Chapter II
At the dinner-table people sorted themselves as they pleased, and Elsdon, yielding to cowardice, secured a place between Emily and Ida. Whatever braveries ’he might attempt at other times, mealtime, he felt, should be a time of relaxation and enjoyment. The disposition of some of the other guests he found to be instructive. It was hardly necessary to note that the doctor girl, Edna, sat faithfully beside her engineer; but the position and behaviour of the couple next to Edna provided food for speculation. Roy and Daphne, in fact, were sitting together. Was it by mutual consent, or by the management of one of the two? Or was it, rather, by pure accident? It almost seemed like it, for neither, as far as Elsdon could observe, paid the smallest attention to the other. Roy, having laid aside for a while the admired young actor, was absorbed in what appeared to be a serious discussion with Edna. Elsdon tried in vain to discover whether Daphne was conscious of this and whether the animated monologue she was directing at the somewhat inattentive Eric across the table was merely CL intended to show her indifference to it. Eric had contrived to sit next Joan, but Norman had promptly worked himself into the chair on the other side of her and was now monopolising her attention. From time to time Eric glanced shyly at her, but her shoulder was still turned to him. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see, as Elsdon saw, her heightened colour, her dark eyes shining through the long black lashes, her small teeth flash suddenly as she listened fascinated to Norman’s lively chatter. For the first time, Elsdon noticed how pretty she was. Her eyes had the fullness and unself-consciousness of a young animal’s. He recalled a young water-rat he had watched years ago, as it sat under the bank of a stream, between water and tree-roots—the soft lustre of its large eyes, every hair of the lashes that fringed them separately visible, every hair of its fluffy coat perfectly in place. Joan, it seemed to him, had reached just that moment of youthful perfection, the very bloom of innocence, so different from the minx Daphne’s carefully assumed childishness which Emily had so quickly seen through, so different too from the mature and (as he always felt) too serene handsomeness of Cynthia, and from the earnest concentration of the spectacled Edna. He hoped she wasn’t being completely taken in by Norman’s facile charm. She had much better turn away and occupy herself with Eric: Eric, he felt, was worth ten of Norman. Perhaps she actually wanted to, but Norman’s assiduous chatter didn’t give her a chance.
When dinner was over they moved out of the dining-room and the broken voices of their talk rippled away with them like water over pebbles, till the dining-room was slowly emptied of sound and the hall received it. There it was thinned, rarefied by the height and space, like water turned to mist, drifting up the wide well of the staircase and losing itself in the passages above. Then, condensing again, it flowed into the drawing-room and settled there in a slowly whirling pool. And then a trickle of musical notes, suddenly clear and precise, broke across the vague rumour of talk, and the talk died out. Somebody had asked Cynthia to play the piano. She sat absent-mindedly stringing a few running chords, trying to think of something to play. Then she began the prelude to Strauss’s “Morgen,” and at once Elsdon dropped back thirty years, remembering with a pang how her mother used to sing it. Marvellous her singing had been. He recalled the wonderful opening phrase—Cynthia had reached it now—as her voice came out above the slow swing of the accompaniment, and the calm intensity with which she held from beginning to end the mood of the song. He stirred in his chair. It was too much, to be plunged into those memories among this crowd of young people. He leaned towards Emily. “Sing it, Emily,” he whispered.
Her eyes twinkled. “Sing it, my dear, at my time of life? You might as well ask a crow.”
He turned away and glanced at the others. They sat about, in their various attitudes, listening or pretending to listen. Roy with his head slightly inclined gave the performance his polite attention, the tribute of one artist to another. Daphne appeared absorbed. So she was; but she was absorbed in trying to decide what she herself should play, if invited. She was listening, too, to discover whether Cynthia, as she had always uncomfortably suspected, played better than she did. If she did—and it really sounded as if she did—she herself would refuse to play. Joan was enjoying the music because she loved and admired Cynthia. “How clever she is,” she thought. “Everything she does, she does well”; and the music seemed to her beautiful because Cynthia was playing it. Roger listened with his brows slightly contracted over the rims of his spectacles, but Edna’s eyes, magnified a little by her lenses, showed the wide, unfocused gaze of inward absorption. She loved music, and this song, which she had not heard before, seemed to her full of rich emotion. She glanced at Roger, stirred by a sudden desire to share it with him, but she could not catch his eye. Ever since they had first met he had been trying to improve her musical taste and she had done her best to dislike Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, Tchaikovski and Scriabine, and to prefer Bach, Haydn, Mozart and that incomprehensible symphony by Sibelius which they had twice heard together. But surely he would approve of music as satisfying and deeply moving as this that Cynthia was playing.
