“But do you mean when you lose things — or in your life?”
“I mean when I lose things — or when I want to get something I want — I am very nearly ALWAYS successful. And I always feel there is some sort of higher power which does it for me.”
“Finds your cloak for you.”
“Yes. Wasn’t it extraordinary? I felt when I saw my cloak in Scotland Yard: There, I KNEW I should recover you. And I always feel, as I say, that there is some higher power which helps me. Do you feel the same?”
“No, not that way, worse luck. I lost a batch of music a month ago which didn’t belong to me — and which I couldn’t replace. But I never could recover it: though I’m sure nobody wanted it.”
“How very unfortunate! Whereas my fur cloak was just the thing that gets stolen most.”
“I wished some power would trace my music: but apparently we aren’t all gifted alike with guardian angels.”
“Apparently not. And that is how I regard it: almost as a gift, you know, that my fairy godmother gave me in my cradle.”
“For always recovering your property?”
“Yes — and succeeding in my undertakings.”
“I’m afraid I had no fairy godmother.”
“Well — I think I had. And very glad I am of it.”
“Why, yes,” said Aaron, looking at his hostess.
So the dinner sailed merrily on.
“But does Beethoven make you feel,” said Aaron as an afterthought, “in the same way — that you will always find the things you have lost?”
“Yes — he makes me feel the same faith: that what I lose will be returned to me. Just as I found my cloak. And that if I enter into an undertaking, it will be successful.”
“And your life has been always successful?”
“Yes — almost always. We have succeeded with almost everything.”
“Why, yes,” said Aaron, looking at her again.
But even so, he could see a good deal of hard wornness under her satisfaction. She had had her suffering, sure enough. But none the less, she was in the main satisfied. She sat there, a good hostess, and expected the homage due to her success. And of course she got it. Aaron himself did his little share of shoe-licking, and swallowed the taste of boot-polish with a grimace, knowing what he was about.
The dinner wound gaily to an end. The ladies retired. Sir William left his seat of honour at the end of the table and came and sat next to Aaron, summoning the other three men to cluster near.
“Now, Colonel,” said the host, “send round the bottle.”
With a flourish of the elbow and shoulder, the Colonel sent on the port, actually port, in those bleak, post-war days!
“Well, Mr. Sisson,” said Sir William, “we will drink to your kind Providence: providing, of course, that we shall give no offence by so doing.”
“No, sir; no, sir! The Providence belonged to Mr. Lilly. Mr. Sisson put his money on kindly fortune, I believe,” said Arthur, who rosy and fresh with wine, looked as if he would make a marvelous bonne bouchee for a finely-discriminating cannibal.
“Ah, yes, indeed! A much more ingratiating lady to lift our glasses to. Mr. Sisson’s kindly fortune. Fortuna gentil-issima! Well, Mr. Sisson, and may your Lady Fortune ever smile on you.”
Sir William lifted his glass with an odd little smirk, some touch of a strange, prim old satyr lurking in his oddly inclined head. Nay, more than satyr: that curious, rather terrible iron demon that has fought with the world and wrung wealth from it, and which knows all about it. The devilish spirit of iron itself, and iron machines. So, with his strange, old smile showing his teeth rather terribly, the old knight glowered sightlessly over his glass at Aaron. Then he drank: the strange, careful, old-man’s gesture in drinking.
“But,” said Aaron, “if Fortune is a female — -”
“Fortune! Fortune! Why, Fortune is a lady. What do you say, Major?”
“She has all the airs of one, Sir William,” said the Major, with the wistful grimness of his age and culture. And the young fellow stared like a crucified cyclops from his one eye: the black shutter being over the other.
“And all the graces,” capped Sir William, delighted with himself.
“Oh, quite!” said the Major. “For some, all the airs, and for others, all the graces.”
“Faint heart ne’er won fair lady, my boy,” said Sir William. “Not that your heart is faint. On the contrary — as we know, and your country knows. But with Lady Fortune you need another kind of stout heart — oh, quite another kind.”
“I believe it, sir: and the kind of stout heart which I am afraid I haven’t got,” said the Major.
“What!” said the old man. “Show the white feather before you’ve tackled the lady! Fill the Major’s glass, Colonel. I am quite sure we will none of us ever say die.”
“Not likely. Not if we know it,” said the Colonel, stretching himself heartily inside his tunic. He was becoming ruddier than the cherry. All he cared about at the moment was his gay little port glass. But the Major’s young cheek was hollow and sallow, his one eye terribly pathetic.
“And you, Mr. Sisson,” said Sir William, “mean to carry all before you by taking no thought for the morrow. Well, now, we can only wish you success.”
“I don’t want to carry all before me,” said Aaron. “I should be sorry. I want to walk past most of it.”
“Can you tell us where to? I am intrigued, as Sybil says, to know where you will walk to. Come now. Enlighten us.”
“Nowhere, I suppose.”
“But is that satisfactory? Can you find it satisfactory?”
“Is it even true?” said the Major. “Isn’t it quite as positive an act to walk away from a situation as to walk towards it?”
