Chapter II: Balloons (2)

She lay on a sofa covered with white marabou, her head sunk deep into a billowy morass of lace-coloured satin and lace-coloured lace. She could see her pointed toes emerging and her arm dangling over the edge as if she had forgotten it. On her finger was a huge emerald ring, a splotch of creme de menthe spilt on the whiteness of her hand. She felt entrenched and anchored in an altogether strong position, so fixed that all advances would have to be made to her. This gave to her voice and to her gestures an indolent melodious security.

As the door opened she turned her eyes round slowly, suppressing all eagerness.

"Mortimer!" She wondered if disappointment could be as easily controlled as joy. "How nice of you to come and see me!"

"Are you glad--really?" He was kissing her hand with an unnecessary mixture of shyness and intensity.

"How intolerably literal people in love are," she thought petulantly; "always forcing significance into everything."

"Of course," she said, smiling lazily.

"It is good of you to let me come like this." How she hated his humility, but--"I like you to," she murmured, automatically kind.

"How lovely you look! Lovelier than ever before--as lovely as ever before." And then, "I love you."

"Do you think so?" She seemed amused and sceptical.

"Do you doubt it?" He clutched her wrist.

"Not if you put it like that."

"You are laughing at me," he recognised sadly.

"Forgive me." She put her hand on his, lightly, caressingly, her voice gentle and tender.

"But you do know it, don't you?" He was very insistent.

("Does he think that I am blind and deaf and that no one has ever loved me before?" she wondered irritably.)

"I think you think so," she prevaricated.

"I know," he was firm. "I shall love you always."

"Nonsense." She was tart with realism. "Why do you fly in the face of all experience with meaningless generalisations?"

"I have never said it before."

"Then how can you know?"

He hated her barrister mood.

"Elaine, aren't you glad I love you?"

"Of course." She closed her eyes wearily. They talked of other things and she remembered how intelligent he was. It had been--during these last months--very easy to forget. But though her interest was concentrated, his attention was on other things.

"Elaine," he blurted, "are you going to the country to-morrow?"

"I don't know."

"When will you know?"

"I have no idea!"

"But when shall I see you again?"

"I can't tell."

"Elaine, please do put me out of my misery."

"Very well then--I shan't see you again this week."

"Elaine!"

"Yes."

"Please."

"Please what?"

"I _am_ sorry I bothered you; don't punish me. I promise not to ask any more questions, but please let me know when you come back. Even if you only ring me up on the telephone I shall have heard your voice!"

"Very well."

"You're not angry with me, are you?"

"Why should I be?"

"I thought perhaps you were."

There was a pause. "Is there anything amusing about being loved?" she thought; "what patient women the great coquettes of the world must have been! How I wish I were a crisp intelligent old maid, with a talent perhaps for gardening or books on the Renaissance!"

"How tired you look!" He had taken her hand and was pressing it with funny little jerky grasps. "I wish you belonged to me; I wouldn't let you spend yourself on every Tom, Dick and Harry."

"It is so difficult to know," she murmured, "who is Tom, who is Dick, or who is Harry!"

"When I think of the way your divine sympathy is imposed upon--the way your friends take advantage of you!"

"But I like being taken advantage of."

"People's selfishness makes me sick. Look at your white face and your drooping eyelids, and your tired little smiles."

"I am sorry."

"Sorry! Good God! My beloved, do take care of yourself, please. Promise me not to see any one after I leave; go to bed and pull the blinds."

"But I am expecting Bill."

"Bill will be all the better for not getting what he wants for once."

"But supposing he doesn't want it?"

"I don't understand."

The door opened.

"Bill!" She put out her left hand, all her features lit up with a quiet luminous radiance. His eyes were smiling, but his mouth was grave.

"Elaine!" He said it as if it were a very significant remark, and, though he hadn't meant to, he caressed her name with his voice.

"Mortimer thinks I ought to go to bed and send you away."

"But you won't?"

"Probably not." She was bubbling over with gaiety. "I am very weak-minded."

The two men were not looking at one another, but currents of hostility flowed between them. Bill had not fought for Elaine's love; it had come to him with a strange inevitability. He had no fear of losing it and no particular desire to keep it, but the thought that you possess something that some one else passionately covets is always exhilarating. He would never have admitted it--he could never have admitted it, but she was to him like an object dangled on a watch chain--not obtrusively displayed but a possession recognised by everybody and taken for granted by him. Only he never seemed bored because he was never tired of mobilising his own charms. And in herself, she delighted him--it was only in her relations with him that she got on his nerves. He loved to see her with other men exercising the divine arts of her irresistibility, her every smile, her every gesture, the intonations of her voice, the turn of her head, her bubbling brilliance, her cool indifference, the ice of her intellect, the glow of her sympathy, each contributing to the masterpiece of her coquetry. But with him she was not even a coquette--jerky, passionate, nervous, humble, exacting, dull--she tired him to death.