Coffee came in as Cynthia reached the end of the song, and, when they had finished their coffee, Eric and Joan, who had been talking together near the tall French window that stood wide open to the evening, slipped out quietly, as Elsdon noted with pleasure, into the garden. Norman, he was glad to see, was occupied with Ida Buxted and had not noticed them go.
Edna saw that Roger was coming towards her. Cynthia spoke to him as he passed her: “I must apologise for playing Strauss in your hearing, Roger.”
He laughed. “Well, you must admit,” he said, and Elsdon hated him as he said it, “that it’s pretty saccharine. I had to take my coffee without sugar.”
Edna was still glowing under the spell of the music, and his words roused a deep antagonism in her. At that moment he caught her eye. “Come for a stroll in the garden, Edna,” he said.
For the first time she disobeyed him. “I can’t,” she said, leaving him before he could reply. “I’m going with Cynthia,” and she threaded her way to where Cynthia stood, and took her by the arm. “It’s the most lovely thing I ever heard,” she said.
As they went together towards the window, Roy, who had caught Daphne’s eyes fixed on him, joined them and the three went out together. Daphne turned away and there was a flash of tears in her eyes. Perhaps Todd had seen it, for he went over to her and, after a moment of hesitation, she went out with him. The derelict Roger, looking grim and preoccupied, followed them, and Norman, after a quick, surprised glance round the room, followed Roger. The old people found themselves alone in the large twilighted room.
It was Elsdon who broke the silence. “One gets the impression that they’re always seeking for something.”
“So they are,” said Emily. “They’re seeking for love, life, experience, or whatever name you like to call it by. It’s an instinct of youth.”
“A reflex action perhaps,” said Elsdon, “or what the scientists call a tropism. They’re like those young spiders that at a certain moment of their lives are automatically compelled to climb to the extreme tip of the highest stalks and leaves. Do you think they really know what they want?”
“O, they know what they want,” said Ida Buxted, “but very few of them know how or where to find it. That’s the tragedy.”
From an almost invisible chair the Colonel’s voice croaked sharply above their murmur. “Blind-man’sbuff!” he said.
The door opened softly and a maid came in with a lamp, and as she moved forward, a soft orangecoloured bloom crept over the walls and ceiling and bright streaks slid along the edges of picture-frames and polished tables—a slowly growing luminous disturbance that settled into tranquillity as she placed the lamp on the piano. The old people blinked, and looked at each other as if surprised to find that they were anything more than voices, and Elsdon, glancing at the windows, saw that they had suddenly become dark. Garden and room which a moment ago had been conti
nuous were now sharply separated. The young people, whose voices and movements just now had filled the room, whose very thoughts and emotions had been visibly and audibly fermenting there, were suddenly swallowed into an outer darkness, leaving the elders idle, serene and a little lonely in the security of their four soft-lighted walls. For a moment Elsdon felt isolated and imprisoned: for a moment—no more—he wished he was searching, groping, however blindly and ineffectually, in the darkness out of doors; that there were still hopes and cravings and possibilities ahead of him, not—good heavens, no—not a repetition of the old ones, but others, brighter, keener and more successful. But next moment that feeble echo of youth had died out, for his body, he was aware, was tired; it was grateful for the comfortable chair in which it reclined; and his mind, too, admitted to a sense of relief that all the questing and craving was over. No, it was more comfortable to sit and enjoy the mild distractions of a spectator in this peaceful, selfcontained room where all he sought was to be found. He recalled that passage at the beginning of the Republic which tells of how someone asked the aged poet Sophocles: “How does love suit with age, Sophocles? Are you still capable of it?” and of how Sophocles replied: “Hush! I am glad to say that I have escaped from it, and I feel as if I had escaped from an insane and savage master.” And there was that far greater passage on love which Plato in the Symposium puts into the mouth of the wise woman Diotima. Emily, he knew, had Jowett’s translation of Plato: he would take the first volume from the shelves over there and read it in bed.
