by Alec Waugh
But now that at last she had been brought close to him by this miracle of science that could defy the noise and distance of intervening streets, she felt that she had nothing, after all, to say to him. She had wanted to hear his voice again, to have his presence cast mantle-wise about her. That and no more than that. And then suddenly an idea came to her.
“I’m going to the Wolves to-night,” she said. “Couldn’t you come on there and join us?”
“The Wolves. And what manner of entertainment will they accord us?”
“The Wolves—but of course you know, Ransom; that new dance club we were made honorary members of the other evening. Couldn’t you come on there after dinner?”
There was a pause. Then, “Well, I don’t see really why I shouldn’t. That is if the folk I’m with are sober still. You know what old soldiers are when they get together.”
“But you’ll do your best, Ransom.”
“If I can manage it, Marjorie.”
“Till this evening then.”
“Till this evening.”
And from the other end of the line came the click of a replaced receiver.
Chapter II
Trimalchio in Piccadilly
“It appears, Giles,” said Ransom Heritage as he walked out of his living-room into his bedroom, “ that we are expected to dance this evening, so you had better, I think, put out a white instead of a black waistcoat; and a piqué shirt to match it. Tails, oh yes, tails. That combination of dinner jacket and white waistcoat which so offended our old world susceptibilities was buried in ’28. A good thing, Giles, we had to move with the times, but it hurt us too. And the old bus, Giles, better get it round here by a quarter to.”
The ex-guardsman nodded. “Very good, sir, but that car you know. You’d get there quicker really in a tube all things considered.”
“Perhaps, Giles, perhaps. But think of the expense. You’ve got to pay cash on the underground. No credit there. We musn’t be reckless, Giles.”
Giles looked up, scratched his head, opened his mouth, thought better of it, shrugged his shoulders and proceeded to remove the two pearl studs from the striped piqué shirt that lay across his master’s bed.
“And the tie, sir, wide or narrow end? ”
Ransom reflected for a moment. “The narrow, yes, I think the narrow, Giles. Oh yes, and if you’re anywhere round about Jermyn Street to-morrow you might collect a couple of pairs of black silk socks, and tell them to push along with another double-breasted waistcoat. I paid my account there yesterday, and I don’t like to think of credit lying idle.”
Giles made no reply. He was used to that sort of thing. He did not pretend to understand it. But he had learnt to disentangle from his master’s sophistries such parts of it as might contain definite instructions. He repeated the orders over to himself as he unfastened the clamp of Ransom’s tie press. “White waistcoat, shirt to match, narrow end, car seven forty-five. To-morrow, two pairs of black silk socks and double-breasted waistcoat.”
Next door in a mood of rich contentment Ransom Heritage slowly lathered his face, while the hot water splashed into his bath. Unquestionably this was the best hour of the day. If there was anything better than the thrill of looking forward, it was the exhilaration that followed a thing’s completion; were it even only a long day’s idleness. To relax and to anticipate; to desire and to possess; to be excited and at the same time satisfied. The wise man’s idea of heaven. And in a way you got that in this hour before dinner. It was a pause, an interval between two worlds. The lights in the big offices one by one were being lowered and put out. Behind the thick damask curtains of the restaurants waiters were busily laying tables and sweeping floors. It was an hour both of dawn and twilight. The black coat and expanse of shirt front for which the light grey lounge suit was exchanged were a symbol of this stepping from one world into another.
What a mistake it was to rush home at ten minutes past seven, to fling one’s hat and stick and gloves broadcast about the hall, to scamp one’s shave, to scamp one’s bath, to grow hot and impatient with one’s tie and leave the house breathless and exhausted with nerves that it would take three cocktails to restore to comfort. People would say that they were workers, that they were busy, that they had not the time; but that was nonsense. One could always find time for the things one really wanted to do, as one could find money always for one’s luxuries if not for one’s necessities.
No, he had no use for that. At twenty-five minutes to seven and not a moment later one should begin the serious business of self arrayal. And however the evening was to be spent, that hour would be equally delightful. Were it to be spent alone he would muse as he slipped the deeper into the enervating warmth of water on the excellence of the dinner he had ordered and the quality of the wine with which he would heighten his enjoyment of it. He would savour in advance the relish of that rich moment when he would settle himself into a deep armchair, stretch out his feet in front of him upon a footstool, lay a large cushion across his stomach and rest on it, so that his hands should have only to lie against its covers, the new novel that the library had that morning sent him: at peace, secure; for a space of hours not to be molested.
If, on the other hand, as to-night, he was dining out, or was going after dinner to a dance or party, there was of all forms of anticipation the subtlest and most alluring, the attraction of the unknown. Whom was he to meet, who would be his partners. Had life some deep surprise in store for him. Who could say. Did not all good things come to us after eight o’clock. Slowly he slid his body forward over the slippery white enamel of the bath, leant back his head so that the water crept over his hair on to his forehead, then slid slowly back and turned to look at the small travelling clock on the chest of drawers beside the window.
