“Then why make it harder still by wasting two precious hours sitting sulking in the flat?”
Silence followed, broken only by occasional footsteps. Elsdon, tying his black tie with his usual slow precision, smiled drily to himself in the glass. What had become of the obedient little dog that, so recently, as it seemed to him, had trotted so faithfully after her master? The inevitable change had come with a vengeance and it was clear that Roger did not like it. No wonder, when he had trained the little dog so carefully.
But before that interesting bit of eavesdropping had been forced upon him Elsdon had made other discoveries. When tea was over they had all drifted into the garden, which was already bright with the clear yellows and blues of springtime. Droves of daffodils spread from the shadows of the trees to the sunny edges of the lawn, and, in the shorter grass, lilac-coloured crocuses stood wide open to the afternoon sunlight, transparent and luminous as if with a light of their own. And, while they were admiring the flowers, Eric and Daphne drove up and, leaving the car, came towards them across the lawn. Both were in high spirits. But how rapidly, thought Elsdon, the years told on these young creatures. Daphne had aged, slightly but very noticeably. The flesh had sunk and tightened about her mouth, giving her, just there, an old and hungry look which assorted ill with the little girl that she still presented to the world. For it was evident, from the first moment of their arrival, that Daphne was as artfully innocent as ever. She was out to enjoy herself and it was plain, from the gaily proprietary manner with which she treated Eric, that she was anxious to display the fact that she had got him in tow. And Eric obviously enjoyed it: his brown eyes glowed with a dark satisfaction. It was all very well, thought Elsdon, for Cynthia to brush aside his suspicion: he had not the smallest doubt that there was something between them. Well, if Eric was consoling himself for the loss of that pretty little Joan, so much the better, so long as he did not console himself to the point of marriage. That, Elsdon thought, would be a thousand pities. As a permanency Eric deserved something better than this absurd little automaton, just as Joan, to his thinking, deserved something better than that superficial, fair young man whose name he had forgotten. Still, Joan, after all, had had her choice. Presumably she had known which of the two would suit her best.
But, when Joan joined them an hour later, Elsdon found himself more than ever doubtful if she had chosen rightly. It was not that a renewed inspection of her choice revealed him in an even less favourable light, for Joan came alone, explaining that her husband had been prevented. It was the change in Joan herself that increased Elsdon’s doubts. All the youthful bloom that had so appealed to him had left her. It was not that she had aged; it was simply that she had faded. And she had lost, too, her look of inner contentment: it was obvious that she was very unhappy. Elsdon watched her with a deep concern. He longed to help and protect her, but what could he do? He was painfully conscious of the impassable barrier between her unapproachable youth and his old-man’s case-hardened sympathies. But Emily, bless her, had none of his cramping disabilities, and he was glad to see her and Cynthia take possession of the poor little thing and lead her away apart from the others. And throughout the evening he noticed how marvellously Emily responded to the girl’s need, bringing it about, as if by accident, that Joan should sit next her at dinner and next her or Cynthia in the drawing-room afterwards. Already at dinner some traces of the former Joan had returned: it was as if she had arrived frozen with cold and were already reviving visibly in the warmth of human affection.
But while Elsdon was delighted by the quiet solicitude of the Drydens, he was exasperated by the behaviour of Eric. It was obvious that Eric was deliberately displaying in front of Joan his preoccupation with Daphne. No doubt it was only human that he should be moved to show her how completely he had recovered from her rejection of him; it might even be pleaded in his favour that the pains he was taking to show his indifference were a measure of what his feelings for her had been and still were. But couldn’t the young ass see that she was suffering? Had he no perceptions and no human decency? Not that Joan seemed troubled by his behaviour: she was too securely guarded by the care of Emily and Cynthia for that. None the less, Elsdon longed to take him aside and give him a good dressing-down. As for Daphne . . .! But what did Daphne matter? Being Daphne, she could not be expected to behave otherwise. Besides, she, no doubt, had her own fish to fry: no doubt she was eager to show the company that Roy’s absence meant less than nothing to her. What a restless, unbalanced lot these young people were. He glanced at Edna, then at Roger. Each was talking with great animation and each laboriously pretending meanwhile that, whoever else might be in the room, the other was conspicuously absent. Cynthia and Todd were the only sane ones. Each, Elsdon could see, was so securely happy in the presence of the other that they did not need to exchange a word or a glance.
