by Alec Waugh
Chris Hammond did not answer. He sat, absently dividing and re-dividing the square of saturated roast on which the kidneys had been brought to him. If only he did not love her so; but he did love her, and there it was. It was ten days since he had seen her. For ten days he had not seen her; for ten days he had not held her in his arms; for ten days he had not kissed her, kissed that warm, heavy mouth, and kissing it breathed the rich, full luxuriance of her. Ten days and her presence so close to him, at his elbow, so close that the scent of her was about him, maddened him. It was no good, he could not lose her. On her terms, if not on his, he must hold on to her.
“Manon,” he said timidly, “Manon. Would you allow me—might I, in this new flat—might I pay to you as rent—what I’m paying for my present room? Please would you let me, Manon?”
She turned her head towards him. “If it pleases you,” she said, “I don’t care.” And as he watched her return her attention to her kidneys as though nothing had been said, nothing had been decided, he knew that in very truth she did not care, did not care what became of him, what happened to him, as long as he should be handy for her when she needed him, and as she needed him, and for just so long as she needed him. Just that and no more than that. Then she turned in her chair and smiled at him, and it was like sunlight coming from behind a cloud. He was warm again, warm and happy, reassured in that smile’s swift brilliance of the continuance for a while, at any rate, of her love for him.
Chapter XIV
A Quarrel on the Telephone
It was one of Ransom’s rules that never while he was on a holiday should any letters, however important, be forwarded to him. There was nothing, he maintained, that could not wait. And besides, he would continue, “I go abroad not so that I shall be able to enjoy myself away from London, but that I shall be able to enjoy London when I return. For me, at any rate, the best moment of a holiday is the arrival of the boat at Dover. The second best the settling down at home to the tackling of a two months’ mail. Among some fifty letters four at least are certain to be extremely pleasant.”
“ And so now, Giles,” said Ransom on an early October morning, “you may bring my mail to me.” He had arrived at Dover on the previous evening, had reached Victoria shortly before midnight, and for ten hours had slept hard. “I have in front of me a very happy hour.” It was less happy, however, than he had hoped. There were practically no pleasant letters; there were a number of querulously worded bills, an intimation from his bank that his account was drawn some twenty-five pounds beyond the limit of his overdraft, and a letter from the Grand Hotel, Paris, enclosing a note for four thousand francs. So, Marjorie had never got his present. She must have thought he had forgotten her. Oh well, he was dining with her to-night; he had sent her a wire asking her to keep the evening free, and he would be able to take her something then. It was a pity though: it wouldn’t be the same thing now. And that damned overdraft. It would mean another call upon his capital. “Poor old Cartwright,” he thought, “I shall break his heart before I’ve done.”
A couple of hours later he was explaining the position to his solicitor.
“ I have you see, Mr Cartwright, less than no money in the bank. Dividends are not due for some days yet. I shall want at least four hundred pounds to last me through. Now, what shares do you think we ought to sell?”
Mr Cartwright leant back in his chair and tapped the long handle of his penholder against the nails of his left hand. “Four hundred pounds,” he repeated. “And only last March we sold two hundred and fifty of those South African Railroads. At this rate, my dear boy, you will have nothing left by the time you’re fifty. Of the thirty thousand pounds your father left you’ve spent a fourth already.”
Ransom shrugged his shoulders. “And why not?” he asked.
Mr Cartwright jerked his arms sideways in a gesture that seemed to say: “Really, can such stupidity exist.” “What a question,” he said.
“You haven’t answered me.”
“There’s no need to.”
“ Oh yes, there is,” said Ransom. “Money is sacred to you because it’s property. And it’s your business to protect property. But I say money is not property. Its value is relative to the conditions of the moment. It has no intrinsic value. In the same way that china and jewellery and pictures have no intrinsic value. In fact, Mr Cartwright, I rather think that money is to-day a rather worse investment than old china.”
