Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “‘Don’t you think…’ he began.

  “But Jerram would not let him finish. ‘There’s no use discussing it,’ he said. ‘I know Mrs. Querrel and you don’t. You think I’m behaving like a cad. Perhaps I am. But I’m playing at her own game. I’ve laid my cards upon the table. If she’s going on with the game, those are the cards she’s got to play against. And since that’s all there is to it, I’ll go and have my lunch.’

  “That afternoon John Murgatroyd called on Daisy Querrel.

  “‘I’m very sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve done my best. He’s adamant.’

  “She bows her head. She does not protest or whimper. That is her strength: that when once she has roused sympathy, she does not again invoke assistance. That is her strength, to stand silent at your side with upturned begging hand.

  “‘Very well then,’ she says quietly, ‘there’s nothing for me but to leave this flat. It was very kind of you to help me.’

  “‘And where will you go?’ he asks. ‘What’ll happen to you?’

  “She shrugs her shoulders. ‘My dividends will be paid through in a month or two. We can hide ourselves away somewhere for a little. It’ll be sad leaving this flat, though. I was happy here.’

  “And indeed it was a charming flat: a symphony of green and gold, soft-lighted, with high-heaped, many-coloured cushions. And it was the artist as much as the man in Murgatroyd that was wounded by the picture of some wretched lodging-house, as the setting for so delicate and winged a charm. It is his turn now to protest that there must be something that can be done.

  “‘What about an overdraft from the bank? If you’ve dividends you must have securities.’

  “She looks dubious, however. Already she is overdrawn a little. And the bank has been rather difficult of late. She has not cared to ask them.

  “‘Then we’ll go to-morrow,’ he says, ‘and have a look at them together.’

  “The situation is, however, as she feared. Such money as she held in gilt-edged securities was already amply mortgaged; the remainder and far the greater portion was invested in a private company whose shares were not quoted on the Stock Exchange.

  “‘The company,’ the bank manager affirmed, ‘may be all that you say it is. I have, however, no means of judging. I’m afraid therefore that I cannot accept those shares as a guarantee against a further overdraft. How much was it that you needed?’

  “She hesitated. ‘A hundred—er—a hundred and fifty.’

  “‘And you have no other property, no life insurance?’

  “‘Nothing.’

  “‘Then I’m afraid,’ he concluded, ‘that we can only extend your overdraft if you can find someone who will give a personal guarantee.’

  “She smiled wistfully.

  “‘I’m afraid that I don’t know anyone whom I could ask for that.’

  “‘Then in that case…’

  “But as she rose from her chair, so slim and graceful, so helpless and so alone, there came visibly to Murgatroyd the picture of an ill-furnished room, bleak and banal, such as he had known himself during his days of struggle. It was intolerable that so lovely a creature should be imprisoned there. And for the sake of a hundred and fifty pounds. The price of a couple of small landscapes.

  “‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you my guarantee for that.’

  “And as the pale blue eyes grew fond with gratitude he felt that had it been actually an affair of flinging away a couple of landscapes instead of the mere legal formality of attaching his signature to a document, he would by that smile have been amply recompensed.

  “A week or so later he ran across Tony Jerram. There was a sneeringly supercilious smile on Jerram’s face.

  “‘And I thought,’ he said, ‘that there was nothing between you and Daisy Querrel!’

  “‘Nor is there.’

  “‘Yet you’re paying her rent for her.’

  “‘That’s only…’

  “But as on that earlier occasion Jerram interrupted him. ‘Please don’t explain,’ he said. ‘I know the geography of that road pretty thoroughly. You’re welcome to Daisy Querrel. I’m tired of being brinked.’

  “‘Brinked!’

  “The answering laugh was none too pleasant. ‘It’s a word,’ said Jerram, ‘that plays a largish part in Mrs. Querrel’s vocabulary. You’ll be tolerably familiar with it, by the time you’re through.’ And he passed on, leaving the painter irritated and perplexed.

