“Celia Belamy shall be the heroine of my book. She will come into all my books. There will never be anyone else in them but her. Celia, be my belle amie, my fair, sweet friend. Help me to find the pot of fairy gold. Help me to write, help me to live, make it worth while to die. I will build a rainbow bridge into the air and we will stand on it together, alone at the top of the world.”
He kissed her wisely and not too well.
He did not move when she broke from him, silent, and backed against the window curtains, not looking at him.
“‘ Let me alone,’” he mocked. “‘ Don’t. Don’t.’ All the heroines in the novelettes say that. Well, Celia, are you to be let and left alone for ever?”
She did not look at him. She picked up her gloves.
“Poor pale innocents! And now the three of you will go home and you will tell your Haversham, ‘ This evening I was kissed by a dago,’ and if he is truthful he will say ‘ I would rather you had not told me about it.’ But you who spend your life fluttering away from the rough contacts that make you wince, you will always try to escape from loneliness with the wrong people, telling them the wrong things.”
She looked at him. Her gloves drooped in her hand. He approached her and lifted them lightly, not touching her hand.
“We stood alone at the top of the world,” he said. “May I not be excused if I became a trifle giddy?”
Chapter VI
The other rooms came back. First, the drawing-room at home and her mother sitting by the fire which never gave out enough heat, however big it was, because the nobly spacious fireplace kept it all away from the room. There were the figures over the fireplace and her mother looking at the clock, not at her, as she came in, and saying, “Wherever have you been? The first gong has gone and Ronny’s been here for hours.”
“What is the time?” she said.
“Of course,” said Dicky.
He was still lifting the gloves she held in her hand. It was the first time she had spoken since he had kissed her, but he noticed that she did not notice that.
He became very practical. His watch, he said, was most unreliable. Should he ask Jimmy Underneath? Jimmy had an excellent clock that he had bought for two-and-six at a city auction ; it ticked as loudly as the clock inside the crocodile in Peter Pan ; if you lay along the bare boards by the wall with your ear to a crack, you would hear it ticking below. Celia resisted this temptation, nor did she wish him to ask Jimmy the time. She knew it was dreadfully late ; she must fly.
“You will come again?”
She did not answer. She wanted no arguments nor entreaties to delay her departure. She hurried down the stairs and he after her, and a powerful smell of burning assailed their nostrils so that she feared to find the lower floors in flames. Dicky reassured her by saying it was only from the basement, where the caretakers lived and produced this odour so frequently that they must belong to a gang of murderers who always burned the bodies of their victims, or perhaps, in his kinder judgments, they shared the more innocent tastes of that sultan who so much approved the flavour of his inadvertently burnt milk that in place of executing his cook he gave him a harem of a thousand houris.
The first floor room drifted back, no longer in full sail. Behind their shut door was only the subdued sound of a few remaining voices. It astonished Celia that any should still be there, still holding light conversation on peculiar subjects, for it seemed to her a very long time since she had left.
As before, she would not let Dicky accompany her home, afraid, so she said, of meeting someone who might involve her in later explanations. It was only a very little way ; yes, she would take a taxi if she met one, but she would not wait for him to get it for her. She hurried away into the street. She did not turn to look back. He was haunted by the face that he had not seen looking back at him, a face like a silvery moth set in dark furs, flitting away from him through the darkness.
She did not meet a taxi and ran most of the way. It was, as she had thought, quite near. At the end of The Borehams she saw Ronny standing in an undecided attitude, trying to obey the dubious injunction of the traffic controllers to “look both ways at once.” She dropped into a walk and waved her hand to him.
“Am I so late?” she called.
“Horribly. Nobody knew where you were. What’s been the matter?”
He was certainly very cross.
“What nonsense! I said I was going to see the Grays.”
“Yes, but when dinner came in and you weren’t back, Mrs. Belamy rang them up and they said you’d only come in for a moment and left hours ago.”
“What a fuss! I went on somewhere else afterwards of course and my watch doesn’t go. What is the time?” she asked for the third time that evening.
“Eight fifteen.”
“Then dinner’s been in half an hour. Papa must be bursting with rage.”
“He’s burst. That’s why I’m out here.”
“Cowardice?”
“Chivalry. I thought I’d prepare you.”
They were walking slowly towards her home along the railings past the exclusive church, but now she stopped at the door before her inner vision of the dining-room where Papa sat bursting in a setting of polished wood and silver and old glass and Mamma sat trembling as to what Papa might say next before the watchful, critical parlourmaid.
“I can’t go in and face it,” she said in a voice that was faint with dismay. He slipped an arm round her shoulders and the exasperation fell out of his tones.
“You shouldn’t mind things so much. Just tell him where you’ve been and why you couldn’t ring up.”
“Yes, but where have I been? I haven’t thought it out yet.”
“What on earth do you mean? Where have you been?”
She shook off the arm on her shoulders and walked on past the door, to the great interest of the policeman at the corner, who knew the cook at the Belamy’s and at what hour they dined and was of opinion that the young lady would catch it from the Colonel if she didn’t look out.
