by Alec Waugh
Happily, her hand upon his arm, they passed across Cambridge Circus into the stiller reaches of Soho.
“Where are we going?” she asked; “to Iso’s?”
He nodded.
“I’ve booked our usual table.”
It was the first restaurant at which they had ever dined together. He had taken her there because it had been small and good and cheap; because he had very little money and a great deal to say to her. It had prospered, however, during the intervening months. It was larger now and quite expensive, but he had more money and less need, perhaps, for privacy. At any rate, as often as not, they went there when they dined together.
Their usual table was in the front of the room and in a corner. They had gone there in the first place because in early days, when the staff was smaller, communication with the kitchens had been effected by a lift that emerged unexpectedly out of the centre of the floor. “Do let’s sit here,” Joan had said. “It’ll be such fun to see all the dishes coming up.” For the lift’s sake they had gone there, and also because from that table they had a good view of the succession of paintings that decorated the opposite wall of the room. The lift had been superseded, but the pictures stayed.
“I must tell you, darling, so exciting,” Joan was saying. “Mother’s just come back from staying with Uncle John. And he told her that he was going to give us his Queen Anne bookcase for a wedding-present. It’s a heavenly thing. You’ll love it—great glass doors.”
The cheeks were flushed, and the cornflower-blue eyes were alight with eagerness.
“It’s sweet of him, isn’t it?” she said. “The only thing is that I don’t know how we shall be able to get it into any room that we shall be ever able to afford. I’m not sure that we shan’t have to take a studio.
“Not that that wouldn’t be rather fun,” she added thoughtfully. “We could give awfully jolly parties if we had a studio. That’s the worst of a flat or a small house; the rooms aren’t big enough for parties. Not parties like Christopher Stirling’s, at least. And those are the only sort that are really fun. Don’t you think cocktail parties before dinner would be a good idea? A six to seven show. It’s the sort of time when everyone’s at a loose end.”
Gaily, rapidly, she chattered on, her face sparkling with happiness and animation. But as Graham listened, slowly, unwillingly, a nameless melancholy, the reaction from his mood of earlier elation, rose in him. All this talk of furniture and parties; this settling down and getting one’s friends round one; wasn’t there something somewhere more than this? Was it inevitable that this should be the destined end of so much promise of high adventure? “Something wild, untamed, untamable——” What was it that that woman had said to him? “Something that you can’t control, something that’s neither for sale nor seeking.” Where was it, the glow, the thrill, the mystery of life?
His eyes rested on a painted panel across the room of a woman in a wide black hat, her head thrown back, her eyes half closed, stretching upwards towards a butterfly that hovered tantalizingly above her lips. A symbol of life, perhaps, that scarlet butterfly denying the red mouth’s kiss; and a queer loneliness and melancholy engulfed him; a sense that he was missing something, that some rare quality of emotion had looked at him, to pass by upon the other side.
• • • • • • • •
The film to which Graham took Joan that evening intensified this sensation of unattained fulfilment. It was a Ruritanian story of politics and swords and love. A ridiculous story enough, he realized. Life was not like that; never had been probably, and never would be. And yet would such tales, he asked himself, be written if men and women were not dimly conscious that life could be, that life ought to be, like that; if they did not feel that somewhere buried within themselves was that which, properly directed, might win to that fullness of emotion?
In silence they rode homewards through the gleaming, emptying streets. On the threshold of Joan’s house they hesitated. There was no rim of light against the high-curtained windows of the drawing-room.
“They’ve gone to bed,” said Joan; “come in for a second and get warm.”
In silence he followed her through the hall, upstairs, along the passage, into the drawing-room.
The fire in the grate had not yet burnt down, and the red heap of coal filled the room with a dull, warm glow that lit here and there the brass handle of a cabinet, burnishing an occasional thread of gold in chair cover and cushion.
