Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  “Of course,” and she didn’t mind ; she only minded that the reason of his wish to be seen with Damaris was so exactly what her mother’s might have been, for Damaris was the niece of a Duke. But then her mother would never have admitted the reason.

  Dicky seemed rather apologetic about her. “She hasn’t got any nose, of course. The Bankshires haven’t you know.”

  “When do her eyes snap?” asked Celia, “for I never noticed her eyes at all. Or haven’t the Bankshires got any, either?”

  “Well, they are rather apt to leave their features on the dressing-table. But you didn’t really see her just now. She hadn’t started the evening yet. She only comes alive at night. What the hell has happened to that waiter?”

  In long overdue time he was resuscitated and told them there was no chicken mayonnaise, no Russian salad, and no tomato soup. By the time they had chosen substitutes he had again vanished.

  But they did not mind. They had so much to talk about, for Dicky was explaining all about the option and if he got it, it would all be owing to a lucky chance and his consummate nerve in taking it, for he had seen a famous actor manager at a table near when he was dining with some people at Romano’s, and he had gone straight up to him and said, “Will you read my play? I think it is what you want.”

  He should have heard to-day, he was certain to hear by to-morrow morning ; it was a good omen that they had run into that cheery party, it showed that everything went well with them. She said, “Yes, but I wish you hadn’t shown them my present first.”

  “Celia, darling, I never thought you’d mind. Yes, I did, but I hoped you wouldn’t, I thought you’d understand. I wanted to get them away from that chattering foreigner. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and there we were talking about Chinese things. Do say you understand.”

  She understood. But the words “chattering foreigner” made a frightened laughter in her brain.

  He went on eagerly, “I’ll show it to you now, this moment.”

  “Is it the moment? It wasn’t before.”

  “Yes, of course it is. Don’t let’s spoil it. Only—oh God, what was it they said? It is spoilt.”

  He flung it on the table and sat scowling at it. The small bottle was of a strange and livid blue, and through this harshly predominating colour there showed the thin lines of a painted scene on the one side, of a scrap of Chinese writing on the other.

  “But Dicky, it’s adorable. What is it? And what a lovely stopper! Why, it’s a rose crystal.”

  She pulled it out and there was a scent of jasmine and ammonia. Attached to the rose crystal was a tiny flat spoon. She exclaimed at finding that that too was a violent blue.

  “It’s all blue,” he said, “bluer and bluer. It wasn’t half as blue as that just now. It wasn’t blue at all to start with. It’s a Chinese snuff bottle,” he added morosely, “and I filled it with smelling salts. I suppose that was a mistake. Everything I do is a mistake.”

  It was a mistake. The acid in the salts had corroded the spoon and the chemical had changed the colour of both spoon and salts. Dicky sat regarding them with a sullen anger that was more than half fear. The bottle was his omen of success in love as in life and it had turned blue on him.

  She saw the superstitious anguish in his eyes and assured him sharply that of course it wasn’t spoilt, they had only got to remove the salts and it would be just the same as before. She removed as much as she could with the spoon in the stopper but it was too small to reach down very far. They would have to ask for a skewer.

  He uttered a yell which made Celia leap from her chair in primaeval terror ; he had, he explained, caught a glimpse of the waiter, but the only effect of his unusual summons, as far as they could judge by the results, was to drive him once again into the deepest recesses of the earth.

  Dicky began to search the ground for a dropped hairpin to serve instead of a skewer. The slanting sun revealed threads of gossamer in the grass, they shimmered in rainbow colours before his eyes, mocking them with a mirage of unreal happiness. There was Celia having to scoop out all the jasmine-scented salts he had so ingeniously inserted into the bottle. It had been such a good idea, appropriate both to her and the bottle, and it was a mistake, it was a failure, “it is a shame,” he thought, and he was glad he was on his hands and knees looking for an impossible hairpin, for the sun was making rainbows not only of the threads in the grass but of the tears on his eyelashes.

