Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  Once again they stood in Piccadilly, but now, like the Emperor in his invisible new clothes, they stood invested with the unseen grandeur of the suits that Dicky had ordered. The magnificence of their moral effect could not be wasted ; he would call on Gordon and take him out for a drink.

  But first he would buy a hat. His choice of one made Celia uneasy ; she did not think Ronny would have chosen it. The shopman, cynically indifferent, made no effort to restrain his ardour or direct it into a more suitable channel. It was a terrible position for her. She could not say it did not go with his new suit, for it did, the colour was perfect, it was just that the shape was a trifle exaggerated, the brim a thought too wide and the ribbon—no, she did not like the ribbon.

  “Why don’t you like it? “said Dicky suddenly.

  She would have to be decisive and unreasonable. If she stammered :” Well, I don’t know—it’s not quite right somehow,” it would show an irritating consciousness of her instinctively superior taste. She said firmly :

  “No, Dicky, it’s no good, it’s pure prejudice, but I can’t bear to see you in it. It’s exactly like one Uncle Charles used to wear which made us all call him I-talian Bill.”

  It was the first time she had mentioned him to Dicky, and now with the faithless cruelty of women in love she had gladly thrown him into a hat and nickname he could never have worn, merely to save Dicky a qualm as to his possible inferiority to herself and her family.

  He had stiffened a little as she began to speak, but when she had finished he was smiling in kindly patronage of Uncle Charles and she had the reward of her betrayal. With no injury now to his prestige he chose the hat she had wished him to choose and swaggered gorgeously on to Gordon’s.

  Gordon was in, Gordon saw them, Gordon came out with them. They sat in the lounge of the Savoy, Dicky with his hat held well in view, his eye observant of the effect of Celia’s vernal elegance. Three women had looked at her clothes, two men at her ankles, and Gordon at her smile. He was in the right place with the right people.

  “This is I,” sang in his head,” this is the real I “; and he saw himself as in a vision, handing a notorious duchess to her seat with a gesture that made a modern version of Watteau’s L’Indifférent.

  Celia, though she could not see what he looked at so intently, knew that he was not beside her. The moment which had called her to him, running through the wet streets in such breathlessly happy haste to Rainbow Road, was already past.

  “Richard loves Richard; there is none else by.” She had had to say something like that at school, and now it came back as though Shakespeare had only thought of Dicky when he wrote it; but there never had been anyone like Dicky, so selfish, so base, so utterly worthless, so utterly adorable, so simple, so childish you longed to take care of him, so sophisticated, so sharp, nobody knew better how to take care of himself. “Dicky, Dicky,” she called inside herself, and wondered that he could not hear her.

  And Gordon, between the boy who could not hear and the girl who could not see, attributed their quiet to their very proper sense of his magnificence and sought both to increase and temper it by a good-natured précis of the most exciting story he knew, the story of his rise to power. Each step in the ascent seemed to have been taken on somebody’s hand, for at every crisis of his career this Somebody (and, but for his changing and increasingly high-sounding names, it might have been the same Somebody, to judge by the monotony of his behaviour) stepped forward firmly from a large throng and shook Gordon’s hand, saying, “My boy, you’ve done the damned trick,” or “rung the—excuse me, Miss Belamy—bloody bell,” or some other phrase equally recognizant of Gordon’s services to his country. Celia, depressed by so much industry, looked at Gordon’s hand and thought of all the people that had needlessly shaken it, for it was very large and red and, as her glove had testified, of a tropic damp. His face was also large and red and gave evidences of the same temperature, his voice and manner were equally expansive.

  Dicky suddenly wished to cut into it as into a thick and juicily underdone beefsteak. But that was after he had ordered his second cocktail, for the order went to his head more than the drink. He began to talk in a low, rapid, and melodious baritone that made an effective contrast to Gordon’s big bass. He described in ironic terms people that he had not seen but had read of in the evening papers. He impressed Gordon, already influenced by Celia’s hat and gloves and well-attuned smile, with the idea that this young man was getting on. People were taking him up. He was talking of them. Soon they would talk of him. This girl that he addressed a little too often and clearly as Celia, was obviously a very nice girl, with that air of unconscious decorum that can only have been acquired at great expense.

