“Take this down, please.”
It was the most uncharacteristic letter of his that she had ever recorded—abrupt and frank to the point of violence. But was it so uncharacteristic? She had read somewhere that at forty a man’s suppressed self is apt to erupt.
“That’s all.” Ten minutes later he went out, and Miss Sims caught the 5.33 from Waterloo.
It was one of those soft, pearl-grey November afternoons—the western sky reddening as for a carnival. Carr found himself walking down Regent Street with a queer sense of having broken away from some boring tradition, a routine that had begun to be exasperating. He felt exhilarated, restless, suddenly alive to new sensations, new impressions. A lighted window attracted him, and he turned aside to look at a glowing model of Monte Carlo bathed in improvised sunlight—brilliant, youthful, and alluring.
Two girls in fur coats were standing beside him, and one of them brushed against his sleeve. The faint perfume of her clothes suggested the warm and exotic south, and he had a glimpse of a little, pale, provoking face with red lips and sidelong eyes.
“I should like a month down there.”
“Have you been?” twittered the other voice.
“I had some luck last year.”
Carr walked on with a feeling that life was slipping past him. He saw himself growing grey in the dull but comfortable room that housed the brain of the firm of Ellerby and Carr, while life went past him like a carnival procession, a procession in which he had no place. These girls—these richly dressed and sensuous women, these young men who idled along with eyes that were the eyes of men who hunted! The lights, the jazz-roll of the traffic, the blazing windows, the rush of humanity, the passion of life hurrying to spend itself, the intoxications, the adventures! Had he not missed it all—he—who was on the edge of growing old? The ego in him uttered a cry of desire and of pain.
The lights and the life-vortex of Piccadilly Circus held him bemused.
He looked at his watch.
Was he going to catch the 6.4 at Euston?
No!
He walked on like a stranger in a strange city, lacking any definite object, hardly noticing whither he went. His newly-revolted body was controlled by ancient, immemorial instincts. He was aware of the lights, the colours, the luxury of the shop-windows, the interminable traffic, the women and girls who hurried or loitered past him, the va et vient of it all. He diverged up a side-street and saw opalescent darkness, a spacious quiet, the lights of a few taxis, trees. He was in Darlington Square. A portico outlined by a string-course of electric lights attracted his attention. There were letters of light on the cornice.
“THE DARLINGTON ROOMS:
DANCING.”
He paused and stood reading a poster:
“LESSONS:
FOX-TROT—WALTZ—TANGO.”
“How long is it since I danced?” said a voice from the depths of him.
A moment later he was speaking to the commissionaire who had opened one of the swing doors.
“Can I have lessons here?”
“Upstairs, sir; first door on the right.”
Wilton Carr went up. He found himself in a sort of lounge, and talking to a fair-haired young woman behind a long desk and an array of ledgers. The sound of a piano came from the next room. Two settees stood at right angles to the fire-place, and they were occupied by three young women in black dresses, an Italian and a Frenchman. The upholstery of the place struck Carr as being vaguely familiar—perhaps because the Darlington Rooms had been decorated and furnished by the firm of Ellerby & Carr.
“Can I have a lesson, now?”
“It’s rather late.”
The fair-haired girl glanced at the clock over the door, and then at the three instructresses.
“There is half an hour. Pepita?”
One of the young women got up with an air of protesting languor. She was a dark girl with a snake’s head of black hair, a brilliant pallor, and large soft eyes. Her nose was short, audacious, predatory. She had a full, red mouth—a mouth that made Carr think of an unfolding flower.
“This gentleman wants a lesson.”
The girl looked at Carr and her gaze puzzled him. It was a quick, comprehensive, critical stare, a glance that summed him up from spats to collar and made an estimate of his social state. Yet this protected and domesticated male thought what beautiful and gentle eyes she had! And she looked tired!
“Half an hour. Will you come with me, sir.”
