Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  “Not yet,” said Dicky ; “that is to say, nothing’s been published yet.”

  “That would naturally follow,” said Celia.

  Their tones were so antagonistic that the quiet man tactfully drew Leila into conversation, leaving them to glare and hiss at each other under the table.

  “Get me out of this,” said Celia between her teeth.

  “It wasn’t I who got you into it.”

  “Certainly it was.”

  Their few moments of hostility fostered their intimacy as weeks of friendliness could not have done. They might have been continuing the quarrels they had had under the nursery table, and then with equal intimacy fell silent while the furious buzz of talk and interruptions and contradictions raged round them and occasional scraps drifted into their isolation like fragments from a storm-tossed wreck into a quiet bay.

  “He’s a dear boy, a perfect dear, but I do think there’s something funny about him, though perhaps it’s only drink. He ’phoned me last night from a pub round the corner where he was dancing with a lot of fat women and kicking up all the sawdust on the floor and only to tell me that his life had ended. It made me late for dinner at Claridge’s.”

  “Why did they get divorced? Oh, I don’t know. I expect they both felt they might as well be free in case anything else turned up.”

  “And talking of glass cases, did you know that one can buy the entire Holy Family for sixpence at Woolworth’s?”

  The indefatigable Leila detached various members from the party and introduced Celia to a woman who had escaped from Russia with her honour but without her toothbrush, to a man who knew all the systems in Monte Carlo, to a man who understood the origin of Sanskrit, and to a girl who wore a gold bracelet round her ankle under her transparent stocking and presumably required to have no other label attached to her.

  Celia wished she hadn’t snubbed the quiet man, for though he had been too high up to look at, his voice had sounded interesting and she would have liked to talk to him again.

  She was struck by a girl whom everyone called Blincko and wondered how she had acquired such a nickname ; she was a good-looking girl who never listened but watched everyone’s positions, her eye darting in the direction of any movement and becoming fixed and glazed in a bull-like stare. She spoke seldom and irrelevantly and people did not answer her ; they only remarked genially, “Good old Blincko,” and “Blincko’s quite mad.”

  She was tiresomely disappointed when Dicky had succeeded in obeying her injunctions to get her out of this.

  “Do come again,” said Leila ; and Celia said, “I should love to, and I do wish you’d come and see us some time if it isn’t too deadly.”

  Then Leila said she would love to, and Celia felt very nervous because she ought to warn her that they didn’t know any interesting people and she wondered if Leila would think Ronny boring and if her mother would think Leila rather peculiar, and these embarrassments caused her to slip away in a silence and haste that betrayed her shyness.

  “What a sweet little thing!” said Leila, closing the door behind her. “And such lovely clothes! Did you notice her shoes? That’s Dicky’s latest, you know. Rather a back step for him though, as he’s longing to have an affair with a beautiful woman of thirty-seven whose third husband is in Nigeria.”

  There were shouts for “Name! Name!”

  “Oh, there isn’t one yet,” said Leila. “That’s just his dream ideal. Mr. Chance, do tell us why your books are like Marcel Proust. Dicky said so, but he can’t say why as he hasn’t read either of you.”

  With the ingenuity of an urchin’s methods with a winkle she extracted the quiet man from his corner and set him to talk on Proust with the man who understood the origin of Sanskrit. The slightly apprehensive pause produced by a stranger’s arrival was quickly covered over ; it was no more than if a face had looked in at the window and then gone away. But one person was conscious of that same face now in a room above them, a room that had been dark and empty and now held two people in its subdued glow of warmth and light; that other room seemed now more present to him than the room he was in, perhaps because he was the sort of man whose books were held to be like Marcel Proust by one who had read neither of them.

  They ran upstairs to Dicky’s room ; it was waiting for them in a warm and welcoming darkness. He lit the gas-lamp and fire and drew the glowing curtains, the books winked with bright-coloured labels, that other room and all its people floated away from them, a thousand miles, a thousand years away. Celia, alarmed to find it recede so fast, like some ship that had marooned them on a fairy island and now sped away over the illimitable seas, made vain efforts to retain it, talking fast of Leila, whom she had disliked at first and was now determined to like.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she, in a strange, floating way. She looks like a lost princess. Or a piece of seaweed. I mean, she seems to have no roots.”

