by Ursula Bloom
He forced her to drink it.
III
She went back into the ballroom and danced again. With the sherry trickled warmly down her throat, the infection of the music had gone to her head. Her feet seemed tireless and young with an eternal youth. They danced in long even rhythms to Dardanelle. All of the tunes were catchy, full of suggestion, full of an unreal gaiety, of a wine-sweet delight in life. They were full of the fire of enthusiasm, the desire to live the moment for the moment. They fused all the latent emotions within her. Suddenly, when it was late, she found that she was becoming exhausted. They had come for coolness on to the wide terrace beyond the French windows. With the contagious melodies grinding on within, the garden seemed serene by contrast. In it flooded the great wide peace of the night. A quince-gold orange of a moon swung in the dark sky powdered with a yellow dust of stars. Against them the cedars were etched in blue blackness. There was the delicious pungency of summer scents, syringa and heliotrope, roses, and stocks refreshed with dew, all blent together.
‘I’m tired,’ she said dully.
‘Darling little Jilly sweet. You are only a little girl, aren’t you? A very little girl. I’ll drive you home.’
‘I feel almost too lazy to say good-bye.’
‘We won’t say good-bye. Much greater fun slipping off like that. That nasty old woman ‒’
‘Mrs. Wilbur?’
‘Of course. She’ll suppose that we are in some dark corner. Too late she will find we are not, and all her beastly speculations will crash to the ground. What a sell for her!’
‘But it is rude of us.’
‘More Alexandra fringe. As if a hostess mattered!’
She was quiet, plucking furtively at the orchid on her breast. She flung back her head and said dreamily, ‘It’s difficult to live post-war when you’ve been born pre-war.’
‘A revision of standards, that’s all. Saner reasoning, wiser thought. It’s the outlook that matters, Jilly sweet.’
From within a new record blared forth its message. It was a swinging waltz. He got up, drew her into his arms, danced languidly with her down the terrace. He danced as elementals dance, body to body, with the swelling scent of rose and heliotrope, and the unwinking light of the moon above them.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, and in her voice was surrender. He lifted her into the car and they drove purring into the night. She was oblivious to Twit and Edward and being old. She saw only Clive in his beautiful but brittle youth, and the eternal joy of love. She was Juliet, Helen, Cleopatra. Out of her sea of suffering this love had sprung Aphrodite-wise.
She cared no longer.
The car slid to a standstill at the gate. As she stepped out a sudden rush of blood from her head turned her faint.
‘Oh!’ she said.
‘Darling, what is it?’
‘I don’t know. I felt faint.’
‘I’ll carry you.’
He carried her up the path and across the veranda. So she had always dreamt a lover would bear her. She felt as he had said but a short span before, such a little girl in his arms. Twit had gone to bed, and the house was deathly still. In the drawing-room was a silver tray with a Thermos of coffee and some sandwiches beside it. To them it was the feast of Vitellius!
Clive laid her gently on the divan, and propped her up with cushions.
‘Jilly sweet, you frightened me.’
‘It was nothing. I often turn faint.’
‘You wouldn’t if you were my wife.’
She smiled whimsically.
‘You’re going to be my wife, you know that, don’t you?’
‘But Twit ‒’
‘Twit doesn’t matter, nothing matters, just us two, that’s all.’
She felt the faint pricking as of tears behind her eyes, but they were tears of joy.
‘Kiss me, darling, kiss me again.’
She could not refuse.
After a long while there came the silence, and then her voice. ‘I must go to bed,’ she said pitifully.
He got up and lit a cigarette with a hand that shook a little. ‘Is your maid waiting?’
‘No. I told her not to bother. It was silly, because I shall have to waken Twit, as I can’t undo my frock.’
‘I’ll undo it.’
‘You wouldn’t know how.’
‘Wouldn’t I just?’
She felt his nimble fingers at the shoulder fastening, and again at the side. The green orchid fell to the floor. It looked more snakish than ever. You might have expected it to writhe away, belly to earth. It had done its work, the eternal serpent, in the eternal Eden! The bodice fell back revealingly. There was the peach gleam of flesh under lace, of soft satin ribbon threaded through frothy lingerie.
