Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  “Then you want me to marry so as to be as miserable as you are?”

  “Oh, don’t argue. And all married women aren’t miserable ; Iris isn’t.”

  “Iris would never be miserable. She’s too jolly selfish.”

  “How can you call your sister selfish? And I’m sure you’re selfish enough. You don’t do anything for anyone else——”

  “I said jolly selfish, and I meant it. It must be jolly to be selfish as Iris is. I’m only selfish in a feeble, negative sort of way.”

  “Oh, don’t be introspective.”

  Celia went away to be introspective by herself. She was more frightened than angry. Something that had at times crept into her mother’s tones and her own like the jarring sound of a false note had now become articulate, definite, and dangerous. Her mother was going to reproach her in silence if not again in speech with being an old maid. And she would retaliate with her mother’s dissatisfied marriage. They would be two bitter women girding at each other.

  So terrified was she of this that she ran round her bedroom as if she were in a trap, beating on the walls with a tight-clenched fist. Then she stood still, told herself she was an ass, that the only thing was to be reasonable, sat down on the bed and on her never-to-be-crushed blue and rose embroidered silk coverlid and considered the situation very reasonably with a calendar. It was precisely ten months since she had had her last proposal, and even that could not be counted very weightily, since it was from a young man of small income and colourless prospects for which neither his presence, person, nor intellect had made sufficient amends. She had indeed only encouraged him so as to be able to tell her anxious mother of another firm offer.

  This bleak triumph had been followed by a barren period induced by disgust at the young man’s complaining letters and a painful visit from his mother to her mother to suggest that her boy’s affections had been trifled with. The climax was reached in Iris’s chaffing congratulations on so much havoc, which nearly persuaded Celia to enter a convent.

  For several months she was frosty to every man she met, and, as she now remembered with her finger on the calendar, she had in June turned down the most promising opportunity that had yet offered by a refusal, without any reason, to go to a dance with George Mainwaring, the amiable, interesting, and above all eldest son of dear old Lord Kintairn, whose health was so uncertain.

  In this mood of cold deliberation she could calculate to a nicety her mother’s secret satisfaction if she could go one better than Iris and end up in the peerage. “Ah, she would be sorry then she hadn’t better appreciated my true worth,” Celia thought, putting her tongue out at herself in the long glass in front of her bed.

  She still often wanted her mother’s appreciation as she had done as a child, despairing of ever being as altogether right and successful as Iris. But it sometimes had unfortunate perversions, as on the occasion in June when she had been so conscious of what her mother’s carefully disguised pleasure would be in George Mainwaring’s attentions that she had felt it would be unendurable, that she could never carry it out, that she would want to shout every time his name was mentioned, “Yes, if we are all very good and quiet and don’t say too much about it, I may land a lord yet.” Her rudeness had settled that, for George Mainwaring had gone abroad soon after and she had not heard of him since his return.

  At the present time there was only Ronny Haversham that was likely to be any good. He was ten years older than her, he was in the Navy before the War and had done well during it. Now he had retired and was working at a motoring business. He was tall, fair, as nice-looking as was consistent with strict good-breeding, and even her father had not complained of his manners.

  “Now, Cissie, forward,” she peremptorily commanded that white-faced, staring reflection. “Remember your name and live up to it.”

  With the calendar still in her hand she went down to the ’phone, rang him up at his office and asked him if he had nothing better to do to come with her to a play of Bernard Shaw’s at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead. This enchanted him as the subtlest compliment she could have offered, since he had long feared that she only thought him good for musical comedy or revues and not brainy enough for her.

  At the dinner preceding the play he talked exclusively of Bernard Shaw, to her discomfort, for she had failed to appreciate that great man’s works and had only chosen the Everyman because of its distance and the long taxi drive home. She was right in supposing he would take a taxi, though the Tube would have been considerably quicker. In a closely wrapped fur coat she did not much mind nestling into his arms after the suitable inducements, and when this encouragement enflamed his ardour to the point at which she was accustomed to sigh inwardly “Oh dear!” she quickly buried her head in his chest in an action that suggested she was overcome but confident of his tenderness, and thus proffered only the back of her neck to his kisses.

  She wrote her reply to the hundred questions he asked on that drive, and the same reply did for them all. She then told her mother she was engaged to Ronny. It was not in Mrs. Belamy to show her pleasure as in any way excessive. Perhaps she too had been a little frightened as to the possible result of that conversation, on which this announcement had followed with such grim rapidity. She was very sweet to Celia, very delicate in her insinuations that under no possible circumstances could Ronny ever become like Papa. This was generous in her, since Celia by her nervous and fidgeting ways, her tearful irascibility, her long and pensive silences with downcast eyelids, conveyed whether by intention or not that most maddening reproach, “See what I’ve done to please you.”

  A week later and in one breath she told Ronny that she did not love him nor Bernard Shaw, that she had got up that expedition to the Everyman on purpose for the drive because she had meant him to propose in the taxi, and that it was all and only because she was sick of being at home and wanted to get married.

  After a long pause Ronny said slowly, “Well, you might have told me before I’d waded through all the Plays for Puritans.”

