by Alec Waugh
“You don’t need to be told,” Graham was saying, “that I’m in love with you.”
It was the first time that the word “love” had been used between them. And it was in keeping that it should be spoken here, in this crowded room,’ with the stage so unset for protestation; in keeping with the conduct so unpremeditated and so unforeseen of their love’s development.
He had never meant to fall in love with her—she knew that now. And she had meant merely to make him pay for his imagined treachery.
“I guessed,” she answered.
“It was because I was afraid of meeting you that I sold those shares, because I wanted to free myself of the excuse and cause of meeting you, because I thought that if I never saw you again I should be able to forget you.”
“And would you have?”
“I shan’t now be able to.”
Softly, over the undulating couples, was murmured the languid rhythm of a tango. With slow, gliding steps, now short, now long, the few dancers that were capable of its intricacies patterned the floor with an elaborate and Eastern elegance.
“Can you do this?” Gwen asked abruptly.
He nodded.
“Very well; let’s try it, then.”
It was the first time that they had danced that evening. The first time that, loving her, he had held her in his arms.
“If only you knew,” he whispered, “how much I love you!”
The cool softness of her arm drew him more closely to her. The vague fragrance of her hair was nearer to his cheek.
“So much,” he whispered, “so terribly much! And to-morrow,” he added, as they walked back at the dance’s close towards their table, “to-morrow I’ll be alone in London.”
Alone, but not so alone, she thought, as she would be. There was that girl of his, after all, who loved him, whom he would marry, who would teach him to forget.
“Did you know,” she asked suddenly, “that that girl of yours was here in Paris?”
“Joan?”
“Yes. Did you know?”
Joan in Paris! But, of course, she would be, if she were to return to London on the following day. It had never occurred to him that he and she would be there together.
“She was standing,” Gwen continued, “in the doorway of the hotel opposite while you were settling with the taxi.”
“Did she notice me?”
“I don’t know. There was the taxi between you. But I don’t know how long she was standing there. She may have seen you. Would it matter much?”
He shrugged his shoulders. Matter? Did anything matter much; anything except the loss so imminent of this so loved woman? Perhaps it was better on the whole that Joan had seen. It would make easier the inevitable explanation.
“No, I don’t suppose it matters much,” he said.
The words were spoken tonelessly, without any sort of animation, and Gwen Lawrence felt her blood beat the quicker as she heard them. He loved her as much as that, then; it did not really matter to him whether his simpering schoolgirl knew or did not know.
A soft glow of triumph caressed and warmed her. A glow, though, that subsided quickly. To what use could she turn her victory? If only she were free! And she recalled ironically how so few months earlier she had refused her husband’s offer of divorce, that she might be at greater liberty to follow what she had described to May Julian laughingly as her profession.
“You may be fearfully sorry for it one day,” May Julian had cautioned her.
Well, and May Julian had been right; had been right, too, when she had warned her that one day she might fall in love herself; that in the person of some man as yet unknown to her, all these other men whose love for her she had flaunted and exploited would take their revenge on her. Well, and if they were, what of it? She’d see it through.
“I’m tired, Graham,” she said. “Let’s go back.”
. . . . . . . .
It was only when they had paid the bill and were standing in the vestibule, while the immense and liveried commissionaire busied himself about a taxi, that Graham realized that he had nowhere to go back to.
“I never thought of booking a room,” he said. “And at this time of night and without any luggage there’s nowhere I could get taken in.”
For scarcely a second Gwen Lawrence delayed her answer.
“That’ll be all right,” she said. “There’s a sofa in my sitting-room at the hotel. You can sleep on that.”
The night porter at the Hôtel Splendor accepted the return of Gwen with a young and unluggaged man as an event too customary for comment. He was neither distrustful nor ingratiating.
“A room for monsieur? At this hour?” he said. “Ah, but it would not, I fear, be possible. There is no room prepared. To-morrow there will be nothing simpler. But to-night—I am afraid, no.”
“Then my friend,” Mrs. Lawrence informed him, “will sleep upon the sofa. You will send up breakfast for both of us to-morrow morning.”
Soundlessly, through the sleeping house, the lift shot upwards. Soundlessly they walked down the silent passages, past the succession of locked rooms with their boots and shoes arranged singly and in pairs outside them. The key turned in the door of Gwen’s private suite.
After the chill of the draughty taxicab the room seemed warm; lit softly by the faint glow of a gas fire that was burning at half pressure.
“How thoughtful of them,” Gwen murmured. “Oh, but I feel lazy, Graham.” And, sinking down on to the sofa, she let the grey chinchilla cloak fall backwards from her shoulders. “Give me a cigarette, there’s a dear. And you might turn on the fire full.”
It was a largish fire and its rich glow filled the room with a pleasant twilight, lending to the very ordinarily furnished place an agreeable sense of poetry.
“Not a bad sofa, this,” Gwen said. “With a blanket and a rug you ought not to be uncomfortable.”
Graham made no reply. He was not in the mood to chatter indifferently of indifferent things. Too much had happened, too much had been said, during the last twelve hours, to permit of evasion now. He leant forward on the edge of the sofa, his hands stretched out towards the fire; his face ruddily brown against the surrounding darkness.