  If he showed his face to Celia, she would pity him divinely, but might she not also secretly despise him a little? would she remember that Ronny never cried? did Ronny never cry? would she remember he was a foreigner? Not that he was ashamed of it. Why should he be? But he had just spoken of the Prince as a foreigner. It was a slip, of course. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  “Damn the thing,” he said, rising from his knees ; “it’s not worth bothering about. I’ll get you something else twice as pretty.”

  Celia was at work with a long brooch pin. “I’m getting it out. It’s coming all right.”

  “It’s not all right. It’s spoilt. It’s spoilt twice over, by my messing it up and by my showing it to that half tipsy crowd.”

  “Oh, what nonsense, Dicky! I didn’t mind, indeed I didn’t, and I thought they were delightful.”

  “You thought that because you were half tipsy yourself.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You was—you were, I mean. Or you wouldn’t have thought them delightful. I tell you it’s spoilt. You’re not going to have a spoilt present.”

  He snatched it from her and threw it on the rainbow-threaded grass.

  Like some obscene bat or bird of darkness the waiter was upon them, bearing two plates of pale soup. His senile coat and grin of feeble malice struck chill to their hearts, the soup struck nearly as chill.

  “Come,” said Dicky, seeing that Celia was blinking her eyelashes much as he had done in his pursuit of the hairpin, and therefore feeling much more manly. “We may as well make the best of this.”

  They made the best of it. They had sat down at that table at 8 o’clock. They rose from it at 9.30. They commented on the view, the sunset, anything but the snuff bottle. Celia remarked brightly that where every prospect pleases, only man is vile ; Dicky added that their waiter was sub-human. Nor were the cooks, or tin-openers, or whatever professional poisoners prepared their food, any less vile than he.

  At last they reached the coffee, but there was only one thing to be done with it, and they did it. It watered the earth. The chocolate ordered in its place for their famished appetites that craved some nourishing stimulant, was prepared with tepid mud and harboured a lump of congealed fat or possibly boiled milk skin at the bottom of each cup as if in a last derisive warning to them to dare to dine out of doors again in this fresh-air-loving country.

  “Another failure,” said Dicky tragically. He shot an odd, suspicious glance at Celia. She asked what he was thinking of ; he said “Nothing” mysteriously ; she felt frightened, it was as though he had seen something evil and terrible in her ; she could not guess that he was wondering if she brought him bad luck.

  She walked decisively over to where the bottle lay on the grass, brought it back to the table, gave a few final prods with the brooch pin, rinsed it out again and again with the contents of the dirty water jug. All the time her hands were shaking. “Oh what a pity—what a pity!” she whispered to herself. But she held it up to him in triumph.

  “Look! all the blue’s gone. You can see the picture much more clearly now. Oh, what a darling one! A mountain and a river and a little curved bridge like a rainbow. Dicky, it’s our rainbow bridge! Is that why you got it? I love it.”

  “Quite the little mother,” said Dicky.

  She threw the bottle at him.

  “I won’t stand it any longer. You’ve been beastly to me all through dinner, and it wasn’t my fault any more than yours. It was you said it first.”

  “Said what?” he drawled.

  “Oh, I don’t kn
ow. Said we’d dine here, of course. It isn’t that. It’s your sneering at me in that caddish way.”

  She had said it. She had called him caddish. She did not notice that the one unmentionable word had passed her lips, but he did, and he noticed also that she was stamping, flushed, and half crying, more alive than he had ever seen her and more adorably pretty. He held up the bottle and looked at it critically and spoke coolly but his hand shook.

  “Ya-as,” he said (and why on earth did he say it like that? was he really trying to talk like Ronny? and anyway Ronny didn’t say “Ya-as”). “The picture is clearer than before. But not nearly as clear as when I bought it. The lines are very faint and the colours are all blurred. It must be painted on the inside. That is very curious. I am quite ignorant of these things. That is my mistake.”

  His voice trembled ; he dropped the bottle and snatched at Celia’s hands.