Twelve minutes past seven. Another five minutes yet and there would still be left him that seven minutes to spare before he began the arranging of his tie. Less he never allowed himself. Who could expect to achieve at a first attempt the gracefully proportioned bow that spread sideways and upwards from an uncreased waist. One should linger over one’s tie as an artist before a canvas. For five more minutes he could lie back, agreeably anticipative of the evening’s dinner.
There would be four of them, fellow soldiers who had somehow contrived to remain together after the dividing in the spring of 1919 of so many paths. They had not a great deal beside the War in common; neither age nor outlook nor profession. There was himself a retired guardsman, and young Eric Somerset who was scarcely twenty-three, who had come out to France in the last weeks of the War, had gone up to Lincoln afterwards, and was now a barrister-at-law. They had met him through Merivale who had been in command of the cadet battalion to which Somerset had been posted. Simon Merivale, who had taken in 1914 a first in science, but whose career had been cut across irretrievably by the War. Merivale who, at Neuve Chapelle, had killed five Germans single-handed, and at Loos, with quarter of a section and a machine gun, had held off for three hours a counter attack that would have wiped out half a regiment. Merivale who wore the D.S.O. and the Legion of Honour, and who had seen at the end of the War how hard it would be for him in any other profession to make up for the years that he had lost and had applied for a regular commission. Somerset and Simon Merivale, and lastly Vernon Archer. The War had made Vernon Archer. For fifteen years he had painted landscape after English landscape with a complete absence of success, had hailed the War with delight as a pause from penurious labour, had made at odd moments a number of sketches of front-line life, had deposited them during a leave in the office of a London editor, had returned to France to think no more about them, and to discover three months later that he had been floated into an immense success on one of those unaccountable waves of popular emotion which rescue from obscurity alike the genius, the mediocrity, and the bagman. For four years there had been an Archer vogue. The landscape for which in 1912 he had been delighted to receive three pounds, he was now able to sell without any trouble for sixty guineas. The
y had come together the four of them at odd times during the War, had grown to like each other and had not lost touch. They met now every two or three months, gave each other a dinner, then returned to their lives, till one or other of them should chance to be in funds. To-night it was Ransom’s turn, but beyond fixing a time and a place he had made no arrangements. Merivale, whoever might be the host, had come to regard the composition of the menu as his privileged contribution to the night’s hilarity.
As always, Merivale was the first arrival. Ransom found him in the centre of the lounge, talking at a great pace to Vernon Archer. He was tall, wide-shouldered, slightly stout, with a curling black moustache and a full red-cheeked face that exuded good health and geniality.
“And here is our host,” he exclaimed. “Welcome, good brother, welcome. In your absence we have taken the liberty of ordering four champagne cocktails. It’s been such a relief to Comrade Archer and myself to feel that you were to pay for all of this. We were able to order exactly what we liked. Your cocktail, brother, and Bungo as the young lads say in Tooting. And here’s Somerset. Now I hope the young man isn’t going to disgrace us with a sky-blue dinner jacket. Well, child, what of it?”
A broad good-natured smile spread across Eric Somerset’s boyish face. Without being actually handsome, he had pre-eminently the qualities of his age, youth and a clear complexion, freshness, and health and vigour, the attraction of a thing untried and so unspotted.
“It’s a very dark navy blue,” he said. “It looks perfectly black at night.”
“Admittedly,” Merivale conceded, “and for such old and respectable members of society as Brother Archer and myself a very suitable object of attire. But for young blades like yourself who stagger up the Cromwell Road by daylight. No, brother, it lets us down. I think, Major Heritage, that this young officer had better parade tomorrow before the colonel. And now, gentlemen, I think that we will move into that nice big room where the music is, and the old war-horse shall run his eye down one of those nice long cards.”
They followed him down the centre of the room to a round table decorated with pink and white carnations. “Thoughtful, very thoughtful,” murmured Merivale. “But I think, waiter, you may remove the horticultural effects. No man can appreciate a glass of wine with the scent of an herbaceous border six inches from his face; that long card of yours, now, thank you.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Now what about a stab at the old salmon. Some soup first? Yes, of course, some soup. A gentle soup you say, Brother Archer. By that I suppose you mean a clear one. Very well then, consommé Henri quatre. And the salmon, grilled I think. Yes, grilled. And afterwards why shouldn’t we dig a fork into a spring chicken: or pigeon. I am told that if you eat a pigeon every day for forty days you die. It takes, you see, two days to digest a pigeon. You never quite catch up. I suggest that to you, Archer, as a married man. Be careful when you see pigeon coming up too often. Pigeon or weedkiller; a nice alternative. In the meantime though perhaps a spring chicken would be safer, with crêpes Suzette to follow.”
He paused and looked interrogatively round the table. “A crêpe Suzette,” he repeated. “What, the young man Somerset has never heard of it. What youth, what innocence. Ah, well. By half-past nine another virginity will have been shattered. And as a close I am prepared to concede that there are worse things to bite at than asparagus, or artichoke. Somerset thinks artichoke. We yield to youth. Artichoke, waiter, then the wine list.”
He pondered thoughtfully for a couple of minutes, then raised his head. “You know, Heritage,” he said, “we will not, I think, put you to the extravagance of champagne.”