  After another pause he said, “You kept it up so well too. That dinner before the play, whenever I asked you which of his things you liked best and you looked sort of abstracted as though you were seeing the whole lot of them together and considering each one, and then you said dreamily, ‘ Well—I don’t know quite—it’s difficult to say.’ Of course it was if you didn’t know any of ’em.”

  “Ronny!” she cried sharply, “is it only Bernard Shaw you mind about?”

  “Well, you see, that’s the only thing that’s news to me. I couldn’t help knowing all the rest long ago.”

  “And you never said anything—you were going on with it?”

  “Yes, if you were. Why not? I calculated there’d be more of a chance of your getting to love me if you married me than if you married somebody else. Though I don’t know. Things seem to work by contraries, especially with you.”

  “But you didn’t mind the meanness of it, the ugliness, the vulgarity?”

  “Oh, I minded it being me all right. That you didn’t want to kiss me. But the rest, I don’t see that. It’s only natural you should want a home of your own now and that your mother should want you to have it. You’re more honest than the rest of ’em, that’s what’s the matter. Most girls would have fooled themselves into thinking they were in love with me. You’ve got to deceive yourself first before you can deceive anyone else.”

  But this sage aphorism, which considerably pleased Ronny as he thought of it, was lost on Celia, who in the middle of it flung her arms round his neck and kissed him, passionately indeed, though it was the passionate gratitude of a child. In her, gratitude readily suggested love.

  She was changeable, not forgetful, but impressionable as a soap-bubble to the colours round her. She had thought Ronny a uniform grey and found him, to use a favourite expression of her father’s, true blue. And she herself, chameleon-like, changed colour in the new light in which she regarded him and reverted to a simpler and more childish Cel
ia that had for a long time lain concealed or asleep. The perverse young woman who from example or from contradiction was trying desperately to get and to be all the things she did not care for, now had leisure to recognize something that she had once cared for very much.

  In her mind there existed two people of whom she now seldom thought, nevertheless they still inhabited that room, crowded though it was with newer but lesser figures.

  One was a wicked old woman who had said of her mother, “I think it is so brave of poor dear Daisy to go on being pretty, when it makes no difference whether she is or not.” This incomprehensible remark she had overheard as a child and it had impressed her uneasily with a sense of mysterious dangers, of a patient and unrewarded courage, noble but depressing, like the uncomplaining heroism in the old-fashioned children’s books that her mother’s old Nanny gave her on her birthdays. The children in them, who were always either invalids or misunderstood, fostered a naturally morbid taste that had been dissatisfied with the Chummy Books and Jolly Books and Happy Kiddy Books all full of pictures of apple-cheeked children with eyes like blue glass buttons, all so well and happy and good that their stories were very dull, in fact it was a wonder they had any at all.

  Celia had supposed it was brave of the angel doll to go on being pretty ; she was brought out for the Christmas-tree year after year, her spangled skirts more towsled and grey, her glitter tarnished, but it would make no difference, for she was too high up to be noticed. It was brave of herself to go on being pretty, when however much she might prink and preen in front of the glass and tell Nurse to tie her hair with a smarter bow, Iris was always so much bigger and more beautiful and bouncing than she. She would hear people say that she was a perfect little picture, and then Iris would come rushing into the drawing-room with dirty hands and curls all over her face and never mind when she was scolded for it but dance rebelliously in the middle of the room, and everybody would forget the little picture and chaff and admire Iris to her face. With such competition it was certainly no good to go on being pretty.

  Impressed by the latest of old Nanny’s birthday presents, she tried to be useful instead, but soon discovered that that also made no difference, for nobody noticed her efforts to be a secret sunbeam in the home, except her father, who complained that the darns in his socks were like cobble-stones. The paucity of opportunities for use in the Belamys’ household had driven her to steal his socks out of the sewing-maid’s basket, with the result that she got the sewing-maid into trouble and had to confess her virtue as a peculiarly perverted form of wickedness, for when her parents asked her why she had done it, she could not face the chance of their laughter and so replied lugubriously, “For fun.”

  She had chosen her father’s socks because she adored him with that uneasy worship that is due to fear. But he was too busy adoring Iris to notice. Celia held him to blame for the episode of the socks, and discovering that it was no fun being misunderstood in real life, though it might be in stories, she soon transferred her adoration to his elder brother Uncle Charles, an old sailor whom she had hitherto dreaded because of his deafness and his unintentionally loud voice.

  Iris and Dodo had long since decided that though on the whole he did them very fairly well, they would rather not be taken out by Uncle Charles because he made such odd comments in the theatre, and though the waiters at the Carlton were very kind to him, the people at the neighbouring tables were inclined to stare when he remarked on their personal appearance in what he imagined to be a low tone. Moreover, he never went through St. James’s Park without taking bread to throw to the ducks, which was so childish ; and never crossed Trafalgar Square without stopping in the very middle of the traffic and taking off his hat to Nelson on his column and shouting up to him, “Good morning, m’lord. Find it cold up there, m’lord? Aye-aye,” and then replacing that ancient grey topper at a Byronic angle. Which was so conspicuous.