  “I have never seen you look like that before,” he said. “It’s because you’re angry with me but that doesn’t matter. Celia, I’ve been a beast—no, a cad ; you said it first, you know. Oh, Celia, what’s the matter with us? Why do we quarrel so? Why do we make ourselves so exquisitely miserable? It’s all too much. Celia, do hang on to me. I don’t know what I should do if I hadn’t got you to hang on to. Everything’s come at once. Love. Life. Success. Money. Power. Pleasure. Happiness. It’s all there, all just ahead of me. I don’t know if I’m going to get it all or lose it all. I so easily might. I’m unlucky, at least I am sometimes. I got this bottle on the luckiest day of my life ; it was the turning-point, everything went well with me after that. But look what I’ve done to it now, look at this foul, filthy dinner, and just when those cocktails had made us so ravenous——”

  “Dicky, shut up. I won’t listen to you. A village idiot would have more sense.”

  “Yes, you’ve got sense but you’ve got no imagination. I am cursed with it.”

  “That’s right. Now give a hollow groan.”

  “Oh, you English upper classes! You impenetrable fools! You’re too much for me. It’s all too much. Can’t you see how it is? I’ve got my chance ; can I keep it? I may get a hundred pounds by the first post to-morrow and we could marry next day and move into that house. I may get a cable from New York to-morrow saying that my play’s been accepted there and I’m to go out at once. Anything may happen. Tomorrow, it’s always to-morrow ; the Spaniards say to-morrow never comes. I’m dining with your people to-morrow and I may conquer them ; on the other hand, I may make a ghastly mess of it, just as I have of the bottle, that was a clumsy gesture, a bêtise. Kensington doesn’t appreciate wit and impudence like Belgravia, and even then it’s got to be just the right kind of impudence and it’s so difficult to tell. I may live for thousands of to-morrows, all alike, all empty, never any luck. I’m crying. I don’t care. I’m only a foreigner. I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I’m anybody really. I just pretend to be different things. Sometimes I pretend to be very gay and successful and then everything’s gorgeous ; and then I pretend to be a lonely failure and I want to kill myself. But there’s nothing there inside me. I don’t even know if my love for you is real. I probably love you only as a reflection of myself. Sometimes I pretend on paper and write stories and that’s more respectable. But is there anything in them really? is there anything? Tell me, Celia, tell me truthfully, honestly if you can, is there anything at all in me?”

  “It can’t last, it can’t last,” she was thinking ; and it could not, the unbearable pain inside her relaxed, she found herself laughing and shaking him and saying, “There’s not enough dinner in you and too many cocktails, and that’s what’s the matter. Oh, Dicky, do pull up and let’s get away from here and that horrible old waiter. We shall be in time to hear the band if we go now, and I can’t stand being as unhappy as this any longer, I just can’t.”

  “What fools we are!”

  “Why are we so unhappy?”

  “Don’t you know why?”

  He was standing close to her ; he looked down into her face with dark and eager, beseeching eyes. They took his thoughts and put them into her and waited for her eyes to reflect them back to him. So it seemed to her, for she could not continue to meet those unbearably brilliant, questioning eyes.

  “Celia,” said Dicky, “Celia!”

  The waiter laid the bill on the table. He began to clear away the uneatable food. They had to move away. Dicky consented to put the bottle in his pocket for safety. They walked by an enchanted lake towards the turrets and minarets of a fairy palace floating in a pearl coloured twilight. They agreed they had always liked the Hyde Park Hotel from this angle. But they said nothing more about Venice or Constantinople.

  They drifted towards the band. High up in the trees, its scarlet circle lit with lamps, it was playing a pot-pourri of old dance tunes and comic songs of five and ten and thirty years ago. Celia heard a line of a song that Uncle Charles used to whistle.

  “They like me,” Dicky was saying irrelevantly. “Look at Damaris. She really wanted me to come with her crowd to-night. She’s nothing to me—how could she be beside you with her blank debauched face like a pushed-in turnip?—but it’s what she stands for, you can see that.”

  He fell silent as they entered the vast circle that drifted innumerable as a cloud of insects round the lights of the bandstand. The girls’ dresses were like fireflies when they passed into the light, like moths when they drifted again into the shadow of the great trees. Like moths or fireflies courting on a summer night, this immense circle was composed of couples, not attending much to the music, sometimes not even conscious of it, yet it formed an accompaniment to their ephemeral, eternal dance of which they were also hardly conscious.

