Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “Oh, my dear,” she cried all in a breath, “I saw in the papers that you had landed at Plymouth yesterday, and I knew that you would come and see me this morning, and oh I have done the most terrible thing!”

  In spite of his distress, Strickland could not but laugh.

  “I am quite sure you have,” he answered.

  It was one of her pleasant ways to greet her friends as though they had parted from her late on the night before, however long the interval had actually been. Friendship was resumed without awkwardness because it had never been broken. There was no recovery of lost ground, for no ground had been lost. She was at home with her visitor on the instant.

  “Yes,” she explained. “I wondered how I’d look with my hair a Venetian red, whether I would really look like a girl out of a picture by Tiepolo. So I thought I’d try just a tiny bit you know, which wouldn’t really matter much if things went wrong. But the dye wasn’t Venetian red to begin with and I did much more than I meant to, besides, I got a prescription to take the dye out again,” — she nodded towards her boiling kettle— “but it doesn’t work at all. Isn’t it too awful for words?”

  She snatched the handkerchief from her head and gazed at herself sadly in the mirror over her mantel-shelf. Strickland saw a small bobbed head of very fair, curly and shining hair which was parted upon the left side; and from the parting across to the right ran a broad, glowing strand of vivid scarlet. With her slim, straight and supple figure she had almost the look of a greatly-wronged and very indignant boy. Only no boy ever had her delicate colouring, or the whiteness of her skin, or the smooth oval of her face and the soft curve of her lips, or those big curiously light-blue eyes, which could darken to sapphire in distress, and break up into sparkles of gold when humour touched her spirit.

  “Yes, it’s terrible, Ariadne,” Strickland gravely agreed.

  “I shall just have to cover it up as best I can and let it grow out,” she said.

  “It’s the only way,” said he.

  “Meanwhile I shall look like a macaw.”

  “That can’t be helped,” said Strickland.

  Ariadne broke into a laugh. Her face, like her parlour, was likely to surprise the stranger who had only read of her doings.

  For it was quiet rather than vivacious; it had so much more of the Madonna than the sprite. It was not indeed until she laughed that the sprite took possession of her, but even then its prisoner preserved an air of dignity.

  “Strickland,” she cried suddenly with a change of voice. She took his arm and drew him over to the divan. “Sit there! Now take a cigarette out of that box beside you and give me one. Now take a match and light them both.” She flung herself down on the left of him and asked her question.

  “Do you know my Ransome?”

  “The world isn’t big enough to hold it.”

  “Don’t be foolish or misunderstand me.”

  “It’s true then?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a moment’s silence — hardly noticeable at all. Strickland was contented with himself so far. His voice had not been falsely flippant nor had it carried any poignant accent of regret. So long as he avoided looking Ariadne straight in the face he had a very good chance of keeping his secret to himself.

  “I congratulate you,” he said. He laid his left hand upon hers which were clasped upon her knees, whilst he turned to his right to knock the ash of his cigarette into the ash-tray.

  “Put it here between us, for I shall want it too,” Ariadne commanded.

  The ash-tray was duly placed on the divan between them.

  “Did you have trouble over your engagement?” he asked.

  Ariadne nodded.

  “A little. Of course I’m a disappointment.” She leaned forward with her chin propped upon her hands and gloomily contemplated her shining shoes. “I can see that myself. But the people I care about have been good as gold. As for the others, I never could satisfy them anyway, could I?”

  “Ariadne, you could not,” Strickland said fervently.

  Ariadne laughed again and her face cleared.

  “The creatures I detest,” she flashed out, “are not the old people, the Victorians. They’re often and often the most sympathetic of all — I suppose because they remember how secretly they had to snatch their liberty when they were young. Anyway, they’ve been darlings. The women I can’t stand are the superior young ones who read half a page of André Gide between two rubbers of bridge and are sure they know everything. As for me, I’m old-fashioned. Don’t laugh, Strickland,” she pleaded wistfully. “I am!”

  “I wasn’t laughing. I should have called you more than old-fashioned.”

  “What?”

  “Primitive.”

  Both of them very seriously considered the epithet, for which there was a good deal of reason. Ariadne might call her friends and her lovers by their surnames and jump in a gorgeous riot through all the conventions as though they were so many paper hoops and she on the back of a circus horse. But in the essentials primitive did not inaptly describe her. She proceeded to give her visitor an instance.

  “Yes, Ransome’s my man,” she said. “I have known it ever since one dreadful night in January.” She broke off and suddenly gurgled with merriment. “I have got to tell you about it.”

  “I want to hear,” said Strickland.

  “I went to a party in Chelsea — you know everybody sat on a cushion on the floor and there were barrels of oysters and it took a long while to get going. You know the sort of entertainment. It was quite out of date even then, though a lot of them, including the host, didn’t know it. Julian was there, of course.”

  “So he has a Christian name!” cried Strickland in surprise.