“You’re very silent,” Gwen Lawrence said at length.
“Better be silent than—oh, I don’t know. I suppose you’re thinking me a fearful cad.”
“Cad, Graham?”
“For making love to you when I’m engaged to someone else. For saying I love you, when love’s an impossibility between us: when, whatever I felt, I ought to have stayed silent. I suppose that’s being a cad, isn’t it?” He paused on a note of interrogation. “I suppose it is,” he went on, as she made no answer. “But for all that, you know, I wouldn’t have it any different. I’m glad you know. I’m glad I’ve told you. I don’t know why I should be, but I am. I care so fearfully, you see.”
Still she remained silent. But her head dropped forward a little on her breast, and on the soft velveteen covering of the sofa her tapered fingers tightened.
“And you’ll be going where,” he asked, “to-morrow?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I told you I don’t know.”
“Just wander on?”
“I suppose so.”
He sighed.
“In a way, I’m glad you’ll be out of London. I shouldn’t be able to bear it, if I knew that by lifting the receiver of a telephone and repeating a certain number to the exchange I could hear your voice; if I knew that by driving my car back by a certain street I should be passing within six yards of you; if I knew that at any moment, by the caprice of chance, I might be meeting you in this restaurant or the other, in this theatre or the other. You’d be too near to me, too tantalizingly near. It’s better as it is.”
“Perhaps,” she said. Then, after a pause, “I’m tired, Graham. I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed. Wait half a second and I’ll bring you out a blanket.”
She rose from the sofa and, with knee
s that trembled a little, walked towards her bedroom door. His eyes followed her. The door opened. Her fingers pressed down the electric switch. For a moment against the lighted interior her figure was outlined in silhouette. There was a sound of rustled bedclothes. A moment’s pause, then Gwen came back into the room carrying on her arm a blanket and a rug.
“Here you are,” she said.
He took them from her and tossed them across the sofa. Through the shadowed half-light of the room her eyes were strangely bright; and her face whiter than he had ever seen it.
“Good night,” she whispered.
But he could not let her go like that. For weeks, for months, for the rest of his life it might be, he would not be seeing her again. For on the morrow there would be the business of packing, the stress of catching trains. Never again, perhaps, would they be so alone together. At all costs this moment must be prolonged. When that door had once more closed behind her she would have passed out of his life for ever.
Awkwardly, and for want of anything else to say:
“I suppose you’ll be going south,” he said, “to-morrow?”
“That’s the third time, Graham, in one way or another, that you’ve asked me the same thing.”
“I know.”
She smiled softly at him.
“You’re tired—more tired probably even than I am. And I’m tired enough. Good night!” And she stretched out her hand to him.
But he took no notice of it.
“I’m so wretched,” he said, “so immeasurably more wretched than ever I’ve been before. I can’t bear the thought of saying good night to you, because it may be that it’ll be good-bye, and I’ll say any silly thing rather than see you go.” And then suddenly his power over himself broke down. “Oh, Gwen, Gwen,” he gasped, “I love you so!”
The sight at that moment of her loved face was more almost than he could endure. His arm raised across his eyes, he turned from her, staggered across the room, lurched up against the mantelpiece and buried his face against his hands in a desperate attempt to recover his control.
“I love you, I love you so,” he muttered.
Before Gwen’s eyes the room appeared to rock uncertainly. Through a mist she felt herself walking across the floor to Graham, through a mist saw herself laying her hands upon his shoulders, through a mist heard herself murmuring soft, consoling words.
“Don’t, don’t, you mustn’t. I can’t bear to see you unhappy. Don’t, don’t.”
As the words fell from her lips, words softer than she had uttered for many years to any man, she felt little by little her strength deserting her.
“You mustn’t, you mustn’t,” she went on whispering, and her cheek now was very close to his. Where she might have been able to resist passion, his unhappiness had unweaponed her.
He shook his head.
“You don’t understand,” he said unsteadily. “I’ve cared so much. And I’ve fought so hard to prevent your knowing that I cared. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Ah, but I do.” Through a mist, against her will, the words were wrung from her. “Understand? How should you?”
His answer came like a retort, almost impatiently.
“I’ve fought so hard,” he said, “I never knew that one could fight over anything so hard. Fought till I knew that I was beaten. Till I knew that there was safety only in flight for me. When I realized that I was beaten, I went to my employers and asked if I could be sent abroad. The very day I went they had decided that I must remain permanently in London. That same week I sold your shares; sold them because I was afraid of meeting you. I didn’t dare to see you again. How should you understand that, Gwen?”
“I can understand that very well, my dear. Understand it better even than you can. Because I can understand a person being even more afraid than you were.”
“More afraid!” He repeated the words scornfully, incredulously.
“Yes, more afraid,” she repeated bravely. “You sold the shares because you were afraid of the certainty of meeting me. I ran away from London because I couldn’t face even the risk of meeting you.”
. . . . . . . .
