood motionless, her own letters
in her hand, a terrible figure, as though she held
there a proof of her own blood guilt. And the
question now arose to her mind, when did we first
begin to care for each other? And was I here
for Elaine? Or was I here for Graham's sake? She
had come for Elaine, but she had stayed for Graham,
and before Elaine's tragic death, she had been the only
comfort that he had had. Then she heard a step
behind her, and then his voice, and instead of her
own name, Elaine, he called, and then with a face
of horror and her hands outstretched in a gesture terrible
and tragic, a gesture they knew well, and that was
not her own. She cried, yes, Elaine, if you like,
Why did you keep these letters? You who never keep
any letters? He tried to recover himself. Are you mad, Beta,
he said, but the sternness of his voice faltered. Oh,
she took up. I wish I were. You could shut
me up, then madness would be easy. We killed her,
You and I between us killed her. She trusted us,
and we killed her. She trusted us and we tortured her. Hush,
said Graham, you don't know what you're saying. Beta. You're
not well. You've not been well for a long time. No,
she agreed, I've not been well, but you've said nothing
about it. Graham. It's a very strange illness. I've had
what's been its name, Graham, what doctor's curate. You've tried
not to believe what couldn't be believed. Such things can't happen.
That's what you've said to yourself when my face has
frightened you, when you came into the room and thought
Elaine was standing here. But how should I have come
where I am now to find my own letters, my
letters that you kept, My letters that I've been waiting
so long to find. Listen, Beta will go away. You're ill,
We'll go away. She saw that he couldn't admit what
he had seen in his man's world. Such things couldn't
be But it made no difference to her. Now she
held her proof in her hand. We'll go away and
forget these weeks, he repeated. We'll do what you like.
It won't alter anything we know now, Beta answered dully,
for she knew as Graham did that there was no
flight possible for them, no refuge that they could take
anywhere in the world. Apart or together, they had heard
the voice from the other side of silence. There was
no country where they could take refuge, no place to
go that would blot out from Graham's memory the picture
of Ada leaning over his desk, her letters in her hand.
End of the Second Wife