Kept

by Alec Waugh

  “I don’t think,” said Kingsway, after they had been twice round the gallery, “that you’re much interested in anything except technique.”

  Vernon Archer scratched his right ear meditatively.

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I daresay you are right. I daresay that I am chiefly interested now in the way one does the thing.”

  “It’s just the same in literature,” said Kingsway. “They say that Ulysses made a sensation simply because it was obscene. But I should doubt if an obscene book had ever depended less on its obscenity for its sensation. It was the technique of the book that excited people; it showed us a new way of doing things. It’s rather curious you know, Archer,” he added, “that ten years ago they were all saying that the art for art’s sake doctrine had been killed for ever. And yet here we all are six years after the War more uncompromisingly aesthetic than ever the ’nineties were. Painting for painting’s sake, writing for writing’s sake. And always putting the thing we do second to the way we do it. Why is it, Archer?”

  Archer shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “unless perhaps we’ve lost faith during the last few years in so many things, that if an art doesn’t seem worth practising for its own sake, it certainly won’t be worth it for anything else’s.”

  The gallery was beginning to fill up. A sort of revolving queue was forming itself along the wall. There was a babel of talk, a consulting of catalogues, a hailing of acquaintances. “No, number twenty-three, dear; twenty-four’s Piccadilly Circus.” “Oh look, there’s Sybil Marchant.” “Hullo, I thought you were going to cut me, Mrs Potter.” It was a fashionable, well-dressed crowd, of women for the most part. There did not seem to be any artists present.

  Kingsway and Archer moved into the centre of the room to stand watching them. “That tall, rather striking woman in black,” asked Kingsway; “who is she? I think I know her.”

  “The one by the second portrait?”

  “Yes, looking at her catalogue.”

  “Lady Manon Granta.”

  “Ah, I don’t know her then. A fine woman, though,” and his eyes followed her appraisingly.

  Manon Granta’s presence at the exhibition was only incidentally due to such pictorial enthusiasms as she intermittently possessed. She had come to meet Chris Hammond. People were beginning to talk, she fancied. There was something she particularly wanted to say to Chris, and when people become inquisitive, one had to protect oneself either with complete secrecy or complete publicity. “If you are going to carry on an intrigue, carry it on,” a man had once said, “within fifty yards of Piccadilly. You are far safer than if you go for romantic week-ends into the wirds of Sussex, for there are no wilds in Sussex. Sooner or later, probably sooner, you will meet someone that you know. And you will be quite unable to explain your presence early on a Sunday morning with an attractive member of the other sex in a village that has no Sunday train service. Stick to Piccadilly.” And so she had told Chris to meet her at a quarter-past twelve in the one place in London where she could be quite certain of finding at that hour half a dozen people that she knew. “My dear, it’s quite impossible,” they would say afterwards. “Manon Granta and that boy—why, I saw them talking together at Vernon Archer’s private show for a full ten minutes, in the very centre of the room. Oh no, darling, they wouldn’t behave like that if there was anything in it.”

  She waited till Vernon Archer was disengaged, then walked up to him. “It’s splendid,” she said. “I must congratulate you. And how many of them have you sold? Half of them before you opened. Now that is fine. I’m glad, though, that there are some left for me to choose from. Tell me now, who was that very distinguished looking man I saw you talking to?”

  “The man with the beard?”

  “Yes, the short clipped beard.”

  “That. Oh that was Martin Kingsway, the novelist. Do you know his stuff?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I remember the name, but I read so many novels, and they all seem exactly the same to me: the same men, the same women, the same plot or lack of plot; they might all be written by the same man. Perhaps they are. What do you think, Mr Archer?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “The bad ones, perhaps; but the good ones, surely not.”

  “Are there any good ones, I wonder? There’s that nice Captain Merivale. Let’s ask him. Captain Merivale, come here. We want your opinion. Are there any good novels, or are they all the same?”

  “I never read novels, Lady Manon.”

  “Ah, there you are you see, I read nothing else. A novel a day. Sometimes two. I have managed three. And they all seem just the same. Like so many sausages. You can divide them into classes as you can divide sausages into classes, beef and pork, and so on. There are highbrow novels and the slush novels and realistic novels. You can pigeon-hole it after two pages, and after ten pages you’ll be able to know everything that’s coming.”

  “Perhaps if you didn’t read so much,” suggested Merivale, “they wouldn’t all seem alike. After all, if you spent your whole day eating, you wouldn’t be able at the end of the day to tell a partridge from a pheasant; you’d have lost your palate. It may be the same with books.”

  He paused interrogatively, looking sideways at her through half-closed eyelids.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she answered slowly. “Perhaps. Yes, I daresay that is it, we’re overfed and we’ve lost our palate. And I shouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t true of everything, if that wasn’t why after thirty we lose our capacity for enjoyment. For we do you know. We’ve read too much and seen too much and done too much and felt too much. We’ve lost our palate, and it’s only something highly spiced that’s got the power of touching it. That would explain rather a lot, wouldn’t i t, Captain Merivale?”