  Nurses and schoolmistresses had struggled through years of training, had taken diplomas and degrees, had sacrificed all their less edifying instincts, remaining for ever really nice women, in order that Celia might raise her eyes to Gordon’s stare with polite, impersonal interest and answer Dicky’s semi-rhetorical questions of “didn’t we, Celia?” and “don’t you remember, Celia?” without either coyness or annoyance at the degree of intimacy revealed.

  He was losing his head. He wasn’t drunk except with anticipation, hope, despair, for he was not impressing Gordon; when he made a witticism, Gordon drowned it with “Yes, you know, what I was going to say was——” And Gordon did not notice his choice of a side-car, he stuck to whisky with a splash; and Gordon scarcely seemed to listen when he told him his brilliant and quite new idea for a series of articles on London Life. He ought never to have rushed this interview. If he had only waited till next week he would have had his new clothes, he would have felt right and would therefore have been right. He had been given a chance and had thrown it away.

  He saw the depressed and ageing back of the Dicky who would sit on an office stool in Birmingham for the rest of his life.

  His time was up. He was counted out. There was Gordon doing it with his watch in his hand, looking like the successful boxer and the referee in one.

  “Well,” he said, “time I was trotting back to the treadmill. We’re not all free, like you lucky children. That’s not a bad idea of yours, Dicky; show it me as soon as you’ve done one or two. Shouldn’t wonder if we might find room for ’em. And we must have that little dinner with Mary some time; you come along too, Miss Belamy, and make a foursome—well, why not, hey? That’s all right, then.”

  They stood again in the street and the rain poured down. They had each said good-bye to Gordon four times over, and Celia believed that they had shaken hands ten times. He had settled the date of the dinner, subject to Mary’s approval, and he had taken due note of the fact that Dicky said he was engaged every night for a week; Celia indeed wondered whether his considering eye had seen through the deception to the bare fact that Dicky’s new clothes would not be ready for a week. But if it had he could not say so, and it had all been safely arranged and he had gone and they stood in the rain and she was holding her green umbrella over Dicky’s new hat and wondering what she had better wear and whether Mary Something was likely to wear black or scarlet with clanking earrings and as many epigrams as a comedy of Somerset Maugham’s.

  Dicky, with a dull, empty, exhausted expression, repeated : “That’s all right then,” in incredulous tones.

  “Of course it’s all right. You were splendid. He was pretending not to be, just for your good, I suppose, but he was fearfully keen on that idea of yours.”

  “Was he?”

  She repeated it in different words about three times, after which Dicky seemed fairly satisfied.

  “I am a fool,” he said. “I thought it was all going wrong—I don’t know why. Just nerves. I haven’t any belief in myself, any confidence.”

  “You will get it.”

  Celia spoke a little wearily, but Dicky did not notice, or if he did it was some moments later.

  “He fixed that dinner because of you, Celia. You’ve been jolly useful.”

  But this time t
here was a thoughtful calculation in his tone which struck a little chill on her mind.

  Now they were walking up Pall Mall and approaching the narrow, insignificant house where Uncle Charles had lived.

  She said : “I had a funny old uncle who used to have rooms here and sit in his window all day and watch the people. He couldn’t hear them. He was deaf.”

  “Was that the one you called I-talian Bill?”

  “I-talian——? Oh yes, of course. But it was just a joke; he wasn’t a bit like that.”

  “Only his hat then?”

  That self-assertive and flamboyant hat could never now be dislodged in Dicky’s mind from Uncle Charles’s head; of her own doing she had fixed it there in place of his own ancient and honourable grey topper, and it was all that was ever likely to interest Dicky in him.