“My dear boy, you can’t merely walk away from a situation. Believe that. If you walk away from Rome, you walk into the Maremma, or into the Alban Hills, or into the sea — but you walk into something. Now if I am going to walk away from Rome, I prefer to choose my direction, and therefore my destination.”
“But you can’t,” said the Major.
“What can’t you?”
“Choose. Either your direction or your destination.” The Major was obstinate.
“Really!” said Sir William. “I have not found it so. I have not found it so. I have had to keep myself hard at work, all my life, choosing between this or that.”
“And we,” said the Major, “have no choice, except between this or nothing.”
“Really! I am afraid,” said Sir William, “I am afraid I am too old — or too young — which shall I say? — to understand.”
“Too young, sir,” said Arthur sweetly. “The child was always father to the man, I believe.”
“I confess the Major makes me feel childish,” said the old man. “The choice between this or nothing is a puzzler to me. Can you help me out, Mr. Sisson? What do you make of this this-or-nothing business? I can understand neck-or-nothing — -”
“I prefer the NOTHING part of it to the THIS part of it,” said Aaron, grinning.
“Colonel,” said the old man, “throw a little light on this nothingness.”
“No, Sir William,” said the Colonel. “I am all right as I am.”
“As a matter of fact, so are we all, perfectly A-one,” said Arthur.
Aaron broke into a laugh.
“That’s the top and bottom of it,” he laughed, flushed with wine, and handsome. We’re all as right as ninepence. Only it’s rather nice to talk.”
“There!” said Sir William. “We’re all as right as ninepence! We’re all as right ninepence. So there well leave it, before the Major has time to say he is twopence short.” Laughing his strange old soundless laugh, Sir William rose and made a little bow. “Come up and join the ladies in a minute or two,” he said. Arthur opened the door for him and he left the room.
The four men were silent for a moment — then the Colonel whipped up the decanter and filled his glass. Then he stood up and clinked g
lasses with Aaron, like a real old sport.
“Luck to you,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Aaron.
“You’re going in the morning?” said Arthur.
“Yes,” said Aaron.
“What train?” said Arthur.
“Eight-forty.”
“Oh — then we shan’t see you again. Well — best of luck.”
“Best of luck — ” echoed the Colonel.
“Same to you,” said Aaron, and they all peered over their glasses and quite loved one another for a rosy minute.
“I should like to know, though,” said the hollow-cheeked young Major with the black flap over his eye, “whether you do really mean you are all right — that it is all right with you — or whether you only say so to get away from the responsibility.”
“I mean I don’t really care — I don’t a damn — let the devil take it all.”
“The devil doesn’t want it, either,” said the Major.
“Then let him leave it. I don’t care one single little curse about it all.”
“Be damned. What is there to care about?” said the Colonel.
“Ay, what?” said Aaron.
“It’s all the same, whether you care or don’t care. So I say it’s much easier not to care,” said Arthur.
“Of course it is,” said the Colonel gaily.
“And I think so, too,” said Aaron.
“Right you are! We’re all as right as ninepence — what? Good old sport! Here’s yours!” cried the Colonel.
“We shall have to be going up,” said Arthur, wise in his generation.
As they went into the hall, Arthur suddenly put one arm round Aaron’s waist, and one arm round the Colonel’s, and the three did a sudden little barn-dance towards the stairs. Arthur was feeling himself quite let loose again, back in his old regimental mess.
Approaching the foot of the stairs, he let go again. He was in that rosy condition when united-we-stand. But unfortunately it is a complicated job to climb the stairs in unison. The whole lot tends to fall backwards. Arthur, therefore, rosy, plump, looking so good to eat, stood still a moment in order to find his own neatly-slippered feet. Having found them, he proceeded to put them carefully one before the other, and to his enchantment found that this procedure was carrying him magically up the stairs. The Colonel, like a drowning man, clutched feebly for the straw of the great stair-rail — and missed it. He would have gone under, but that Aaron’s hand gripped his arm. So, orientating once more like a fragile tendril, he reached again for the banister rail, and got it. After which, lifting his feet as if they were little packets of sand tied to his trouser buttons, he manipulated his way upwards. Aaron was in that pleasant state when he saw what everybody else was doing and was unconscious of what he did himself. Whilst tall, gaunt, erect, like a murdered Hamlet resurrected in khaki, with the terrible black shutter over his eye, the young Major came last.
Arthur was making a stern fight for his composure. His whole future depended on it. But do what he would, he could not get the flushed, pleased, mess-happy look off his face. The Colonel, oh, awful man, did a sort of plump roly-poly-cake-walk, like a fat boy, right to the very door of that santum-sanctorum, the library. Aaron was inwardly convulsed. Even the Major laughed.
But Arthur stiffened himself militarily and cleared his throat. All four started to compose themselves, like actors going on the stage, outside that library door. And then Arthur softly, almost wistfully, opened and held the door for the others to pass. The Colonel slunk meekly in, and sat in a chair in the background. The Major stalked in expressionless, and hovered towards the sofa where his wife sat.