He spoke gaily, flippantly, but with a certain seriousness.
“That’s absurd,” his solicitor began.
“ Is it?” he answered. “For the half of Europe money has proved a singularly bad investment. You say to me now, save your money, you’ll want it in 1950; but that’s exactly what twenty years ago Austrian and Russian and German solicitors were saying to their clients, and with what results. What are they thinking now, do you imagine, those people who denied themselves pleasure in 1900 for the sake of greater pleasure in 1920? How they must regret it.”
“ But do you mean—?”
“I mean that the worth of the pound is its exchange value in ties and omelettes and theatre tickets. I know what I can buy with it to-day. I don’t know what I can buy with it to-morrow. A man whose account was overdrawn £500 in 1918 has had that overdraft automatically reduced during the last ten years by half. For the £500 he owes his bank to-day, he had in 1913 the present equivalent of £1000 in property and pleasure. Money has no permanent value. It fluctuates as pictures do. It’s a bad investment.”
Mr Cartwright eyed him sadly.
“ That, my young friend,” he said, “in addition to being a very perverse doctrine, is as political economy quite unsound.”
“ It’s common sense, though.”
“ I’m glad that the majority don’t think so.”
“Haven’t the brains to, Mr Cartwright. In the meantime I’d be rather glad if you could let me have an advance cheque for one hundred pounds on the sale of those securities.”
Mr Cartwright sighed. “Well, well, I suppose I can’t dissuade you.”
Ransom laughed. “Not unless you can suggest some other way in which I can support life for three months without money and a diminishing degree of credit.”
“Why not do some work?”
“And take a job I don’t really need from a fellow who really needs it. Oh no, no, no. That doesn’t even begin to be cricket. It’s robbery. It’s immoral when there are so few jobs going round for fellows to take them who haven’t got to. Besides, I shouldn’t do it at all well. You can’t change your life at thirty. I was brought up to be a soldier. I was a tolerably good one. But soldiering’s played out now. There’s nothing for me to do. And I might as well spend the stuff as keep it. I don’t want to leave it to anyone. It is improbable that I’ll have children. But were I to, they’d be better off without it. It’s done me no good. And you can compare me with my grandfather if you like. He made a million in thirty years. And to that I’ll answer: How did he make it? Probably through making life unendurable for some hundreds of thousands of wretched mill girls. I don’t suppose that that money till I got hold of it had ever made anyone outside our immediate circle anything but miserable. At least I’m doing no harm with the stuff, and by spending I may quite conceivably be doing good.”
He smiled that same curiously winning smile that had first attracted and that still held Marjorie, that smile that unweaponed opposition. And Mr Cartwright shook his head, but shook it kindly. One couldn’t but like the chap, which was more than you could have ever said of that hard-headed, hard-hearted grandfather of his who had sold his estate in Sussex, gone north to the cotton-mills, and returned thirty years later with a million. One had admired him but one had not liked him, and one did like young Ransom. He had that indefinable quality of charm. And it was easy enough to say that charm like all physical attributes was a caprice of nature, a gloss on the essential handiwork of life. But who was to be sure of that? Who was to say that it was not the expression of an inner excellence, the
guarantee of an eternal quality? And charm Ransom Heritage possessed. Whatever he might do or might not do, whatever he might say or think, that thing remained with him. He was a waster, doubtless. He was making nothing of his life, doing nothing, creating nothing. And yet—and yet—anyhow, had it been lightly come by that croix de guerre with palms.
“Well, well,” he said, “it’s no good, I suppose, my arguing with you. And I expect you’d like your cheque for a hundred now?”
As Ransom walked back from Lincoln’s Inn down Kingsway he passed a man selling million-mark notes for twopence. For one of those notes ten years ago men had fought and lied, betrayed and traduced each other, and now they were being sold for twopence.
“And who’s to say,” thought Ransom, “what the pound will be fetching in New York in 1930. At least I can give pleasure with it now.”
