Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  Her face swam beneath his eyes, a white anxious blur against his coat sleeve. His face sank to meet it. The candle flame was darkened, the dim room shut out. Clinging to each other, they floated through space, through darkness and silence.

  “It can’t last, it can’t last,” thought Leila, and it could not ; the room again surrounded them, the candle flame rose among its familiar furniture, and Ronny said, “What a selfish brute I am to kiss you now! You must lie back and keep quiet while I see to things.”

  He spoke with the proud confidence of a free man for at last he was set free of the necessity to wonder what he really wanted, and the corresponding necessity to tell himself and others that life was a muddle. He now saw and wanted one thing quite clearly, and that was to get Leila well. He had become alert and vigorous and in the light of his purpose he had changed colour to something more bright and decisive than his usual indeterminate hue.

  That same evening he got in a nurse who slept in Mab’s bed and was both capable and tactful, for after the first few days of strict emotional dieting she always had to go out for just a minute when Ronny called in the evenings to see how Leila was getting on and to bring her a bunch of flowers and a basket of pears or grapes or even nectarines and Brand’s jelly and lovely things from Fortnum & Mason.

  During those days he was a god, life-giving and bearing benefits. Leila lived for the moment in the evening when he called ; hours before it arrived she began to group the flowers round her, to sleek her hair and test the exact amount of rouge that would lighten the grey tint in her pallor without destroying the fragility of the invalid.

  Then the moment would come and go in a flash, blinding her so that while it lasted she could not seize and hold it and use it as she had intended ; she forgot all the things she had been planning to say, was restless when she had meant to be reposeful, chattered about herself when she had meant to draw him out. But Ronny found her chatter more restful than Celia’s silence, for Celia’s silence had been full of questions, making him uneasy. Leila had long ceased to ask questions of life. Instead she accepted what she could of it.

  This gave a curious balm to Ronny’s introspective mind, and Lady Marshall, Mrs. Belamy’s dearest friend, reported to her that that poor Commander Haversham really looked years younger lately so that she must not reproach her hard-hearted little Celia too severely. She had been looking rather pale, she thought. She supposed it was Celia who broke off the engagement, wasn’t it?

  “What do you think of that?” wailed Mrs. Belamy to her daughter.

  “That I can’t help your having rotten friends,” said Celia.

  She did not often do as well as that. Her answers to her mother on this eternal question were apt to resolve themselves into cries of, “Let me alone. For God’s sake, let me alone.”

  This time her mother said, “You look down on Iris, but at least she succeeded in remaining engaged.”

  Celia rushed downstairs and smashed the best piece of Waterford glass.

  Mrs. Belamy said “Hysterical” to the drawing-room door.

  Then she turned to the mirror over the mantelpiece and arranged her hair with fingers that shook a little, aghast at her own vulgarity.

  But she was not vulgar—how could she be? She was still Daisy Chillingham of Chillingham Manor, though it had had to be sold. That solid support to her family’s civility had fallen away from them ; she felt lost and ill at ease in this angular, alien house in Kensington where strangers had lived and strangers would live after them.

  “All the old standards have gone,” she complained to the mirror. She would never have answered her mother as Celia had done. “Rotten friends!” But, however often she repeated it, she knew her mother would never have said what she had said. It was all this worry and nerve-strain that made her unlike herself. But what was she like? For the first time in her life she did not know.

  Her eyes fell on the row of china figures. The Manor was gone, but she had built her own bulwark to her self-esteem. Here, at any rate, she never made a blunder, her taste was instinctive, unerring, perfect.

  But presently she found bitterness in the thought that it was not her child who brought out the best in her, but a row of china figures.

  Then she thought, as if she had just seen it for the first time, of the blue and white room at Chillingham, of its odd haphazard harmonies such as mere taste could never achieve, its faded chintz and glowing Sèvres plates and shabby tapestried chairs and treasures from far countries brought home to the blue and white room by wandering Chillinghams of the last three centuries. And a sudden doubt smote her as to the quality even of that “best.”

