“Oh, quite fairly, but she didn’t tell me anything as nice as that.”
“Now, you’re laughing at me. He is a brute, isn’t he Celia?”
She pointed out that the whisky was in its usual place and Celia’s hot milk in the fender, and tactfully ran upstairs to bed. Ronny, who was very fond of her, said, “How pleased she was to be wearing your pearls! She is just like a girl.”
“Yes, just.”
“That must be topping for you.”
“Yes, topping.”
“When she’s over fifty too.”
“Yes.”
He thought she looked depressed, and with an amused but tender recognition of feminine jealousy he said reassuringly, “I expect, darling, you’ll be just like her at her age.”
“I expect so.”
Chapter XI
Dicky had decided it would take too long to tell Leila exactly what he thought of her. He was gone when she returned to the sitting-room to find Blincko sitting in a hunched attitude over the fire, her head making the shadow of a feather mop on the grey wall. Leila, who had hoped she might have already departed by the balcony, asked curtly, “Where’s Dicky?”
“Don’t know. Where’s Mab?”
“Out dancing with Harry. She won’t get in till after two, so I want to get to sleep before she does.”
Blincko ignored this.
“Nobody remembers the War,” she said.
“Thank God, no. Why should we? And you’re wrong. Never shall I forget the day I paid four-and-six for a powder-puff because the woman said they were wanted at the Front.”
Blincko ignored this also.
“I was in a Putney bus to-day,” she said, “and there was one of those wounded soldiers who are still at Roehampton and he said that nobody comes to see them now or gives them cigarettes or anything.”
Leila made a sympathetic noise, mingled with anxiety, for she was afraid that Blincko would now tell her about the man she loved, who was killed in the War, and she could not hurry a girl who was telling her a thing like that even if she had done so two or three times before. So she said hastily :
“You know, Blincko, you’re very sweet and sympathetic and that’s why people always tell you their troubles, but it’s really much better for them to count up their gains instead of their losses. I’m sure that’s the chief point of Christianity, and one can always get one up on life if it’s only by cheating on the bus fares.”
“I don’t care about religion myself,” said Blincko. “Who’s the cross man?”
“Commander Ronny Haversham. Took me out to dinner. Rather dull, but,” said Leila, virtuously pointing her former moral, “I thoroughly enjoyed the dinner.”
“I don’t care about food either.”
“No, you’re dyspeptic and so you prefer troubles, even if they’re somebody else’s.”
“Isn’t Commander Haversham somebody else’s trouble?”
Leila gave a pleasant shriek and offered a cigarette.
“Do you like the little man who was prancing about here just now?” pursued the inquiry.
“Dicky? You know him, don’t you? He’s only the boy upstairs.”
“Looks old for a boy. Is he a Jew?”
“Not a bit. He’s pure Greek—or as pure as Greeks ever are.”
“He makes good gestures and he stands well, but he moved too much to-night.”
“He was nervous,” and Leila proceeded to explain why, but Blincko did not listen. She asked one or two irrelevant questions, but did nothing with the answers, turning them over in her mind and then dropping them as a rag-picker turns over and discards the useless scraps on a rubbish-heap. She continued to stare into the fire until Leila said impatiently :
“Oh, get on with it, Blincko, what’s the matter? Is it a young man or has someone let you down over a poster?”
To which Blincko said, “Let me use your ’phone, will you, darling? I feel there’s something wrong with Jack Lamorny.”
“I’ve always felt that.”
Leila went into the next room and shut the folding doors between, for on the first floor the two rooms led into each other, and the James-Duffs disguised their bedroom as a sitting-room in the daytime by means of curtains and settee beds. As she undressed she heard Blincko’s jerky, monotonous voice issuing condolences of a surprisingly intimate nature. It was silly of Blincko to plump for failures. She counted up the evening’s achievements. She had had a good dinner and there was a lot of liqueur left. There was also just a chance, if only that dull little fool would carry on with Dicky——But she sighed, for competition dispirited her when she was tired.
“There’s something wrong,” she thought ; “I am too eager and anxious. Now Mab gets everything she doesn’t want. And I—I want everything and don’t get it.”
Then she remembered that she got all her flowers and cigarettes as a gift and had been asked out every night this week and that Blincko, good old Blincko—there was something very decent about her really—had once said, “Just the things you have to refuse would be enough to give anyone else a good time.”
She had also collected many memories that she did not care for, but these could be labelled as Experience and so much useful material. But what was it useful for?
This doubt disturbed her ; she did not notice when Blincko stopped speaking into the silence of the disadvantages of a partially divorced wife, and when some time later she returned from her bath and opened the doors before jumping into bed she was startled to see that same crouched figure still sitting over her fire, not turning nor looking up as the doors opened, like a stray cat that has adopted a house while ignoring its household.
Presently Blincko said, “I wish you’d let me stay here a bit and I’ll go without disturbing you. I’ll put out the lamp and you can go to sleep.”
“Of course, darling. I’ll talk, if you like.”
“No, I’d much rather not.”
So Leila got into bed but could not sleep with that silent figure sitting before her fire.