She had pronounced in his favour, perhaps because she had secured the softness of the man. He had an opulent look, and was well-groomed and ruddy. Men of forty are prone to be sentimental and generous.
Carr took off his overcoat, and followed Pepita into the dancing-room.
He began by being absurdly clumsy and self-conscious, for there was something about Pepita that confused his stolid, normal self. She made him feel absurdly boyish and sentimental. She looked tired and his clumsiness seemed brutal. He kept kicking her feet.
“I’m awfully sorry! You ought not to be dragging an idiotic bulk like me round the room.”
“Why not?”
“You are tired.”
“I’m used to it. I’m paid to get tired.”
In spite of her name she spoke very good English, having been born in Lewisham and christened Florence Smith. Her Spanish-South American atmosphere was part of her art.
Carr felt ashamed of himself—ashamed of all men who made this graceful creature the slave of their elephantic ambitions.
“Look here, let’s sit out for five minutes.”
“We are not allowed to sit out—except for the two minutes between each dance.”
“And you do this all day?”
“From ten till six.”
“What a shame!”
She looked at him curiously. Carr was quite sober, and yet something seemed to have gone to his head and made him furiously sympathetic. The experience was not new to her: she had met it most often in boys, and men over forty. One of the two-minute intervals had arrived, and they sat on a blue and yellow settee and smoked Carr’s cigarettes. There were only two other couples in the room. The pianist—a Russian with a mop of tow-coloured hair—watched Pepita with cynical interest.
“I am afraid I am ruining your shoes.”
She smiled suddenly at him with her large soft eyes.
“Shoes are rather precious—now. And I have to begin again at half-past eight.”
“What, to-night?”
“Yes; we have to dance with some of the men at the evening dances. Sometimes I’m so tired at six o’clock that I can’t eat any dinner.”
Carr’s sentimentality was shocked. The pianist began to pound out a waltz, and Pepita jumped up.
“Come along.”
“But it seems so confoundedly hard on you.”
“Oh, I never give in,” and she laughed intimately and confidingly in his face.
Carr stammered through the waltz. He was not thinking of his feet or of her instructions—but of a soft-eyed, weary girl who seemed so full of pluck and resolution.
“I say,” he ventured, “don’t think me impertinent, but what you want is a rest, a little wine, and a good dinner.”
She smiled up at him.
“I get a shilling an hour for pushing you round. That doesn’t provide——”
He plunged.
“Look here, I’m dining in town at seven. Will you do me the honour——?”
She knew her man, and she looked him straight in the eyes.
“Thank you—but I am not that sort of girl.”
Carr blushed like a boy.
“My dear girl—I did not mean that! I’m not a cad. Now—you will have to let me prove it——”
Of course—she allowed him to prove it—and they dined at Carbonaro’s, and drank Bollinger 1910. Pepita found out quite a lot about Wilton Carr: that he was Carr of Ellerby & Carr, that he was married, that he had a big place at Melfont. But, about Pepita, Carr learnt nothing.
He left her in the vestibule of the Darlington Rooms, took a taxi to Euston, and travelled down to Melfont by the 9.52. The Melfont church clock was striking eleven when he walked up the drive to his old Georgian house among its cedars, conscious of a vivid freshness in his life, a little guilty tremor under the starlit sky. He let himself into the house, hung up his hat and coat, and opened the door of the drawing-room. Lucy was there, curled up in a big chair in front of the fire.
He had hoped that she would be in bed.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. I was kept in town—business.”
Then he realized with a shock of emotion that it was the first conscious lie that he had ever told her. Lucy was not a woman who provoked deceit. Repose was her great charm, restfulness, a kind of wise and quiet candour. She had one of those fair, tranquil, and slightly indolent faces, blue eyes set well apart, a mass of warm brown hair, a comely figure.
“You must be tired.”