It was a little after half-past twelve on one of those clear, blue, sun-drenched autumn days when winter seems far off; the sort of day on which it is impossible to be unhappy. And with the cheque for a hundred pounds in his hip pocket the world appeared to Ransom a very pleasant spot as he watched from the upper deck of a number nine bus the stir of life below him. How London was altering though. There would not be much left in a year or two of the Strand that he had known in boyhood. Regent Street as well. Only a few feet remained of that lovely low-roofed curve. There was no room for it in a world where every square yard of earth was capital, and you had to expand upwards if you could not sideways. At any rate there it stood, that unlovely disarray of buildings, a silent witness to the form life took in the early years of the twentieth century. An expression of our tastes and habits and the traditions of life that governed us.
Ugly enough in all conscience. But three centuries hence people would look at it with awe and reverence for the sake of its associations. A thing had only to be old enough to be thought beautiful. When we linger before a case of Roman relics we are not judging by aesthetic standards that profusion of rings and pins and brooches. We are fascinated not by their shape and modelling, but by an association of ideas and pictures. “Two thousand years ago,” we say, “that small brass ring was made. It was worn on a hand that had touched for all we know the hand of Caesar; who can tell what it may have seen. Sulla’s triumph perhaps—the Coliseum. The wild baying of the soldiery, the sack of Rome. How much it has seen. How much it has outlasted.” The emotion that it evokes is independent of the thing’s intrinsic value. Ugly or beautiful, it contains the past.
The emotion that a sixteenth-century tavern wakes in us is due less to any harmony of line and gable than to the knowledge that within these walls for four hundred years man has lived and loved, sorrowed and made merry, grown old to see life budding to replace him. In this door we say men have stood gossiping of the Armada. From that window a woman leaned waving farewell to men that fought at Blenheim. And the sense of all the life that has been lived there, all the things that have been seen and thought and heard and felt, cast an irresistible spell on our imagination.
Was there any such thing, he wondered, as an intrinsic aesthetic standard any more than there was an intrinsic moral standard? The good of one generation was the evil of the next. What was ugly to-day was beautiful to-morrow; what was complexity in one century was simplicity in the next; the paradox of one age was the platitude of another. In the same way that we, before the curved outlines of an Elizabethan cottage, muse on how good life must have been in the days when it was built, how direct, how simple, so did the Elizabethans speak of the rude hutments that they demolished. “Ah! the old days,” they must have said, “how easy to know then what was right or wrong, how unperplexed were those Plantagenets by our modern doubt.” And so in three hundred years, Ransom imagined, would our successors speak of Kings way. “What naïveté” they would say, “what simplicity. The infancy of the world.” “He must be a conceited man,” thought Ransom, “who can imagine that anything that may happen in his day, in the narrow period of time that belongs to him, is really of the least importance.”
It was ten to one by the time he reached the Berkeley, which gave him just time to order the evening’s dinner and ring up Marjorie before having lunch himself. The grill-room was, as he expected, completely empty when he entered it, and the head waiter was able to devote to him a full ten minutes of his time. “At eight o’clock, sir. Right. The second table against the wall. And some flowers. White carnations. Yes, sir.”
Once already that morning Ransom had tried to get through on the ’phone to Marjorie, but there had been no answer. It did not really matter. He had told her in his wire that he would be calling for her at a quarter to. It would be as well to make quite sure, though he hardly expected, it is true, to find her in at lunch-time. He waited for a minute with the receiver to his ear. Then “Two pennies, please,” a click, and from the other end Marjorie’s voice—“Yes, who is it?”
“Good morning, Marjorie,” he said.
There was a pause, then rather hesitatingly it sounded—“Oh is that you, Ransom?”
“It is, Marjorie, and I’ve just ordered you such a jolly dinner, and at about a quarter to eight I’ll be fetching you to come and eat it.”
This time there was a longer pause.