  Chapter XVII

  “At last,” said Celia, looking at the fragments of broken glass on the dining-room floor.

  Whenever her mother had said, “What is he?” or “Who was she?” or “I thought it rather peculiar,” or “Don’t be so hysterical,” whenever her father had spoken of those worthless, idle workers or of these ill-bred, ill-dressed, ill-mannered young men of to-day, or of his poor old brother Charles on a dirge-like note that buried him more deeply than could any sexton, then Celia had tasted in her mind the appeasing intoxication of lifting that massive and complacent bowl, that fat and bulging and spiky bowl, high above her head and crashing it down upon the floor.

  For years and years this moment had been coming towards her and now it had come and gone and she had done what she had wished.

  Nobody answered back, nobody blamed her. If you smash something on purpose you should not do it in an empty room.

  She had broken her father’s favourite bowl and it had not even been her father who had made her angry.

  “I couldn’t have done it,” she said aloud and wondered if it were an accident. But that was a lie bigger than any of the hypocrisies and conventions that she had wanted to smash along with that rounded swollen bloated huge glass bowl.

  “I must have been mad,” she thought. “Perhaps I’m going mad. If only I could have a nervous breakdown, they would know I wasn’t myself when I did it.” She wondered how quickly she could develop a nervous breakdown and whether Lady Marshall would say it was on Ronny’s account—that would not do. Even suicide was debarred her.

  Now another moment swam ahead of her, following inevitably in the other’s train, when she would have to tell Papa what she had done.

  She caught a glimpse of something dark through the thick window-blind, someone had come up the front-door steps. It was Papa returning. He had left the house some little time ago with a man who had called this afternoon, with a cold shock she remembered that he was the dealer whom Papa had insisted on having in to value his collection with a view to selling some of it, for he had stuck obstinately to his idea of sacrifice. She looked in the sideboard cupboard to see if she could hide there, she looked at the window to see if she could crawl out of it as he came in.

  The front-door bell rang. So it was only visitors after all. Now Gladys would be opening the door, taking them up to the drawing-room where her mother would receive them with her accustomed graciousness, showing no sign that she had of late been slightly ruffled and knowing not at all that beneath her in the dining-room lay a wreckage that would wreck the peace of the household for many days.

  Poor Mamma, it was more likely that she would have a nervous breakdown than herself, and Celia suddenly saw that in breaking her father’s bowl she had chosen the surer method to revenge herself upon her mother. Consequently she began to shake and whisper, “I can’t face it.”

  Here was Gladys just outside in the hall going to open the door. When she had opened it and taken the visitors upstairs she would creep out and up the stairs and put on her hat and coat and collect what money she had and creep down again past the drawing-room door where her mother’s and the visitors’ voices would mingle in polite harmony, and down into the hall again and out of the house.

  But where should she go? Iris would laugh, she had broken with Ronny, Dicky had given no sign since that afternoon
weeks ago, and indeed she had known then with the relentless knowledge of a premonition that she would never see him again. She would rather die or tell her father of the bowl than run the bare chance of seeing Dicky again, and it was in any case absurd that the only place which came into her mind as sanctuary was a lighted window looking into a room full of books and music down near the farther end of Rainbow Road.

  “Can I see Miss Belamy?” said a voice outside, a voice that she had known she would never hear again.

  “I’ll see if she’s in, sir. Won’t you come in?”

  Whatever happened, Gladys must not take him up to the drawing-room. Celia flung open the door and confronted Dicky.

  “How do you do?” she said coolly. “Will you come in here a minute? It’s all right, Gladys.”

  She drew him into the dining-room and shut the door.

  “Well? “she asked with the accumulated ice of several weeks.

  “What do you mean by ’ well’? Why do you look at me like that? Aren’t you glad to see me? And in this suit too? Celia! “in tones of agonized delight,” can it be that you are angry with me for not trying to see you all this time?”

