Celia thought the glass very dull as it was not coloured, and did not at all care for her father to meet them at Christie’s, for he would smile in a grand way, and Uncle Charles would order him about, and they would both get very cross about the things they liked best, and once Uncle Charles told Papa he was a confounded puppy, yes, and a prig, a damned prig too, sir, which was extraordinary when even Iris and Dodo, who were always quarrelling, would rather die than quarrel in public as did these two big, elderly, important-looking men.
When Charles died, Henry said he was broken, that Charles was his oldest friend and, reversing the usual formula with relish, so much older than him that he was more like a father than a brother ; that he had adored Daisy all his life and that was why he had never married ; and that he himself would never get over his death because they had quarrelled the last time they had met.
And he went on reproaching himself for it, and nobody dared remind him that it was entirely Charles’s quarrel as he had suddenly flown into a passion at one o’clock in the morning, after he had been playing piquet with his brother quite quietly and contentedly for hours, because Henry happened to tell him that he was going to have a new overcoat. The roar of rage with which Charles received this casual information brought Daisy down trembling in a dressing-gown, to be greeted, not with the news of a captured burglar but the infuriated inquiry, “Why should Henry have a new overcoat? He’s got one, hasn’t he?”
“Well, Charles dear, he’s had it six years.”
“What’s six years? I’ve had my overcoat thirty years. Thirty years, and it is as good as new. Don’t talk to me about fashions. Only fit for women. Henry’s an effeminate puppy. Why should he want to go chopping and changing the cut of his clothes every other day? He ought to be a young lady.”
The extravagance, luxury, effeminacy, and degeneracy of Henry were further denounced until the whole house was awakened and nobody could tell what the servants thought about it nor the people next door.
But now Henry insisted on bearing the whole burden of remorse alone.
“I was to blame,” he said. “I should have kept it from him. He was an old man. There were things he could not bear to hear.”
And Daisy said, “He was a dear eccentric old thing, so kind and warm-hearted. A true sailor.”
Iris and Dodo did not mentioned him if they could help it and were uncomfortable when anyone else did.
Celia missed him. That was how she knew no one else did. Her father’s remorse and enumerations of his brother’s good qualities were because he was trying hard to feel something he did not feel at all. She saw through it and the Waterford glass at the same moment. Papa had never cared for it as Uncle Charles had cared for his incongruous treasures. He had only pretended to, as he was pretending now. As soon as she saw that, she clenched her fists and wanted to smash all the beastly stuff, especially the fat, smug, spikey bowl that sat heavily in the middle of the dining-room table. She was fourteen now and subject to sudden passions that were seldom expressed.
The last time she had been to see Uncle Charles in his rooms had been on a fine June afternoon, and she had found him as usual sitting in the open window looking down on the roaring traffic of Pall Mall. He never tired of watching it, of picking out a horse or a car or a pretty face that struck his fancy.
“The Whirligig of Life!” he would declaim with a flourish, for he had a way of announcing such trite phrases as though they were startling discoveries, and could never look at a skating-rink or a ballroom without bellowing “The Poetry of Motion,” or at the picture in the study of the Priory, their old home, without reciting the whole of Hood’s “I remember, I remember the house where I was born.”
But this time he did not greet her with a flourish and a proclamation ; he continued to look out of the window with an expression that was both wistful and anxious. At last he said, “Motor traffic has changed London very much.”
“Yes, Uncle Charles.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘ Yes,’ Uncle Charles.”
“Yes, yes. No doubt you are right. But motor traffic has changed very much. It used to be a noisy concern. Now there isn’t a sound in the street. Is there? Hardly a sound.”
He looked below and he looked at her, and before the involuntary appeal in his eyes something seemed to tear her and in that moment she became a woman.
She assured him that motor traffic had grown much less noisy. But he still gazed anxiously below and said aloud, though he thought he was talking to himself, “But no voices. There ought to be voices.”
In another moment she would betray the secret by bursting into tears. She asked him with unwonted boldness whether he had anything for her ; she pulled him away from the window and the din and clamour of that crowd which moved before him as silently as a procession of ghosts.
His presents were always irrelevant; he had not given her a toy for years, but now his last present to her was a rainbow top that would have delighted a child of four. But it also delighted Celia and Uncle Charles. They spun the top and then they threw on circles of glazed coloured paper so that it was now crimson, now flame, now violet, now black, and, when the movement was so intense as to appear stationary, the colours also were lost and it became white.
“The Whirligig of Life,” recited Uncle Charles, and presently, with a divine inspiration, “Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel.”
So intimately did they share their pleasure in the top that she actually asked him, without thinking of it, why he had never married, and for the first time in his life Charles answered with the true story, a short and unexciting story since he had never married only because he could not marry the lady he loved. She was very unhappy and had promised to send for him if ever he could help her. She had never sent for him, but she had given him a flower and told him he would help her best by never seeing her again, and so he never had. He had kept the flower in his Prayer Book, and that had reminded him to open it sometimes, though he was afraid it was always at the same place.