“I’ve been with some new people, an awfully interesting girl, I’d like you to meet her, and there were lots of other people there, all awfully interesting. Oh, and there was that foreign boy, they call him Dicky, whom you all ran down after the dance, but I think he’s awfully interesting.”
“God, what a lot of interesting people! Well, why can’t you tell the Colonel all that?”
“Because he’ll want to know where I met her, and I met her through Dicky.”
“Look here, Celia, do mind what you’re saying. You’ve just told me you met Dicky through her.”
“No, I didn’t. I haven’t told you a single lie, though I may have told the truth so as to look like a lie ; but if I did I can’t be bothered to keep it up ; and, oh, Ronny, what am I to say to Papa?”
“Damn Papa!”
“No, I can’t say that.”
“Will you tell me what you mean? How could you meet this girl through ‘ Dicky,’ as you call him? You’ve not met him again since the dance, have you?”
“I went to see him at his flat some days ago and again to-day.”
Ronny crossed his arms on the railings and looked down into the tangled darkness below in the attitude of a passenger on a liner who is trying to overcome his inclination to sea-sickness by a firm contemplation of the ocean.
Celia began to laugh.
“Don’t get hysterical,” said Ronny sharply.
“Well, please stop looking at the sad sea waves.”
“At the what? Celia, do pull yourself together. I simply don’t know you to-night.”
“And after a time nobody knew her,” she murmured. “No, I was only quoting. I’m sorry I was an ass and told you like that about Dicky. I thought perhaps you might help me out with Papa,” she added disingenuously, for she had not thought of appealing to Ronny and only did so now because it seemed the quickest way to coax him out of his ill humour.
He turned his head and looked at her, and it was on the tip of
his tongue to say, “You ask a lot.” It was a pity he did not. But he reminded himself of the desire to protect her shrinking helplessness which had been the motive power of his love, and they continued to play up to each other.
“I’ll make it all right with the Colonel,” he said ; “there’s no need to mention Dicky at all. This awfully interesting girl, you can say you met her at any one of your friends.”
“Ronny, you are an angel. But how am I to go on? I shall have to bring out Dicky some time, for I mean to go on seeing him.”
Her words fell as softly as snowflakes on the air, as coldly as snowflakes on his mind. He was determined not to consider the chill discomfort they brought him, he brushed them off and said, “Why not, if he amuses you? Only you can’t go on going alone to his flat, of course. That’s absurd. You simply don’t know how to take care of yourself. It’s not that I’m jealous, not in the least. Don’t bother to tell me about it, you’re much too tired and overwrought. Let’s go in and get dinner.”
He took her hand in a firm, protective grasp as they turned and walked back to the house.
“He is a dear,” she thought, and then, “He is like me. He is afraid. He says, ‘ Don’t. Don’t. Don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear.’”
She returned his grasp with a sudden warm pressure. He should not be afraid. It was a shame. He was much too nice for her.
He mistook her succour for signals of distress, and looking down into her face, which was certainly very white, he said, “Look here, I’m not going to take you in to a row. The Colonel is a bit of a bully, though it’s quite natural after so much regimental work. I’m going to put you in a taxi and take you off to have dinner somewhere quiet, and I’ll ring them up from there with all the explanations.”
She could not answer because she was crying with relief. He called to the policeman at the corner to whistle for a taxi.
“Well I’m blowed!” said the policeman to himself. “Under the old man’s very nose and them expected to dinner.”
He wanted to express his appreciation of their lawlessness by a friendly wink as Ronny tipped him, but you never knew with some gentlemen. Then he saw that Celia was crying and felt more inclined to denounce him as a heartless profligate. There was no doubt, as he told Cook later, that he intended to wrong her, and while they drove away he looked dubiously at the sixpence in his hand as the price of her shame.
They drove out of The Borehams, away from the dining-room and Papa and Mamma and Gladys the parlourmaid, away from the policeman’s lonely imaginings, cheered by one lurid spark of romance, away from the dark sequestered squares of South Kensington all trying to look like country houses, up into glittering streets, into a traffic of cars and taxis full of theatre-goers and dancers and diners-out, into the Town.
He took her to his club. The elegance of the eighteenth-century chimney-pieces induced repose as much as the broad, complacent comfort of the modern chairs. Even the retired colonels modulated their voices to a hushed harmony, so that it delighted Celia to find them so tame, and the faded good looks of their wives seemed content to have achieved something once which they need never bother to achieve again.
The waiter, who always kept the corner table for them, was full of benevolent admiration for Celia as a heavenly being, for Ronny as a connoisseur. He whispered to him of a certain brand of old sherry about which he had lately inquired. It produced in the exhausted and hungry Celia an almost maudlin appreciation of Ronny’s good qualities. He was patient, strong and manly, kind to the weak, and she had no idea how weak she was until she had tasted the sherry ; he had the sound old-fashioned good taste to despise cocktails before good wine, and she felt she admired everything that was sound and old-fashioned ; he was straightforward and simple while she was a faithless, sophisticated, complicated mixture of the fool and knave.