  She laughed as she spoke, but her eyes were serious.

  Chris Hammond in the meantime was spending an unexhilarating quarter of an hour. Pictures bored him.

  He had with extreme difficulty persuaded his employers to let him take his hour’s interval for lunch from a quarter to twelve to a quarter to one. And if Manon did not very speedily conclude her animated discussion with that absurd soldier he would be only able to get back to the city in time by taxi—a necessity he would be ill able to afford. Why on earth had she insisted on their meeting at an exhibition? And such an exhibition too. He didn’t know much about pictures, but he knew what he didn’t like. He knew what things looked like too, and he had never seen a railway station looking in the least like that thing in the centre of the left-hand wall. It couldn’t be art, it wasn’t beautiful. If it had to be at a picture show, it might at least have been at a decent one. And there she stood laughing and chattering away, while he had to pretend to be absorbed with enthusiasm for these pictures, whereas actually he had to be watching for the precise moment at which she would decide that they might recognise each other. There were times when she exasperated him almost to hysteria; but he knew even at the times when she most maddened him that she had only to stand in front of him and look at him out of those deep, black, unfathomable eyes, and he would be unconscious of everything but her beauty, and the need that her beauty stirred in him. Who was to explain it—that magnetism of a woman’s glance? You could meet woman after woman, beautiful women, cultured women, and they meant nothing to you. And then one day there came a woman outwardly seeming like all the others, to the rest of the world indeed one with all the others, no more beautiful, no more cultured than the rest, intrinsically not a jot worthier than the rest, and she looked at you out of deep and unfathomable eyes; and nothing that you had ever looked on would seem quite the same to you again; nothing that you had prized previously seemed again so worth the winning. She would just look at you, and those deep, unfathomable depths would concentrate and draw to them all that you had ever dreamed and honoured, and thought and cherished; and your man hood and your strength slipped from you, and ambition slipped from you, your desire to
conquer slipped from you—everything slipped from you save the will to continue for all time there in the look of that enchantment, to fall in abasement there, to make your whole life a service to that strange essence. Who was to explain it? Who was to analyse it? That curious power that came and went in a woman’s eyes. That went as unaccountably as it came. For it would go, that he knew; one day or another she would turn and look at him in that slow way of hers, and he would find himself unmoved, freed suddenly of her bondage. Who was to explain it? It was there, and it was not there. It gave itself, and it withdrew itself. You could make no truce with it. You could not bargain with it. It was neither for sale nor keeping.

  At last she had finished her conversation. She was turning, slowly looking along the ever-thickening queue before the pictures. In a moment she would catch his eye, smile, and move across to him.

  She received him as he had expected to be received.

  “My dear Chris, what a surprise,” she said. “I never knew you cared for pictures. Or perhaps it’s only Mr Archer’s pictures that you like? I can well understand that.”

  But the brief pressure of her fingers upon his hand was full compensation, an ample reward for the day’s anxiety. “If only you knew,” he said, “how much I love you.”

  But she had not asked him there to be made love to.

  “Now don’t be importunate, Chris” she said. “I’ve made such a delightful plan for you. In the first week in January I go to Cannes. Three days later you will go to Antibes. You will have a pleasant time there, and we shall be able to arrange to see quite a lot of one another. There now, Chris.”

  And she smiled, The sort of triumphant smile with which, expecting you to be pleased, a dog will deposit at your feet the chewed relics of your favourite tie.

  “But it’s impossible, Manon.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” she said cheerfully. “Nothing’s impossible.”

  “But this is really, Manon.”

  “You don’t want to, Chris. Very well, then,” and she turned to walk away from him.

  In a moment he was at her side again. “Oh, but I do, really I do. There’s nothing I want more than to be near you, Manon; but you see, don’t you—surely you must.”

  “I can see no reason why if you want to come you shouldn’t.”

  “My office would never let me.”

  “Leave it then.”

  “But Manon, how--—”

  “Money?”

  He nodded. “I’d thought of that, Chris,” she said.

  “You’re earning at present three pounds a week; it will take you six months perhaps to get another job. You lose seventy-five pounds. There are your expenses at Antibes for a month, a hundred we shall say. You would probably want some new clothes to take there. Two hundred and fifty say. That is what you would lose by coming. Well, as I want you to come, I will send you a cheque for three hundred pounds as a Christmas present.”

  She looked searchingly, suspiciously at him as she spoke. Was he going to be stupid again? Was he going to say he couldn’t take money from a woman? There was nothing about him that exasperated her more than this idiotic prejudice of money. She might just as well not have married at all if she couldn’t buy what she wanted with the money she’d married for. But her power over him was greater than it had been five months earlier when they had quarrelled at the Wolves about that tailor’s bill; he had not been so desperately frightened then of losing her. And besides the first step had been taken.