"Well, I must be going." Mortimer spoke doubtfully. There was a pause. Then Elaine pulled herself together.

"Why?"

"I have so much to do."

"It was so nice of you to come and see me."

"It was so nice of you to let me come. Please remember your promise to let me know when you come back."

"Of course." He was gone.

Wearily she shut her eyes. "Do you remember the time when Mortimer was charming?"

"Indeed I do; he was quite delightful till he fell in love with you. He is really a warning against loving."

"You hardly heed it, do you?" Her voice was very bitter. How he hated the entry of the acidulated tragic into all their talks.

"Perhaps not." He felt guilty, knowing how much he was hurting her. "After all you cannot ask me to model myself on the man who bores you most in the world."

She smiled. "What a good reason for not loving me!"

"The best!" He was smiling his enchanting, flattering smile at her--the smile that always seemed to draw you into the Holy of Holies of his confidence.

"I may be going away to-morrow," she said.

"May you?"

"But I shall be back on Thursday. Shall we dine together that night?"

"I am dining with a Russian friend of mine who is passing through London."

"Friday, then?"

"Friday I am going to the country for the week-end."

"Then it will have to be Monday."

"Yes, I am afraid so."

"Afraid that you will have to dine with me?"

"How civil you are!"

There was a pause. She wished she could keep all the acid out of her voice. He thought how tiresome women were, always wanting to know just what you were going to do.

"Bill," she said, holding out her hand, which he took rather perfunctorily. He felt like a dog that knows exactly which trick follows what word of command, but as, from force of habit, he invariably became lover-like when he was absent-minded, he stroked her arm with a significant caressing gesture that filled her with joy.

"Are you glad I love you?" she murmured.

"Of course."

"There is an intelligent woman," he thought, "who has had hundreds of men in love with her, making a demand for verbal assurances that can't possibly add anything to her peace of mind. Either they are true and superfluous, or they are false and transparently unconvincing."

"Bill," she said, reading his thoughts, "you can't understand my wanting mere words, can you?"

"No," he said, "not you, who know so exactly what they mean."

"Nevertheless, they are sometimes vaguely comforting and reassuring--a sort of local anaesthetic." He loved her insight, her curious layers of detachment.

"Bill," she murmured, "I haven't seen you for ages."

"Not since two this morning."

"I don't count a ball; besides I was too tired to stop dancing."

"You danced like an angel and your eyes were shining with ecstasy, lighting hopes all round, though of course I knew you didn't know your partner from the parquet--if he happened to be as good as the floor."

"You love watching me, don't you? much better than seeing me." How he wished she weren't always right.

"Remember what a wonderful drama you are, Elaine."

"A drama in which you have played lead. But you only liked the first act--the Comedy Act, and you won't even enjoy the curtain as much as you think, because always there will be the nasty certainty of its some day going up again, and then you won't even be in the wings."

How diabolically clear-sighted she was!

"Bill, dearest," she held out her hand, "you are reaching the moment when you long to be the third person. You want a little rest. You have come to the point in the life of every lover when he prefers the husband to the wife."

But this was more than he could stand. A horrible shadow was being cast over his future, romance was shrinking before his eyes. Frightened, he bent down and kissed her. "Darling," he murmured, nestling his face in her neck, "what nonsense you talk."

Love, passion, romance, fidelity--all were vindicated by this deliberate act.

Her doubts, her certainties, subsided, vanished--hypnotised with happiness. "I was teasing," she lied.

"I must go," he said.

"No."

"Yes."

"Not just this moment, please; five more minutes."

"It will be just as difficult then."

"But I shall have had five more minutes."

"How practical you are!"

He stayed.

"I will write to you."

"Do."

"And I shall try and be back in time for tea Thursday, then I shall see you, in spite of your stupid Russian."

"If I can get away."

"Can't you bring him to dine with me?"

"I'm afraid not; he has asked some one else."

"Shall I have some forms printed with 'I miss you, bless you,' for you to sign and send me each day."

"Goose!"

"Well, at any rate, I shall have you properly on Monday."

"Yes."

"And please make a great effort about Thursday."

"Yes."

She drew him down to her, holding his face in her hands.

"It is silly to love at my time of life," she said; "I am too young. It is like wearing a lovely new dress to climb mountains in."

"You will always be young," he said; "you are eternal."

It was his considered view; he wished she weren't. Kissing her a little absently he walked to the door; then because he had always done so, he walked back.

"Bless you," he said. It was perfunctory and final. The shutting of the door turned out the light in her eyes.

"How tired I am!" she thought, and then--"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday--Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday."