But she was straightforward and simple when she was with Dicky. Why could she not be so with Ronny? But probably it was only because Dicky was still more faithless and sophisticated and complicated than she. Ronny was her contrast, her counterpart, the man she really loved, all the more perhaps because she was not very conscious of it. She would have liked to tell him of this happy discovery, but even by the end of the sherry she had not grown sufficiently straightforward and simple to risk a complicated subject for conversation.
They shared instead their enjoyment of the wine.
They drove back to his chambers for coffee. Ronny made it, and very well.
“I’m getting quite Bohemian too,” he told her anxiously. “I cooked my own breakfast the other day. Tea and scrambled eggs.”
He looked at her for applause. She hugged him and felt herself unworthy.
To make up for it she encouraged him to tell her again about his sad past. Ronny had for many years been in love with the gay and beautiful wife of a junior officer. It was natural, he said, that a pretty woman should like to keep a constant admirer by her side, but she and her husband loved each other and one could not in honour attempt to break that union, so they were both his friends and she in particular valued his friendship. It might well be regarded as of some value, since he advanced her husband’s position and managed to secure for him the particular post he was wanting ; he listened to all her confidences and frequently helped her out of small scrapes which she preferred not to tell her husband, and on one occasion when staying at their house, his devotion had carried him so far as to paper their dining-room.
“I’m quite a handy fellow, you know,” he would say with mild amusement when Celia’s indignation invariably boiled over at this point.
“How could you stand them? How could you stand staying with them? Weren’t you jealous?” she demanded, forgetting that she had introduced the subject for his pleasure, not her wrath.
“Well, one gets accustomed to anything,” said Ronny. He puffed at his pipe a little time before he continued : “I was, at first ; then as I saw I couldn’t go on seeing her unless I stopped being jealous, I made up my mind I wouldn’t be. Besides, it got boiled out of me, I suppose.”
She wondered how much else had got boiled out of him by that exhaustive friendship. He was like a dress-shirt, beautifully laundered, folded, and glazed from the wash, but that smoothness, that repose, had been attained by the iron pressure of characters and circumstances stronger than himself. His gentle tolerance, his patience—he had expected so little of Iris, so little of her—was that because his standards had been formed by those of the gay and beautiful and firmly acquisitive wife of his junior officer? Then like the sudden movement of a bright snake across her path came the thought, “Dicky would have got what he wanted.”
She was ashamed of it. Dicky would have got what he wanted because he was a selfish little beast. Ronny was unselfish and honourable. Women were supposed to worship success ; she hated to believe it of herself. She could not struggle any longer in silence.
“But, Ronny, didn’t you feel it was rather weak of you to go on letting yourself be used like that, and used up too?”
“I suppose so,” said Ronny ; “but men are weak, aren’t they? especially about women.”
Yes, men are weak and women are vain and colonels are bullies and girls are husband-hunters, and it was all quite natural. The dead-weight of his tolerance lay between them like a feather-bed.
She vowed to herself that she would never enslave and make use of him, as had done that rapacious wife of his junior officer. It had, however, been alarmingly easy so far to make use of Ronny. Perhaps it was what he really liked best.
Dicky came into her thoughts again. It was so like him to be always pushing his way in where he wasn’t wanted. If she didn’t look out there would soon be a crisis with Dicky, and it would be humiliating if she could not stave off a crisis with a boy five years younger than herself, whom she had only met twice. She thought with more respect of the wife of the junior officer ; she must have been, as her mother frequently said of Iris, “a wonderful little manager.”
“And she ke
pt you at arm’s length all those years?” she murmured.
Ronny glanced round at her.
“Well, at elbow’s length,” he amended.
She cried, laughing, “Ronny, I love you.”
He put the statement hastily behind him, for he knew that, though sincere, it was untrue, and he did not wish to examine it.
The policeman at the corner was pacing past the Belamys’ door when their taxi stopped before it. Out jumped the young lady as gay as a cracker by now and talking about sherry.
“We ought to have brought back a bottle for Papa,” she was saying. “That would pacify him.”
“Drink,” said the policeman. “That’s what does it. They’re all the same. And such a nice young lady.”
It was not till he fitted Celia’s key in the lock that Ronny remembered he had forgotten to ring up her parents with explanations of her absence.
Chapter VII
Celia feared to transplant Leila and Dicky from their exotic soil to the dull air of her mother’s drawing-room, to the bleak disapproval of her father’s frowns and still worse of her mother’s smiles. Ronny would not join in the chorus of comment and criticism at their departure, he would be as nice about them as he was to them, and that was due not merely to his tolerance but his good manners. Yet the thought of his long, fastidious nostrils filled her with apprehension.
She need not have troubled where Dicky was concerned. Colonel Belamy refused to admit to the house a young man who had insulted his elder daughter.
“Darling, you are an absurdity,” was Iris’s mollifying comment, for she was good-naturedly backing up her sister ; “besides, I flirted disgracefully with him.”
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