When the others rose to go to bed he lingered behind in the empty drawing-room, found the three puce-coloured volumes in their usual place and, pulling out the first, took it over to the piano where the lamp stood to make sure that it was the one that contained the Symposium. But his search was slow: the earlier dialogues in the book waylaid him—the Apology and the Phado—and he stood, slim, dry, his elbows on the piano, his head between his hands, his feet crossed, reading in the mellow lamplight which turned the silver of his hair to pale gold. Nothing stirred in the room except when he dropped his right hand to the book to turn a page with a soft flick.
He had been browsing for a long time when a vague movement at the window brought him suddenly to himself. Someone was there. It was Daphne. She was staring into the room and Elsdon was shocked by the expression on her face. Its customary mask of childlike innocence was gone and in its place was a look half stealthy, half desperate. The lamp with its large shade stood between him and her, it was obvious she did not see him, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that he ought not to be there, that if she knew he was there she would be aghast at that betrayal of herself. He lowered his eyes to his book, so that if she saw him she might believe that he had not seen her. But she did not come into the room and when he ventured to raise his eyes again the dark oblong of the open window was a blank once more. He returned to his book, but though he still turned the pages his mind was occupied for some minutes with what he had seen. Then, reaching the Symposium at last, he was lost again in his reading.
He had not yet found the great passage on love when another sound at the window disturbed him. It was Norman this time who was inspecting the room, but, beyond the mere fact that he was inspecting, Norman offered no unguarded self-revelation. His search was conducted under cover of his usual urbanity, and when, next moment, he stepped into the room and noticed Elsdon, it was Elsdon who appeared to feel the guiltier of the two.
“Hallo, were you looking for someone?” Elsdon asked.
Norman calmly took a silver cigarette-case from his breast-pocket. “Merely some matches,” he said, going to a table where matches were to be found, and he had not lit his cigarette before voices and footsteps were heard outside the window. It was Roger, once more obediently followed by Edna, who came in first, and then came several others, Daphne among them, demure and childlike as usual. They were all, it seemed, coming back to the house. Elsdon took up his Plato and, muttering a vague and general good night, retreated to the shelter of his own room.
Chapter III
Elsdonsat in the Library of his club, toasting his feet at a blazing fire. It was a quarter to one: at one o’clock Bob Buxted was lunching with him. They had not met since their visit to Lannery in the summer, nor had Elsdon, who had been abroad, seen Emily since then. It was snug in the library, but outside the tall windows a cold rain that seemed to fall from a great height was driving diagonally down Pall Mall. Colour had vanished from the world: the opposite houses rose gaunt and grey, mere ghosts of houses, behind the slanting lines of the rain: the pavements shone like flint. What a contrast, thought Elsdon, to the warm, open, colourful life at Lannery last July. He recalled the crowd of young people and they seemed to him now like butterflies, ephemeral creatures that exist only in the summertime. Was it possible that they crept about now in coats and hats and cowered under umbrellas like himself and Bob Buxted and all the other winterstricken folk that hurried down the dark London streets? Cynthia and the curate Todd were the only two that seemed to him independent of the seasons.
The rest must surely have tucked themselves away to hibernate among the disused nets, rackets and deck-chairs, and all the other paraphernalia of summer, in some dark shed. Possibly Bob Buxted would have some information about them, since he and Ida—so he had learned over the telephone yesterday—had recently spent a week-end with Emily.
The Colonel arrived, of course, on the very stroke of one. After a preliminary sherry they made their way to the dining-room, and there, when they had selected and ordered their luncheon, Elsdon put his question.