With a quick movement of her wrist Joan pulled off the small felt hat, flung it carelessly upon a chair, and tossed back from her forehead the mane of yellow hair. Her eyes through the half light of the room were fiercely bright, and on the half-parted lips glinted a film of moisture.
“Darling!” she murmured, “darling.”
It was their first kiss that evening, and as the cool, soft arms went slowly round his neck, as the powdered fragrance from her neck and hair rose troublingly about him, as he felt her lift herself upon her toes so that her mouth might be pressed the harder upon his, as over the smouldering eyes the long-lashed eyelids closed, slowly drop by drop his resentment and impatience ebbed from him.
Cheek against cheek they sat for a long while, whispering before the sinking fire. Her yellow hair was dyed by the light from the glowing coals to a dull copper. Dark shadows rimmed her eyes, the soft colouring of her cheeks had deepened. Ah, but he loved her so.
“If only I hadn’t got to leave you,” he said. “It’s cruel that on such an evening one should have to part.”
She said nothing, made no sign, just sat there, her hands clasped before her knees.
“It’s cruel,” he repeated, “it’s cruel, and it’s because I want you so, because I so hate to be away from you that I’m impatient at times and irritable. It maddens me, the thought of our not being everything to each other. You’ll understand when I’m like that, won’t you? You’ll know why it is? It’s not easy, this long waiting. I’d be so much more the perfect lover if I didn’t love you so.”
She made no answer, but quietly her hand was stretched out to his.
• • • • • • • •
It was a cool, starlit, moonless night. The tubes and buses had stopped running. The disused streets shone like dark glaciers in the reflected lamplight.
A good evening for a three-mile walk: a walk that would clear his mind of the day’s confused impressions. His agitated indecision at the office, his talk with Mrs. Lawrence, the elation with which he had walked back from her flat to Oxford Circus. The elation that had changed suddenly to an engulfing melancholy: the entranced happiness of that last hour in the fire-lit drawing-room: the long, breathless kisses.
How he loved her! loved her more, far more, than he had loved her on that evening when he had for the first time kissed her. And in all conscience he had loved her enough then. She had been the first girl that he had ever kissed. Curious to think of it. That he should have come to the age of twenty-five without kissing a single girl.
But he had gone straight from school into the war: his years of service had been spent in France and away from London. The moment he had been demobilized he had gone up to Oxford for a couple of years, to an exclusively masculine society. And then almost immediately after coming down he had met Joan, and after that—well, after that, of course, no one else had mattered. There had been nobody but Joan.
And in so few months now they would be married. He ought to be happy, radiantly happy. And yet, and yet . . .
“Something wild, untamed, untamable——” slowly, insidiously the words were repeated in his ear. Slowly, insidiously before his eyes out of a spreading triangle of light from a dead white face clasped round by a helmet of brown hair. “Something wild, untamed, untamable, something that makes its own laws, because it is stronger than all laws, something that you can’t control, that may destroy life but will make it worth the living first.”
In the upper windows of an occasional house a light was burning still. There was the love that could
be preserved in cases; there was the docile, ordered, civilized commodity: and it was to that that his love and Joan’s would come eventually; had already come, perhaps, since it had adjusted itself to their conditions, come to them on their terms.
And he felt suddenly an overwhelming, heart-breaking nostalgia for that other love, the something wild, untamed, untamable, the something for which ships had been sunk and cities sacked. The thing of which Gwen Lawrence in that calm, controlled, infinitely disquieting voice had spoken.
Chapter VIII
The Price of Virtue
“A Little cooler, sir?”
Guy Fortescue nodded his head, and the innumerable jets of tepid water from the curved zinc pedestal chilled slowly to a stinging cold. With a shudder he stepped out of range. To his left and in front of him stretched forbiddingly the clear waters of the plunge; through the glass wall over his right shoulder stretched the warm chambers of eternal heat. How happy and contented they looked there, lying back with their closed eyes and folded hands and dripping foreheads, the striped towels hanging loosely on their knees. How utter the tranquillity before lunch time of a Turkish bath; how complete a suspension of all effort. How fair a contrast to that ominously unruffled expanse of water.