IX

THE END

He knew that nothing could ever possibly happen to him again and so he sat on his sofa waiting--for death, he supposed, having excluded every other possibility. He didn't want to die, he didn't want to do anything, to eat or drink or feel or think--above all, he didn't want to move. He had shut his eyes trying to shut out the room. Every bit of it was saturated in her, everything had been consecrated--contaminated, it seemed to him now--by her touch. There wasn't a patch of carpet or chintz that didn't belong to her intimately and exclusively. Every object in the room seemed to pose her and add to the interminable picture gallery of his memory. He opened his eyes and saw an uncut pencil. Here, at any rate, was something new and independent--neutral territory, unsharpened it was an unloaded pistol and he wanted to shoot. At her? He was bound to miss. His bitterness was no medium through which to recapture her magic and without it he would merely be forcing a lay figure to perform vulgar and meaningless antics. And if he tore her to bits, it would be an indictment of himself, not of his gentlemanliness, that had long ceased to mean anything to him--but of his taste. Wearily, he shut his eyes. It was no good thinking when your mind had become a circle--a very small circle. He remembered something she had once said, "The future looks like the present, stretching interminably ahead in the shadow of the past." She had always understood everything, so she didn't deserve to be forgiven anything.

The front door bell rang and at once, he felt sick and faint. A ring still excited him as much as it had done in the days when it might have been hers. It was a ridiculous state of nerves that he had never been able to get out of.

A moment later she was in the room.

An absolute limpness had come over him. If his life had depended on it, he couldn't have lifted his hand. The surface of his mind examined every detail of her--the intense whiteness of her face and the severe blackness of her clothes, the fact that she wore no jewel of any sort, not even a ring--except, of course, her wedding-ring. He had never seen it before and it seemed a gaudy splash of colour out of harmony with the rest of her.

She took off her hat and laid it on the table. Then she walked to the window, touching the things she passed with a little caressing gesture. He noticed that she picked up the unpointed pencil and he felt a little desolate feeling, as if he had lost his only friend.

Suddenly, she turned round, "I am leaving England to-morrow," she said.

He shivered at her velvety voice, as he would have shivered had his hand touched suede. "Well," his voice was too natural to be natural, "you don't want to say good-bye to me again, do you?"

"Is there such a thing as 'good-bye,'" she mused; "won't this room always be a part of my life? Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?"

Relentlessly he brought her down from her generalisations.

"You have ended my life," he said.

"Oh, no." She was sitting beside him on the sofa. Gently and tentatively she put her hand on his. "Take it away," he said roughly, miserably, conscious that he was behaving like a hero of melodrama, and then more quietly, "can't you spare me anything?"

"I never could spare any one anything, could I? Not _even_ myself?"

He resisted the wistful pleading of her eyes, taking a savage pleasure in their tired look. No doubt the preparations for her journey had exhausted her. Her hand was lying limply on the arm of the sofa.

"What does it feel like to wear a wedding-ring?" he asked harshly.

"It feels so strange at first. One keeps catching sight of it and being made to feel different by it. Somehow, it really matters, it really seems to mean something."

"Indeed?" He was ashamed of the cheap cynicism of his tone. It wasn't what he had meant to say.

She waited a few minutes and then she got up and put on her hat, deftly arranging her veil with almost mechanical quickness and skill. Then she pulled on her gloves. How well he knew the swift deliberateness of her movements. Without turning round she left the room. He heard her go into the dining-room.... A few minutes later, he heard her come out again. He heard her open and shut the front door.... He went to the open window. Would she look up? Surely that was the test of whether or not she was still the same--the eternal. In the past, whatever had happened between them, she had never been able to resist that final peep, half to see whether he was there, half to send up a little tiny semi-binding glance of reconciliation. Sometimes, when he had been very angry with her he had watched from behind the curtains. To-day, he was at the open window, waiting to send her the smile which was to obliterate the past half-hour, the past six months. It was not to be so much a smile as a look, a benediction.

She got into her taxi. Through the far window she told the driver where to go. She never glanced behind her, she never glanced up.

He shut the window with a shiver. "The end," he murmured.

X

MISUNDERSTOOD

[_To JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES_]

Her greatness was an accepted fact. Her fame had not been a dashing offensive but an inevitable advance quietly over-running the world. People who never read knew her name as well as Napoleon's. There was, somehow, something a little irreverent about being her contemporary. To attend the birth of so many masterpieces gave you the feeling of a legendary past invading the present.

A few great critics wrote wonderfully about her, but a vast majority of them, trained only in witty disparagement and acute disintegrating perception, became empty and formal in face of an unaccustomed challenge to admiration and reverence.

It is only the generous who give to the rich, the big who praise the big; the niggardly salve their consciences in doles to the humbly poor, making life into a pilgrimage of greedy patrons in search of grateful victims.

June was radiantly removed from the possible inroads of charity. You couldn't even pretend to have discovered her--unless, of course, you had met her--then you were quite sure that you had. Her friends explained--as friends always do--that it was what she was, not what she did, that mattered, that her letters and her conversation were far more wonderful than her books, that she was her own greatest masterpiece.

It was irritating to be forced out of it like that, but when you had seen her you began doing the same thing.