  She had bored Ronny by telling him of Uncle Charles, and she would certainly bore Dicky if she did so to-day on top of so many important things; or, worse, he might be interested in the wrong way, so that she saw his bright, astute eye become fixed and ruminative in some computation as to Uncle Charles’s social or monetary value.

  This horrid suspicion made her feel desperately homesick, so that she put up her hand to Dicky’s arm which was now bearing the umbrella, and said : “Oh, isn’t it funny, how we all care about different things?”

  “What do you care about, then?” asked Dicky kindly.

  But she did not know, she could not think; it seemed in looking back that there had been one moment of perfect happiness when she had played with Uncle Charles at a top with changing colours in the window they had passed, but she did not know and could not remember why it was.

  Dicky walked beside her buskined in jewels, for he had just decided that his sock suspenders, bestowed by female admirers, would be made at Cartier’s and inset with emeralds.

  He would soar so high above human ken that chatty paragraphs would appear in the evening papers to say how simple and unassuming he was with those who really knew him.

  He would soar so high that those who really knew him would rapidly diminish; he contemplated with calm the social distinction afforded by dropping the aforesaid visionary duchess; at the furthest point of his imagination it seemed there could be no one left worth his while to know, and he saw himself as at the end of a long tunnel sitting alone in a huge marble hall or perhaps with the Prince of Wales.

  Celia said : “I’m not coming back with you, Dicky—I’ve got to go and see someone; but you’ll get your bus from here, won’t you, or you’ll get your hat wet?”

  She was afraid he would want her to come back with him for the kiss they had not achieved, a long time ago. But he had forgotten it; he got his bus, and she saw him run upstairs because it was full inside and sit hatless on the front seat because he was holding his hat under the cover; she saw him rock and swing and rush along through the driven rain, through the driving traffic, faster and faster down Piccadilly between the gigantic new buildings, a fly in a swarm of flies whizzing between the towers of Nineveh, and fancied as she watched him that he was leaving not only her behind but himself also.

  There he was still standing beside her, and this forgotten shadow she would have with her always; but the Dicky she watched driving down Piccadilly would never know either of them again.

  Chapter XIV

  Dicky ran into the quite interesting man just as he was leaving Leila, so that he was free to bump against her door and ask to come in for a moment as his head was too full of importance to face an empty room. She was standing at the window swearing at the girl on the balcony opposite.

  “She’s been there for hours looking up and down the street and pretending to see to the plants, but I know it’s only to see who comes here : she’s always out through the window when Mervyn’s car draws up, and she always has a duster so that she can flap it as an excuse. Such a plain girl too. You can never see into their room because of the muslin curtains—horrible, aren’t they?—but you can just see it’s choked with furniture. And there’s an awful old woman sometimes comes creaking out with a spy-glass, or perhaps it’s only a watering-pot. It must be dreadful to be old and live with such a lot of furniture and have a spy-glass as your only outlet.”

  “I have,” said Dicky firmly, “been drinking with Gordon.”

  “Who’s Gordon?”

  Women were strangely forgetful and obsessed with the unimportant things of life. He helped himself to one of Leila’s cigarettes and told her for about the seventh time who Gordon was, but she was fiddling about the room arranging the flowers and furniture and she only said “Oh” in an uninspired manner.

  Dicky spoke still more impressively.

  “He asked if I would care to do a series of articles on a subject he suggested. I said it was a rotten subject and suggested one of my own. He jumped at it.”

  But Leila did not even look incredulous.

  He longed to tell her that he had just spent thirty pounds on clothes, but she had no delicacy, she was sure to ask how he had got it. What a day it had been! Probably the turning-point of his life. And she knew nothing about it!

  “By the way, Celia was with me. We had been to the tailor together. He’s asked us out to dinner.”

  “Who? The tailor?”

  Dicky threw a glance that should have withered her.

