by Alec Waugh
He said no more. There was no more, indeed, for him to say. He had said all in that one admission.
On such an evening and at such a dance a few months earlier he had met her. She had gone there as she had come here to-night with other friends, with friends to whom she had stood, perhaps, in the same relation that now she stood to him. He had met her casually, as she had met to-night this other man. She had met him, and for his sake those other friends had been relegated temporarily into the background of her life, as now for the other man he might so find himself discarded. What once had happened, might happen well enough again. She was a woman to whom things like that would happen. She had that striking quality that made men always when they passed her in the street look twice at her. As once she had attracted him, as she had attracted now this other man. And how was he to know what other man he had not himself on that first night supplanted? What she had done once, she might do again. For the first time, almost, he was realizing the vast implication of her acceptance of him. As she had accepted him, so for all he knew, might she accept or might she have accepted others. He could never feel for one instant sure of her.
Well enough now, could Christopher appreciate what effect that restatement of their relations had had on them. It had made Brackenridge intolerably jealous; or rather it had intensified his jealousy, for from the beginning he had been jealous. Three months back, at the cocktail party, Christopher had noticed that. But he had no doubt found comfort then in the belief that though most women were capricious while they were being wooed, all women are subservient when they have been won. He had expected from their changed relations a complete reversal of their positions. And that reversal had not come.
She was the same friendly, witty, affectionate companion that she had always been. He was no more necessary to her than he had been before. He saw no more of her than he had done before. She had abandoned none of her habits and none of her friends. She had retained control completely of her emotional keyboard, the keyboard on which he had expected to play what tune he chose. Things were approximately unchanged. He had done no more than add to the repertory of their endearments.
And because Geoffrey had regarded as ultimate those favours that had been granted him, he found himself now unweaponed and defenceless. He had no means left with which to hold her to him. She was free. And he could no longer calm his anxiety with the hope that “soon, in a few days, a few hours, a few weeks, it would be different.” There was nothing now he could hope for. What, where that had failed him, could succeed? She was free. He had no hold over her. That gift of herself that she had made so lightly, could be retrieved as lightly. She would remain with him so long and just so long as it might please her. She would go as easily as she had come. And that thought, because he was in love with her, he dared not face.
And as they walked slowly arm in arm through the soft summer night, Christopher smiled quietly to himself. “J’en ai soupé.” How vain a boast, and how he would have to pay for making it.
Chapter XIV
Twelve Hours of Turmoil
Drowsily Mildred Atkinson blinked as a stream of unwelcome sunlight drifted across her eyes. She had not meant to wake so soon, and once awake she knew that she would not be able to go to sleep again. Besides it was after eight, and from the dining-room and kitchen came the laboured sounds of Mrs. Jocelyn’s matutinal preparations. Breakfast would be ready in half an hour. Cautiously, so as not to disturb Humphrey, she extricated herself from the rumpled mass of sheets and tip-toed into the bathroom.
He was still asleep when she returned warm and fresh and scented from her bath. The hair upon his forehead was disordered, his cheeks were a little flushed and about his chin was the slightly grubby look that precedes a shave; but as he lay there with an elbow bent beneath his head he made a not unpretty picture; and a smile came into her eyes as she looked at him. It was a lovely morning. They would not waste the day apart. They would drive down into the country, and leave their car at some inn or other and wander together through the fields, letting the sun-drenched hours pass. It was a day for love making. “And it’s time,” she thought, “he woke.”
So that the sunlight might fall across his face she drew back the half-drawn curtains. Humphrey blinked, lifted himself upon his elbow, rubbed his eyes and smiled.
“Heavens,” he said, “I’m sleepy. That comes of these late nights. What’s the time, pretty one?”
“‘Bout half-past eight.”
“And I’ve got appointments from ten o’clock. I must rush.”
She walked over to the bed and seating herself upon the edge of it took his hand in hers.
“It’s such a glorious day,” she said. “I’d like to spend it in the country.”
“And why shouldn’t you?”
“But not alone.”
He smiled, a kindly, indulgent smile that denied regretfully.
“If only,” he said, “you knew how much work I have on hand.”
She pouted, but did not protest. Instead she bent forward beside him on the bed, curled round his neck a cool, soft, scented arm, and set her mouth on his. But he responded to her kiss in the absent-minded way men have when they are not in the mood for love-making. “It’s no good,” she thought; but she was resentful less at the disappointment of her plan than at the failure of her kiss to move him; three months ago, she had only to lift her eyes to have her will of him.
“What are we doing to-night?” she asked.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve got to go to a dinner party that will be probably extremely dull but that should be extremely profitable.”
“Then you won’t,” she asked, “be coming back?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know what time it’ll end. They want me to go on somewhere. I’d better go back to my own place.”
“And to-morrow?”
“To-morrow evening you shall make your choice of such poor amusements as this law-riddled city has to offer.”
She laughed gratefully as he drew her into his arms, but at the back of her mind lingered uncomfortably the memory of her failure.