Her heart beating, her mouth dry, the rim of her eyes burning her, Gwen Lawrence sat before the mirror at her dressing-table. Her arms still ached from the harsh pressure of Graham’s fingers, her lips still stung from the heat of Graham’s kiss. What had been said, what had been done? To what was she committed? She was powerless now that Graham knew she loved him. As long as he had been able to believe that her feelings for him were simply those of friendship, he had had the courage to resist her. He had never set himself ardently to woo her, he had never said the things before which her strength would have been changed to weakness. And because he had never said those things, she had been able to retain her attitude of aloof composure. Now that he knew, now that they both knew, was there any power in the world to protect them from one another.
Mechanically she smoothed the soft cool cream across her face; mechanically she passed over her nails the long curved leather pad; mechanically she began to brush her hair, sweeping the fine stiff bristles through the short cropped hair. Mechanically she raised herself from her chair, and began to draw her dress up from her waist in pleats before she lifted it above her head.
From the drawing-room she could hear the sounds of Graham’s undressing. He was having difficulties apparently with the bed. The far side of the sofa would not, it seemed, let down. A sudden creak. Ah, that would be it then. Two heavier sounds one after the other. The chink of money. A metallic rattle. His braces probably. A rustle or two of linen, then silence. Slowly she dropped her silk nightdress over her head, slowly slipped off beneath it her thin silk camisole, and seating herself on the edge of the bed, began to pull off her stockings.
How still it was. Not a sound of any description in the immense sleeping house. All those floors and corridors and rooms, and themselves perhaps the only two waking persons in it; and between themselves that narrow partition of matchwood only. Was he asleep, she wondered. Silently with straining ears she listened. Was he so tired that sleep had come to him the moment his body had found itself upon the tolerable discomfort of the hotel cushions, or was he awake as she, with beating heart and dry mouth and straining ears?
Was that a sound? In a second she was sitting bolt upright in bed. Had she heard, or was it merely fancy, the rustle of a blanket slipping to the floor? Rigid in every nerve, not daring to breathe, her fingers clutching tightly to the sheets, she sat there listening. For minutes it seemed, she waited. Again what was it? Was that the creaking of a board, or fancy, or her own heart’s beating? She could hear nothing, not the sound of breathing even. But though neither through her eyes nor through her ears could the sense of his presence be conveyed to her, she knew as clearly as though she could see and hear him, that Graham Moreton was standing close up against that narrow partition of painted wood, his heart thudding against his side, his tongue dry within his mouth, his fingers raised towards the handle of the door.
She did not stir. Perfectly rigid, with closed eyes and straining ears, she waited: waited till with that same inner sense that could transcend the power of sight and sound, she knew that on noiseless feet Graham Moreton was creeping back to the sofa across the floor. Then limp suddenly, the tension loosened, she sank back into her bed, and a pillow pressed against her mouth stifled as best she might the surging flood of sobs.
Chapter XXIII
The Cost of Loving
Mr. Stirling rang you up sir,” the maid informed Graham on his return, dusty and tired, some twenty hours later, to his parents’ home. “He is giving a party this evening at his studio. He hoped that you and Miss Faversham might be able to come.”
A party at Christopher’s; how quickly one got back into it. That old life of formality and routine, of parties and dances and engagements.
Already the incidents of the last thirty-six hours had come to belong seemingly to another century, another period of time. The conve
rsation over the telephone with Humphrey, the rush to Croydon, the argument at the aerodrome, the perilous passage of the taxi, the meeting at the Gare du Nord, the conversation in the small café off the second street, and after it that ecstatic tearstained evening, the untasted dinner, the poetry of the bois, the raucous vitality of the Concert Mayol, the cabaret of the Moulin d’Or, the drive back to the hotel through the chill and emptying streets, and afterwards their talk together in the twilit drawing-room.
Those twenty or thirty minutes; whatever else of ecstasy life in the course of its fifty odd years of traffic with him might hold in store, nothing surely could be comparable with the rapture of that moment, when for the first time he had felt under his the parted softness of her lips. The wonder of it, the surprise, the marvel. One could not, whatever came to one, feel that way twice.
Confusedly Graham recalled the incidents of that hurried morning, the long silence at breakfast, the pervading sense of an irrevocable decision.
“But we are going to be together now,” he had pleaded. “Whatever happens to either of us, we shall be together. Things are not perhaps as we would have had them be, but as they are, because we so love each other, we will accept them on their terms, as they cannot be had on ours.”
She had nodded her head.
“Very well,” she had said, “if you wish it so.”
“And you will come back to London at once,” he had persisted.
For a moment she had hesitated, then suddenly had shrugged her shoulders.
“Very well,” she had said. “Sooner or later it has to be. It might just as well be sooner. I had better buy a dress and hat or so whilst I am here, but I will be back by Friday afternoon.”
“As soon as that.”
“Oh yes, I shall fly over probably. No woman can be expected to cross the Channel twice by sea in fifty hours.”
And so they had left it there, left there the decision of how they were to arrange and manipulate the conduct of such a life as they were to decide upon. This only had been agreed, their lives, whatever was to happen, were to be one. It had not in so many actual words been said, but in every word and gesture it had been implied.