  “How can you interrupt me so foolishly!” she exclaimed. “I am telling you something serious. There was a girl on the cushion next to me, and she had a quite new drug. At least she said it was new and no one could contradict her. So of course she was the success of the evening; and as proud as two peacocks. Of course I wanted to try her drug. You can understand that, Strickland, can’t you? Yes, but understand it without interrupting,” she added hastily.

  Strickland did not interrupt and Ariadne resumed her story.

  “I had got to try it. She gave me one of her cachets, and nothing happened at all — not the least little bit of an Oriental vision. Oh, I was disappointed! So I borrowed another from her.”

  “‘Borrowed’ is good,” Strickland interjected.

  “And still nothing happened — no wonderful languors — no falling back of the walls and floating away in great spaces of stars — just nothing. So I got annoyed, and took another. Something had got to happen — you see that. And it did. Oh, my dear, in a quarter of an hour I knew that I was dying. I felt — awful, I was sinking down and down into depth after depth. My heart wouldn’t beat. I have never known such misery. That was it. It wasn’t pain. It was sheer overwhelming misery.”

  Ariadne clasped her head between her hands and rocked her body. So vivid was her recollection of that evening that she suffered once more the distress which the poison had caused her.

  “I was frightened too,” she resumed with a gasp, “terribly frightened. I told you that I was old-fashioned, didn’t I? I was dying unprepared, with all my sins right on the top of me. Like the King in Hamlet, ‘unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed’. And everybody thought I was dying — all except Ransome. The man who gave the party wanted to call up a cab, so that I might die in a taxi rather than upset his old studio by dying there. The girl who gave me the cachets went off into hysterics, and all the rest were running about trying to find remedies which weren’t there, and more than half off their heads. All except Julian. He was wonderful.”

  “What did he do?” asked Strickland, and in spite of himself some sharp note of jealousy was very audible in his voice. Ariadne, however, was so completely living over again her unfortunate adventure that she passed it by unnoticed.

  “He just sat by my side on
a cushion, with his hair unruffled and his tie quite straight, just as if nothing of any importance at all was happening. When I moaned, I’m going now! I’m going! he patted my hand and said, ‘Not at all, Ariadne,’ just as if I had apologised for treading on his toes. And when I whispered with what I thought was my last breath, ‘Good-bye, my dear,’ he replied, That’ll be all right,’ like a man in a shop, when you tell him to take care and see that your parcel reaches home in time for tea. Not a sign of anxiety, you see, and not too much sympathy! Oh, invaluable when everyone else was for ringing up an undertaker and ordering my hearse. After an hour or so I began to come up from the depths. Somebody called up a taxi and Ransome drove me home. It was only when we were alone and I was safe that he showed that he too had been afraid. He held me crushed in his arms — he’s terribly strong — and all the way home my heart just sang to me, ‘This is ray man.’”

  She stopped. A gust of March wind shook the window panes. The fire in the grate spluttered. Strickland, aware that he must respond to her mood, had nevertheless not a word at his command. The humour with which she had told her little story only threw into greater relief the two pictures which were before his eyes and tortured him. The wise young lover, so wise in his comprehension of her, sitting by her side, neat as a new pin, his hair smooth and the butterfly bow of his white tie not a fraction out of the line, his manner commonplace and unconcerned. And the same young lover a few minutes afterwards holding her crushed in his arms in the cab— “he was so terribly strong.” The whole story was in those last words.

  Strickland tried to assure himself that this was just what he wanted for her, that it was just for some such consummation that he had started off upon his two years of wandering. But with her so close to him, with her breath upon his cheek, with now a hand, now a knee touching him, and the sound of her clear, fresh voice in his ears, he could not so assuage the fire of jealousy which burnt within him.

  Perhaps on that very night when Julian Ransome drove her home crushed in his arms, he, on the veranda of the bungalow at Mogok, had been maundering over some remote peril threatening her, in which his energy would be engaged — and, of course, triumphantly engaged! Vanity after all — that was all that his fine premonitions in fact amounted to — and a great flame of self-contempt blazed up in him. The peril had been here, in the studio at Chelsea, and young Julian Ransome, not he, had been on the spot to meet it.

  Ariadne broke in upon his bitter ruminations in a voice which warned him that his silence hurt her a little.

  “What have you to say to me?” she asked.

  Strickland took both her hands and bowed his head over them.

  “Bravo,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she answered and his secret was still his.

  But the next moment she made it still more difficult for him to keep it.

  “Do you know, that I always had an idea that I should marry you,” she said, and she quite misunderstood the gasp of his voice and the spasmodic recoil of his shoulders. For she went on with a laugh:

  “Oh, don’t be afraid You are quite safe now! But I did imagine that one day you would say to me, ‘Ariadne, marry me,’ and that I should drop my very prettiest curtsy and answer, ‘Thank you, kind sir, and what day shall we fix for the ceremony?’” She fell to silence for a moment, and since there was one still more cruel phrase which it was possible for him to hear, it was fated that on that March morning he should hear it. “What a woeful day it would have been, my dear, for you and me if I had met my Ransome afterwards!”

  And still Strickland kept his secret. For he answered and laughed as he answered:

  “Twenty-three can’t mate with forty-two when there are any number of desirable twenty-sixes and twenty-sevens clamouring for the privilege.”