Chapter VI
The loss of Joan had left Eric stranded. For a year and a half she had been the centre about which all his thoughts and actions had revolved, and now, deprived of that centre, his life, it seemed, had come to a standstill. He took his disaster reasonably, and that, perhaps, made it the harder to bear. Resentment would have acted as an antidote by giving him an outlet for his emotions and so hastening his recovery. But he felt no resentment against Joan: she had made him no promise, had never treated him as anything more than a friend. He carried on his daily job at the office as usual, met his friends and talked and laughed, but he felt himself doing these things like an automaton, not of any will of his own, but from sheer force of habit. At first he had consoled himself with the resolve that he and Joan should remain friends, and when, a few months after her marriage, the chance came to meet her again, he did not avoid it. He believed that he had so far recovered himself that the meeting would help him to regain his balance. It would be a return to reality, he would realise, when they met, that, as a friend at least, she was still his, that his life was not really so empty as he had been imagining. But the meeting, when it came, was a painful disillusionment. At the first sight of her, as she came towards him smiling, with hand outstretched, so overwhelmingly more vivid than she had been in his memory, the old emotions rushed back. He stood before her dumb and bewildered, hardly able to hear what she said or stammer a reply. Her very cordiality, showing him how little she entered into his feelings for her, seemed to him an affront. He hurried home, sick at heart, angry with himself, angry with her, determined never to see her again. It was as if his disaster had repeated itself and he had to live it down a second time.
In the months that followed he dropped back into his former apathy. Then, quite suddenly, he grew impatient with it and woke up. He had become, as he imagined, a rather cynical young man, quite ready for a little fun, but determined not to hand himself over for another girl to make a fool of.
It was in this precarious state that he ran across Daphne again. He had not seen her since that afternoon when he had met her at Waterloo on her return from New York. He had always rather liked Daphne. Her lively flippancy entertained him, and her childishness, which it had never occurred to him to suspect, provoked in him a somewhat fatherly attitude towards her. And now, half-way up the Haymarket, he saw her strutting in her birdlike way towards Piccadilly Circus, a few yards ahead of him. He called to her and she whisked round. How amusing it was to see her again. She gazed up at him, blue-eyed, innocent, absurdly small, with a roguish smile. “You’re looking very bright,” she said. “Have you come into a fortune, Eric, or are you engaged?”
“Neither,” he said. “In fact, I’m unusually disengaged, and, that being so, let’s go and have tea somewhere.”
Under the surface of lively chatter across the table for two, each curiously examined the other. “What’s happened to him?” Daphne asked herself. “He’s woken up. He used to be such a solemn, friendly, immovable old thing. Now he looks at one as if . . .” She caught his eye, watching her. “It’s ages since we met,” she said to him. “What have you been doing all this
time, Eric?”
“Doing?” he said. “Nothing!” And as he said it he realised the truth of it. He had been doing nothing all this time: he had been living in a state of suspended animation.
“Nothing?” she said. “How delightful! I wish I could do nothing for a change.”
“And what have you been doing?” he asked.
“O, thousands of things,” she said with a sigh; “frittering away my life on thousands of idiotic things.”
“Well,” he said, “it seems to suit you.”
“Suit me?” Her eyes danced.
“You don’t look a day older than when we last met.”