It was impossible not to want to tell people that her hair was like a crisp heap of rusty October beech leaves, that she always had time for you. And then you began to explain that she was happily married, which led you to the fact that she was happy, which reminded you that you were happy, by which time no one was listening to you. But it didn't seem to matter. People would ask such silly questions about her. "Does she admire Dostoievski?" they would say, and you would answer, "She has the most enchanting brown squirrel----"

George wasn't thinking any of those things. His mind didn't work like that. He was eating a huge breakfast, with the "Times" propped up against his coffee pot. The two and a half columns about her new book annoyed him. He hated a woman to get herself talked about--June, too, of all people. There was nothing new-fangled about June. Why, his mother loved her and she was so pretty and so fond of clothes and babies. There was really no excuse for her sprawling over his paper when she ought to have been moving discreetly through the social column like his other female friends.

There was really no reason for a happy, cared-for woman to write. It wasn't even as if she had to earn her own living. Richard ought to put his foot down, but Richard didn't seem to mind. One might almost have thought that he was proud of his wife's reputation, if one hadn't known him to be such a manly man. After all, a woman's place was in her home--or the Court Circular. She should never stray from birth, deaths and marriages to other parts of the paper. Even the sporting news (though he liked a woman to play a good game of golf or a good game of tennis) was _hardly_ the place for a lady.

George knew that he was working himself up and he hated doing that at breakfast. So he started undoing the elaborate knot of a brown paper parcel to soothe his nerves--George never cut string. And out of it emerged her book--her new book. It was beautifully bound (she knew that he liked a book to look nice) and on the fly leaf was the inscription: "A leather cover, a little paper and my love."

It was as if she had sent him a box or a paper weight or a clock. It wasn't the gift, it was the thought that mattered. She knew that he had never read any of her books, but they were as good a vehicle for her affection as another.

"You are the only person," she had said to him, "to whom my books are really tokens," and she had smiled very radiantly as if he were the only person who had discovered the real secret of her books. George reflected sadly that he was the only person who understood her. Why, it was maddening to think that any one reading those paragraphs in the "Times" might imagine her middle-aged and ugly and spectacled. And how were they to know that her knowledge of cricket averages was probably greater than that of the Selection Committee? Probably, too, they pictured her with short hair, June, with her crinkling crown of autumn beach leaves; and thick ankles, June with her Shepperson legs; and blunt inky fingers, June with her rosy pointing nails and her hands like uncurling fans.

His mind went to other things, her low hard volleys and the lithe, easy grace with which she leapt over the lawn-tennis net. In thinking of her, the irritation her writing caused him decreased. It seemed altogether too irrelevant. June was the sort of woman one did things for. Helpless, he reflected with satisfaction, thinking of her tininess. Why, he could lift her up with one hand. George always mixed up physical phenomena with psychological fact. Small women were in need of protection; pale women were delicate; clever women were masculine--the greatest of all crimes. June might think it funny to be clever, but no one could deny that she was feminine--the sort of woman who appealed to you to do little tiny things for her (things you would have done in any case), as if they were very important and very dramatic and very difficult. George liked the sort of woman who said to him: "Mr. Carruthers, you who know everything----" It was apt, of course, to lead you into a lot of trouble, but that was one of the necessary results of being a man and having a superior intellect. June wasn't like that. She never asked you for legal advice or financial tips. She simply thought it most angelic of you to have fetched her coat and so clever of you to have noticed that it was getting chilly. And when you sent her flowers on her birthday, she would explain to you the flow of delight she had felt and perhaps a tiny little moment of surprise until she realised that of course it wasn't surprising at all, but just exactly what she knew at the bottom of her heart you would do--you, who were such a wonderful friend. Only the flowers were far more beautiful than she could have imagined and how had you been able to find them?

George had a photograph of June on his writing table. People were apt to stop short at it and say: "Is that the _great_ June Rivers, the writer?" And he would brush the question aside--one must be loyal--and say: "She is a friend of mine," rather stiffly, as if they had said that she had run away from her husband or been found drunk.

He looked at it this morning, and suddenly he felt that he must see her--a feeling she frequently inspired. He knew that she hated the telephone, so he sent her a little note.

"Dear June: Thank you for your beautifully-bound book. May I come round this afternoon? I long to see your hair."

He wondered why he had put that: it was a silly sort of thing to say; so he scratched out the "hair" very carefully so that you could see nothing, and substituted "you." Then he wrote "George" and, after a moment's hesitation, added the postscript:

"Of course you saw that Macaulay had taken four wickets for two runs?"

Half an hour later her answer reached him.

"George dear, please come this afternoon. I was so hoping you would. Come whatever time suits you. I shall be happy and patient and impatient waiting for you." ("That doesn't mean anything," he growled to himself. "Pity she can't write more clearly.") "Of course I saw about Macaulay. June."

At five he was on her doorstep, and a very few moments later he was holding both her hands. They seemed somehow to have got lost in his. Her hair was crisper and rustier than ever, swirling about in competitive overlapping ripples. Her eyes, like a shallow Scotch brook, were laughing at him: like transparent toffee they were or burnt sugar or amber. "June," he said, and his voice was funny and thick, "I had forgotten how pretty you were."