‘You mustn’t,’ she said weakly. ‘I must go to bed. I feel faint.’
‘You shan’t faint.’
‘I may.’
‘You know you won’t. You love me, Jilly sweet, you do love me?’
She made a last effort for control, but it evaded her. The night was going to her head. That glass of wine, the tinkle of jagged music firing the senses, the long-drawn hours dancing together drenched in sweetness. Nothing else seemed to matter very much.
‘Yes,’ she said quickly, ‘I do love you.’
And she raised her lips to his.
CHAPTER IV
‘If everybody knew what one says of the other there would not be four friends left in the world.’ ‒ Pascal.
CHANSON DU MATIN.
I
She did not get up until late next day. She lay there in the veiled room, in the first quiet joy of awakening, until the sudden anguish of remembrance stabbed through her sabre-wise. After all, it was not a dream. Here in the cold of daylight her soul was stripped stark, and it was hideous. She knew that she could offer no excuse for it in that first blind panic. There was no excuse.
Things like this had happened in the war, and they went on happening in the new generation that had sprung up as fruit of carnage. But she was not of that generation. The brittle loveliness of youth to which she had clung had been too brittle. It had splintered in her hands. It had cut sharply into her soft flesh.
She wondered if Twit suspected what had happened. Then she believed that he would have warned her of her danger. He might be stupid, but he was not neglectful.
Twit had wakened when she and Clive returned the night before. He had listened to them talking, and for a moment had thought of going down to them. He had got up, pulled on an old dressing-gown, and had crept to the stairhead. He had heard the low rumble of their voices in the drawing-room, and had stood on the landing, suddenly keenly aware of danger. The soft, subdued lights, the peace-wrapped night, the whole environment. He had been poignantly aware of Clive as a tremendous risk that Jill was running. If he went in now, neither of them would want him. Yet, although he might be the undesired third, he might save Jill from the consequence of her folly. He had stood there, a figure strangely attenuated by the long camel dressing-gown, swaying this way and that indecisively. After all, it was Jill’s house, he was only a lodger in it. She was capable of seeing after herself. She was far cleverer than he was, and yet he was wondering if she needed help. No, he told himself, of course she didn’t. Twit crept back to bed and curled up, though sleep evaded him. The dreams of his delight escaped him too. They no longer reared glittering turrets through the dim mists of perception. They were hidden in fog, and it was the fog of indecisive action.
Long afterwards he heard the soft closing of the hall door, and the sound of a bolt thrust to with a clumsy attempt at quiet. He heard Jill coming to bed very cautiously. Then for Twit had begun such a hell of remorse that would not release him. What a cad he had been ‒ how cowardly! He blamed himself for the whole occurrence. Yet, he argued, perhaps he was letting conjecture run away with him. After all, he knew nothing, it was only what he had guessed. Clive had brought Jill home from a dance, just as he had done any other night. They had sat on talking. That was all. T
wit had tried to calm his fears, tried to convince himself that he had behaved wisely, and finally he had fallen into an uneasy sleep.
Later, when the day had blossomed into afternoon, Jill faced Clive. It was raining. She thought, perhaps platitudinously, that the skies wept for her. She was sitting in the late Victorian conservatory which occupied one whole side of the drawing-room. It was a gay splash of colour where the cream walls broke off into wide glass doors, through which blazed flowers. In the cool drawing-room itself there seemed to be a certain harshness. The carpetless floor, the cold bare walls, the chairs and the divan. That was no longer the throne of Jove’s enlightenment. It was unyielding, and its memories struck forcefully into her soul. A Dorothy Perkins dropped cerise tears over her. A pot of lilies of the valley poured forth their delicious perfume beside her. She had telephoned for Clive earlier. All her Victorianism leapt affrighted into prominence. They must be married at once. She could see no other way out. In this crisis Jill was very much the daughter of Isobel. She believed that she had done something that was intensely wicked, but that a marriage service could condone the sin and purify her. Even if she had hated Clive ‒ and she did not hate him, though she believed that she ought to have done ‒ even then it would have been her obvious duty to marry him without further delay. Prim and stereotyped as were her precepts, she was, in her dilemma, staunchly pre-war.