Interrogatively the masseur looked at him.
“The plunge, sir?”
With a jerk, Guy Fortescue pulled himself together.
“Of course,” he answered.
It was worse than he had expected. Gasping and shivering with water in his eyes and mouth, he scrambled up the slippery marble steps.
“Most gentlemen begin to think twice about the plunge at your age, sir,” said the man as he wrapped the warm, large towel round him.
At his age! And it seemed such a little while ago that he had been brought here by John Featherway and Archie Gammell, and had felt genially contemptuous of their shuddering avoidance of the plunge. In retrospect so little a while ago, but actually in days and months . . .
The years went so fast when you had once turned the corner, when you found yourself in the straight road, when there were no new events to mark the swift days’ passage. So little a while ago. But John Featherway was dead, and the green seats of the park no longer saw the stately figure of Archie Gammell threading its way between them on Sunday mornings after church. While himself, with two married daughters, and a son at Oxford . . . How swiftly the pages of the book were turned. With his arm crossed behind his head, he lay back on the narrow plush couch and brooded moodily. Youth went and in its turn life likewise.
To be old and out of it! To see through your bedroom window the soft-hued marvel of an April day; to feel on your cheek and draw into your lungs the deep breath of awakening life; to recognize unchanged about you the familiar and loved landscape that you had known in boyhood; and to know that soon, soon, on some near or later day, the same sun would be rising over the same hills, to shed on these same lanes and cottages its gentle radiance, and you not there to look on it! . . . It seemed only yesterday that he had been “young Fortescue”; and here he was now in middle-age, timorous of cold water.
To be old and out of it! Already, for all he knew, people were beginning to treat him with dreary intolerance, making behind his back contemptuous allowances for age. “Poor old man.” Was that now what he was becoming to them? A silly old man, to be played with, and made use of. Was that the rôle he was playing in Gwen’s life? Angrily the line of thought passed through him. Let her think it, if she chose. He wasn’t “gaga” yet.
It was in a dark and clouded state of mind that he was driven round to Ciber Crescent.
For a full four minutes he was kept waiting on the doorstep.
“I’m so sorry,” she explained. “I was telephoning.”
“Who to?”
“Nobody you know,” she answered.
They had scarcely left the hall before again the bell of the telephone began to ring.
“What a life,” Gwen murmured.
“Hullo, what is it? Yes, this is Grosvenor 53282. Yes. It’s Mrs. Lawrence speaking. Who is that? What? Oh, but, my dear, how are you? And to think that I didn’t recognize your voice; that only shows how long it must be since I heard it. You’ve been neglecting me, Ralph. Oh, yes, quite seriously; of course I’m offended. And when am I going to see you again? Thursday? No, I’m afraid I couldn’t manage Thursday. Friday I can. Yes? Then you’ll call for me at eight. Splendid. Good-bye, my dear.”
“And now, Guy,” she said, turning round to face him, “we can decide where you’re going to give me lunch.”
Guy Fortescue made no reply. There was a surly, impatient expression on his face, All these men rushing through her life; these men of whom he knew so little, who played in her life he didn’t know what part.
“If you’ll just wait half a second,” she said, “I’ll get my hat on.”
But he had stepped quickly across the room to stand between her and the door.
“No,” he said, “no, not for a moment. There’s something that’s got to be said between us first.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“So?” she said. “And must lunch be kept waiting for it?”
“Yes,” he blustered angrily. “It is important. I’m through with it. That’s what I’ve got to tell you. I’m through with it. It can’t go on any longer. I’ve had enough.”
“And of what, Guy Fortescue, have you had enough?” Her voice was controlled and calm, but beneath her words there was the chill of steel.
“Of this. Of everything. Of you and me. Of all these men that you keep hanging round you. I’ve had enough, I say. I’m through with it.”
