“An excellent idea, and a better motive. How can I help?”
“Well, first of all, as you are the surviving Elder, I wanted to know if you would mind if we went back to the origin of the Bude Bank in Elder’s Bank. The book, of course, would carry no criticism of any kind.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bude. I would have known that anyway. Well, how can I assist you?”
“You can help me by letting me have all the old letterheads and documents and seals and crest of the Elder Bank in case we ought to reproduce any in the book. There are some, of course, in the bank, but I want everything available.”
“Nothing is more easy. Come with me.”
Mr. Elder went over and drew a curtain, and somehow the desk and modern furniture were surprising and almost ugly behind the lovely Chinese room. Mr. Elder opened his desk, went to a cabinet, and produced the various documents and seals and the great crest. “You can take all these, Mr. Bude.”
“Ah, I see you are still using up the old notepaper. Can I have some of the pages?”
“Of course.”
Mr. Elder was putting the things in a case while Nicholas examined the notepaper. He looked sharply at Mr. Elder as he stooped over the case. Whatever was behind that white mask of his face, this was undoubtedly the notepaper he had come for. He had made up his mind to probe Elder with some questions, but now he had an instinct to postpone it. If he made Elder suspicious, it would do no good. Nicholas picked up some sheets of the paper and was going to put them in the case.
“Do you mind if I ask, Mr. Bude? How many pages have you taken?”
Nicholas suddenly felt himself grow taut with suspicion. This was a damn curious question. He counted the pages. “I—I’ve got five.”
“That is all right, Mr. Bude. I just wanted to know.” Nicholas realized that the apparently casual piles of notepaper on the desk must have been counted, and he was tempted to pursue the matter a little, but he was baffled by Elder’s air of detachment. They went back into the room. Nicholas felt that he had not better go too abruptly and accepted a cigarette. Suddenly a thought amused him.
“You know, Mr. Elder, one day when I said that I liked to see life down in black and white, I think you were in a way laughing at me.”
Mr. Elder looked at him in inquiry.
“Well, it just struck me that, after all, you’ve got this Chinese room because you wanted to get it down in black and white, if you understand what I mean. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes. That is quite an interesting thought. It’s a matter of actualizing a thing. After all Keats’ Ode to the Nightingale couldn’t exist for anybody else but him until he got it down in black and white. Hum, yes. It’s the same with a painting or a sonata. The imagination must take flesh.” He paused. “I was just thinking of those letters you said you were going to write to yourself. After all, you could have imagined them, but you felt you had to see them to make the experiment real. Are you still doing it?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose they are as boring as bills?”
“About the same.”
“All the same, they have proved something to you, that what affects the abnormal person does not affect the normal. Nothing is useless in a way. They are actual and therefore carry an argument and a proof.” He paused. “Hum, I was just thinking. I don’t know what you write to yourself, but I often wondered if a thought, once it got down somewhere, didn’t have an existence that must affect somebody. I think a thought, or an idea, must have a kind of life of its own. Hum...Would you like some more tea, Mr. Bude?”
“No, thank you, I think I must go now.” Nicholas got up. “Well, I’m glad I discovered your room, Mr. Elder. If I had just walked in and walked out again, I might have thought I had dreamed it. But now I can see it is the only way you can live. Well, I hope you will be well enough to come back soon. I’m more used to you and Miss Coleman than anybody.”
“Good night, Mr. Bude. It has been a great pleasure to me.” He hesitated. “If you will allow me to say so, I hope you will consider this house your own.”
“I’ll take you at your word, Mr. Elder.”
“The door will open when you step on the rug, Mr. Bude. I have those curtains to shut out the noise.” When Nicholas got out into the cubicle he felt in some way that he no longer feared the dragon.
As he went down the street he felt the cooling air and wondered if Elder’s curiosity could be the mask of malice and design. Somehow his instinct did not believe it. He sat on a bench by the public garden and let it settle down into reflection in his mind. Elder was certainly clever, so clever that suspicious as the question about the number of pages was, it was also not logical to believe that he would give give himself away. But why had he asked that question? And Nicholas felt suddenly that he had overlooked one thing. Surely Elder could not have been such a fool as to write his personal note of apology for absence on the same paper as he used for the Personal Monday letters, if he sent them.
“By God,” Nicholas thought, “I’m wrong. It’s not Elder. And I might have thought it was Sidonie if I hadn’t found out about the orphanage. Then who the hell is it? If the anonymous letters were inspired by his own declared proposal, it could only be Muriel or Saluby. But how could they get the paper or get them posted? By heavens, there was some Elder Bank paper at Barrington...”
SEVENTEEN
On the same Monday when Saluby rang her up in the morning Muriel lost her temper. She repeated: “I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Dorminster today.”
“Damn it, we missed out last Monday, and you might have kept this day free.”
Saluby was annoyed. He knew also that she was likely not to go next Monday for a natural reason. She tried to keep calm.
“I don’t like going in there after last Monday. That made me nervous.”
“I don’t believe you. You know very well MacGregor won’t be there today.”
“I don’t care a damn whether you believe it or not. I...”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am.” The parlor maid went out with an apologetic nod.