  When she was about sixteen, Iris suddenly changed from a tomboy to a disdainful beauty, and this proved effective with her father and her more youthful admirers but made Uncle Charles ask if the poker had disagreed with her. Which was so cheap.

  He had not as yet taken out Celia because he went on supposing her to be a baby for years, and when he did notice her it was only to comment on her smallness and to ask if she were four years old yet, and when she told him haughtily she was nearly eight, he showed his surprise in the most unflattering manner, shouting at her that she must grow downwards like a cow’s tail.

  But she began to find him worthy of her affections from the morning on which he called and found that Iris and Dodo had been taken by some almost grown-up friends to a quite grown-up play. Daisy was too busy to attend to him and he was in the middle of his weekly quarrel with his brother, so he made his way straight to the nursery, where his round red face and white hair looked round the top of the door like a wintry sun.

  “And what are you doing, Madam Hop o’ my Thumb?” he roared at Celia. “Playing with dollies as large as yourself?”

  “I’m too old for dolls,” Celia bawled back. She summoned all her courage and breath for a supreme effort. “I’ve told you before I’m just ten.”

  “Good Ged!” said Uncle Charles. “I apologize. A man can’t do more than that.” He held out a hand as knotted with gout as a tangle of ropes.

  “High time,” he said, “such a fine young woman as you went to a grown-up play herself.”

  And he carried her off in a taxi, and this time it was she who lunched at the Carlton and all by herself with him too, which made it so much more important than a family party, and they consulted with the waiters as to the most suitable grown-up play to ring up for, and Celia became so self-assertive that she protested against the condition, and there was a moment of keen anguish when all the people near looked round because the waiter roared at Uncle Charles that the young lady wanted to see the most unsuitable play in London.

  One other blot remained to tarnish the memory of that golden afternoon. It was that on her attempt afterwards to out-Iris Iris, she had remarked airily, “Cosy little place, the Carlton,” a conceit ignored by her sister, whose interests were self-contained, but naturally and unmercifully shouted at by her father and Dodo as a perfect illustration of Celia as a prize poseuse. But when they at last succeeded in conveying it to Uncle Charles, he thundered back, “And so it is. Gel’s quite right. Always lunch there myself when I’m not at the Club.” Which was so unhumorous, but endeared him to Celia as even the unexpected and grown-up treat had not done.

  They were friends after that. Once when he was staying with them at the seaside, he got her up very early to see the sunrise, and they walked over bare and shining sands towards dark hills remote as undiscovered islands, and from behind them came a thread of fire, and then the whole great sun stood balanced on their edge and looked astonished to see the world so lovely and so still.

  Yet it was the same world as in the noisy coloured glare of crowds and bathing-huts and nigger minstrels at midday, though Celia could not believe it nor Uncle Charles either, for the only time his voice crashed through that vast shell of quiet was when it boomed at her, “It is another world this morning, another world.”

  There woke in her a sense of lonely adventure, of wide spaces, silence, and the sea.

  She grew to care far less for her large and expensive toys than for making paper boats with him, which they floated on the Serpentine and invented hair-raising accounts of their voyages on the Spanish Main and the Southern Seas.

  But it always remained an agony to be heard with him in public places, and none the less so because she was ashamed of herself for feeling it and knew she ought to be very proud to be with Uncle Charles, especially as great people whose names Papa read out of the newspapers would come up to him, so glad to see him and not mind when he bawled things at them which did not sound at all the right things to bawl at great people. But she never lost her anxiety lest they should mind ; nor her sense of guilt in the reading-room at his club where he
would point out the notices commanding silence and bellow at her that she mustn’t talk in here, causing the bald heads to raise their indignant faces ; nor her terror at his indifference to traffic so that he would stroll through the worst maelstrom with no more precaution than a lift of his cane, glancing neither to the right nor to the left and causing chauffeurs and bus-drivers to swerve and slow down suddenly and swear horribly.

  So that she came to prefer visiting him in his rather dingy rooms in Pall Mall, where they could shout at each other in peace and quiet and he showed her his treasures, a few left from those he had found on his travels and given away, but many more that he had picked up at Christie’s, and all of them kept in old hat-boxes tied up with bootlaces and bits of knotted string. She would raise the lid cautiously and discover a Chinese lady waiting for her with a mysterious eternal smile, or a gorgeous bubble of blown glass, or a fan that had been folded for centuries, and these concealed beauties would excite her interest which was never roused by the ordered and cunningly displayed evidences of taste at home.

  Sometimes he took her to Christie’s when an auction was going on, and sometimes Papa came too, for he was not going to be outdone by his brother just because he was twenty years older and had knocked about the world a bit, and from the day that Charles had brought his mother home a queer white pot with raised figures which was found to be valuable, Henry had started collecting Waterford glass. He saw that the thing was to have a line and stick to it. Poor old Charles knew nothing and had nothing of the true collector spirit; he just frittered about picking up anything that caught his fancy and frequently embarrassed Daisy by giving her figures of the wrong kind and period for her row of old Chelsea. A glass jug and a china boy had first commended Henry and Daisy to each other’s notice; their tastes had formed their introduction and became their refuge.