“Now that,” said Heritage, “is extremely generous of you.”
Merivale accepted the tribute in the deferential manner of an absolute monarch whose whim it is periodically to make concessions. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps, but for the moment I am rather tired of champagne. It possesses, I am told, for women—Somerset will no doubt on that point be in a position to enlighten us—for women it has, I repeat, a certain emotional significance. Personally I distrust it. When people speak of champagne being good, they merely mean that it is not undrinkable. The only value in champagne, as I see it, is that its presence on a sideboard will make people who are eating a bad dinner believe through a process of auto-suggestion that they are eating a good one. There is, however, on this occasion no likelihood of the dinner being anything but excellent, and I do notice that there is on this over-decorated list what promises to be a singularly admirable vintage of Chateau d’Yquem. There are those I know who will maintain that Yquem is too sweet to be drunk with anything but dessert or fish. But in my modest opinion Yquem is a thing of which one can never have too much. One eighty-nine, waiter, and three bottles of it.”
Two hours later as the waiter returned for the second order of liqueurs, there was not one that was not ready to endorse the wisdom of his selection.
It had been an admirable dinner, and Merivale from start to finish had maintained an incessant animated flow of talk.
A curious outcome, Heritage reflected, for the man of whom in 1914 his college authorities had thought so highly. But then what else had there been for him to do. He could not have hoped to compete successfully with that new crowd that was coming up straight from school in the December of ’18. And besides, one’s faith in the value of academic honours had survived only halfheartedly the triumphs and disasters of four years in a front-line trench.
“I wonder what he would have thought though,” Ransom reflected, “if ten years ago he had been told that he was to spend the greater part of his life in barracks.” A curious outcome. A curious outcome, too, for a very genuine sense of humour was this heavy conversational facetiousness.
Archer, as usual, spoke very little. But, as always, the party seemed the pleasanter for his presence. It was a friendly, not a disdainful, silence. He was a man though with whom it was scarcely possible to become intimate. There was a point past which one never got. For Archer it had been once said, there were only two things that mattered—his work and his wife. He had no need to assert in conversation a point of view for which in his work he had found adequate expression. And a man so completely absorbed in another person as was Archer in his wife had no need for any other intimacy. “It’s rather fine really,” Merivale had said. “In this diffused period a unique example of concentration.” And every now and again as he sat listening to the others’ talk a veil would seem to descend between him and the contacts of normal life, a veil behind which he retreated into the seclusion of that other world, the world of form and colour, among those shapes which, through long brooding on, had achieved significance, had become somehow the transmitters of an eternal essence.
For the most part the conversation was of that bright, swiftly moving nature that as it passes from mouth to mouth, with its flow of allusions, its repartee, its smattering of epigram, gives the impression of much brilliance and much cleverness. But from which, on the following morning, you are unable to remember anything as having been said particularly wittily or profoundly or impressively.
Once Eric Somerset had asked Merivale if he took the army seriously. The answer had come interrogatively: “The staff college?” Merivale had said. “If that is what you mean by taking the army seriously, no. I’d much rather remain a regimental officer. I’d much rather stay with my own friends, among the men I’ve grown up with.”
“But haven’t you any ambition?” Somerset had persisted.
Merivale shook his head. “I don’t care much for ambitious people. They can only see one point of view—their own; they see everything in terms of their own success. And you don’t make friends that way. And friendship’s about the only thing I value. No, I’d rather carry on the tradition of a regiment; rather a fine thing, mark you, a thing that’s come down honoured through three hundred years.”
But for the most part personal topics had been avoided, through absence of material, perhaps. For, although Merivale and Ra
nsom maintained fairly intimate relations, their communities of interest lay for the most part in the past.
“And now, children,” said Ransom, as he collected from the plate at his elbow such change as was remaining from a couple of five-pound notes, “I must warn you that I have promised to forgather shortly at a dance club called ‘The Wolves.’ No one will be expected to dance, and there will be available certain magnums of surreptitious alcohol. What say you? ”
“I think,” said Somerset, “that I shall have to be leaving soon after twelve.”
“Ah, that last tube home,” said Merivale. “How well I remember it in my days of childhood. Now, I wait for the first tube in the morning. You too, I presume, Comrade Archer.”
“As long as I get through five hours’ work a day, it doesn’t matter when I do them, and half my stuff how’s in black and white, which means that one hasn’t to worry about daylight.”
“Admirable I Admirable. We may foot it then till dawn. But first I would suggest in all humility to our host that he should take us to some neighbouring hostelry. An old world innocence in me still hankers for the village tavern. In the name of the Lord, forward.”
It was one of those warm, scented summer nights when the flickering radiance of Piccadilly burns dimly through a thickened air. And for a moment they paused at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, watching in the rich afterglow of food and wine the multi-coloured, multi-sounding throng of life stream past them.
“Ah, to come fresh to London,” Merivale apostrophised, “to be able to see Piccadilly for the first time with a matured judgment. The things that were wasted on us in our childhood. If ever I have children, which does not seem likely, I shall never let them read a book or see a picture till they are seventeen.”