Celia was reminded of Hood’s poem and asked him if it were true that he was “further off from Heaven than when he was a boy.”
Uncle Charles considered this for several turns of the top.
“I used to think so, but by Ged I’m not so sure now. The Almighty must have learnt to take the rough with the smooth by this time, and if He liked us all best as children, then, by Ged, why did He let us grow up?”
He looked at her with great tenderness and told her she would marry a good man and make him very happy. He then fell into a short doze, which disconcerted her extremely, but he presently awoke from it much refreshed, to say he had been dreaming of bread sauce. Nanny had called for her, so she kissed him good-bye, shouting down his ear that she proposed to dream that night of marrons glacés.
She did not see him again. She wondered afterwards if he had guessed that it was chiefly because of his increasing deafness that she had so much preferred going to see him alone in his rooms. She wished passionately that she had made him believe that it was entirely for the pleasure of having him to herself. It was this secret grain of remorse that made it so difficult to bear her father’s laboured attempts at it.
She decided that the Navy was superior to the Army. The Navy was kind and true.
Then Dodo got into the Army because of the War, and the Junior Service rose in her esteem. In a British-warm he was suddenly magnificent, a boisterous young giant.
When he had been out four months he wrote her a very strange letter. He had cried, he said, when alone in the night; he was afraid he might run away from his battery ; and did she remember the greengage tree at Granny’s where they had played ships, “and you always had to be cabin-boy because you were so much the youngest, it was a shame.” He told her to burn the letter and not tell the others ; they mightn’t understand.
She was terrified. She was awake most of that night composing answers ; all seemed intrusive or inadequate. She cried, “Oh, why is it so difficult?
I have only got to say what I feel,” for she did not realize that this required practice.
On his next leave Dodo was on the old terms of perpetual ragging with Iris and her friends and good-natured oblivion of Celia as a nice little girl. The only time they were alone together he spoke of her, not himself.
“You ought to have been one of those Early Victorian thingummies with skirts and samplers, doing the ministering angel touch on a fevered brow. You don’t get much scope as it is, do you?”
She turned scarlet. She said, “I wish I’d never answered your rotten letter. I wish I’d told you you were a funk and a cry-baby.”
He caught hold of her and kissed her and told her she was quite right, he was a funk and a cry-baby, and he had had no business to let her know it, a baby like her.
He went back to France that day and on his next leave he got engaged. Mrs. Belamy was more upset by that than by the War, but she learned quite soon to say that Kitty was really very sweet, and it helped to reconcile her to Dodo’s post-war appointment in India.
Celia went to a school in France, came out, was shut in. No further demands were made on her sympathies ; her relations with people depended on whether they thought her pretty and sporting. She found she was apt to fail in the latter respect, but could make up for it fairly well by a light brand of cynicism. She did not believe there were any men nowadays like Uncle Charles ; she forgot the isolated and mysterious treasure of Dodo’s trust in her, but remembered that she had once been taunted as Early Victorian.
Ronny’s generous sympathy now recalled Uncle Charles to her.
Ronny too was a sailor, though everyone agreed that he was not in the least like one. But there must be a few sailors who happened not to be bluff and hearty, and at any rate his eyes were blue like Uncle Charles’s, though they were naturally very light and Uncle Charles’s had been faded as if with long looking on the sea.
He was the good man prophesied for her, the fulfilment of her fate ; she would care for him as she had not cared for anybody since Uncle Charles. She had been safe with him ; it would not have mattered what Iris did nor how beautiful she became, he would still have been just as fond of her and she would not have had to be brave and go on being pretty.
And it would be the same with Ronny, who was a good man and kind and true, and what was more, sympathetic and understanding. He had enabled her to step down from the auction table at Christie’s and was taking her away into his home, where she would no longer be on show but of use to him.
Her gratitude at this discovery surprised Ronny and slightly disconcerted him, so that he took it a little awkwardly, as a child takes a present when he does not quite know what to do with it. Her sudden sincerity had given him the comfort of assurance, but it had also broken off a fragment of her charm, for he held that women should have mystery. He had been attracted to Celia by her precious air, and felt instinctively that she should accept his office as a princess, not a beggar-maid. Moreover, he knew himself to be no good in the role of King Cophetua. His line was that of the gentle knight, always ready to be of service. It is as difficult when two people both wish to serve as when they both wish to be served.
Her change from coldness and caprice to impulsive affection also included a good deal of talk about an old uncle who seemed to have been a holy horror, but of whom this new funny little Celia of his had evidently been very fond. So Ronny nodded kindly and said “Yes, rather,” when Celia asked if she had made him see what a darling Uncle Charles was.