She looked up at him unsuspiciously, and Carr—the infatuated—thought her phlegmatic—even a little stupid. He was so accustomed to Lucy. She had made his life very easy and very comfortable, and it never occurred to him that this wife of his had had her moments of restlessness, dreams that had never come true.
“We are getting too much business,” he said, walking to a table where whisky, a syphon, and glasses were ready. He poured himself out a drink. The details of life were always in order in this house that Lucy managed, and he had come to accept the smoothness of it all as a man expects a comfortable bed.
She leant forward and stared at the fire.
“Too much business! Do you know, Will, there are times when I almost wish that we were poor.”
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, the commercial man in him naïvely shocked.
She laughed.
“We are so successful. Sometimes it may be a very terrible thing to be too successful. I’d like to go blackberrying.”
“My dear girl,” he said pompously, “one’s commercial responsibilities are very serious things.”
She looked at him with veiled pity and tenderness.
“I know. Some people wonder whether they are worth while.”
“Of course they are worth while. Progress, civilization. You can’t get away from progress.”
“Yes, progress,” she said a little sadly; “and then—at the end of it—you find——”
“Come along to bed, dear.”
She was making him uncomfortable, challenging him to think, and your middle-class Englishman hates nothing so much as thinking. It is like putting on a suit of clothes that have not been cut by his orthodox and pet tailor.
But what the devil did she mean? Progress! And at the end of it—you find—what?
Then she completed the sentence he had interrupted: “You may find that you have left the most important thing behind; and sometimes it is too late to go back for it.”
That was the whole secret of Wilton Carr’s sudden and violent dissatisfaction with life, this sudden feverishness, this impulse towards reckless adventure.
During the next three weeks Carr went regularly to the Darlington Rooms. He was infatuated, but in a sentimental and benignant fashion. He told himself that he felt a fatherly interest in Pepita—which is the decent man’s excuse for not calling himself a cad. Carr was not a cad.
He resembled, perhaps, a half-blind man groping towards a light, towards beauty, romance, the dawn on the hills, the intangible loveliness and mystery of life. He was more innocent than any boy. He thought that he had discovered beauty and mystery in this Pepita who taught dancing.
She understood that he was not the ordinary coarse male out upon adventure. There were possibilities in Wilton Carr, and she set out to develop them.
He had begun to give her presents, the extravagantly generous presents of a lover. She scolded him, and ordered him not to waste his money.
“Money!” he said, “—oh—I have too much money.”
She had no doubts as to his financial solidity. All sorts of men came to the Darlington Rooms, and one of Pepita’s pupils was a little stockbroker whose infatuation was almost as fatherly as Carr’s. She told him that she dabbled in shares and fancied “Industrials.” And what about Ellerby & Carr’s new issue?
“Sound stuff,” said her adviser; “it’s the richest ‘house’ of its kind in London.”
She had no intention of buying “Billy’s” shares, but she had serious thoughts of—Billy. Five years of rag-time life had left Pepita with few illusions, and a passion for respectability and a solid future. She wanted security, a comfortable house, a car, winters at Monte Carlo, a soft and easy-going husband. Carr was the sort of man for whom she had been watching—but then Carr was married. If she could persuade him to jump over the cliff with her—a great passion might carry her to ultimate prosperity.
“Oh, how I loathe this life, Billy.”
They were dining at Carbonaro’s, and she looked at him with her large, tragic eyes. She had no pity for the other woman, that dull and dowdy somebody who lived down at Melfont.
“It’s rotten. I meet rotten men, rotten people. And there’s no escape for a girl like me.”
“You are ambitious, Pepita?”
“Ambitious! Not a bit. I should like to go right away and see beautiful scenery and pictures and all that. And then I should like to settle down in a sweet old home with the one dear man. And children——”
Carr thought he saw a sacred light in her eyes when she uttered the words: “children.”
“Perhaps you have never met the right man.”
She traced invisible patterns on the table-cloth with a tragic forefinger.
“I don’t know. Sometimes one meets him too late.”