“I feel a hundred,” she said, but he saw that her eyes glowed with pleasure. In fact her eyes, he noticed for the first time, carried on activities of their own which bore little or no relation to what she was saying. At one moment their wide innocence would warm to a puzzled amusement, at another they seemed to be searching him sharply for some response, or he would catch them examining him with an interest and approval that were almost embarrassing. Once, at some trivial remark of his, they changed suddenly to a cold, hard blue. What the devil was she up to? What did she want? Why were they rattling along at this extraordinary speed instead of taking each other for granted as they had always done before? Eric found himself enormously exhilarated. How strange that they had suddenly become such particular friends, or, rather, not exactly friends; this gay, sparkling, delightfully dangerous encounter was not mere friendship; it was more like a lively fencing-match in which each was amusingly puzzled by the tactics of the other. They talked of Lannery and their meeting there and the others who had been there with them, and then Eric, with deliberate brazenness, asked: “How’s Roy?”
Instantly Daphne’s expression changed. Her face became the face of a peevish child. “I don’t know,” she said emphatically.
Eric felt a little thrill of excitement. “I’m sorry,” he said; “I thought . . .”
“You thought we were lovers,” said Daphne,
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and for a moment he was shocked by the callousness of her tone.
“Well, yes,” he said, “as a matter of fact . . .” But Daphne ignored his modest hesitation. “Tell me, Eric,” she asked, with the cold self-possession of a woman of the world, “what do you think of Roy? Do you like him?”
Eric considered. “Yes,” he said, “I like him. I’ve always thought him a very good chap. A little too pleased with himself perhaps, but then he’s an actor, and actors, of course . . .”
“Yes,” she broke in with bitter sarcasm, “a marvellous actor, when he’s off the stage.”
“You mean . . .?”
“I mean he’s utterly insincere and utterly unscrupulous.”
Eric was embarrassed by her vehemence. Her accusations were so inconsistent with what he had known of Roy that he couldn’t believe them, while at the same time his feelings towards Roy were not strong enough to rouse him to take up his defence. What was he to say? He sat looking uncomfortably at his tea-cup.
Daphne watched him critically. “Of course you don’t believe me,” she said. “Why should you?”
Eric was chilled by the sudden change which had come over their encounter. He had been thrilled by their sudden electric intimacy: now it seemed that he was being roped into some quarrel to which he was completely indifferent. He was too detached from it all, too bored to respond. “It’s not that I don’t sympathise, Daphne,” he replied dully; “it’s simply that ... well, that I know nothing about it.”
“Of course you don’t, my poor Eric,” she said with a smile; “and it’s horrid of me to bore you with my troubles.”
His eyes kindled. “O, please don’t think I wouldn’t sympathise. But I didn’t know, you see, that you had any troubles. In fact, of all the people I ever met, you’ve always seemed the most carefree.”
“Care-free!” Daphne appealed to the skies. “For years my life’s been simply hell.”
Ever so slightly Eric flinched. Wasn’t there just a hint of melodrama in the phrase and the air with which she uttered it? “And all because of Roy?” he said with a faint twinkle.
Daphne noticed it without resentment. “Ah, Eric,” she said, “you don’t know very much about love, do you?”
Eric was instantly aware that he had no wish to confide his own troubles to Daphne, but she was not, it seemed, expecting an answer to her question. “Life treats you kindly,” she went on; “you don’t know how hateful it can be.”
“I know that one can sometimes be very unhappy,” said Eric, “but I don’t blame it on life. After all, life with a capital L is nothing more than a word in the dictionary.”
She looked at him with a gently scornful smile. “What a little philosopher you are, to be sure. But if I mayn’t blame life, what may I blame? God?”
Eric shrugged his shoulders. “God, by all means, if you consider Him the guilty party. Personally I blame myself. I don’t mean I’ve deliberately made myself miserable, but in nine cases out of ten one’s miseries are the result of one’s mistakes.”
“O, well, if you like to put it in that way! No doubt I made a mistake in believing that Roy wasn’t a liar and a cad, in loving him and giving myself to him and letting him ruin my life. But it’s a little hard to blame me for that. If I’d been less trusting and less generous and less ... well ... capable of love, everything would have been all right. But faith and generosity and love are supposed to be virtues, and suspiciousness and selfishness and cold-heartedness, vices, aren’t they?”