  “Please don’t be funny. If I’m angry, as you call it, it is that you should assume that you can call and ask to see me like this.”

  “Oh, Celia, for your sake don’t look and talk like that. It’s like a Saint of Society in a stained glass window and all Kensington shall rise up round you and call you blessed. Slang me if you like, say you’re sick of me or that you thought I was sick of you, swear at me, turn me out, but don’t, don’t, don’t turn into something else that never was nor will be you.”

  She began to laugh helplessly.

  “That’s better. What’s all this scrunching under my boots?”

  “Broken glass.”

  “I say! Had an accident?”

  “No.”

  Dicky stared at her, but hastily took up his own thread.

  “Look here, Celia, I don’t care what you think of me or whether you believe me or not, but since that day, that glorious, amazing, all-important day, that day that was the turning-point of my life, I’ve worked and thought of one thing only and that is how to get on so that I should be able to call and ask to see you like this. And I have, the luck’s turned, I’m getting to know a whole crowd all at once and some of them quite useful. I’ve got a decent suit, I’ve got money—look at that, eight guineas in my pocket—I’ve got a story taken with cash on acceptance at eight guineas and the promise of two more. And one I wrote in a morning and another in a couple of hours, so that if I work six hours a day I shall make sixteen guineas a day and that is five thousand eight hundred and forty guineas a year. Don’t laugh, I’ve worked it out on paper.”

  But she could not stop laughing. How ridiculous it all was! Dicky, whom she was never to see again, stamping about their dining-room on broken glass, and all the cold, unhappy anger that she had had about him all these weeks crumbling away under his perfectly reasonable and really rather fine sentiments. She had mistaken a morbid fit of depression for prophecy, she could not even remember what had caused it. Something less than nothing had led to nothing, and nothing was what she had been worrying over all these weeks. That desolate fog rolled away, yet still there clung a faint, persistent breath of uneasiness somewhere in her mind ; perhaps it was nothing to do with Dicky, perhaps it was because somewhere in London her father was coming toward this house, coming nearer and nearer, bringing with him the moment when she would have to tell him of the broken bowl.

  “And you will come, won’t you? Celia, say you will come?”

  He was waving a note at her now instead of the cheque. She at last heard what he had ceased to say. He had been reminding her of Gordon’s invitation to dinner, telling her that it was for to-night. He began to repeat words like “wrong number,” “delay,” while she fought something chill, impalpable, that rose round her like a mist. Dicky seemed aware of it too, he was adding so many unnecessary items.

  “He didn’t ask us before because he had ’flu. There’s a lot of it about. Leila’s had it.”

  “Poor Leila! Who looked after her?” She held up the question as a shield.

  “Oh, she was all right,” said Dicky evasively.

  By the shifty glance he gave her she was sure that Ronny had been looking after Leila. She was annoyed, she had made up her mind that Ronny ought to marry someone very peaceful, with large, maternal arms, someone in fact entirely different from himself, but also entirely different from Leila. She tried to think she was really worried about it, but it was no use, not even jealousy could make her escape what was round her.

  The fog had come down again. She looked at Dicky through it as though he had visibly changed shape and colour before her eyes. She said nothing. It was too horrible to say. But was it this note that had reminded him of her? He had used her once to help him show off before Gordon ; did he now seek her out again only for that object?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am engaged this evening,” and moved towards the door.

  “You lie,” said Dicky furiously.

  She heard a key being fitted into the front door lock. She stood still, leaning back against the door and Dicky started forward, thinking she was about to faint.

  “It’s a lie,” he said, piteously now, and she knew that he had only just seen her suspicion which she had already forgotten, for her father was coming into the hall behind her.

  “Will you——?” he began.

  “Shut up,” she said in a sick whisper, and held up her hand for silence. He stood still in awed amazement, his mouth open, his hand outstretched in expostulation, while Colonel Belamy went through the hall into the study next door.