  “Gordon. To meet Mary Vane, the editor of——”

  But Leila had at last taken the inoculation.

  “Asked you and Celia to dinner! That’s funny.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Ronny would.”

  “Well, you and he have been dining together quite a lot.”

  “Not with editors,” said Leila virtuously.

  She thought about it while she moved a vase into three diferent positions and back to its original one. He wondered if she were going to have a party. But she never said so. Could it be she didn’t mean to ask him to it?

  She said : “Celia annoys me. She’s trying to break it off. I know, because he gets bothered and says, ’ I don’t want to worry. Why can’t we go on as we are? ’ A a man feels so much safer to enjoy himself when he’s tied to someone else.”

  Dicky looked at her with his head on one side like a parrot taking notice. She had uttered a profound philosophy suitable to his future works, but he could not write it down till he got upstairs or she would be exasperated.

  “It’s too soon to jolt him up yet,” she continued ;” a man like that doesn’t know what to do with freedom.”

  “Well, then, he’ll get tied up with you.”

  “No, he’ll get so frightened he’ll shy off it altogether. Do see what you can do with Celia, Dicky.”

  “It will be a bit difficult to persuade her to keep on with the engagement entirely in your interests. It might make a play.”

  “Much better as a play. Real life is so “—she hesitated, anxiously patting her hair in front of the mirror lest a single loose thread should disturb its close consistency, then subsided elegantly into a chair and said “complicated,” for it was never safe to say things derogatory to life, it might get back on you in revenge, and anyway it only made people think you were bitter, which was a great mistake.

  Mab ought to be in by now and helping her to get ready for this evening, for she had only gone to see Harry off on his holiday by an afternoon train. Not that she was worrying about that, of course, but it worried her that Mab should care so much about Harry ; it was not safe to care as much as that about anything, especially a man. It had been dreadful to see her gradually lose all her glorious insolent ease and security ; once she had cried on a day when Harry hadn’t rung up, and Leila had trembled, suddenly aware that there was no fixed and certain point in all the universe.

  And she was so engrossed and unobservant now that Leila often felt that Mab did not know she was there, but moved in a dream about an empty flat that they had used to share together. It made her feel unreal as if she were a ghost or were not anything at all, so that she began to
suspect that one’s existence depends only on other people, and if they refuse to recognize it, does one then cease to be? She was sitting crouched a little forward in the chair where Blincko had sat that night, and she remembered how Blincko, whom everyone refused to recognize except as a joke, had disappeared from that chair.

  She started up and listened quite eagerly for a time to Dicky, who had been talking unheard in an empty room ; for she must join the conspiracy, she must recognize others in order that they might recognize her, or they would all fade away and become nothing and the world full of empty rooms.

  Yes, there he was, though she had forgotten him, quite solid and noisy and smoking all her cigarettes and talking about himself of course, about the style he was going to choose.

  “Haven’t you got one to start with?”

  “Too clear. You see what it means at a glance. You want to have people saying : ’ Awfully amusing but different, you know. Not at all ordinary.’ A. S. M. Hutchinson gives an impression of writhing agony simply by full stops, and those who writhe may be read.”

  “But, Dicky, it isn’t natural in you to writhe.”

  “Who wants nature? I want style. I’ll say ’ Damn Nature ’ like Aubrey Beardsley and pull down the blinds and turn on the light. I want a style that is rich and slow-dropping and mellifluous and frequently meaningless. My metaphors should be fantastic, my images grotesque, one particular phrase of no particular importance should recur like the refrain of a ballad, but I bet you that will be the only thing like a ballad about it. None of the wind on the heath brother for me. But it will have flashes of wit and colours like rainbow-tinted glass on the rich mahogany of the sideboard.”

  He wrote down this last sentence ; then gnawed his pencil, dissatisfied.

  “It is too obvious,” he said ; “anyone would see the colours in iridescent glass. I should have said the colours in a cricket field.”