She kept opening her eyes to see if it were still there, and each time she did so the firelight was a little dimmer, the figure more black and its shadow on the wall more vast and overhanging.
She wanted to call out, to tell Blincko to speak, to ask her why she would not go back along the balcony to her own studio, though she knew that she herself would hate to go back, for Blincko kept the studio like a pigsty in spite of sweeping it out every morning herself with her fur coat over her pyjamas and her bare feet on the bare boards because she never remembered to get a pair of dressing-slippers and when Leila gave her a pair she lost one of them by throwing it at a cat that was yowling in the back-yard. It must be miserable to be an artist and live quite alone, and Leila wondered when Mab was coming back and how she would get rid of Blincko, for Mab had her own ways of disposing of people quite quickly and unobtrusively.
But then she was so much more efficient in every way. Leila could just remember when Mab was born and how proud she had been of looking after a little sister and how quickly Mab had grown out of needing to be looked after. They were called Lily and May in those days, and some of their children’s books still had these dreadful names inscribed in ink on the title-page so that you had to be careful and remember which books must not be shown to people ; it was a great strain.
There were so many things now to guard against, to look out for, to remember, to notice, and yet a long time ago there had been two funny little things at school called Lily and May, and Lily had only thought of getting her cricket colours and May of winning certificates. Neither had cared about boys or men, they had dressed badly because it was bad form to be smart, and their hair was not even bobbed, though to tell the truth it had not begun to be fashionable then, but hung in ugly pigtails that hid the napes of their necks.
She had disgraced herself by crying with excitement although she was by then an “old girl” with her hair up, when it was announced to the school that May had won a scholarship for So
merville. What a thunder of applause there had been! They were great and glorious, everything lay before them.
“It’s the happiest day of our lives,” Leila had said sentimentally, but her younger sister had answered :
“I mean to have lots of happier days than this.”
Leila, who was superstitious, did not like her saying that, but it came true and they had lots of happier days, at least, she supposed now, looking back, that they were happier, but somehow she had not known it at the time. That was the pity, that she had not known it at the time ; it was only long afterwards, when she had ceased to be worried and anxious and wondering whether it were true or could last, that she knew that then she had been happy.
In the darkness against her tight-shut eyelids, for she would not again open them to see that brooding figure still waiting for nothing by her fire, there sprang up a sudden picture of the drawing-room at home in Eastbourne when it hadn’t even been dusted yet, and she was sorting out the gramophone records for the dance that evening and Arthur came in very red and nervous and said,” Look here, it’s no use going on. You’re extravagant and I’m poor and if we marry we’ll always be quarrelling about money, so let’s have the strength of mind to stop it now before we make each other wretched.”
She had not known she was extravagant and she had not minded his being poor and she had known at the time that it was not really that at all, but he refused to say anything else ; he went out of the drawing-room without looking at her, and that was all. They were a man short at the dance that evening and the gramophone ground on her nerves like the whirring wheel at the dentist’s.” It’s the unhappiest night of my life,” she thought ; but it was not true, for she had had unhappier nights since then, but since then she had learnt to expect them.
She knew that now as she lay there with her eyes tight closed so as not to see the figure by her fire. She knew that it was unlucky to expect bad luck, that she must not do so, she must believe that it would all come right for her.
But how could she do so again when she had believed it so long and so certainly, all the time that she had been engaged to Arthur, and he had broken the belief so easily, all in one moment without even explaining why, that morning in the drawing-room at home before it had been dusted?
Years later she heard that he had been in a semi-detached position with regard to a lady who had permitted his engagement but forbidden the marriage. It was funny to hear that when it could not affect her, like reading the end of a story that she had begun so long ago that it had lost its interest.
But that moment in the drawing-room had lost nothing. So vividly did she see it now against her eyelids that some part of her must have remained there ever since, still sorting out gramophone records for the dance that evening at which there was a man short.
“It is no use shutting one’s eyes,” said Leila. She opened them. The next room was quite dark except for the dull red coals which shed only a faint glow just in front of them. She could see a point of light on the copper coal-scuttle, the thick and shapeless blackness of the arm-chair, but she could not see if there were anyone in it. She called out, but no one answered. She screamed,” Don’t be a fool,” but still there was silence, and in a panic she stumbled out of bed and fumbled wildly for the matches and struck one, and saw that there was no one in the chair.
At that, perversely, she felt desolate and afraid to find herself alone. Blincko should not have left her so silently, so stealthily, that she did not know she was alone.
She was shaking so much that she had to hold on to the mantelpiece. She laughed, for she was afraid she was going to cry. It was a comfort to think of the Jimmys overhead, that funny little couple living in two rooms, Mrs. Jimmy cooking sausages on the gas-ring and Mr. Jimmy coming home with his genuine antiques and writing serial stories all about Dukes and Lords, so Dicky said. They must be very happy not to mind living like that. She wished she could have been more friendly with them, but it would never have done. And there was Dicky sleeping away upstairs, the little beast ; it must be lovely to be a man and just twenty-one. She pushed the arm-chair back from the fire and got into bed and in time fell asleep, but woke with a start when a light fell on her face.