And then she pushed her chair back and sent the waiter for her cloak.
“What’s the use? I’m tired; I seem to have got to the end of things. Take me home, Billy; I shall go to bed.”
He walked back with her to the seedy house in a seedy street where she had a room, and the apparent pathos of her life filled Carr with reckless and compassionate dreams. This beautiful body, this tired soul, in prison! He felt that he loved her as he had loved no other woman.
They said good-bye at the doorway.
“Good night—dear.”
“Billy—do take me out to-morrow. I feel I shall do something desperate unless someone cares.”
He bent over her as he held her hand.
“There is someone who cares,” he said; “someone who can’t help caring.”
For the next two days Wilton Carr hesitated on the edge of the precipice. He stood there, seeing strange and wonderful distances, blue skies, mountains, exotic lands, made for a lover’s pilgrimage. He imagined Pepita’s kisses, the kisses of that flower-like mouth.
Miss Sims thought him ill—on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He was extraordinarily restless, and quite unable to concentrate upon the details of his business. On the Tuesday before Christmas week, he went out at half-past three, leaving a dozen letters undealt with. A casual acquaintance saw him strolling along Piccadilly in the direction of Bond Street.
He wanted to buy Pepita a pearl necklace, and he paused outside a jeweller’s window. In ten days it would be Christmas, and quite suddenly he remembered that he had not bought Lucy’s present. He stood there shocked and ashamed. The buying of his wife’s Christmas present had always been a happy and almost romantic event with him.
But—damn it I how could he buy her a present? It would be like giving Lucy some treacherous gift that was poisoned. Wilton Carr walked on.
He dined with Pepita, made up his mind that there could be only one ending to the affair, and reached Melfont soon after ten.
He found Lucy reading in front of the fire, and somehow her complete and unsuspecting happiness shocked him. She looked so secure, so surely and innocently anchored in the quiet waters of their home. And he was going to inflict upon her the greatest humiliation that a man can lay upon a woman. Was it p
ossible?
He poured himself out a drink, keeping his back turned to his wife.
“I’ll settle the house on her,” he thought, “and three thousand a year. I rather wish——”
Then he heard her speaking.
“Will, I want you to take me to see a play.”
He turned, slowly.
“A play! What play?”
“That thing of Barrie’s——”
He came and sat by the fire.
“What sort of play is it? I’m not much of a theatre-goer.”
“But you will take me? I think you will like it. We don’t go out much.”
“Do you want to go out—more?”
“I’m still young,” she said gently.
Some unexplainable impulse stirred in Carr.
“All right,” he said; “what about to-morrow evening? I dare say I can get tickets.”
He was not looking at her face.
“Thank you, Will. I can come up and dine with you.”
Carr managed to get seats in the dress-circle, and Lucy called for him at Ellerby & Carr’s about half-past six. He had had a difficult day with Miss Sims, and several rather exasperating business details to deal with, and he was tired. He sat back in his chair, conscious of a sense of relief on finding himself surprised by the happy and restful comeliness of his wife. She was wearing her furs, and as she sat by the fire in Carr’s big room, the firelight made little gleams upon her hair. She seemed to have brought a warm and subtly perfumed atmosphere with her into the room, a serenity that was like the serenity of a beautiful garden.
She looked extraordinarily handsome, and she was not restless like Pepita.
“You look tired, Will.”
“Oh, a bit fagged. I have got seats all right. Where shall we dine?”
“Let’s go to one of our little old places.”
They went.
That dinner was a very pleasant affair, and Carr caught other men looking admiringly at his wife. The play followed. Carr was the sort of Englishman who always resented the idea that literary and dramatic art were to be taken seriously, but this play of Barrie’s was peculiarly apposite, and carried to Carr a vivid and almost prophetic appeal. It moved him most strangely. During the last interval he went out and walked up and down the foyer with a feeling that something was about to happen to him, something that he could not foresee.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 21