  This philosophy, indeed, had been the real cause and secret of his wanderings. He had thought to leave the field free for youth to capture youth; and that he had done with success. He had believed, too, that his own inappropriate passion would, in Ariadne’s absence, soon diminish to a steady, painless friendship. There, however, his judgment had failed him.

  Ariadne rose from the divan with one of her abrupt movements and ran across the room to the piano. She sat down upon the music-stool and running her fingers over the notes sang to him a verse of a song. Strickland followed her and looked over her shoulder. The music upon the stand was written in manuscript.

  “Is that story true, too?” he asked.

  “That I am going to play Sonia the Witch? Of course it is. We open the last week in July.”

  She sang another verse.

  “Isn’t there a certain amount of incompatibility,” Strickland asked, “between marrying a rising young politician and taking the lead in a musical comedy?”

  Ariadne took her hands from the keys. She lifted again the burning cigarette which she had balanced on the edge of the lid of the piano and replaced it between her lips. Then she turned to Strickland with the kindest look of pity upon her face.

  “Dear thing,” she said gently, “there would have been in the days of Mr. Disraeli.”

  Then she took him by the sleeve and dragged him back to the divan. The blue of her eyes deepened and softened. A courageous heart looked at him out of them.

  “Listen to me!” she explained. “It’s all according to plan. We have between us about twopence-halfpenny a year, if that. Well, a girl can make money at once whilst she’s young, a man must have time. That’s clear, isn’t it? I have just the evanescent sort of qualities which can make money, whilst Julian makes his way. Then my turn will be over and his will begin. I can command a good deal of money, I think, until — perhaps, I am thirty-one or two. Then I shall stand aside and he will carry on.”

  In the last words her voice shook, her eyes lost their fine bravery. She was in the grip of some misgiving. She shivered.

  “You mean, if he’s strong enough?”

  “Oh, no, no,” Ariadne was quick to reply. “I don’t doubt that. No; the fear I have, the fear that all women in love must have, is that when I stand aside, a little tired perhaps, a little worn, no longer the glossy creature you’re so amused with, he will leave me behind him.”

  She sat very still with brooding eyes for a little space of time. Then she jumped up and went over to the window. She stood with her back to him, setting apart the marriages which she knew to have become catastrophes from the marriages where unity had been retained. There were many more of the former category, no doubt, but there were after all not a few of the latter, enough to enhearten her. The first sheen and glamour had worn off, no doubt, but the stuff below had been durable enough to keep a couple of hearts warm through many years.

  She swung back into the room.

  “There!” she cried. “You have now the whole life and adventures of Ariadne Ferne. Tell me something about her friend John Strickland.”

  “I will,” said he, and he fumbled in his pocket. “John Strickland bought a ruby at the ruby mines of Burma.”

  “For me?” cried Ariadne, clapping her hands.

  “For you.”

  He placed in her hands the little pouch of black velvet, and with a thrill of excitement she opened it. When the great jewel glowed upon the white palm of her slim hand, with such a fire that it seemed her flesh must burn, she uttered a little cry of amazement and delight. Then slowly her face grew serious and her eyes clouded.

  “John?” she said in a questioning voice.

  The size and beauty of the stone troubled her. She recalled some curious silences this morning when she had expected a quick and gay reply, some evasions and — yes — a reluctance to meet her eyes.

  “John!” she said again. “Let me look at you!”

  She took him by the arms and turned him to her so that they stood face to face.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said in a whisper.

  Strickland’s secret was his no longer. Ariadne knew, although no word had been spoken, that he had brought to her that morning not merely a ruby but an
offer of marriage.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said gently, and she was filled with consternation at the light words which, upon this very subject, she had this morning used.

  She had a thought to give him back the ruby as a present offered to her under a misconception. But her kindness checked her. By taking long thought, she could hardly manage to hurt him more than she would hurt him quite undesignedly, if she refused his gift. On an impulse of compunction, and without a trace of coquetry, she clasped suddenly the ruby against her heart.

  “Thank you! I shall treasure this stone very dearly and all my life,” she said with a smile.

  As she tucked it away into its pouch, with her neat, slim fingers, Strickland had a fancy that she was putting away his heart under a velvet pall. He shook himself with annoyance, and climbed back on to the safe ground of practical things.

  “But it’s to be worn,” he said.

  “I shall wear it, never fear,” she answered, catching his humour. “One doesn’t hide priceless rubies under the mattress.”

  “How will you wear it?”

  “It’s too big for a ring. It would be lost on a bracelet. I should want another for my ears. As a pendant then.”

  Strickland looked at his watch.

  “Let us walk up Bond Street now and fix it tip.” Ariadne nodded and left him standing in the room. She reappeared within a period miraculously short to him who remembered the endurance of cavaliers in the early years of the century. She wore a small bright blue hat upon her head and a dark coat of velours with a great collar of white fox, which framed her small face in snow.

  “Come along, Strickland,” she cried, and she ran down the stairs in front of him.