"That was just a little plot you were making with yourself to please me," she said.

They sat happily on a sofa and talked about the wonderful way Mr. Fender managed the Surrey bowling; they discussed the iniquities of the Selection Committee; they decided that no woman who played the base line game could ever be quite first class. They considered the relative merits of Cromer and Brighton from the point of view of George's mother; they agreed that being braced was one thing and being overbraced another. Then June told George that he ought to marry, and George said that he was not a marrying man, and June said that men became the worst old maids and that a man's place was in the home and George thought that she had got it wrong by accident.

June was perfectly happy. She loved talking to George--George who adored her without knowing that she had genius, only that she had sympathy--had no idea that she was a great woman, only that she was a charming one. He was looking at her with a worried expression.

"June," he said, "you look tired."

"Oh, but I'm not a bit."

He put her feet up and covered them with a shawl.

"I wish you would stop writing," he said. "What good do books do? Health is the only thing that matters."

"Loving is the only thing that matters," she murmured, "loving and being loved."

"Well," (George thought it so like a woman to go off at a tangent like that), "you've got Richard."

"Richard," she twinkled, "is not like you. He loves my books."

"He ought to know better," George asserted severely, and at that moment in he came.

"George!" Richard was jubilant. "Have you heard the news?"

"What news?" George was thinking of the Carpentier-Lewis fight due that night.

"June has been awarded the Nobel prize."

"How splendid!" George looked a little puzzled. "Is it for life saving?"

"Yes," June put in quickly.

"I'm not at all surprised." George beamed at her. "You always were as plucky as they made 'em and gifted. Do you remember how charmingly you used to sing? 'Not a big voice, but so true,' Mother used to say, and she's a great judge."

"Your mother has always been so sweet to me."

"What a talented woman like you wants to write for beats me."

George had got back to his grievance again, but she lured him on to the subject of irises on which they were both experts, and it was not till just before dinner that he hurried away.

Then suddenly he remembered that he hadn't asked her whose life she had saved. How silly and how selfish! It was so like her not to talk about herself, and then he saw on a patch of posters: "June Rivers awarded the Nobel prize," and though he was very late he stopped to buy an evening paper.

XI

COUNTERPOINT

[_To THE MARCHESE GIOVANNI VISCONTI VENOSTA_]

Matthew half shut his eyes--as he always did when he particularly wanted to see.

"For the first time in my life," he said, "I regret my myopia. Confronted with this room, imagination pales before sight."

Virginia looked round--at the strawberry ice brocade, at the gilt, at the Bouchers--so painstaking and so painful--at the palms that seemed to conceal manicurists and barbers.

"Look," he continued, "at our hostess. I am sure her ears and her nose take off at night. Her hair is a libel on horsehair and dye."

"Oh,"--Virginia's smile was playing like a light over his face--"think of the days when her eyes were like stars and her ears like shells and her hair was curling all over the place."

"Virginia," his voice was tender, "where you are there are no more palms, wigs turn into hair, rouge into blushes----"

"Matthew," she said, "you are a romantic and I am the only person in the world who knows it."

"You are the only person in the world with whom I am in love."

"For the moment."

"How practical you are!" he teased, "full of forethought and arriere pensees. Isn't the moment the capture of the divine?"

She sighed a little--wise with the wisdom of frustrated dreams, and she thought how happy he was--happy with the happiness of iridescent, ever-changing whimsies.

"Virginia, does that young man love you?"

"Which one?"

"The one in spectacles."

"I don't think so."

"Are you sure?"

"One can never be sure."

"Of course if he doesn't, it proves that I am right in saying that spectacles are fatal. They prevent people from using either their eyes or their imagination. Shall I go up to him and ask him?"

"He would answer: 'I don't understand.'"

"And I would explain: 'Virginia is the only lady in orange,' and he would look at you for a moment or two and, holding out his hand in an ecstasy of gratitude, he would say: 'Thank you. Yes, I love her.'"

"Matthew," she murmured, "what an unsuitable name."

They sat in silence, interfered with only by the necessity of convincing passers-by that they did not want to be interrupted.

"Matthew," she said, "do you see that tall fair man?"

"The blond beast?"

"With a very tall woman."

"With gold hair and eyes like cows in pictures of Christ in a manger?"

"Yes. He loves her."

"How suitable."

"But it isn't. He has a red-haired wife."

"How unsuitable."

"Matthew, do be serious. I like him."

"How complicated."

"I told him I hated his air of perfunctory but restrained passion, and he laughed."

"Any one would have."

"And we made friends."

"You always make friends with everybody."

"You are unsympathetic."

"I am, I confess, a little bewildered by the situation. Do I understand that you are suffering from an unrequited passion for a man who is illegitimately attached to a magnificent cow and legitimately bound to a bewitching squirrel?"

"Matthew, you really are provoking. What I mean is that he is making a fool of himself."

"Why not?"

"Because he might do something irrevocable."