Twit had gone up to London to see about a job. It would not materialise. She had given up all hope of Twit’s jobs ever coming to anything. He was limp and spineless, and all her energy would not vitalise his inertia. She heard the pounding of Clive’s motor-bike outside and the crushing of his foot upon the path. She was ashamed that the very sound should send flame rushing to her cheek, and should thrill her in such a pre-eminently physical way. She tried to tell herself that this was the man who had seduced her last night, but only succeeded in telling herself that this was the man whom she loved. A great difference. A difference wide as the Tiber where it gushes at Ostia into a regurgitating union with the sea.
She heard him come into the room behind her, but did not dare to turn to look at him. There was the rapping of his step across the parquet and its smooth roll as he trod on the tessellated pavement of the conservatory. She knew that he stood beside her. Her own fever told her that he was there, the swelling, uncontrollable Tiber of passion within her.
‘Darling, darling!’
‘Clive, I feel awful!’
‘Awful, Jilly sweet, why?’
Now terribly ashamed, she said in a thick throaty voice, ‘Last night.’
He was quiet for a moment, then he dropped into a chair beside her. She had been very sweet, this Jilly of his, and he had flooded himself in her sweetness. He was not so predominantly male that possession sated him. At the moment his passion was to drink more from the fountain of his fancy, to quench his thirst there. He leant over her tenderly, and caressed her with light fingers.
‘That was nothing very dreadful, my sweet.’
‘I must have been mad.’
‘Or sane for once.’
‘We must not talk of it like that.’
‘But why not? We are going to be married.’
‘When?’ she asked weakly, and the pulse in her quickened.
‘We’ll be married at the end of the summer if you like.’
‘We must be married,’ she insisted.
‘Why?’
‘You ask me that? You!’
‘There’s no “must” about it, is there?’
‘But … last night.’
His warm live hands clasped her cold fingers. They had seemed to her to be like dead flowers before, now they lived again in his possessing warmth.
‘Jilly, you’ve lived a queer life. Your people were old-fashioned. You have always been brought up by unmoral moralists. You don’t understand life as it really is.’
‘I know that last night was sin,’ she declared stubbornly.
‘To commit sin you must actually sin against someone. Nobody was sinned against save ourselves.’
‘We hurt ourselves dreadfully,’ she persisted, and her reproachful eyes challenged his.
‘We did not hurt ourselves in the least. On the contrary, it was the first normal act in your abnormal life. Jilly sweet, you ought to be glad of it.’
‘I’m ashamed,’ she faltered.
‘Yet you are willing to marry me?’
‘Of course. After that we must be married.’
‘Even though you are ashamed of me? Even though you hate me?’ His voice had a sharp scathing tone. ‘Thank Heaven my standards are better than that. I would consider it a sin to marry a woman I did not care for, just to legalise an act that only love could justify.’
‘But under such circumstances?’
‘Under exactly such circumstances.’
In the kitchen Louisa was singing as she got the tea. Jill thought that she would never be able to sing again. She envied her own maid. She felt that she must make Clive see her viewpoint, and she began again:
‘The fault was all mine. I’ve been married; I ought to have known.’
‘Jilly sweet, there was no fault.’
‘I cannot believe that.’ But he was convincing, and he called her by that name, the whimsical name reminding her of dewy wallflowers against a sun-matured old wall.
‘I’ll make you.’
‘I feel so desperately wicked,’ she quavered.
He stooped forward impulsively and kissed her on the lips. The unexpected caress took her by surprise. He saw that her eyes had become suddenly moist and knew that she was surrendering.
‘Darling, you shan’t cry. We’ll be married at once, anything you like.’
‘I feel awful.’
‘I won’t let you feel awful. There is nothing criminal in what is the natural outcome of love. You’ve either got to trust me or not. If you love me you’ll believe in me. Surely you love me a little, Jilly sweet?’