“Hibernating?” said the Colonel. “Far from it. They’ve been up to all sorts of tomfoolery. The two young scientific folk, Roger Pennant and his girl, have gone and got married. Well, there’s nothing very dramatic about that, I suppose. The drama comes in, very appropriately, with the actor and his young woman. He has gone with some show or other to America. Apparently he was regarding it as an opportunity to give that girl Daphne the slip. It seems he was having altogether too much of Daphne, and I must say I sympathise with him. Something rather meretricious, to my mind, about Daphne! So he kept the thing quiet. For the last fortnight, according to Cynthia, he was all winks and whispers, imploring all his friends to keep their mouths shut. And it seemed to work. Whenever they were seen together Daphne wore that look of babelike innocence which she cultivates so successfully, while Roy displayed the boisterous and hearty candour of the melodramatic crook. Cynthia says that she felt very unhappy about Daphne, was all conscience-stricken at being a party to the deception, wondered if she oughtn’t to do something about it. However, in the end she didn’t: she decided it would only make matters worse. The rest of the story she gathered from Norman.
“It was Norman’s view that actors going abroad like to be seen off by a bevy of friends and admirers; so he betook himself to Waterloo, carrying with him—trust Norman to do the thing gracefully—a box of a hundred Turkish cigarettes as a parting gift. Well, he had just spotted Roy leaning out of a first-class window, in a magnificent fur-collared coat—no doubt the young devil would take a third-class seat after the train had started—had just reached him, been hailed and greeted and introduced to a singularly fine young woman—the leading lady, it seems—when, glancing for a moment down the platform, he saw approaching him, hardly ten yards away, Daphne rigged out in Wedgwood blue and followed by a porter and a bag and a rug. She gave them both a little wave of recognition—a miracle, according to Norman, of demure self-possession. Norman, so he told Cynthia, was far too embarrassed to observe the effect on Roy, for the fact that he was there, seeing Roy off, revealed him at once as an accomplice. At all costs the situation—his situation—must be saved, and with sudden presence of mind he darted forward.’ Ah, here she is, here she is, just in time,’ he said. ’I was waiting, my dear Daphne, to wish you bon voyage.’ He handed her the box of cigarettes. ’A small parting gift,’ he said. ’I knew you liked Turks.’ And with that he bolted down the platform. A
t a safe distance he glanced back. Daphne was shaking hands with the leading lady while the porter lifted her things into the carriage.”
The Colonel gave his grim laugh. “Quite a charming little unrehearsed drama, don’t you think? As for the other young folk, I’ve nothing to report. You heard, of course, of Joan’s engagement?”
“No!” said Elsdon. “To Eric, of course.”
“On the contrary,” said the Colonel, “to Norman.”
Chapter IV
Daphne Lay on the bed in her cabin staring at the grey moon-shot circle of sky framed by the brass rim of the porthole. Its cold, grey emptiness seemed to her the mere reflection of her mood. She felt emptied of everything but disillusionment, a numbed pain that possessed her like a narcotic. What was it that always forced her to cling to Roy even though she hated him? He had become a sort of drug that she couldn’t shake off, a drug that she had tried, simply as an adventurous joke, two years ago. It was really Juliet who had started her off. She and Juliet shared a flat: Juliet was working at the Slade while she herself did dress-designing and dress-making, and they shared that funny little attic flat which they had fitted up so cheaply and so amusingly. It had been great fun at first, until Juliet had got hold of Bill and that had spoilt everything. It was just like Juliet to make use of her and then suddenly leave her in the lurch. Not that she disliked Bill: on the contrary, he was a perfect pet. She had been delighted when he had turned up at the flat from time to time with a bottle of wine, and she and Juliet had set about preparing a perfectly marvellous supper out of nothing at all, dashing out to get half a dozen cutlets and a bunch of watercress or some totally unforeseen luxury, as on that occasion when she had run out secretly with an empty medicine-bottle, darted into a pub and got three glasses of sherry in it, bought three spongecakes and some cream and then turned out the most amazing trifle, to the astonishment of the other two. Yes, it had been lovely at first. Then Bill had begun carrying Juliet off to theatres and concerts, even snatching her away for a week-end, leaving Daphne alone in the flat with no one to amuse her. That had wounded her deeply. She had seen then, what she ought to have seen at first, that she was nothing to them.
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