"Lucky man."

She looked at him in desperation--a desperation half exasperation and half enchantment. If only Matthew would sometimes appear serious--there is something so restful about appearances. Instead of which he always remained superlatively unsatisfactory and superlatively irresistible.

"Virginia," he said, "let us leave all this and drive round the park and I will talk to you like a lover in a bad book and I will mean every word I say."

"We can't go yet," she murmured.

"Virginia,"--his voice was urgent--"I will be divinely pompous."

That was so like him. He always tried to safeguard the simplest, most sincere moments of his life by inverted commas. It was a little trick that always irritated her.

"What an artist you are," she remarked acidly.

"Yes, indeed," he assented, smiling her out of her irritation. And then: "I have known you, Virginia, ever since I can remember."

"You told me that the first time we met."

"It is still true."

"How magnificent."

It was her turn now to ward off what she was longing for. To be serious with Matthew was a form of disarmament you always regretted.

"And knowing you as I do, I recognise the crusading light in your eye and I must point out to you that your altruistic excursions have not always ended by tidying up the situation."

"Alas, no."

"Now, why plunge into the eternal triangle? There is really no role for you unless you propose to supplant the cow. What, by the way, is her name?"

"Grace."

"I don't like the statuesque," he said, wrinkling up his eyes. "Look at her ecstatic vacant expression. A dangerous combination."

Virginia wished she had not given him this theme. He would weave it into such marvellous patterns that she would never be able to get it out intact again.

"I must have some more facts," he said. "What is the squirrel called?"

"Estelle."

"And the hero?"

"Edgar."

"More and more suitable. What prophetic parents! How admirably they kept their heads at the font. The squirrel is very vivacious--is it a brave front, a blind eye or a shallow heart?"

"Estelle is a courageous woman and discreet with the unpierceable reticence of spontaneity."

"How delightful. I might try Estelle myself."

"You might."

"If I said 'I love you,' would she laugh or cry?"

"Laugh, I think."

"With a little hidden tear in her voice?"

"I have my doubts about the hidden tear."

"Then she would be no good to me. I like mixed effects."

At this moment Grace and Edgar danced by. They were both radiantly fair and a little colossal in scale. Her eyes were half shut and her mouth was half open.

"Matthew," Virginia was firm, "something must be done. How can he scale the heights of a great passion carrying that hold-all?"

"An empty hold-all isn't so very heavy."

"It is if you can't put it down."

"Virginia," he said, "your missionary zeal appals me. Why invade the situation? What are you going to tell the man? That he has children?"

"No. That he is throwing his life into a cul-de-sac."

"He won't believe you."

"No."

"And it will probably end by his falling in love with you and think what a terrible mess the cow and the squirrel will make."

Edgar came up to them.

"Will you give me the pleasure of a dance?"

"I should love to."

Virginia's apricot had become a strand in the pattern of the ball-room.

A parma violet lady settled on Matthew like a fly.

"I can't think how you have anything left to say to Virginia," she remarked disagreeably. "But I suppose you simply make love to her."

"It is not simple at all."

"Let us go and sit somewhere," Edgar was saying, and they went into another room.

All of our real indiscretions in life come in the form of generalisations. A name is a warning, and we really give ourselves away in abstract philosophisings applied by an intelligent companion to the particular.

"Why should we accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions."

"No."

"Sometimes you have to set out to sea and turn your back on the old familiar coastline."

"In a pleasure boat for an excursion."

"In a sailing ship for distant seas."

"Argosies have a way of turning into penny steamers."

"You ought not to say that--you of all people, who sail the seas in a tub with a sunshade."

"Oh," she said, "I am at the mercy of the winds. But you have a harbour and an anchor and a flag to fly."

"You are thinking that I'm a fool."

"Yes."

"One must sometimes cut one's losses."

"One must sometimes cut one's gains--a much more difficult thing."

"You can't throw away light."

"The world is brighter with your back to the sun."

"Virginia," he said, "I have made up my mind."

"What can I say? I am helpless. I see you going shipwreck on dummy rocks--the water let in by a penknife."

"You are cruel."

"Don't you think I know those frontiers, when paradise seems but a step away, but you know that it is a step you can't retrace?"

"Why should you want to go backwards?"

She looked past him into space.

"Behind us," she murmured, "lie so many things--memories of childhood, dim happy echoes, primroses and hoops and peace shot with laughter. When you have taken your step you daren't look back. Remembering hurts too much. And so you look forward--always forward, knowing that the promised land is behind you."

Grace was dancing round and round, wondering how one stopped. Away from him she felt restless and nervous and will-less and incomplete, like a frustrated animal lost and impotent, with smouldering rage in her heart and sulky fires in her eyes. Why didn't he come to release her, to calm the tearing fever of her blood?

Again and again she walked through the library and always he was on the sofa with Virginia--Virginia in her orange haze melting into cushions; and sometimes he was bending right forward, his whole body curved into urgency. And when she passed, he half looked up with the tail end of a smile falling as it were accidentally in her direction.

