Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  “There aren’t any, unless you mean the players and they’re in white.”

  “Their faces are red.”

  “That’s absurdly far-fetched,” said Leila, who had gone on being sympathetic long enough.

  “That’s what I mean to be. Far-fetched. The treasures of the Indies, the pearls beneath the ocean, aren’t they far-fetched? I tell you, those who read my stuff will dive for pearls. At least,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “they’ve got to think they’re diving for pearls.”

  He proposed to shut himself up for a week and write not one word and read for nine hours a day alternate sections of the Song of Solomon, Swinburne, Wilde, and James Branch Cabell.

  This sternly ascetic purpose seemed to affect her oddly, for she said : “There are a lot of selfish old women going about the world in trousers.”

  Dicky looked astonished and, gradually, offended. That would not do, pursuing one’s own thoughts as Blincko did. She must adhere to the conspiracy. After all, Dicky might be enormously rich one day, successful, useful, grateful for early kindnesses ; he might say, “In those days when I literally hadn’t a bean those Girls Below often used to stand me Indian corn.”

  It would be a good thing to nurse him through influenza or preferably pneumonia, but Dicky was never ill.

  “I was thinking of Ronny,” she said ; and now she came to think of it, so she was ; her remark had been far more applicable to Ronny, he had prosed on so about himself the last time they had talked, sitting by her fire as she and Dicky sat now, and dipping twigs in the fire and twirling them so that the red sparks shot off and made Catherine-wheels in the dark.

  He had said, “It isn’t my fault, is it, it’s really my tragedy, that I can’t fall in love thoroughly like other people? God knows I wish I could again, but I suppose it’s been taken out of me for good and all.”

  Leila had said “Poor old Ronny!” but then she laughed and added : “You think of love as a nice warm bath, don’t you? And there you sit on the edge, waiting for someone to come and push you in,” and then grew anxious, for he had been very nice to her, and she said yes, of course it was all that woman’s fault, for she had heard all about the wife of the junior officer, and that she was very sorry for him, to which he replied stiffly :

  “I didn’t say that to ask your pity,” and she, briskly :

  “Sorry, I thought you did.”

  But there was something very nice about the way he smiled and looked as though he were thinking about her, half amused and half sorry for her, though there was certainly no reason to be sorry and she would be most annoyed if he really were. How dreadful to be called “Poor old Leila!” Her worst enemy could not say worse of her.

  Yesterday Mab had spoken of “Poor old Blincko,” and she had shivered and when Mab asked why, she had said the usual, “Oh, someone walked on my grave,” and Mab had laughed that vague, happy, foolish laugh that had come to her lately, a laugh that had nothing to do with what happened or was said round her, but seemed to continue a conversation she was having with someone who was not there.

  “What’s up?” asked Dicky. “You’ve got something on your mind besides your hair.”

  “Have I? Perhaps it’s your manners. Or—yes—it might be a postcard I got to-day which should have been a letter.”

  “Cheer up. He may have been considering the few and vicarious pleasures of the Ground Floors.”

  “But then by the same post there also arrived an anonymous pot of Devonshire cream, and so,” concluded Leila vaguely, “there’s good in everything.”

  “Devonshire cream???”

  “I suppose I’ve got to ask you to supper.”

  “You might just as well. Mab’s out, isn’t she, and it won’t keep. It will cheer you up to have me.”

  “It hasn’t so far.”

  “Dear Leila, you are so impossibly natural. No one could be so natural without years of practice. Who’s coming?” “Who’s told you anyone’s coming?”

  “You, of course. You’ve been shoving those chairs round and round the room as though you were playing trains. And you’ve thought of nothing else all the time I’ve been talking. Who is it you don’t want me to meet?”

  “Oh, it isn’t that. I wish Mab would come in.”

  “We won’t leave any cream for her as a punishment. Let me be a sister to you. I’ll make your party go with a bang.”

  “I haven’t asked you to it yet.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I quite understand it was an oversight, but you are getting rather forgetful, Leila.”

  That was the worst of making friends with people in the house, especially when they were as insensitive as Dicky. She had wondered whether it wouldn’t be a pity to have him with Toby Clinton. “There are only dull people coming to-night, Dicky.”

  “Never mind, I’ll bring out the best in them. And I know what I have got to go with the cream—some maraschino cherries.”

  “The remains of your supper with Celia! Not mouldy yet?”

  She laughed her high nervous laugh. Celia, in the bus on her way home, shivered because someone walked on her grave.

  She had waited a suitable time so as to be in no danger of catching up Dicky, for The Borehams, though occurring at an earlier and more correct position from Piccadilly, were on the same bus route as Rainbow Road. Now she followed, sitting on top, crouched under the green silk umbrella, tossed and jolted to and fro with a queer sensation of physical lightness and emptiness that answered to her thoughts, “for now,” she thought, “I am free.”