Muriel felt her nerves more jumpy now and continued to Saluby in a low, irritated voice. “Look here, I can’t argue with you now. The maids are about. You must stop ringing me up here.”
“Very well. I’m taking it for granted I’m seeing you today!”
“You are not!”
She smacked down the telephone and felt she had made a mistake in snapping at him. Saluby would not like being snubbed. She walked out into the garden and lay on the plot of grass in the corner. She loved the sunlight on her limbs and had felt it limbering her mind this lovely summer. She felt that since her ring was no longer a gold shackle on her finger, she had gained a liberty of mind that was more important than sexual freedom only. Now she let her thought range out again as she did when a girl, before she learned that it was better to confine it to the smooth Poona lawn.
She knew that she had been by nature a passionate girl who had felt that love was a wild mustang on the prairie and been given a tame cob who stayed on the lawn. She remembered the vexation in her blood when the subalterns who became human in a fox trot turned from men into dancing partners before they got out on the balcony.
Nothing at all happened for three years as the same day was turned over and over again on the Poona calendar, and then Nick came along to a reunion dance because in his war service he had been attached to her father’s regiment. Mrs. Canjole, who always looked as though she would have been more at home in Mayfair and who had constituted herself Muriel’s emotional guide, had looked him up and down and said: “Public school one or two generations, but gentleman by instinct. Bored as hell because he’s got nothing in his hands but lots of money...Ah, his hands! All the rest of him is manufactured, but they are the man himself. Can’t make them behave. Hum, a plowman underneath!” Mrs. Canjole had another sip. “Lousy with sex as a bull, and doesn’t know it. Wake up like a volcano...Oh, you’re dancing this with him! Hum...You’re
about right for him, but neither of you know a thing, so who’s going to be the schoolmaster? Hum, if you don’t get anywhere, I’m going to find out if the rest of him is as hairy as his hands. Bah, these bloody women here!”
Muriel danced with Nicholas, and a strange picture. came into her mind in which he seemed to roam about like a dark and brooding peasant on a wet spring earth under a sky congested with black clouds and red dripping light. He stalked through a gloam in her mind, and she could feel his body laboring in desire and his emotions all tangled up in her blood. This strange and troubled picture formed in her mind, and she felt somehow that it was wholly communicated into her body through his hands, and that there was no way of understanding him except by the flesh. Also, there was a kind of coagulating in her belly, as though of a hot and thickening honey, and suddenly her mind sank altogether into her body, and no thought was clear until the dance ended and she was able to get hold of herself again.
“You were just drowned in it like in a sea of chloroform!”
Startled out of her emotion, she looked in anger at Mrs. Canjole’s amused face, and her mind cleared in the shock of annoyance. Mrs. Canjole’s intrusion into her mood was not less intolerable than the appalling accuracy of her remark.
“Why don’t you mind your own damned business?” Muriel snapped.
Mrs. Canjole was not disturbed. “I can see you in a double bed already, my dear!”
“Well, I’ll have a third pillow for you, in case you might miss anything!”
Mrs. Canjole smiled. “My dear, I’m going to miss you.”
Muriel turned away to conceal her smile. There was no use in trying to hide anything from this woman. And somehow Mrs. Canjole had made Muriel’s emotion concrete—had, as it were, identified it, and made her look at it. She danced two more dances with Nicholas, and they went out into the garden. It was a lovely night, and Muriel could almost hear her heart knocking on the white silent gong of the moon. Nicholas looked about. Words jumped out of Muriel’s mouth.
“Now, for God’s sake don’t talk about cricket. Why do all you officers dance as though you wanted to polish your buttons on a woman’s belly and then come out here and talk about cricket?”
She saw the mild astonishment in his face.
“I wasn’t going to.” There was a long pause. “Well, are you going to marry me?”
Muriel did not experience any of the feelings that romantics had prophesied for this moment. She said:
“You haven’t had much to do with women?”
“No, not a lot. Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you had, I thought you might have suggested something else.”
“You are a bit shocking, you know. What age are you?”
“Twenty-one, off.”
“Lord, I am about fifteen years older than you!”
“I shouldn’t let that worry you. Every man is as young as his inexperience.”
He laughed. “You are a bit disconcerting. Well, what do you say?”
“Yes—provided you don’t kiss me now, because that’s supposed to be the right thing to do. Now you can talk about cricket or the weather, if you like.”
“Well, it’s a lovely night.” He paused. “Are you always as edgy as this?”
“No. But I’ve had a little too much of the army.”
“I don’t know very much about you, of course!”
“Do you want a vet’s certificate, or a peep over my shoulder at Who’s Who?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Then what do you mean? Why do you want to marry me?”
“You know why.”
“I do. So what the hell does it matter if you don’t know anything else about me?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Well, let’s go in. I want a drink.” She paused. “I’m sorry, making all this scold, but it’s only because I know it would be far worse if we had a silly necking party in which you were remembering all the time that you were going to marry me.”
“I understand. I’d have been looking up a book of quotations in my mind, searching for all the right things to say.”