Estelle laughed and talked, her feet twinkled, her eyes danced. Marriage, she said, was an altogether delightful thing, quite different from what people thought----

Matthew was introduced to her. He explained that love was so important that it could only be discussed lightly. He said that her hair reminded him ... he wished he could think of what, but he had such a bad memory for metaphors. It took him all his time to remember that a harp was like water and Carpentier like a Greek god. It was funny, wasn't it, to have such a weak head. He thought it came from hay fever--he always had hay fever during the third week of May. It came entirely from honeysuckle.

Estelle said that she would like to sit in the library. Grace was in a corner pulling monosyllables out of her mouth like teeth.

Virginia was still in the middle of the sofa, a dissolving mass of orange mist. Edgar was talking away all risk of his suiting the action to the word. Estelle was dimpling.

"Do you remember," she said to Matthew, "that orange is flame-colour?"

"By Jove, yes," he said, "oriflammes and hell fire."

A low murmur came from the sofa.

"Will you introduce me to your husband?" Matthew asked.

They all talked together.

"By the way, Virginia," Matthew said, "the young man does love you."

"Dear me, how very nice."

"It only required me to point it out to him."

"Was he pleased?"

"Delighted. By the way, Mr. Wilmot,"--Matthew turned to Edgar--"do you ever wear spectacles?"

XII

VILLEGIATURA

[_To MARCEL PROUST_]

What a fool he had been to come. These wooden walls creaking at a touch, and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest footstep. Not that Marie Aimee had light footsteps--far from it. She clattered about with the happy noisiness of a good conscience and perfect health. In her hands the opening of a door became an air-raid and yet what could you do, confronted with her rosy face beaming with a child-like confidence in giving pleasure and satisfaction.

No, it was entirely his own fault. Everything was what he might have expected. The sea was just where he had been told it would be, the air was relentlessly bracing, the cleanliness of the Hotel Bungalow reminded you of a shiny soaped face which had never known powder. It was all, he reflected, quite horrible. The salt-laden wind blowing the sand up from the dunes, the hard bright sunshine, the effect everything gave you of having been painted with the six colours of a child's rather cheap paint-box.

"A different man," she had said he would feel. Well he felt it already--the lassitude of his body feebly revolting against the impending bracing, his eyes watering at the glare. Health and inspiration, Marthe had said, dreamless sleep, an insatiable appetite and perfect peace in which to finish his novel. "Think how quiet it will be," she had said. As if the country were ever quiet, crowded as it was with locos and dogs and sabots. Surely peace meant Paris in August, with every one away, thick carpets and a noiseless valet.

Maurice imagined himself merging into a huge armchair, just able to see a square glass vase of Juliette roses--gilt petals lined with deep pink velvet. Why on earth were there never any flowers in the country? And no one would disturb him--no one. Privacy is only possible in a big town. Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards--even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still--and far more likely--saying "yes."

And then where would his novel be? Not that it was possible any way to write in a place where the sun was always in your eyes, the wind blew your paper away and creaking boards made sitting in your bedroom out of the question.

Marthe was a fool, given up entirely to hygiene and plans for other people. "You will come back bubbling over with physical fitness, your dear face all tanned," she had said. "Dear" indeed! It was simply a bribe. He was being bribed for his own good. And to think that like a great gaby he had been shoved off to the sea by one term of endearment, and to a place, too, where there was neither shade nor shadows, simply miles and miles of bright monotonous sea, three dusty cornflowers, two bedraggled poppies and the sun all around you.

Tanned, indeed! Why his face would be all blisters and his eyes bloodshot.

The insensitiveness of women!

If Marthe were here she would bathe before breakfast, feed the hens, find the eggs, encourage the cook, pat the dog, listen to the story of Marie Aimee's life, pick the cornflowers, praise the cook, churn the butter, play with the children, climb on to the hay cart, collect shells on the beach, lie in the sun, let the sand trickle through her fingers and explain with perfect sincerity that it was the most delightful place in the world.

But he didn't like paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life. He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a deserted Paris around him.

Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by. That sort of literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of imagination. It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea, she simply wouldn't believe it.

"Think of the sunset reflected in the wet sand," she would say, and if you told her that you didn't want to think about it, that it was no fit subject for an active mind, she would be hurt.

In any case no one had a right to make you do things for your own good. It was a horrible form of self-sacrifice. If Marthe had said, "_Please_ go to St. Jean-les-Flots and pick me a poppy," he would have been delighted, but to stay at the Hotel Bungalow in the interests of his own health was a very different matter.

Marie Aimee was putting a pot with one red geranium in it on his writing table. It was, she explained, still very early in the season but Monsieur must not be discouraged. Later it became very gay with dancing and Japanese lanterns in the garden. The Hotel Bungalow would be quite full, whereas now there was only Monsieur and a lady.

"A lady?"

"But yes, Monsieur."

"A young lady?"