“Yes, that’s perfectly true, and it’s true that one can be horribly let down, sometimes, through nobody’s fault—just sheer bad luck. Still, apparently you did make a mistake about Roy; and now you’ve found it out, so everything’s all right.”
“O, absolutely all right!” she said bitterly. “Everything’s simply lovely.”
“Well,” he said, “what exactly is wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Can’t you see,” she almost sobbed, “that I’m in love with him?”
“In love with him? From what you’ve been saying I thought you hated him.”
“So I do,” she exclaimed with exasperation. “I hate him and I’m bound to him, body and soul. I shall never escape from him.”
Once again, Eric couldn’t help feeling, the note rang slightly false. And yet it was obvious that she was terribly distressed. “When one gets into that sort of state,” he said, “the only thing to do is to take oneself by the scruff of the neck, so to speak.”
“And do what?” she asked.
“Force yourself, I mean, not to think of him; exercise sheer cold-blooded self-control.”
“But I’m not cold-blooded,” she said. “After all, what is passion but the sacrifice of self-control?”
“Well then, keep your mind, as much as you can, on the things you like. Dose yourself with a few theatres and concerts.”
“I can’t afford to,” she said bluntly.
“Then let me do the dosing,” he replied with the most charming goodwill. “I’m sure we could have a very good time.”
Her eyes danced with pleasure. “That’s very sweet of you, Eric. Why should you bother yourself over my absurdly morbid affairs?”
“Why shouldn’t I, if I want to?” he said, his dark eyes glowing. “What about to-night, for instance? What could we go to?”
Daphne was once more the excited, happy child. “Let’s get a paper and choose, Eric,” she said, and having finished their tea they hurried out together to plan their evening.
From the moment of that chance meeting with Daphne, Eric felt himself restored to life, though not to the life he had lived before. Life, now, had become at the same time shallower and more complex. After his plunge into the depths, the cheerful security of the shallows was exactly what he needed, and the complexities, such as they were, gave an interest and excitement to an existence which might otherwise have seemed too insignificant. In fact, this sudden, unexpected intimacy with Daphne w
as great fun and he pursued it with a cheerful and somewhat self-conscious recklessness. It had none of the oppressive tyranny of his love for Joan: it left him free to give proper attention to his work and all his other concerns. Life had become free and sane and full of variety. Daphne was the gayest and most amusing of companions: it was obvious that she was enjoying herself enormously, though she could never be brought to admit that her happiness was restored. No, her life was ruined, and that, she stubbornly maintained, was a fact that could never be altered. And yet her moods fluctuated surprisingly. Sometimes she would treat her broken heart as a standing joke, yet when Eric dared to impugn it seriously and accuse her of posing she at once grew angry and taunted him with his ignorance of the dark ways of passion, so that Eric found it impossible to decide whether her insistence was a pose or a mental obsession. It irritated and baffled him and, by so doing, kept their relationship in a state of exciting instability. If she had been consciously scheming to trap him she could not have laid her plans more skilfully. Every day she was becoming for him a problem which he was more and more concerned to solve. He wanted to understand her, and not only that; he longed, as his feelings became more and more involved, to cure her. Yes, his feelings were becoming involved, and he was aware of it. But he was no longer, he told himself, the young innocent he had been when he fell in love with Joan. The present case was entirely different, as different as Daphne from Joan. Daphne was not, he was sure, of the marrying kind, and he had no wish to marry her: to be tied permanently to Daphne was the last thing he desired. But she was curiously attractive and a very good sort. A gay, light-hearted affair with her was just what he needed and, he was sure, just what she needed. And so, quite deliberately, Eric was letting himself go.
And evidently Daphne, too, was letting herself go; at least she imposed no limits on their meetings. Whenever he rang her up he was answered by a gleeful voice, accepting whatever scheme he proposed, and once or twice a week, when Daphne’s friend Juliet was out with her Bill, he spent the evening at the flat, where he and Daphne concocted the most charming suppers.
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