Very straight, with fearless, unwavering eyes, she looked him in the face. Then slowly she nodded her head.
“I see,” she said. “I understand,” and turning, she walked over to the mantelpiece, lifted the lid of a small painted wooden box, took from it a cigarette, and stood there tapping slowly the point of the cigarette against her thumb. She said nothing. Just stood there, tapping.
In the centre of the room Guy Fortescue shifted his feet uncomfortably. He had expected her to protest and plead, to explain and whimper and cajole; cajole till he should be magnanimous and forgive. He was unprepared for this disarming silence that forced upon him instead of her the onus of an explanation.
“You see——” he began awkwardly.
But she cut him short.
“Oh no, please. I understand perfectly,” and turning, her arms stretched behind her along the mantelpiece, she looked him in the face. “I understand perfectly,” she said. “We’ve known each other for three months now. We’ve been seeing each other two or three times a week. You have taken me to a number of theatres and a number of dances. You have made me a number of very generous presents. The time has come, you think, to present your bill. Oh no, don’t interrupt. I don’t blame you. I must have seemed, I know, what you are pleased to call ‘fair game.’ A grass widow, with not a great deal of money, and a great deal too much spare time. You set out to buy me. Oh yes, you did, Guy Fortescue. You set out to buy me with dinners and frocks and dances. And now that you have begun to suspect that you have made a bad investment, you say you’re through, that you’ve tired of it. Well, so be it. If you’ll just wait a moment I will go and fetch the various things that you have given me. You can take them away with you, and I shall wish to see neither you nor them again. You will let me pass now, thank you.”
And without looking at him, with a firm, steady stride she walked out of the drawing-room, across the passage, into the bedroom.
In less than three minutes she was in the room, her arms laden with frocks and boxes. One by one she laid them upon the table.
“That’s all, I believe,” she said at last.
Her voice was calm and level-toned; in her eyes was the old glint of ironic mockery, and in the corners of her mouth a smile was flickering. How simple it all was, she told herself; how easy a game to play. Slowly the swell of Guy Fortescue’s anger subsi
ded. He was embarrassed now; unhappy and ashamed; appalled by the consequences of his moment’s outburst; by the implied finality of that high-heaped pile upon the table.
“But Gwen,” he began to stammer, “really, I—I d-didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, Gwen.”
Fearless and unwavering as ever, her eyes met his.
“I, too,” she answered. “I’m sorry: more perhaps than you are. More perhaps than you’ll ever realize.”
There was a pause; an electric, nervous pause.
“Well, and aren’t you going to take those things away?” she asked.
He shook his head miserably.
“I can’t—I—it’s. I mean—oh, I don’t know—I can’t. They are yours. I got them for you. They mean—oh, but I couldn’t, you’ve misunderstood me.”
She shook her head.
“Oh no, my dear. Not now. Once I may have But not now; believe me, not any longer. Once I thought—but it doesn’t matter what I thought. There are the things,” and she stretched out her hand, her small white hand, towards the table. “You’d better take them. Or will you send your man round? I’ll make them up in a parcel for him.”
But Guy Fortescue was beyond the reach of irony. He was conscious only of the loss so imminent of Gwen Lawrence, and of all that for the last three months she had stood for in his life.
“Gwen dear,” he stammered, “you ‘thought once.’ What did you mean by that, that you had thought once?”
Her hands clasped behind her back, her head flung backwards, in a still level voice she answered him.
“I thought once—but what does it matter what I thought? It was silly of me to think it. I thought perhaps that you were what for all my life I had been looking. A real friend. A man who liked me for what I was; who was kind to me simply because he liked me. It’s what I’ve been looking for, what I’ve missed, you see. Life isn’t easy for my sort of woman, a married woman whose husband’s left her—there are a good many vultures hovering about the spoil. I thought once that you were different. If I hadn’t thought it I’d never have let you give me all those things.”