Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

She could not be sure yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely nothing.

For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was, longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole. _She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.

"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you, I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"

"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."

"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further, or die out completely?"

He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar; then, after a moment's thought, replied:

"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all, or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.

"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"

"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an 'A' that felt right. Unless it was Arthur, but I'm sure my name never was Arthur!"

"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair stress upon it. I easily might have."

"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"

"My husband's name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She _was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself of her own self-command: "I knew him very little by that name, though. I always called him Gerry."

He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.

"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever made Gerry out of Algernon. It's always Algy."

"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."

"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence, "that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it, and so on."

"What do you understand?"

"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress, naturally, on your husband's name, and also on its abbreviation. It affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."

"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry too? It might be----"

"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each other by chance, as yours and mine have done."

"What is 'almost knowing'? But tell me this. When I call you Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the association or impression repeat itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show, if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than his reply, after another moment of reflection:

"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name Algernon _was_ produced by your way of saying it. It _was_ hypnotic suggestion! I assure you that, however strange you may think it, every time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_'s has driven it home." He didn't seem quite in earnest over his conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.

But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.

"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the dark--unless, indeed----"

"Unless what?"

"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."

"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to the unknown."

"You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There was nettle-grasping in this.

"It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a large _if_. I am content to go on without an hypothesis--that is really all she is now. And my belief that, if she had ever existed, I should not be _able_ to disbelieve in her, underlies my acceptance of her in that character."

Mrs. Nightingale laughed. "We are mighty metaphysical," said she. "Wouldn't it depend entirely on what she was like, when all's said and done? I believe I'm right. We women are more practical than men, after all."

"You make game of my metaphysics, as you call them. Well, I'll drop the metaphysics and speak the honest truth." He stopped and faced round towards her, standing on the garden path. "Only, you must make me one promise."

She stopped also, and stood looking full at him.

"What promise?"

"If I tell you all I think in my heart, you will not allow it to come between me and you, to undermine the only strong friendship I have in the world, the only one I know of."

"It shall make no difference between us. You may trust me."

They turned and walked again slowly, once up and down. Then Fenwick's voice, when he next spoke, had an added earnestness, a growing tension, with an echo in it, for her, of the years gone by--a ring of his young enthusiasm, of his passionate outburst in the lawn-tennis garden twenty years ago. He made no more ado of what he had to say.

"I can form no image in my mind, try how I may, of any woman for whose sake I would give up one hour of the precious privilege I now enjoy. I have no right to--to assess it, to make a definition of it. But I _have_ it now. I could not resume my place as the husband of a now unknown wife--you know what I mean--and not lose the privilege of being near _you_. It may be--it is conceivable, I mean; no more--that a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It _may_ be so--it _may_ be! All I know is--all I can say is--that I can now _imagine_ nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He paused a moment, as though he thought he was going beyond his rights of speech, then added more quietly: "No; I can imagine _no_ hypothetical wife. And as for my hypothetical daughter, I find I am always utilising Sally for her."

Mrs. Nightingale murmured in an undertone the word "Sallykin," as she so often did when her daughter was mentioned, with that sort of caress in her voice. This time it was caught by a sort of gasp, and she remained silent. What Sally _was_ had crossed her mind--the strange relation in which she stood to Fenwick, born in _his_ wedlock, but no daughter of his. And there he was, as fond of the child as he could be.

Fenwick may have half misunderstood something in her manner, for when he spoke again his words had a certain aspect of recoil from what he had said, at least of consideration of it in some new light.

"When I speak to you as freely as this, remember the nature of the claim I have to do so--the only apology I can make for taking an exceptional licence."

"How