There was a rather cold-water-down-your-back feeling in the library. The ladies had been waiting for coffee. Sir William was waiting, too. Therefore in a little tension, half silent, the coffee was handed round. Lady Franks was discussing something with Arthur’s wife. Arthur’s wife was in a cream lace dress, and looking what is called lovely. The Major’s wife was in amethyst chiffon with dark-red roses, and was looking blindingly beautiful. The Colonel was looking into his coffee-cup as wistfully as if it contained the illusion of tawny port. The Major was looking into space, as if there and there alone, etc. Arthur was looking for something which Lady Franks had asked for, and which he was much too flushed to find. Sir William was looking at Aaron, and preparing for another coeur a coeur.
“Well,” he said, “I doubt if you will care for Milan. It is one of the least Italian of all the towns, in my opinion. Venice, of course, is a thing apart. I cannot stand, myself, that miserable specimen the modern Roman. He has most of the vices of the old Romans and none of the virtues. The most congenial town, perhaps, for a stranger, is Florence. But it has a very bad climate.”
Lady Franks rose significantly and left the room, accompanied by Arthur’s wife. Aaron knew, silently, that he was summoned to follow. His hostess had her eye on him this evening. But always postponing his obedience to the cool commands of women, he remained talking with his host in the library, and sipping creme de menthe! Came the ripple of the pianoforte from the open doorway down at the further end of the room. Lady Franks was playing, in the large drawing-room. And the ripple of the music contained in it the hard insistence of the little woman’s will. Coldly, and decidedly, she intended there should be no more unsettling conversations for the old Sir William. Aaron was to come forthwith into the drawing room. Which Aaron plainly understood — and so he didn’t go. No, he didn’t go, though the pianoforte rippled and swelled in volume. No, and he didn’t go even when Lady Franks left off playing and came into the library again. There he sat, talking with Sir William. Let us do credit to Lady Franks’ will-power, and admit that the talk was quite empty and distracted — none of the depths and skirmishes of the previous occasions. None the less, the talk continued. Lady Franks retired, discomfited, to her piano again. She would never break in upon her lord.
So now Aaron relented. He became more and more distracted. Sir William wandered away like some restless, hunted soul. The Colonel still sat in his chair, nursing his last drop of creme de menthe resentfully. He did not care for the green toffee-stuff. Arthur was busy. The Major lay sprawled in the last stages of everything on the sofa, holding his wife’s hand. And the music came pathetically through the open folding-doors. Of course, she played with feeling — it went without saying. Aaron’s soul felt rather tired. But she had a touch of discrimination also.
He rose and went to the drawing-room. It was a large, vacant-seeming, Empire sort of drawing-room, with yellow silk chairs along the walls and yellow silk panels upon the walls, and a huge, vasty crystal chandelier hanging from a faraway-above ceiling. Lady Franks sat at a large black Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat, a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen Victoria in Max Beerbohm’s drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur’s wife was bending over some music in a remote corner of the big room.
Aaron seated himself on one of the chairs by the wall, to listen. Certainly it was a beautiful instrument. And certainly, in her way, she loved it. But Aaron remembered an anthem in which he had taken part as a boy.
His eye is on the sparrow
So I know He watches me.
For a long time he had failed to catch the word sparrow, and had heard:
His eye is on the spy-hole
So I know He watches me.
Which was just how it had all seemed to him, as a boy.
Now, as ever, he felt the eye was on the spy-hole. There sat the woman playing music. But her inward eye was on the spy-hole of her vital affairs — her domestic arrangements, her control of her household, guests and husband included. The other eye was left for the music, don’t you know.
Sir William appeared hovering in the doorway, not at all liking the defection of Mr. Aaron. Then he retreated. He seemed not to care for music. The Major’s wife hovered — felt it her duty to aude, or play audience �
�� and entered, seating herself in a breath of lilac and amethyst again at the near distance. The Major, after a certain beating about the bush, followed and sat wrapt in dim contemplation near his wife. Arthur luckily was still busy with something.
Aaron of course made proper musical remarks in the intervals — Arthur’s wife sorted out more pieces. Arthur appeared — and then the Colonel. The Colonel tip-toed beautifully across the wide blank space of the Empire room, and seated himself on a chair, rather in the distance, with his back to the wall, facing Aaron. When Lady Franks finished her piece, to everybody’s amazement the Colonel clapped gaily to himself and said Bravo! as if at a Cafe Chantant, looking round for his glass. But there was no glass. So he crossed his neatly-khakied legs, and looked rapt again.
Lady Franks started with a vivace Schumann piece. Everybody listened in sanctified silence, trying to seem to like it. When suddenly our Colonel began to spring and bounce in his chair, slinging his loose leg with a kind of rapture up and down in the air, and capering upon his posterior, doing a sitting-down jig to the Schumann vivace. Arthur, who had seated himself at the farthest extremity of the room, winked with wild bliss at Aaron. The Major tried to look as if he noticed nothing, and only succeeded in looking agonised. His wife studied the point of her silver shoe minutely, and peeped through her hair at the performance. Aaron grimly chuckled, and loved the Colonel with real tenderness.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 323