There was Mab in her dance frock of gold lace with the nursery candlestick in her hand. She stood bathed in light, her dress sparkled, the light struck upwards at her face, eliminating all shadows, painting it in bright flat colours on the dark background of the next room. Her calm was dispersed in a shimmering and vacant smile. She said,” You were talking in your sleep. Such nonsense. You said, ’ Bad luck came and sat by my fire.’”
And Mab laughed as she said it, a shimmering and vacant laugh, as though it were a deliciously funny thing for anyone to say.
Leila said, “Did you have a lovely evening, darling?”
“Not bad. But the Tadpole’s a foul hole. Hullo. What’s that bottle?”
“New man. Found him at the Belamys’. A reversion of Celia’s.”
“Any good?”
“Oh, quite. They’re engaged, but she gives him plenty of rope as she’s running Dicky as well.”
“How energetic the young things are! I find Harry takes all my attention.”
She sank luxuriously into the arm-chair in which Blincko had brooded, leaning back where the other had thrust forward, and presenting to Leila in profile the tilt of her chin and long white line of her throat. The shadow of her arm on the wall made the proud curve of a swan’s neck.
Leila, still morbid from her dream but determinedly counting the gains, reflected that it would be something if one of them achieved happiness ; it was too much perhaps to expect for both.
Chapter XII
Dicky, in the bed upstairs that creaked every time he turned, could not sleep because he had boasted to Celia and failed to carry her off from Ronny, and now would never see her again.
He envied Ronny, and the Jimmys Underneath, and the Girls Below whose industrious pursuit of the game snatch-as-snatch-can must render them immune to the tender emotions. He even got up and tried to write, having heard that love and despair were the best circumstances in which to produce a masterpiece.
But he could only think of letters to Celia in which he reproached her for her double dealing and fickleness, and Ronny for an overbearing bully, and himself for a miserable failure, and he knew better than to send such letters, for what woman, said he aloud with a sardonic laugh, does not love to be reproached with double dealing and fickleness, and prefer an overbearing bully to a miserable failure?
He wrote down words to describe her—luminous—elusive—none of them gave the haunting charm of her ; beneath all her self-possession she was remembering, waiting, drifting towards her fate, like a fairy visitor to the earth who has to go back at last to her own people. But whatever that fate was, “It isn’t me, it isn’t me,” sobbed Dicky.
By the morning he rose, sick with sleeplessness ; but the inexorable march of events in the past terrible evening had taught him three great lessons.
He was in love with Celia.
He had no proper clothes.
The two things were incompatible.
He went out on to his leads and greeted the grey morning with a cheer. He had only to write masterpieces in order to make money in order to buy clothes in order to take Celia out to dinner. Last night he had seen death beneath him decked with jewels, now he saw life, grand and simple, and full of one great purpose. Down in the back-yards, where here and there a caretaker moved obscurely among the dust-bins, a cock answered him with a shrill crow.
He went back to his room and pulled out a package of foolscap.
But that confounded postman’s knock came along the road every two hours, and from tea-time onwards every step in the street, every taxi, every distinct sound in the medley of traffic at the end of the road, might herald her coming. He wrote a light and witty letter, referring not at all to their last meeting, and assuming, not asking, that they should soon meet again.
Af
ter that he bolted downstairs when the postman had only knocked next door. But he had no answer.
Then he wrote a cold and dignified letter, and hung out of the window when the postman had only begun coming down the road.
Then he wrote a pleading and pathetic letter, and found that he could hear when the postman began in the next street.
Then he asked Leila if he might use her ’phone. But Leila, who had quite an interesting man with her at the time said coldly, “Yes, do. And just call down the balcony when you’ve finished and tell Blincko I hope there’s nothing wrong with it, as she’s only used it twice to-day, and then you might run up to the Jimmys and tell them it’s free for them at the moment, and you might bring in the Jap in the dressing-gown while you’re about it, and that Dutch artist up the road.”
Dicky quailed before her sarcasm, and collecting what pennies he had, ran down to the stationer’s next to Le Coche, and after ten minutes vigil in front of a pane of glass disclosing a heated, furiously working face, he interned himself in a very stuffy call-box and placed two pennies in the slot. “You’re through,” was squeaked back at him, and immediately he became aware of a low and savage growl that had evidently continued for some time before the magic of the ’phone had made it audible to him.
“Why the devil don’t they answer? There’s something wrong with the blasted thing. I shall report to the Superintendent—oh, I suppose it’s one of those confounded call-boxes. Hullo! Hullo! Hullo!”
Dicky clutched feebly at the door-handle behind him, an instinct older than the telephone urging him to have a means of escape other than the sophisticated expedient of hanging up the receiver. He strove to make his voice sound cool and naval in imitation of Ronny’s as he said, “Aw—can I speak to Miss Belamy, please?”
He heard a sound between a snarl and a bellow. “Only for Celia. Celia! A young man with his mouth full wants to speak to you.”
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