They heard the light chatter of the trolley being wheeled across the hall to them. Louisa came in, strangely placid in expression. They sat stupidly surveying each other as she advanced and placed the trolley beside Jill. Then they remained mute until she had crossed the drawing-room again and closed the door after her. They both knew that their manner had not deceived her, but they had had to adopt it. Conventions falsify attitudes. They cannot be helped.
‘Now I suppose that you will say we are compromised?’ he suggested, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘More of the Alexandra fringe. Darling, you’re rather sweetly old-fashioned.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You are dancing with me to-night?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
She flamed redly. ‘How could I? Remember what happened last night. We can’t go on.’
‘We are to be married.’
‘I know, but until we are married ‒’
‘We must be engaged. Nobody need know; but we are engaged, aren’t we? I claim a fiancé’s privilege and I demand to see my beloved. Damn it all, it’s usual.’ His bright eyes twinkled.
‘I feel I ought never to see you again.’
‘If we do not meet, how can you marry me? I’m not doing any proxy wedding, however much you may ask it. After all, you were the person who suggested marriage to be the only way out.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we must see one another.’
She stared across the tea-trolley to him. She felt herself caught in the white froth of the modern wave, being hurled forward. She had until now lain prone on the beach of sterility, but at last she was in the sea, in the wash of it, in the white flurry of foam, and it was beautiful.
‘Clive, dearest Clive,’ she began huskily.
II
That was the hot summer of 1921. The heat had begun with the Easter moon, with the first primroses, and the pussy willow in yellow down blossoming along stark twigs. In July the world was panting for breath, swooning beneath the ardour of a too passionate sun. The
almost tropical days were succeeded by hot and sticky nights, when the luckier ones took out their cars and ran down to Hindhead by moonlight for a breath of cool air from the sea beyond Portsdown hills. Sometimes they went to those hills and, leaving the cars, sat in the sun-dried grasses, with the night wind sweeping across from the Isle of Wight, cool under the bright light of stars. Clive and Jill danced. Sometimes they went to Murray’s and Moon’s and the Grafton Galleries; but London was unbearably hot, and more often they went to little local dances. They came home late and sat on in the drawing-room with coffee and sandwiches, or, what was even more dangerous, they would stay by the languishing roadside. She remembered it afterwards in her life as through a haze. It was as though a cinema had projected the whole thing before her eyes and the hero and heroine were other people, mere actors.
During the epoch she was vaguely aware of her friends’ attitudes. Grenville admittedly avoided her. He now made up his mind that Jill had jilted him, although in the beginning his proposal to her had been but half-hearted. Dora and Nigel remained loyal, but they never veiled the fact that they considered the friendship with Clive to be dangerous. Olive avoided her. Olive had always adopted the sexless attitude, but in the matter of Clive she could not be sexless. Once Clive had kissed her. It had been a devilish whim of his to bestir her from her smothered passion into virility. He had stirred her. She had dreamt bright sensuous dreams about him. She had never admitted them to anyone but herself, and no one knew the sharp pain they had brought her. But she was jealous of Jill, jealous of Clive’s love for her, and her love for him. In a sense Jill guessed it. The friendship slid slowly into the backwash of antipathy. It died. But Jill’s love waxed unflickering.
One dazzling August night they had sat on the edge of the Devil’s Punchbowl, till the dawn itself rose pinkly topaz above the rim of the cup. A pink dawn, tipping the rich and fertile earth, whereon long veins of purple ling and heather and deep channels of amethyst lay between the pale bronze of bracken. They had lain side by side, two young, virile creatures, clutching at the brittle bauble which they believed represented life. All the while it was so brittle that it was snapping. It broke in her hands, and was cutting into the soft flesh, injuring her, severing her very veins and demanding her life-blood as its price, although she could not believe it. Lying in a green jungle, deeply rivered with violet heather, livid like prunes, pinkly purple, with Nature’s blood spilled into it, they had worshipped each other. It had been an amazing dawn. It had rubified the Devil’s Punchbowl, and had bathed them both in its red glory. It had seemed that the great hollow of earth had been lacerated in the beauty of that red-dyed sunshine. The veins of it had been cut, and the blood poured empurpling down it. Ling and heather, and the sky in a topaz blaze above it.