"A lady of a certain age."

Maurice hoped that it would be an uncertain age. Of course every one over twenty would seem old to Marie Aimee. Probably the lady was on that exquisite frontier line, the early thirties, when the bud is already unfurling its petals, angles have softened into curves, and the significant is stirring in everything like a quickening child. Thirty, the age of delicate response, of subtle tasting, divorced equally from the ignorant impetuosity of youth and the desperate clutchings of middle age. How he disliked young girls with their sunburn, their manly strides, their meaningless giggles, their eternal nicknames! And, over their heads, a warning and a trade mark, that sword of Damocles--marriage.

Maurice was feeling a little happier. As he walked into lunch he felt a real twinge of curiosity. Ridiculous it was--why he was getting quite romantic, imagining an exquisite creature on a holiday from her husband. That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow. On the velvet lawn with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.

He walked into the dining room. At the far end with her back to him sat the lady. She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a white hat with a white lace veil. On the chair beside her lay a Holland sunshade lined with green. It was he thought, deplorable, and indicated yellow spectacles. Her feet were very small and gave you the impression of an insecure foundation to her body. Her back was broad. She was certainly over forty. Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age--the desperate age. From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions. For how many women must it not be a ten years' death struggle.

"What a place," Maurice was disgusted; "it is driving me to melodrama."

The lady got up with a certain waddling stateliness (perhaps after all she was fifty). Her clothes fell into perfection--she walked slowly and calmly with appraising steps. The lace veil was over her face. She did not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief. Louis, the waiter, opened the door for her. She sailed out like a gondola on the stage, or Lohengrin's swan. Her movements gave an effect of invisible wheels.

During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles. Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap. Had she, he wondered, ever read any of his books? Perhaps when she found out his name she would come up to him and say: "Are you _the_ Mr. Maurice Van Trean?" And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that she liked "Sur les Rives" best of his books--"she had read them all many times--and especially that marvellous description of Camille's return to her husband."

Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road. It was the most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction in a maximum of unpleasantness. The air was burning and solid. An occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace by the roadside--a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life. He thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he remembered bitterly, that had brought him here. He wished vindictively that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting through the soles of her shoes. He would walk on and on till there were blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging. His teeth were set in the grim satisfaction of revenge.

"This is the country," he would say. "Do you feel the health-giving sea breeze you told me about?"

He stopped suddenly. Walking towards him was the lady. The offensive sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up. She was, he supposed, forty-six--no, forty-four. Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent and long--brown or blue they might have been. Her face was wide and so was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth. Her cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon. There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, "I shall please at my own time." She was not pretty. Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as her limbs.

Maurice took off his hat.

"Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel Bungalow."

"I think so, too," she said drily.

He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of vulgarity.

And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself, fled.

They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimee's footsteps. He explained how anxious he had been about her--how he had longed to see her face--how much her sunshade had depressed him--how her lace veil had been a personal enemy.

She said that she adored the country....

He told her that only in big towns could you find peace or flowers.

She said the Hotel Bungalow had "un caractere assez special...."

He did not listen to her comments--they were mere breathing places. On the subject of the sea he was, he thought, almost witty, with a touch of real indignation.

She said the sea was her passion....

He decided that she was an obstinate woman--entetee. How ridiculous to love the sea--especially for some one who pretended to like the country. The two were practically incompatible. Could she explain her point of view?

The sea, she said, was such a wonderful escape....

He was thrilled. A thousand explanations of her presence at the Hotel Bungalow jostled one another in his mind.

Of course he quite understood what she meant about the sea. It had a certain spaciousness and it did, so to speak, quarantine you from life. For instance, in a rowing boat, it was impossible to feel the importance of being a snob.

That was not, she said, exactly what she meant....

Maurice was annoyed. He was accustomed to people who were proud to share his meanings.

Madame would perhaps be able to explain....

It was not, Madame murmured, a question of being able to explain, but of being able to interrupt....

Maurice flushed and relapsed into sulky silence. He watched his companion trotting by his side, taking three little steps to each one of his. He took a childish pleasure in making his strides as wide as possible, upsetting the rhythm of her walk. The brim of her hat hid her eyes. He felt that his uncertainty as to their expression gave the matter an interest that it did not intrinsically possess. Even if she were smiling, what did it matter?

Suddenly she turned to him.

"Has Monsieur anything more to conceal from me?" she asked.

Maurice capitulated. It was a delightful formula. He wished that he had thought of it himself. It was she, he said, who had been hiding things from him. Her eyes, for instance. All this time he had been wondering about the expression of her eyes.

"And yet you deny the potency of the country," she sighed, "the miracle-working country, which compels a young man of twenty-seven to wonder about the expression of an old woman of forty-four."

"Madame," he said, "I am very old. I have ceased to take myself seriously. You are very young, for you can force others to treat you with curiosity and respect."

She reminded him that eight minutes ago he had taken himself seriously. "It was you who made me," he retorted, "you have given me back my youth."