  “Not that John Murgatroyd allows himself to be impressed. He is too happy in complete surrender to the charm of a new-found comradeship. He is turning the pages of an enchantingly unexpected chapter.

  “It has been arranged that he is to paint her portrait.

  “‘In an evening frock,’ he says. ‘Hats are only a disguise.’ And indeed the light flaxen hair with its fringe cut low upon the forehead is a subject of which no painter would be willingly deprived.

  “Excitedly she claps her hands. ‘And I’ll get such a heavenly dress,’ she cries. ‘You must help me choose it.’

  “They devote a whole morning to its purchase in Clotilde’s soft-coloured galleries. There had been a dress parade on the previous day, but Daisy refused to go to it.

  “‘One learns nothing from mannequins,’ she said. ‘There is a clash of personalities. You can’t begin to judge a frock till you’ve seen it on yourself.’

  “And so Murgatroyd waits in the spacious ante-room while Daisy Querrel in one of the innumerable alcoved dressing-rooms beyond arrays herself in dress after dress for his inspection. And as he sits waiting here, there comes over him the same feeling of assuagement that he has found at times in the studios of other painters. He is at home here in this atmosphere of display, here where as in the studio, the creation of beauty is alone of matter. He feels no impatience to be back again before his easel.

  “‘No, no,’ he says, as she pauses irresolutely before the mirror. ‘It is pleasant enough, but there ought to be something better.’

  “It is not till quite twenty dresses have been tried on that they decide at last on a sheath of silver over which falls from the shoulders a cascade of golden gauze.

  “‘Marvellous,’ he says, ‘marvellous! It’ll be my portrait for next year’s Academy.’

  “But though it is as the artist that he speaks, it is as the man also that he is admiring her.

  “‘And how much will it be?’ she asks.

  “As she learns the price she gives a gasp.

  “‘I’d no idea it would be so much,’ she cries. ‘That’s much more than I can afford. I’m so sorry, Mr. Murgatroyd, I’m afraid I shall have to choose something less expensive.’ Her face is clouded with contrition. ‘And I’ve wasted so much of your time,’ she adds.

  “But the trouble is one to be laughed easily aside. ‘How much is the difference?’ he asks.

  “‘Oh, a lot. Fifteen to twenty pounds.’

  “‘Then you shall have a cheque for it this evening. No, no,’ he adds laughingly, as she raises her hands in protest. ‘I’m not going to have one of my best pictures ruined for the sake of a few pennies.’

  “It is thus that there opens for them a period of enchanted comradeship. The afternoons are rare on which she does not come for a sitting to his studio, and as he paints, she chatters endlessly, her talk flowing like her thoughts, gaily and irresponsibly from one subject to another: her past, her friends, her interests: each is hurried in its turn through the sieve of her conversation. And in justification of Jerram’s prophecy not many days have passed before the word ‘brink’ is tossed into that spate of her impressions.

  “‘Brink,’ he asks, ‘what’s that?’

  “She laughs delightedly at his ignorance. ‘I should have thought,’ she exclaims, ‘that it would have explained itself. It’s a word that some of us used to use for going as near as one could to the edge without going over. You ought to have met Connie Erskine.’

  “And she burst into a string of anecdotes calculated to display the
mythical Connie’s ingenuity in exploiting the patience of her admirers to the straining point.

  “‘But what’s the idea?’ he asked. ‘Does she just play it as a game?’

  “She pouted. ‘A game with rewards to it. She wouldn’t have bothered to play it with unimportant people.’

  “‘Unimportant people. And whom would she describe as important people. Rich people?’

  “But Daisy will not commit herself. Important people, she repeats. And in another second she has turned the talk to another topic with the childish inconsequence that so delights him in her.

  “Childishness is indeed her prominent characteristic. Childishness in her talk, childishness in her amusements, childishness in her vanity. Her prettiness is an enrapturing toy that she cannot admire too constantly or too much. She spends hours each day before her mirror, so that she can recognize almost without glancing at herself the instant when the first fleck of powder is disarranged.