• • • • • • • •
Humphrey’s first appointment was not till half-past ten. But he had been scarcely five minutes in his office before Graham Moreton had tapped upon his door. It was contango day, and Florida Asiatics stood at eighty-eight and a quarter. That was to say, there was a profit on his shares of roughly fifty pounds.
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that the time has come to sell?”
Humphrey Stirling leant back in his chair, lifted an immaculately-trousered leg and crossed it above the other.
“That depends,” he said, “on the spirit in which you are conducting this transaction.”
“Now, Humphrey——”
“But seriously. If you want to make a profit of fifty pounds sell them, that’s obvious. If you want to run the risk of making five hundred at the cost of losing two, hang on. It depends, as I told you, entirely upon the spirit in which you’re going into it. If you’re out for money or out for fun. It doesn’t, I may add, matter to me in the least which you are. Only the sooner I know the better.”
“Are they going to go up?”
Wearily Humphrey Stirling drew his hand along his head.
“If I knew,” he said, “when shares were going up and when shares were going down, I should not be sitting at this desk now. I should be a millionaire.”
“Surely you’ve some idea?”
“None,” answered Humphrey cheerfully.
“Then it seems to me——” Graham began testily.
“It seems to you,” Humphrey completed the sentence for him, “that I’m a pretty useless sort of broker. An assumption, my dear Graham, that does not confer a great deal of credit on your intelligence. One can have no more idea of whether a share’s going up or not than we can know whether Hobbs is going to make over fifty when he goes in to bat. His average, you may say, is sixty. The probability is ther
efore that he is going to make it. But you can really have no sure idea; any more than you can have that Tate will bowl Strudwick in the course of the next six overs. The law of average, which is the law of probability, tells you that Hobbs will make fifty and Tate bowl Strudwick within thirty balls; but Hobbs may make a duck and Strudwick bat an hour. You cannot tell.”
“Still, if you admit that there is a law of probability?”
“I do. And the law of probability in this case says that they’re as likely to go up as to go down, and that in a few weeks’ time they’ll go one way or another with a rush. In the meantime they’re as good a thing to gamble on as any. But they’re not to be recommended for the spinster’s savings. That’s how it stands and what about it?”
Graham hesitated. He knew all that there was to be known about the things.
“I must ask my friend’s advice,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Any time you like. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Moodily Graham walked back towards his office. If only he could have brought back with him a clear recommendation to Gwen to sell. If only he could say: “These shares are as high now as they’ll ever be. By holding on to them you’ll be only piling up the interest on the capital you’ve borrowed.” If only he could say that, and be rid for ever of this exasperating circumstance.
For that, he knew, was the one thing he wanted now. To be rid of it, to be free once and for all time of this transaction that held him to Ciber Crescent. If there were no longer any occasion for his visits, he would have the strength of will to discontinue them. But as long as the excuse to discuss business with Gwen remained he would be, he knew well, unable to break the spell of attraction that she had laid on him.
Evening after evening, and with increasing frequency during the last weeks, he had found himself at the end of the day driving his car westwards by way of Marylebone.” I’ve just come in,” he would say, “to tell you that your shares have gone up a quarter of a point.” And she would smile slowly. “How nice of you to come and tell me,” she would say. “I had noticed it myself, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less kind of you.”
And they would sit and talk together, and word by word, sentence by sentence, the strong tides of her personality would subdue and weaken him. Every time that he left her flat he would promise himself that never again would he return there. He would arrange things over the telephone in future. It was too dangerous. One should run away from temptation when one was not strong enough to face it. It would be madness for him to let himself fall in love with Gwen. Nothing could come of it except unhappiness; for himself and Joan and everyone who cared for them. He would arrange things over the telephone in future.
It hadn’t worked. That rich, sweet voice along the wire was a magnet drawing him towards her. However hard he might try to say all that he had to say into the metal mouthpiece, sooner or later he would find his lips framing the invariable request, might he not come round and explain things to her? It hadn’t worked.
And it must stop. Of that he was very certain. Somehow or other he must free himself of the occasion and the obligation of seeing her. It was with the fixed determination of persuading her to sell that he drove round that evening to Ciber Crescent.
She was untying, when he arrived, a large cardboard box. Every door in the flat, as far as he could gather, had been flung wide open, and the gramophone was playing the concluding strains of “Katerina.”
“Graham!” she exclaimed. “How nice to see you. You can help me unpack this dress. Oh, that gramophone! Do be an angel and take the record off before the sound-box is completely ruined. I hope you’ll like this dress. It looked heavenly in the shop, but you can’t be certain. Ah!”
From its wrappings of tissue paper she lifted cautiously a flame-coloured film of stuff, held it at arm’s length away from her, surveying critically, but appreciatively, the flicker on its shifting folds of the declining sunlight.
“Not too bad,” she murmured, “not too bad. One moment, Graham,” and turning she ran quickly out of the room to examine the dress more closely in the long oval pier glass of her bedroom. In a couple of minutes she was back again. “That’s that,” she said. “And tell me, am I a millionairess yet?”