  Now that she had suddenly lost all hope or belief of Dicky’s love for her, she was free to break with Ronny. She was free of both of them, free both of happiness and anxiety, free therefore of life and death, and so she felt too light and empty to count at all in this bustling world of men and women and solid purposeful buses and motor-cars, all striving to get past each other, pushing, hooting, panting, all full of the one great business of getting on, a world through which she was blown on a chance breeze drifting she did not know where, but drifting lightly, inevitably, to some point, some moment where she could say, “So here I am. This is what I have been coming to all this time.”

  “But what will it be?” she wondered, and nobody answered her. Ronny had not answered. Dicky could not. Her parents clung piteously to their possessions and belief in the deterioration of manners. Iris was too busy having a good time to notice life.

  Only Uncle Charles might have known something of it, for he seemed to know what he was living for, though he had said nothing about it. But Uncle Charles was dead, and so she drifted on alone down Piccadilly and the Brompton Road, on down the Palace Road, and never noticed that she had passed The Borehams, until suddenly she saw in front of her, gleaming through the dusk, the pale classic columns of the bank at the end of Rainbow Road.

  She got off the bus and went down Rainbow Road, and the lamp-lighter came behind her with long, hurrying strides : he must be late ; it was getting very dark, and the rain had nearly stopped. He went past her with his long pole, first one lamppost and then another opened suddenly into yellow light, and she was reminded of the tall evening primroses that grew as wild as weeds all over the Manor garden where they used to stay as children before Granny died ; they looked like dead stumps all day, and then in the dusk they opened before your eyes into great yellow cups and her mother used to love to decorate the dinner table with them, floating them in green saucers on the old-fashioned white and silver table centre, pushing away the orchids that the gardener had brought her from the conservatory, and Granny said : “It is a great pity Daisy didn’t marry a poor man,” but Celia never knew why.

  She met an enormously fat old woman in a red shawl who came rocking and wheezing towards her out of the dusk like a derelict ship in a high sea.

  Then she noticed that music was stealing out of the dusk towards her, long threads of music that seemed to come from far away.

  She went past Number 39 and glanced up at the top f
loor windows and saw that they were dark. There were lights in the long windows of the Girls Below.

  She went on past them down to the farther end of the road where a large car stood at the side of the road, empty, waiting. In front of it, sharply outlining its dark symmetry, lay a shaft of light from a window on the ground floor, and riding on the light came the long drawn out notes of a violin, the music she had heard before and thought far away.

  As she came up to it she saw that the window was open, the curtains only half drawn, and she could see one side of a room full of books. The leaves of plants in the window box showed black against the bright light in the room.

  A man and a woman stood on the doorstep, listening ; the light of a lamp-post fell on their faces and they stood so still that she did not see them till the light caught the man’s white silk scarf and the woman’s bare grey hair.

  She went on to the very end of the road, to the trees that stood there in a row, stiff and straight and silent, for they were clipped so rigorously that even in a gale they could hardly rustle. Each trunk was encased in an armour of wire netting ; they stood at attention waiting for the word of command, and the word had come, for every sooty twig had sprouted into tight buds and in a very short time now the word would come for these to thrust forward in sharp green points and then spreading leaves.

  She stood there a moment, listening to the music that had followed her and was wandering away among the trees, and then she came back very slowly on the opposite side of the road and stopped opposite the open window and looked into that square of yellow light set in the darkness as if through a telescope at a scene on another planet.

  She saw a picture on the wall of a snow scene with the dark shapes of huntsmen and dogs going over a hillside, and said to herself, “I knew it would be like that.”

  The street was silent, empty. She remembered waiting with Uncle Charles for the sun to rise on a sea-strand lonely as Robin son Crusoe’s, walking with him towards the world’s end and over the edge.

  Now she could see the man who was playing, for he was walking about the room as he played with long, slow steps like a great cat. Sometimes he was behind the curtains, but sometimes he came out to the side of the room which she could see ; but she did not see his face, for always his back was to the window.

  Then he stopped playing and the two who were waiting on the doorstep stirred, and the woman gave a soft murmuring sound like a laughing sigh and the man called out through the open window : “Here we are, Chance.”

  Now he would be coming to the door, opening it, and the light of the street-lamp would fall full on his face and she would see what he looked like for one moment before he let them in and shut the door.

  She waited, and then suddenly she turned and hurried away, back to the row of trees again, away from those two that were waiting, and behind her she heard a door open and the sound of voices talking and laughing and then she heard the door shut again.

  She went on, past one twisted turning and then another and another, away from Rainbow Road to where the houses grew wider and nobler, separating themselves disdainfully from each other.

  And up a flight of spotless steps and into a hall where an ancient French clock ticked leisurely between a couple of Baxter prints, and up a flight of softly carpeted grey stairs and into a long, cold, spacious, and discreetly furnished drawing-room where there sat an elegant and still pretty woman who said, “Where have you been again?”

  And Celia——

  Chapter XV

  For, yes, she was Celia, of course she was Celia, and that was Mamma and this was home and all these objects that she had been looking at with a strange new curiosity as though seeing them for the first time, had been there since her childhood and nothing was any different, not even herself, though she had run out of the house a few hours ago and returned to it a hundred years later.