  “‘Don’t paint my hair this morning,’ she would say. ‘It’s not quite right on the left side.’

  “To Murgatroyd there was not the least difference discernible. But Daisy Querrel was in the habit of judging her effects, by fractions of a millimetre.

  “Childishness in her amusements. For after a few days their comradeship is confined by no means to the studio. Two or three nights a week they dine and dance together. And as the night passes the pitch of her animation heightens. She is indefatigable in her relish for new thrills. ‘Let’s go to a night club,’ she will say. But before she has been twenty minutes there she has started to grow restive. ‘It’s dull here. Let’s go somewhere else.’ And he follows entranced, as one who drinks for the first time a novel and heady wine. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun,’ she once remarked, ‘if one could say that one had been inside every night club that there was!’

  “And so for a month it lasted. Through thirty enchanted days they are drawn nearer to the inevitable moment of avowal: nearer day by day till the evening when he can show her his portrait finished. For during the hours that he has been painting, he has kept it hidden. He has a horror like so many other artists of showing his work while it is in the rough.

  “‘There,’ he can say at last, ‘it’s done.’

  “Timidly she rises from her chair, and walks across the room towards the easel. As she sees it for the first time, she gasps, then stands still. Very still, gazing, gazing. At last she turns her eyes from it, lifting them to his. They are wide and tender, with that in them which no man can look upon with unmoved blood. She says nothing, but her eyes are more eloquent than any words could be.

  “‘But I couldn’t have painted it,’ he says, and his voice is quivering, ‘I couldn’t have painted it, if I hadn’t cared for you so, so terribly.’

  “The long lashed eyelids flicker and are lowered: in a sigh that comes seemingly from the immaterial depths of being, her lips are parted. Her body sways towards him. It is one of those moments that leave no man who has ever known them with the right to call life anything but rich.

  “Yet it is with a sigh and with the back of her hand lifted across her eyes that she turns away from him.

  “‘I’m sorry we did that,’ she whispers. ‘It’ll spoil things.’

  “And for all that he protests incredulously her face has grown suddenly and strangely solemn.

  “‘It’ll spoil things,’ she repeats, ‘for I’m not a woman out of whom any man can have any happiness through loving. I may seem free enough. But there is in fact nobody who is less free than I am. I am watched, I know, by my husband all the time. And he wouldn’t be sorry of an opportunity to divorce me. He wants to see me beaten, either into coming back to him, or taking the easy way with others. And if that were to happen, well, there are some women who are big enough to stand that sort of thing in the way that men can. But my kind of woman can’t. She just goes down; and when my sort goes down men see to it that she stays down.’

  “She pauses breathlessly. Never has he known her talk so seriously before, but emotion stifles him so that he cannot speak.

  “‘No, no,’ she says, as he begins to stutter a denial. ‘I must say this once all that I have to say. I have never spoken like this before. I shall never speak like this again. And I don’t want you to misjudge me later. I want you to realize now at the start of things that there can be no real happiness for you in loving me. And if there’s any danger of your thinking me later on, what shall I say?—ungenerous,—I’ld much rather, ever so much rather, that we parted now with the memory of happy things, of this friendship that has meant such happiness. It would hurt terribly, terribly, but I’ld much rather that than… oh, it didn’t matter with the Tony Jerrams, but with you…’

  “Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are flashing; her arms at her sides are hanging limply. He does not know what to do, he does not know what to say, he can only take her hands in his and stammer stupidly:

  “‘My dear, my dear, but how could you think that I should misunderstand?’

  “Very sweetly, very sadly, she looks up at him.

  “‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she says, ‘if between you and me, it should turn out to be—oh, like all the rest.’

  “And between them is the recompense of wistful kisses.

  “She was right, though, in her foreboding. It does spoil things. The fruit that may not ripen naturally turns sour. There have been words said that are not for recalling. The old frankness, the old openness, have passed: they are on their guard now with one another. But it would be difficult and lengthy and not any too profitable perhaps to show stage by stage the slow process by which Murgatroyd’s love became embittered, by which his faith in Daisy Querrel was turned to doubt, by which the strain of an uneased longing bit into his restraint.