The net result of all this—and all this includes not only Ronny’s new and noble title-role, but Uncle Charles and the wicked old woman who never had a name as far as Celia was concerned but merely croaked her foreboding utterance and vanished like a wicked fairy who had come very late indeed to her christening—was that the engagement was ratified by a dinner given by the Belamys to Ronny, to Iris and her husband Guffy, and a few intimate friends, followed by a dance at their house, at which Celia for the first time wore an emerald ring on the third finger of her left hand.
At this dance one of the female guests, a perennially grass widow who was described in her circle variously as being rather Bohemian or doing something artistic, brought a small dark young man of foreign appearance.
Chapter III
Celia did not notice the young man with any interest, being painfully occupied with the congratulations of her friends, whom she now had reason to wish she had not chosen so exclusively for their bad taste. She did not even have a dance with him, since he oddly neglected to ask one from the daughter of the house. This, it appeared afterwards, was by no means his only lapse. During the days following the dance a gradually increasing chorus of disapprobation from confidential friends, callers, even letters, rose and muttered and swelled to thunder against this young man.
Everybody who came to the house, and everybody kept corning on every pretext, apparently did so for the purpose of drawing somebody else aside and saying, “Oh, my dear, I simply must tell you. You know that young man with the impossible name—well——”
The recurrent and accumulative list of accusations sounded in Celia’s ears something like this :
— That his name was Basil Dictripoulyos.
— “What a name!”
— “Not really?”
— “Yes, indeed ; it was on his card.”
— “Not a card. I can’t bear it.”
— “Yes, he left it next day. Such an address. 39 Rainbow Road.”
— “How poetic!”
— “And his name!”
— “What is he?”
“A Jew?”
“A Turk?”
“A Greek?”
— “No, is he?”
— “Not really?”
— That nobody minded his clothes being shabby, of course, but they need not have been showy.
— “And his name!”
— That he wore a red rose in his buttonhole.
— “No, it was not even a carnation.”
— “How poetic! ‘ My love’s like a red, red rose,’ you know.”
— “Was that to show he wore his bleeding heart in his buttonhole? I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean it like that.”
— “And his name!”
— That he squeezed your hand.
— “Whose hand?”
— “Everybody’s hand.”
— “Ugh!”
— “But his name!”
— “Dick how much?”
— “Dirty Dick?”
— “Dago Dick?”
— That he did everything too well.
— His dancing showed off.
— He talked like a comedian’s patter, never hesitating and always using the right word.
— And made jokes that really—well.
— Though of course everyone had laughed at the time.
— You had to or it would have made it so uncomfortable.
— Like those dreadful acrobatic tricks.
— Which, performed under the evergreen grass-widow’s encouragement, had caused roars of delighted merriment at the time but now only swelled the catalogue of crimes.
— That he had complimented Mrs. Belamy on her youthful appearance and had mistaken Colonel Belamy for one of his guests.
— Had it been one of his waiters, Colonel Belamy could not have seemed more insulted.
— Moreover, he had inquired of him as to the quality of his own champagne.
— That on the stairs he had breathed down the back of Iris’s neck and said, “I understand your type. Let me teach you how to love.”
— “No, did he?”
— “Not really.”
— “Darling, how lovely!”
— “What did you say?”
— “No, did you?”
— “Not really.”
— “Darling, how lovely.”
— “What’s that? What did he say? Impossible. Preposterous. Why did nobody tell me? He ought to have been kicked downstair
s.”
— “Darling Papa, that would have been so bad for my dance shoes. And for the people below us.”
— “My dear, you may joke about it, but you don’t understand these things. ‘ Let me teach you how to love ’ indeed. What did your husband say?”
— “He said ‘ Useful fella! ’”
By which it will be seen that the current of delighted execration had bubbled and squeaked beyond its confidential boundaries of teacups and fireside chats and had invaded even the sheltered ears of Colonel Belamy.
Until then Celia had cheerfully sailed with the stream, comparing notes of exclamation with amusement tempered only with regret that she had not more closely observed the abhorrent but noticeable young man. But when her parents entered the hue and cry of this undeserving character with expressions of horror, when her father repudiated the whole modern system of trusting one’s friends so far as to tell them to bring their friends to the house and shook his head and said he was to blame for giving in to it in just the same richly sorrowful voice that he had blamed himself for Uncle Charles’s last quarrel, and when her mother said, “Poor Iris! What a dreadful young man! How could he say such a peculiar thing?” then Celia declared with surprising violence, “Well, why shouldn’t he? Iris didn’t mind or she wouldn’t have flirted with him.”
“How can you call your sister a flirt?”
“Why not? You are as proud of it as she is. Only I don’t see why a flirt need be a cad.”
“How dare you call your sister a cad?”
“Cad? cad? The girl seems to have mixed things up. We all know who the cad was in this case.”
“Just because he’s a foreigner.”
It was then that Colonel Belamy gave the most remarkable evidence of his leniency and breadth of mind.
“A foreigner,” he said, “need not always be a cad. But in this case——”
“Just because Iris leads him on and then tells everyone how he gave himself away. What would you think of a man who did that about a woman?”
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