  “Why should she?”

  “Well, Mab has roots.”

  “She has an engagement ring.”

  “Oh, is it to the young man who said he’d got a purpose in life?”

  “A whole school of purposes, I should think.”

  “But he has eyeballs like pebbles. Is she very clever?”

  “She was at Somerville, is at the London School of Economics, and will be a lecturer.”

  “Those dull-looking books. Is that why? What are economics?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Doesn’t Mab?”

  “She doesn’t talk of them. Ballet dancing is her hobby. She can do the splits.”

  Celia sighed. Her mother had said that in her day it was enough for a girl to be pretty, but now she had to be high-spirited as well. But the Girls Below showed her that to be successful girls had to be pretty and clever and literary and artistic and fast and feminine and have a job and dress well and make good hostesses. It must make a great deal of work and she did not think Leila looked strong enough for it all.

  “Leila,” she said, “Leila is like——” She thought and found what she wanted in a book of poems she had been forbidden to read in her school days :

  “The lost white feverish limbs

  Of the Lesbian Sappho afloat.”

  Dicky stood behind her and removed her furs with infinite caution lest he should break one of her waxen fingers or threads of spun-glass hair. The other room had vanished in space ; that was why Celia went on speaking of it.

  “I like their room,” she said ; “it’s so bare.”

  “Leila doesn’t take any risks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, a grandmother’s portrait is a safe thing, even if it is a daub. And Leila likes to remind people that she had a grandmother. But pictures that you choose yourself, you don’t know where you might land yourself, do you? With everybody saying such different things about them now, it is so hard to keep pace or to know what is the right thing.”

  She found refuge in Leila’s defence.

  “You are rather catty about her.” And then suddenly remembering the reason for her vague disquiet : “If you don’t like her, why do you tell her so much about me, especially when it isn’t true?”

  “I told her nothing. I’ve done nothing, nothing but wait for your knock, until that man down there with the eyes came round and she trapped us both, though I said——”

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “Who? I? No. I don’t know him, only in Le Coche’s shop. I asked him there for a Russian book because I wanted to know all about suffering as well as everything else. And I said——”

  “But who is he?”

  “Who? He? He’s just a man down the road. Do listen. This is my story, not his. I told her I was expecting someone who was helping me to write a book. That is true, for you have inspired me to write a book about Kensington which will be so true that nobody will read it. Who cares about a society where the men have all retired from life, living on their dead reputations or those of dead people, and where the matrons preserve t
heir barren charms to no purpose since they also preserve their equally barren virtue, and the girls never quite know whether to be rather fast or really nice?

  “Celia, don’t look so cross. Yes, you do, and there isn’t room for us both to be cross. I feel humiliated. That is why I said all those nasty things about your set. Yes, let me take your gloves, those exquisite languorous gloves like the long limp white stalks of naked ladies, for I assure you that is a correct English name for a certain pale autumnal flower. They are as helpless as your hands, and as pure. I have provided red roses again for them since there is no point in purity if there be no passion to set it off.”

  “Don’t talk so hard. Why should you be cross and humiliated? It was I who felt a fool down there.”

  “Yes, and it was I who got you there. A true English gentleman, even a retired one, would have done better than that. These dagos, you never know where you are with them.”

  “Oh, don’t be so absurd. I liked seeing them, I did really. I’ve always wanted to meet girls who did things.”

  “What things?”

  “Any things. And Leila does too, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  His tone was one of elaborate reserve. It prompted Celia to a recollection of her grievance.

  “But why did she say she’d heard so much about me?”

  “She always says that. It’s her way of being pleasant.”

  Then that was why she hadn’t liked Leila, but she did not say so, for she was anxious only to say and think nice things about the Girl Below who led such a brilliant and busy life and evidently knew Dicky so well.