When he had gone off to dance with a major’s wife, Mrs. Canjole inquired: “Are you going to marry him?”
“Yes.”
She knew there was no need to ask Mrs. Canjole to keep it to herself.
“It’s a date?”
“Yes.”
“When? Tomorrow?”
“Don’t be silly, for God’s sake,” said Muriel.
“I’m not being silly. You know the only thing about each other that it’s necessary to know, but you’ll probably spend four months in quarantine to give your mother time to grow a bunch of orange blossoms and for you and him to get on each other’s nerves.”
“I’ve said nothing about orange blossoms.”
“But your mother will. She’s the kind of woman who thinks a marriage is consummated on the social page of The Times. If you were worth a damn you’d have consummated it by now behind the garden hedge, and then everything would have gone all right, instead of getting bitched up, as it will.”
“You certainly are very encouraging.”
“I’m being truthful. I’ll bet you a fiver your mother cries when you tell her...”
“Oh, go to hell!”
Mrs. Canjole had got it all right, Muriel thought wearily now in the garden. One way or another the wedding had taken four months to prepare, and in the end, there were eight bridesmaids.
Mrs. Canjole had called her aside at the reception. “Sit down. You look like hell. I don’t know why the blazes you got asked in here.”
“Damn it,” said Muriel. “It’s my own wedding. Will you let me alone!”
“It’s not your wedding. It’s the wedding of Mrs. Brampton to the Bude Bank. And your mother’s certainly enjoying her marriage. She’s as pink and blushing as a debutante in the middle of a menopause. By the way, I hope...”
“I wish you’d go away.”
“I wish you would. This bloody thing’s going on all day. I heard one subaltern call it a fatigue picket, and he’s not far out. For Gods sake, get out of those nuptial trappings and take Nicholas away. And now I suppose you’re going to a marvelous hotel, with flowers in the bridal suite, and you’ll eat a long, heavy dinner, all dressed up, and then you’ll sit about in the drawing room until it’s late enough to go to bed without the rest of the guests suspecting that you might want to go upstairs for some other reason than because you’re tired. And by that time, you will be tired, and then you’ll go into your bedroom and change into something that you can hardly tell from this wedding dress, and Nicholas will tog himself out in pajamas and a dressing gown in his dressing room, and then he’ll come in, and cough, and look about the room, and you’ll both stand there as if waiting for somebody to introduce you, and...”
“Oh, shut up!”
“All right. But if I were you, I’d stop at the first comfortable-looking haystack by the road, and behave like a man and woman, instead of a tailor’s dummy being married to a wooden mannequin. But, of course, you won’t.”
And, of course, they didn’t, thought Muriel. The whole evening at the hotel had run like punctual trains according to Mrs. Canjole’s timetable. She had yawned five times before going up, and only the first two yawns were caused by nervousness. Nick sat with an expression on his face like a Chinaman playing dominoes. When at last they had gone up, they had separated at her door, and Nicholas had gone into his dressing room. She had sat herself in front of her glass and felt as animated as an exhumed Egyptian mummy. She got up and took everything off but her knickers, and she stood in front of the glass and wished that Nicholas would come in an tear the damn thing off and throw her on the bed. But nothing like that would happen, she knew, and she wearily put on a beautifully made bridal nightdress and a silk jacket and over that a dressing gown and gazed introspectively at a hat and wondered if she ought to put that on and heard Nick in his dressing room and wondered if he were shaving h
imself for the third time today and wondered if he had shaved the hair off his chest as well and then when he knocked on the door it sounded like somebody knocking the ashes out of a smoked pipe.
When he came in, he was as correct as something out of a Jermyn Street window. Elegant bedroom attire of English gentleman, correct tailored look upon his face.
He looked everywhere except at the bed.
After a moment she said: “He’s not here.”
“Not here? Who?”
“Oh, I thought you were looking about as if you expected to find somebody to introduce us.”
His laugh was disconcerted. After a certain amount of promenading, his progress brought him as if by accident to her, and he took her in his arms. Things went along in the elaborate way of an elephant on a tightrope, and eventually they got on to the bed. From that point outward, she blamed herself as much as Nicholas. Her body did not seem to be able to release itself from the habit of restraint that she had been forced to impose on it in proximity to the subalterns and then to Nicholas during the long penance or purgatory of the engagement, and her sense of ignorance was made worse by the one abortive attempt she had had to have sex with an elderly colonel who had given himself Dutch courage out of the gin bottle. And Nicholas, whatever experience he had with women, had clearly learned that while one may be a man with a mistress, with a wife one must always be a gentleman, and when they had performed a kind of slow horizontal gavotte on the bed, it remained as smooth as a Poona lawn. Muriel also remained a virgin during a week of some half-dozen gavottes.
It began to take humorous curves in Muriel’s mind as she watched a robin flirting his beak in a fern pool in the garden. And then her anger returned as she remembered how all spontaneous instincts of love had vanished one by one from her marriage, until in the end, the business of going to bed together became as formal as going in to dinner. And some worse inhibition than all made it impossible for them to discuss it and prevent its getting worse.
The Chinese Room Page 10