  As the study door shut, Celia leaned against the dining-room door and held on to the handle with fingers that he saw were trembling.

  “If you’re so frightened of being caught with me I’d better clear out,” said Dicky. “You won’t listen to me now anyway.”

  “Oh, it isn’t you,” she just breathed.

  And indeed she did not seem to be aware of him. He could not understand it at all. Her eyes were almost closed and he could see how white were their lids, how blue the veins on them. She was distressingly like porcelain, but no china figure was ever allowed to express an emotion comparable to that of her tortured lips.

  “Celia,” he said meltingly, “won’t you listen to me? I’m not asking you now to come to Gordon’s. I was a fool to ask it, a vulgar fool if you like, but my folly was in trusting to your sweet generosity. Celia, when you go frozen like that before my eyes I don’t know what I shall do, stab you, I believe, in order to restore you to life. I know all you’re thinking——”

  “You don’t. It’s not that. I——”

  “There you go again, all lying denials in order to be dignified. What’s the use of it when I see you white and shaking?”

  “Yes, but it’s not you, it’s——”

  “There you go, putting on your insane pride again, as though it could hide you from me. It’s too late for pride now for either of us. I’ll admit anything. What do you want? That I’m a climber, using you as a rung of the ladder? Didn’t you want to be of use to me? Isn’t half the secret of your fascination for me that you are above me, and doesn’t that have some attraction for you too?”

  “Oh! Do you mean——?”

  “No, I don’t. You don’t patronize me, you could never do that, but you are sick of gentility and you don’t altogether hate me for being a bounder. Aren’t all motives mixed? It’s true that Gordon’s note brought me here, now, this moment, but it’s true also that I swore I wouldn’t see you again till I had something to show for myself. It’s all mixed up. How can I cut my ambition into a neat half, distinct from my love of you? How can I dissociate you from your clothes, your surroundings, your training, everything that makes you you?”

  “How cleverly he talks,” thought Celia stupidly, but at that moment he fell silent, staring at her.
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  “It’s no good,” he said at last, slowly. “You’ll always believe of me what is perfectly true. You fool, can’t you see that everything is true, that you can make people what you think them?”

  There was no doubting his sincerity ; he was groping not for his words but for his thoughts.

  “I am somebody else too,” he said dispiritedly and looked round the room as if for something he had lost. Suddenly he flamed up again, passionately imploring.

  “You know that, you more than anyone. Don’t let me lose it. There was a night on the leads long ago when I saw what success could mean, or perhaps it was failure. I’m not sure which. I don’t want to be smothered with roses till I’m blind and stupid and fat and beastly. For God’s sake, no, for my sake, stick to me, Celia, don’t see me like that, don’t, don’t.”

  And seizing her hand he went down on his knees to her.

  “Remember the glass!” she cried, and checked herself in terror lest the sound should have reached the study next door.

  Dicky sprang up, saw and misinterpreted her agitation, caught her to him and kissed her, clumsily, recklessly, without a trace of his former cunning and deliberate reserve.

  Memories, suspicions, accusations, protestations, what were they all but a fog of words? Now everything was clear. They fell back and stared at each other, amazed at the sudden light.

  “What fools we’ve been!” said Celia or Dicky or both.

  “Yes, what utter fools,” said the other or both, and kissed again, this time with a quiet intensity that lifted their embrace into a trance while their feet scrunched broken glass.

  Dicky did not hear it, Celia did. Here was the complete and perfect moment of her life, and she had to remember the glass and the study wall and her father behind it.

  She said, “What does anything matter after all? “and he answered in devout tones :

  “Nothing.”

  She said,” I’ll come with you to Gordon’s dinner, Dicky.”

  He said,” Celia! “

  They heard Colonel Belamy moving about in the study and their next kiss was suspended between two breathless mouths.