  “Don’t think so hard,” he exclaimed. “Nothing that you think is true, so it’s a waste of time.”

  “Oh, the time, what is the time? My watch never goes.”

  “Of course not. Why should its imperishable beauty concern itself with time? Its whole purpose is served in providing an oval of pearls on a black ribbon on a white wrist.”

  He bent his head over her left hand and murmured in a tone of passionate reverence, “I could worship emeralds.”

  Her laughter covered a touch of disappointment and of relief. When they had run up here just now she had actually felt a little uneasy, as though she might in time find herself getting rather silly about Dicky. His rapture over her engagement ring showed her its impossibility.

  “Laugh away,” said Dicky. “Retired English gentlemen don’t care about jewels except to give to their women. Nor are their heads on the coins of ancient empires.”

  Celia stood amazed at her forgetfulness.

  “I meant to give it you the moment I got here. It is really a Roman Emperor?”

  “It’s believed to be Heliogabalus. No, I put it in your purse as a gift, not as an accident.”

  “I nearly gave it to the bus conductor as a sixpence.”

  Their heads bent over it together.

  “He is a little like you, isn’t he?”

  “Not in his main characteristics, I assure you. But he too had a taste for jewels. He had them ground to powder to sprinkle his food. He paved a courtyard with them, in readiness for when he should wish to die, since he thought he could not meet death more beautifully than by throwing himself from a great height on to a jewelled pavement. But death did not wait for that moment, though he was but eighteen when he was murdered. At fourteen his charms and his boldness won him the empire over the whole of civilization. He stood alone at the top of the world and may be excused if he became a trifle giddy.

  “I was given this coin as a child and it has perhaps aggrandized my fancies. When I incline to bombast you should blame Heliogabalus, not me.”

  She cried out at that that he must not give it away, a coin that had coloured and informed his dreams, and perhaps, who knows, his whole life. It would be giving away his luck. In the end she succeeded, for he had slipped it into her purse under the impulse of his wish to leave there some record of himself and -reminder of her visit, and the coin which he always carried in an inner pocket was the most appropriate token. But it was too appropriate and he had regretted having prematurely given away so much of himself.

  So he took it back with a rather bad grace, realizing that it may not be better but is certainly easier to give than to receive. Celia’s appreciation of Ronny rose several points as she observed Dicky under this ordeal, but she was sorry for him, for he was very young and he had tried to make a more magnificent gesture than he could sustain. With a tact that for once gave her the advantage and enabled her to feel a maternal kindness for him, she asked about his book, was he really going to write about Kensington? and would it be South Kensington or West Kensington or Kensington Proper, but wouldn’t that be very dull, and why not write about this road which she supposed to be Kensington Improper?

  At that he struck out in fury against the road, which he declared to be the dreariest road in the dreariest part of London. He would not mind living in a slum if it were in the heart of the City or the Town, but he hated to live in a slum of the village of Kensington, a slum moreover that had been built as a respectable street for the middling-prosperous mid-Victorian and then decayed into disreputability, and then, when increasing rents and population brought forward the hindmost quarters of the town, remembered its proximity to Chelsea and began to ape its neighbour, converting many of its already imperfectly converted flats into studios and giving itself the airs of an artist’s model rather than those of a simple slut.

  “But it has a lovely name,” said Celia. “And you of all people should be grateful for it.”

  “Oh, it isn’t only I. Everyone in Rainbow Road hopes or remembers how they once hoped to find at the foot of the rainbow a pot of fairy gold. Some have found it. Some have stayed. That Japanese writer and artist looked like making a tremendous success some years ago, but he’s dropped out and stuck here. The fellow you saw to-day at Leila’s, he’s down the road and I expect he’ll stay. He gets reviews a yard long, but nobody buys his books. Look at Leila. A girl has the best fun of all of us, for at any moment, at a dinner or a dance or speaking to her out of the silence on the ’phone or driving towards her in a taxi, there may come the man who can find the foot of the rainbow for her and give her the pot of fairy gold.”