  Celia and Dicky became part of it, drew closer as they wandered round and round, in and out of the light and shadow, talking in ever lower voices of closer, tenderer, more intimate things. They were a single couple in a mighty crowd, all moved by the same impulse, travelling the same circle.

  They talked of the two floors above the beauty shop in Birdcage Lane. They would make omelettes in the tiny kitchen and scrambled eggs and—and omelettes. They would get dreadfully bilious if they lived on nothing but eggs. Never mind, one could always get tongue and pressed beef and pickled pork and olives. Dicky would buy a cocktail shaker. But they would never ask a princess to tea who only drank gin.

  Dicky said Celia was made to perch on the crinolined balcony ; Leila had been far too tall. She should wear the flowered georgette he was to see for the first time to-morrow night and baskets of geranium should hang at her feet, and he would come along the street after dark in his red cloak and mask and serenade her on his mouth-organ.

  They even dared talk of the bottle again ; they looked at it and laughed and said, “What fools we were!—what utter, utter fools!” as though they had grown very old and wise since half an hour ago.

  The band played “God Save the King.” The circle stood still, broke up, and thousands of couples drifted away into the darkness.

  Dicky said in a high-strung, unnatural voice, “What we want is some hot soup. We can get it in jelly at Le Coche and heat it up. Come along.”

  She was a little surprised at his earnest tone but he had been rather strained all this evening. They went across the park to where through the trees they saw the lighted windows of some large room and the heads and shoulders of men and women bobbing up and down in a jerky, meaningless motion. A moment later they heard the dance music of the Hyde Park Hotel and could see the rhythm in what had seemed a senseless action.

  “How funny they looked!” they agreed.

  “Not a bit like dancing.”

  “Until one heard the music.”

  “Come along,” said Dicky urgently.

  They mounted on top of a bus and rocked and swung and rushed along to Rainbow Road. It was so hot, Celia defiantly pulled off her hat, her short hair was blown back from her face. “You look like a spirit astride on the wind,” whispered Dicky ;” your hair is pale
as light in this dusk. God, how I love you! I would burn in hell for you, Celia.”

  She tried to say, “Is there any need? “with a cool laugh. He ought to be snubbed for being so melodramatic, but her voice came all wrong and her laugh sounded unnatural, almost a giggle ; she wished she had kept silent. What did it matter what he said? It was his head that mattered, close beside her on the bus, the long head, the rather flat profile of the boy-emperor on the coin, and his eyes, turned towards her, already burning in hell, she thought, with a shivering fancy that made her laugh again in that nervous and inane way. Now she knew why common girls giggled in love, because it was all too much for them and they did not know what to say. She was common too. “My name is Cissie,” she said desperately.

  “What did you say? “but he did not wait for an answer. His arm was encircling her—luckily they were on the back seat—but” Dicky, you can’t kiss me here.”

  “Why not?”

  “The conductor,” she breathed faintly, hearing his step on the stairs. But he snatched a kiss before the conductor intoned, “Fares, please,” over their heads. He was grinning broadly. He must have seen.

  “What does it matter?”

  It didn’t. Nothing mattered. She did not know where they were going. It did not matter. Dicky was beside her ; they were blown in a bubble on a chance breeze, the vast shapes of the buildings were soft as velvet, the sky was sapphire. His whisper reached her ; she did not answer ; she did not much listen. It mattered so little what was said.

  “Celia, do you know how I love you? Will you let me love you? Celia, you are all light and air. I feel I can never hold you, never keep you for my own. I shall go mad if I do not know you are mine.”

  Suddenly he sprang from her and hit the bell; the bus stopped in full course with a shocking lurch ; they tottered and staggered down the steps. Now they were going down Rainbow Road, half running—Dicky was in such a hurry—into a blare of rhythmical noise which proceeded from a group of queer, brightly coloured figures under one of the lamp-posts ; one of them was pounding a movable piano, one was clattering spoons all over himself, and two tall ungainly girls in glittering headdresses were dancing in the middle of the road and singing in raucous voices. As they came up to them they saw that all were men but painted and dressed up in feathers, spangles, and gauze.