She spoke light-heartedly. She had long since, he could see, ceased to take more than a casual interest in her shares.
“You’re about fifty pounds to the good at present.”
“Fifty pounds? That might be worse.”
“Much worse. If I were you I’d sell out now.”
“Why? Is the rush downhill going to begin?”
He hesitated. It would be so easy to lie to her. And he wanted so desperately to make her sell. He had almost begun to say “Yes,” indeed, when something stayed him. He couldn’t. There were some things one couldn’t do, and to lie to her was one of them.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I don’t even say that the rush I warned you about is going to start. I don’t even say that they’ve got as high now as they’re ever likely to. But they’re reaching the risky point. In a week or so they’ll be going one way or another in a hurry.”
“But even if they do go down we shall have time, shan’t we, to sell out before things have got too dangerous?”
“Oh yes, but——”
“But what?” She was perched upon the table; smiling downwards at him through the smoke that drifted upwards across her face from the extremity of the amber cigarette holder. “You’re not going to tell me, surely, that I must play for safety and start saving up for my old age. Fifty pounds. What’s fifty pounds, after all? Last time the shares stood at eighty-eight you told me to hang on.”
He recalled, how well he recalled, that incident. It had been in early days. When he had persuaded himself, because he was anxious to retain the excuse for seeing her, that it would be better for her to hold on.
“It was different then,” he said. “We weren’t so close to the sudden change of value.”
“But that change may bring me in a terrific lot of money.”
“It might,” he admitted grudgingly. “But you don’t want to lose two hundred pounds.”
“I don’t mind,” she answered cheerfully.
“Don’t mind?” he echoed.
“Not fearfully. One’s got to amuse oneself. And one’s got to pay for one’s amusement. Even if I lose my two hundred, which isn’t likely, I shall have had a good two hundred pounds’ worth of enjoyment out of it. No, no, Graham, don’t you start worrying me to sell till the shares are up to a hundred or down to eighty-five.”
She smiled gaily at him.
“Don’t look so serious,” she said. “There are several necklaces between me and the workhouse yet.”
It was useless to argue. He could see that clearly enough. It was useless to argue. She would not sell, and the wretched business must continue, with these disquieting interviews growing more and more frequent as the weeks went by.
“Now that that’s settled,” she was saying, “you must tell me what you’ve been doing since last we met.”
The old thing over again. The long conversations about himself. The conversations that probed and laid bare his secret doubts and dissatisfactions.
“We’re always talking about myself,” he complained, “and I know so little about you.”
“About me? But, then, I’m so far less interesting.”
“My dear Gwen,” he protested, “how ridiculous! All the time your telephone bell’s ringing. All day long you’re going out to new places with new people. You go to the newest plays, the newest restaurants, the newest night clubs. If your life isn’t interesting, whose is?”
She shook her head.
“Oh no,” she said; “restaurants and plays and night clubs don’t make for interest. They may be the setting for interest. But they’re not interest in themselves. They’re external happenings. It’s the things that are happening inside you that are of interest. Nothing,” she added after a pause, “is happening
to me now. And that, after all, Graham, is why you are of so much more interest.”
She leant forward as she spoke; her hands rested on the table’s edge, the long amber holder held away from her. Her face was more serious than he had ever before seen it. There was no mockery, no laughter, in her eyes’ golden depths.
“The things that really mattered to me,” she said, “happened a very long while ago.”
“But when they were happening?”
“Ah, then!”
There was a pause. For a moment she seemed scarcely conscious of the room about her, of his presence, and, indeed, of hers too, in it. For a moment the long-lashed eyelids were lowered over the richly tinted depths; for a moment the damson-coloured lips were slightly parted.
“I wonder,” he said, “whether my life now is half as interesting as yours was then.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Who’s to say? Yours is happier, I think.”
“You weren’t happy then?”
Slowly Gwen shook her head.
“Happy,” she said. “No, not happy. I can’t remember that I was ever happy. To be happy is to be contented: to be at rest. And I was never that. No, I wasn’t happy. The flame burnt brightly though.”
Again there was a silence, and again, as so often formerly in Gwen’s company, there rose stiflingly that vague nostalgia, that home-sickness for lost adventure.
“But you don’t regret it?” he asked. “You wouldn’t have had it otherwise?”
She shook her head.
“No, no, not otherwise,” she said. “There are certain things one wouldn’t have repeated, certain emotions that one does not want to feel again, certain excitements that one would not have the faith, the strength, the courage, what you will, to sustain twice. One would think one’s life empty, though, half-lived, if one hadn’t had them,”
• • • • • • • •
For a long while that evening after Graham had left her, she sat motionless, staring with unseeing eyes towards the tattered sunset. It was getting late, she told herself. In a short while now Guy would be calling for her. They were dining at the Mitre, she believed, and there had been some talk of going on afterwards to that new night club in Silver Square.