“I’m sorry, Ransom,” she said at last. “I’m sorry—I’m afraid—I’m engaged this evening, Ransom.”
“But you got my wire surely?”
“Yes.”
“What day?”
“I don’t know, Ransom. The end of last week some time.”
“A week’s notice then.”
“About a week.”
“Surely, Marjorie then, in a week’s time you could have managed to alter it. You always managed to before. Is there any trouble with Everard?”
“I’m not going out with Everard.”
There was a silence while the full implication of what she had said came slowly home to him.
“You mean,” he said, “you mean—if it’s someone else, if it is not Everard, you could have quite easily altered the date when you got my wire.”
Her voice had grown firm now and resolute. “I suppose I could have, Ransom. One can always, I imagine, get out of an engagement if one wants to.”
“But you didn’t want to?”
“I had made a promise. I keep my promises.”
“You preferred then to go out with another man rather than with me?”
“I haven’t said it was a man yet, have I?”
“It is though, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Ransom.”
“And you preferred to go out with him than to dine with me, although I’ve been away for two months, and we agreed before I went away that we should dine together on my first evening back? You preferred to go with someone else?”
“If you choose to put it that way, Ransom, yes.”
There was a long silence. “I don’t understand, Marjorie,” he said at last.
“No, Ransom, perhaps I never thought you would.” Her voice had grown softer suddenly. It was one of those moments that if they had been together a kiss had settled, one of those moments that could not have withstood the touch of a hand, the sight of sorrow on a loved face. One of those moments though that were strong enough to resist the sadness of a loved voice across a wire. They had both a grievance against the other, a grievance that was not to be made clear with words, that could be stilled only in the long silence of a kiss.
“What’s to be inferred from that?” he asked.
“What you choose to infer, Ransom, I suppose.”
“That it’s over then?”
“I said you were to make it mean what you chose.” If only, she thought, he were to lose his temper, if only he were not so cool, if only he would be angrily jealous with her. Anything to make her think he cared: but he didn’t. That was clear; he didn’t mind whether he lost her or whether he kept her. Probably on the whole he would prefer not to make up the quarrel. He would be free to begin another love affair. She had once heard him say that
the first three weeks of a love affair were the only interesting part of it. “And then one has to pay for them,” he had added. It wasn’t her he cared about, it was the position in his life she filled. He had to have a mistress. And one would do as efficiently as another. He didn’t want her and perhaps other people did. “Then I suppose it’s good-bye, Marjorie?” she heard him saying. She pulled herself together, she was not going to whine for him. “As you choose, Ransom,” she said
Then after a slight pause, and with the note of a new tenderness in his voice.
“I’m sorry, my dear. We’ve had some very good times together,” and from the other end came the click of a replaced receiver.
Motionless, staring with unseeing eyes at the swaying of the trees across the park, she sat crumpled on the sofa, the telephone in her hand. “Have you finished?” the operator asked her. Finished—oh yes, she’d finished. Finished with everything, with Ransom who was everything. And heaven knew why she had done it. Why, why, why? Vanity, she supposed. No present, no letter, not a card even on her birthday. A silence of ten weeks and then that wire: “Arriving London the 7th. Call for you, dinner 7.45.” Just that. While he was away from her he had not thought of her. Now that he was coming home, she could fit back into his life again. She was like a suit of clothes to be worn or not worn at his convenience. And then while she had sat there with the telegram in her hand, she had been rung up by Eric Somerset. Would she dine with him on the seventh? And in her resentment against Ransom she had accepted. She had regretted it afterwards. But if you made a promise you had to stick to it. At least she did, and it would be a lesson for Ransom. It had been foolish of her to think like that. You couldn’t alter people. You had to take them for what they were or leave them. Ransom was like that, and there it was. You had to take him whole or not at all. You couldn’t just pick out the parts in him you liked, and get rid of the others that you didn’t. “Oh God, oh God,” she thought. “What am I to do? I am unhappy.”