  Celia had long ceased to be tactful.

  “Oh,” she tried, after several attempts to interrupt him, “and at the end of Rainbow Road is Palace Road, and you and Leila and that man and everyone else in the road all think that at the end of the Rainbow is a Palace.”

  “But at the end of Rainbow Road is the Delicatessen shop of Le Coche.”

  “It is the same thing. You go to him instead of dining at the Ritz. And you build castles in the air, and the rainbow which is a bridge in the air is to lead you to them. To think of some middling-prosperous mid-Victorian thinking of all that.”

  “He didn’t, God save your sweet simplicity. All that elaborate symbolism of ours is woven round the fact that one Albert Rainbow made a goodish bit in huckaback towelling and invested it in 1860 by building this road. And so proud was he of it that he left his name and the date on the pinnacle shaped as a funeral urn which surmounts the opposite houses and which you shall see if you ever come here in daylight, a thing I can no more imagine than the sight of you in country clothes. You are a silvery night moth, Celia, fluttering round the street lamppost in the late summer dusk. Yes, you flutter, you are very restless for all your cool airs, and you are frightened, heaven knows of what, and you do not.

  “Do you observe that when I talk of you I drop into poetic prose and even rhyme? Your very gloves can make a Pater of me, since à propos of them I remarked that my rose’s eyelids were a little weary. But you are pettish ; you beat your hands against the air, your exquisite, ineffectual hands that flutter like silvery night moths ; you cry, ‘ Let me alone. Let me alone.’ And then when you are alone, when the lamp goes out, when there is nothing round you but the silence and the darkness, you cry, ‘ I am alone, alone, alone,’ and flutter desol
ately up to the stars which you can never reach.”

  “Don’t. Don’t talk about me. Talk about Albert Rainbow. I want to hear about Albert Rainbow.”

  “There you go again. ‘ Don’t. Don’t talk about me. Don’t touch me. Let me alone.’ And running after Albert Rainbow for protection. Fancy stretching out such hands as these to Albert Rainbow, and after a dago too! Whom will you turn to next, Celia? Oh, you will hit or scratch me, will you, if I don’t pander to this new passion, if only to show your hands are not so ineffectual?

  “Then listen. This man who is now essential to your happiness built a fine and wholly detached house, which he doubtless called a mansion, at the bottom of this road. That is Rainbow House, and its garden even now runs behind the mysterious wall above which its trees tower in dejected imprisonment. I was at once convinced that behind that wall there lay a corpse, the result of some not too recent murder, but I was deceived ; its most romantic episode was when Albert Rainbow’s eldest son played battledore and shuttlecock there in a pair of frilly drawers and a nankeen petticoat.”

  “Dicky! Are you making all this up? You must be, or you couldn’t have made it a nankeen petticoat.”

  He was quick to note that for the first time she had called him by his name, the only name that anybody ever called him. But he proceeded hastily, “My historical facts are sound, drawn from no less an authority than the nearest grocer, who can remember when all this road was Real Houses. And to this day Albert Rainbow, Junior, son of its great founder, lives in Rainbow House in proud and secure detachment from the inglorious relics of his father’s work.”

  “I saw it to-night. I saw the wall and the trees all dark and the big house and its wide steps and pillared door. How they loved pillared doors! And the old man still lives there? He must be quite old now, and this funny muddle of a street goes on round him, all so different from when he was a child playing shuttlecock behind that wall, but he just doesn’t notice. My grandmother was like that, she’d never notice. When Albert Rainbow, Junior, who’s about eighty, I suppose, meets you in the street he thinks you’re a Son of the House, one of the houses in the road, and he’d think Leila a clever young lady living at home with her mamma, and I don’t know what he’d think of the Jap in the black dressing-gown I met coming here, but he’d probably make it all right by concluding he was the foreign servant of some eccentric travelled gentleman. Dicky, Albert Rainbow, Junior, shall be the hero of your book!”