  It was all going on just the same, and she was waiting, not for some silly, unimportant little thing such as a strange man opening the door, but for Ronny to call for her after dinner, when she would quite definitely and finally break off her engagement to him, and then she would be left alone, for Dicky did not want her any more. But she would not think of Dicky ; it was Ronny that mattered now.

  When he looked perplexed and reproachful he was like a little boy. He might again implore her, as he had done once, not to show him up as a failure all round. She had known then that she herself was not the principal thing at stake in his mind. But that made her none the less essential to his self-confidence.

  She had thought it monstrously unfair that anyone so nice-looking and well-mannered and kind should ever have been made to feel a failure ; she was furious with the unknown woman or possibly women who had done so, until it occurred to her that they may not have been so very different from herself.

  She had grabbed at him, he needed her, and she was going to throw him over.

  There was Mamma stirring her coffee with that pretty air of smooth and patient discontent.

  “If she only knew what is happening,” thought Celia, watching the Chippendale clock behind her, watching the moment come nearer and nearer, stealing over the gilded face of the clock like the shadow of an executioner creeping up behind her mother’s unsuspecting head.

  Colonel Belamy was reading the paper and blaming the miners. He spoke of the sacrifices he was called upon to make because some of his money was invested in a mine and he would have to sell some of his Waterford glass.

  Mrs. Belamy advised him not to, as it would make so little difference, but this only made him angrier, for he was not going to be done out of his sacrifice. Mrs. Belamy then said it would be less for the maids to dust, and he said that nobody in the house appreciated his feelings about his collection.

  “One must have some beauty in one’s life,” he said—” beauty or something.”

  “Perhaps the miners would like to have some Waterford glass too,” said Celia, who wanted to have a row, wanted anything that might prevent that moment creeping nearer and in its train another moment when she would see her parents turn and stare at her as at a stranger and she would find herself alone in the house.

  But nothing could prevent it ; her father had only just begun to say that miners preferred whippets to Waterford glass, thereby proving their baseness, when there was Ronny at the door ; but, thank heaven, he was not looking at her, he was looking at the clock, so that she had a sudden fear that he too might see on its gilded face what she had been watching that evening.

  But nobody noticed anything and still time went on through everything, through all their remarks and questions and Ronny’s account of a motor smash in Trafalgar Square, and he was afraid the driver had been killed, poor fellow.

  Mrs. Belamy said “How dreadful!” and told Celia she wasn’t looking very well, and then followed her husband out of the room, for he always obeyed a really clear marching order and it had been firmly implanted in him during Iris’s engagement that a father’s first duty to his prospective son-in-law was to leave the room.

  Ronny was taking her to dance and sup at a cabaret show. Ronny was talking ; she supposed it was about the accident, as he was saying what a muddle life was, but she did not see the connection when she heard him say that after all the only thing was to do what you could for other people.

  There they were getting into a taxi again and arriving at last at the place, and there was the commissionaire throwing open the door into a blaze of bright light, and she had to go in and dance and go on dancing, dancing, making remarks about the people and the crush and the heat, wondering what time it was and when the moment would come that she would speak to Ronny, dancing again, going on dancing, until there she was sitting at a supper-table opposite him so that it was impossible not to look at him, and trying to decide what she would have, while the lights turned blue to represent moonlight and a masked man in a black domino passed among the tables, serenading them to his guitar.

  Celia thought of the dark figure of the man that
she had seen through the window walking about his room as he played to himself ; she told Ronny about a literary man she had met that day who looked like a prize-fighter, she did not know if he were listening or not ; it didn’t much matter, since the only thing he had said so far was to ask her if Devonshire cream were really fattening.

  The jazz-patterned curtains at the end of the supper-hall drew apart, revealing a gondola beneath a gigantic moon. Out of it there stepped a row of figures whose faces were stiffly, strangely still. It was a little time before Celia saw that this was because they wore masks, so realistically moulded and painted that they failed to resemble life only in that they did not move, their expressions, some sad and some joyful, fixed for ever in one perpetual moment.

  This god-like quality gave their movements a strange dignity ; they advanced with their eternal faces and ephemeral grace, the women’s white legs showing through a wide transparent framework of black lace so that their hollow skirts looked like shadows dancing.

  She would speak when they stopped dancing.

  “I expect,” said Ronny, “that those dresses are more really indecent than plain tights.”

  Now she looked at him and saw that he was not considering this important subject ; he was finding things to say to her as she had done to him. She saw through him. He was shallow, tepid, and uninteresting.

  He looked at her as she began to speak, and he looked through her, he was looking at an empty chair. Had he too seen through her, finding her shallow, tepid, and uninteresting? They had stepped back into their old positions in the formal dance that their fates and follies had arranged for them, touching hands but hiding faces behind their masks, and all the time they had not really been there at all, only their hollow shadows had danced together, and now she sat in an empty chair.

  The masquers tore off their masks and skirts and turned catherine-wheels, shaking back their bobbed hair from their furiously grinning faces. Acrobats and funny men on roller skates rushed on from either side, and the beauty chorus disguised as black cats. The jazz-patterned curtains were drawn on the gyrating mob and on the gondola and the gigantic moon, and the orchestra played a quiet air.