  “Certain landmarks stand out along the road.

  “There is the demand from the bank for his overdraft’s guarantee.

  “‘So the dividends,’ he asks, ‘haven’t been paid through yet?’

  “She hesitates. Apparently there has been some payment. But it has been much smaller than she expected, and there had been some rather pressing accounts.

  “‘I see,’ he says.

  “Her lips part abjectly in dismay. ‘Darling, if you ask the bank, they would surely allow the guarantee to stand a little longer.’

  “‘Possibly, if I were to bother to ask them.’ For there has been an extremely unfavourable notice of one of his pictures in that morning’s paper, and he is in the mood when one welcomes an opportunity to spite one’s face. So he pays over the value of the two small landscapes.

  “There is a meeting with Tony Jerram.

  “‘Saw you at the Kit-cat the other night,’ says Jerram. And his eyes are scornful and the tone of his voice sneering. ‘Daisy Querrel must be getting cleverer as she goes on,’ he says. ‘I saw through her in six weeks. She’s kept you dangling for four months.’

  “There is the evening when he finds her waiting for him in the Ciro’s lounge with an exquisite Burmese shawl draped over her dainty shoulders.

  “‘What a lovely thing,’ he cries.

  “She coos happily.

  “‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Evelyn Summers gave it me. Wasn’t it sweet of him?’

  “Evelyn Summers is a young barrister whom Murgatroyd has introduced to her, and the increasing intimacy between them has been aggravatingly disturbing.

  “There is the portrait that he is to paint of her in wide-brimmed hat and summer frock.

  “‘I’ll get such a jolly thing for it,’ she cries. ‘When will you come and help me to choose it?’

  “But for Murgatroyd there ensues a week of incessant labour. Every second of daylight must be spent before the canvas. ‘I’m fearfully sorry,’ he rings her up to say, ‘but I simply can’t get away. You’ll have to let the dress be a surprise for me.’

  “‘Very well,’ she says.

  “But she arrives for the first sitting in a frock that is familiar. ‘I couldn’t find anything,�
� she explains, ‘I really cared for.’

  “Small incidents taken separately, but potent enough coming one upon another to turn to poison that ferment of uneased longing.

  “‘She is playing with me,’ he thinks. ‘She is getting out of me all she can, and when the time comes for my patience to wear out, there is Evelyn Summers waiting as a second string.’ That is her game, the game of which she knows every twist and turning. The overdraft for her rent, the frock for his portrait of her: how she has made use of him. And when it comes to paying for a frock herself, she can find nothing that she cares for. Murgatroyd is not niggardly. He has his full share of the artist’s exuberant improvidence. But his masculine vanity is in revolt at the thought that he too in his turn is being ‘brinked’; that he is ‘important’ to her merely in Connie Erskine’s sense.

  “It is over a casual invitation that the crisis comes.

  “They have been discussing the new revue at the Ambassador’s.

  “‘What about going there to-night?’ he asks.

  “She shakes her head.

  “‘I’m terribly sorry. I’ld have loved to, but I’m going out with Evelyn.’

  “‘Evelyn Summers?’

  “‘Um!’

  “Murgatroyd sniffs impatiently.

  “‘Do you see much of him?’ he asks.

  “‘’Pends on what you call a lot. Once or twice a week, I suppose.’

  “‘And is he much in love with you?’

  “‘How should I know?’

  “‘He hasn’t told you yet?’

  “She looks at him, curiously. Conscious suddenly that their light-hearted banter has grown tense.

  “‘Evelyn Summers,’ she says quietly, ‘has never looked like making love to me.’

  “Murgatroyd laughs sneeringly. ‘But he will soon, poor devil.’

  “‘Poor devil?’ she echoes.

  “‘Do you imagine,’ he retorts, ‘that he’ll find it too amusing?’

  “There is a silence; a chill nerve-strained silence during which they realize, both of them, that they have gone too far now for retreating.