  “Very well, Manon,” he said. “It’s as you wish.”

  No sign of the relieved triumph that surged in her flickered across the cold marble of her face. Relentless, she forced her victory home.

  “And you’re very grateful to me, Christopher?”

  The eyes that he raised to hers were dim with a pleading that might have moved her had she cared for him, had he been to her anything more than one of those highly spiced savouries of which a few minutes earlier she had been speaking.

  “Very grateful,” he said, “very, very grateful.”

  But that was what his lips said. “I am a weak man,” his eyes were saying, “a weak and perhaps rather contemptible sort of creature. But I do love you. I am in your hands utterly. Be generous. Don’t make me drink this cup to the last drop. You know that you can. Isn’t that enough for you, the knowledge that you have the power? Isn’t it enough, Manon? Don’t make me despise myself for loving you.”

  But it was the words of his mouth, not of his eyes, she answered.

  “Then that’s settled, isn’t it? And by the way don’t arrange anything for Wednesday, I might be free.”

  The interview was ended. There were others of her friends that she must speak to, and she had practically promised Archer that she would buy a picture. She turned, looked round the room, and recognised in the doorway of the first gallery the straight, awkward figure of her husband.

  “My dear Charles,” she said, “how sweet of you. I was wondering whom I was going to lunch with. And now here you are to save me all that worry. It was thoughtful of you, Charles.”

  Charles Granta bowed stiffly. “I shall be delighted, Manon.” For twenty minutes, though, she had not noticed him, he had been watching her flit from one group of persons to another. An obscure spasm of jealousy had drawn him there. Last night at dinner he had overheard her say that she would be coming to this exhibition, and a premonitory sense had warned him that it would be to meet her lover that she would be coming here.

  “Who was it?” he had wondered, as he had watched her passing from one man to another with the same slow smile of friendship on her face. And watching, he had felt sickeningly the extent of his incapacity to know. They were strangers to him, all these men, strangers in birth and outlook, men whom he could never intimately get to know, into whose minds he would never see, whose hearts he would never read. How was he to differentiate between them? How was he to tell which of them was his supplanter? He did not know, and he never would know unless he was driven to the undignified resort of shadowing. And that he could not do. He could not face the cool smile of contempt with which at that last moment she would turn on him. “A private detective, Charles, really; but how dramatic.” He would feel himself degraded, permanently degraded in her eyes. He would lose in that moment the one hold he had upon her—her respect for him. For she did do that, she did respect him; at any rate if not him, his qualities; his strength, his endurance, his cunning, his level-headedness. And it was so that he would have her think of him.

  It was better, it was more dignified not to know. And after all he had, hadn’t he, what he had bargained for. The body he had desired, the pride and position of her name. There had been no clause about love in that unwritten contract. Emotionally she had been from the day he had married her, unfaithful. And emotional infidelity had always seemed to him a far bigger thing than physical infidelity. Did it alter his position that she should be loving a man now rather than that she should be looking backward or looking forward to a lover? Emotionally she would always be unfaithful. Did it matter then if there were another man, rather than the shadow of a man? Might it not even be better that she should have a lover; that there should be between him and that other an actual instead of an imaginary standard of comparison?

  He bent forward and placed his hand upon her elbow.

  “It would be more convenient for me,” he said, “if we could leave for lunch at once.”

  Martin Kingsway was not alone in finding the exhibition a little dull. The majority of the visitors certainly were well content to catch echoes of a thing they had already liked, but Ransom Heritage as he walked moodily round the gallery could not help wondering whether if Archer were an unknown man such an exhibition would be exciting the slightest interest.

  “Would it now, Merivale?” he asked. “Is there anything here to arrest attention? Anything to catch hold of a man’s arm and say: ‘Stop, you’ve got to look at me’? Is there anything, Merivale? I don’t see it.”

  Merivale s
hook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s good enough of its kind. And because you want to like it, you can find things to like here. But you’ve only got to remember what he was doing seven and eight years ago to see that this is a very different thing. If you could put Archer’s 1915 pictures in that inner room there wouldn’t be a soul in this. These pictures didn’t paint themselves, Heritage. It’s rather sad to be played out at forty.”

  Ransom shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Does it much matter when you do your best work as long as you do do it? Hardy’s writing his best poetry now, at eighty. Swinburne was a back number at twenty-eight. Wordsworth wrote for sixty years, and for fifty of them, the half of a century, he was writing rubbish. Gauguin didn’t begin till he was forty. Do you think it matters much the getting there and the decline, how long they last, or when they come? Isn’t it the moment of being there that counts? Our going hence even as our coming hither. Ripeness is all. For those four years Archer was pretty big. And as long as you’re fine for a few years, the rest of the time doesn’t matter much.”