Chapter IV

1

“Ivor, I’m so glad!” she welcomed him simply, the next night at half-past eight. She made no mention of the “dinner-party.” He and she were the dinner-party. Colonel Gray was again on his travels to “extremely foreign parts,” it seemed.

They were in the drawing-room before dinner, and he was too busy adjusting himself to her even to notice the pleasures of the room. He was glad that she was in black, he discovered a particular admiration for her in black; her dark simplicity was an almost startling decoration in the pale amber light of the July evening. And he enjoyed her hair, dark and thick and so soft, coiling about her ears and framing her wide, intelligent forehead and her mysterious, friendly eyes. So friendly.... And he liked being in her house, he particularly liked her in her own house--it somehow added solidity to her enchantment. He told her that, in those first few minutes. She had come to greet him from a far corner of the room, and he now stood above her in its very middle--dark, and seemingly self-confident, and not very young: and so compact of restraint--yes, he seemed very restrained--that she caught her breath with pleasure in him. It was most unusual in men....

But, with a gesture, she put a period to this dalliance--one shouldn’t palter so on an empty stomach, she might almost have said. And now she made fun of him, insisting on his being intelligently appreciative of her room of state. “My room, all mine,” she magnificently boasted. And she took him by the hand, miraculously lifting him to a pinnacle of comradeship, and twisted him to view the vast and rich expanse of her kingdom. But not all the craft and elegance of Sheraton and Chippendale, of Hepplewhite and Adam, had they been in that one room, could have seduced Ivor’s attention from this wonderful and sudden fact of friendship. For this between them was going to be friendship, a rich and immense friendship. He was going to insist on having her friendship, he wouldn’t let this go....

It was a small house, this in Wilton Place, but this room on the first floor was its room of state: it knew not the limitations of lowlier rooms, and stretched its dignity from front to back of the house. Its appointments were more than worthy of it: the darkish blue of the walls, a subtle quality of colour that mingled austerity with a sweet feminine glamour: the gilded craftmanship of the chairs and sofas and footstools and tables and what-nots, those lovely baubles of Louis Seize days which seem ever to coquette for your admiration the better to despise your favour, for they are not very comfortable: and the rich and fading brocades and velvets that covered them, stuffs of quality whose pride increases as their colour fades, velvets of worldly wisdom which know that there’s nothing in the world more assured of respect than velvets that are caressed by the gloss of respectful usage.... One hand lightly in his, her other swept round the room.

“There was a gentleman of Virginia, who lived in Kent,” she comically began; then very gravely: “very old he was, and fierce and contemptuous and gallant, and very, very odd in the way of his affections. For he said nothing, and for the ten years that he was my guardian he scarcely came near me--and then he died and left me all this and much besides!”

“I’ve spent the ‘much besides,’” she said.

“Dinner is served, madam,” a dim voice broke on them from the twilight of the room.

2

It is a commonplace that a young man in love is very apt to talk about himself. It is also a commonplace that the interest of an intelligent woman will seduce a young man into being exceedingly interested in himself. And so it wasn’t surprising--except, of course, to Ivor Marlay, who had always had a vague idea that commonplaces somehow didn’t, and somehow shouldn’t, apply to him--it wasn’t surprising that he did talk about himself, and at length, during and after dinner on that night in July, 1912. He needed some pressing, of course. Mrs. Gray was very good at pressing.

“For, after all,” she protested, “I know nothing at all about you--except that you are, well, curiously polished and literate, as though you had been educated abroad. But I do hope you weren’t!”

“I was five years at a public-school,” said Ivor, “so I’m quite self-educated.”

She rebuked him, for she was glad of the public-school. She liked her Englishmen to be English. She herself spoke foreign languages quite well enough for two, she said.

And then she led him on by her naïve surprise that he was, and intended to be, a writer. That seemed to her very charming, for he might so easily have been nothing at all, and with every excuse. (The charming things your Magdalens say are as nothing to those they suggest. But there are not many Magdalens.) She had had wide and intimate experience of writers, dramatists, and all manner of artists, so that she was not wildly excited at the fact of entertaining yet another. But that this young man was a writer, interested her happily; for he was so obviously something else as well, which was most unusual in writers. Magdalen Gray did not, as a rule, like writers and suchlike (by “suchlike” she, of course, meant publishers). She only dined with them when there was a “first-night” to go to, only lunched with them before a “private-view.” But she was too wise to explain her dislike by a generalisation, she just mentioned that she didn’t like them very much, especially the younger ones; and she suggested only that, perhaps, the word “I,” an enthralling word when sparingly used, occurred too often in their conversation: “which, on the other hand,” she said, “is very clever of them, for I can’t think how they can manage to squeeze it in so often.”

“But it’s not,” she said, “the most important thing in the world to be clever.”

“No,” Ivor agreed, and felt grave.

“But it’s very important to be genuine,” she said.

She led him on to tremendous confidences. She met the sympathetic figures of his life, Aunt Moira and Aunt Percy, with sincere understanding; and she told him that she found his life strange and exciting and adventurous--and Ivor, looking at it with the impulse of her sympathy, also found it strange and exciting and adventurous.

“It’s odd,” he said, “how one minute’s perfect comradeship can discount all previous solitudes.”

She brought the truth out of him, he saw that, and how can a woman bring the truth out of a man except by understanding him? Clearly, then, she was his friend. It was so wonderful a fact that it almost overwhelmed him; her wise friendliness revealed her to him as a marvellous gift of a god, and a much more than fleshly god, too! And his mind so circled about the _fact_ of this grave and gay Magdalen with the friendly eyes and deep, dexterous understanding--that he was probably very dull indeed towards the end of dinner. But Magdalen teased him about that very gently, for she had always thought that no man was a man who wasn’t sometimes frightfully dull.

3

And yet, as the night grew to midnight and past, all was not well with Ivor Marlay.... They were on the wide divan, a battlefield of a divan, in the window corner of the “room of state”--now changed into a room deliciously intimate and secret, with but the one dim light of a very shaded lamp, near them, to light its rich shadows and make more pregnant the pregnant silences of two people. And there were several silences, in the restless passage over midnight. Magdalen lay full length on the divan, a luxuriously straight figure, her crossed hands supporting the back of her head against a wide cushion of many colours. A tranquil figure she looked, lying straightly there, with her eyes peacefully on him--and yet little peace was there in Magdalen Gray at that moment, or ever! Now, behind her tranquil poise, she wanted frightfully to mock him by inquiring, quite casually, how, at his absurd age, he had discovered that restraint is the highest pleasure of _la volupté_. She wanted to ask him that, but it was just as well she didn’t, for he wouldn’t have known what she was talking about, being much more completely twenty-three than he (or she) thought.

To the cold eye of the philosopher there is nothing more ridiculous than abandon, except it be restraint: there is nothing more absurd than temptation, except it be the grander temptation not to yield to it. But it is notorious that philosophers never allow for other people’s ideals--which do certainly make the ridiculous even more ridiculous, but rarely fail to make it sublime. And Ivor Pelham Marlay, now fired at last out of the lethargy of two years, was become a very rigid and proper idealist, and very troublesome to himself, which is the way of idealists.... He was distressed, in that restless passage over midnight. He wondered, very dimly, if masculine brutalities were peculiar to essentially feminine woman; years later, he found that they were. She wanted her way of him, in her own way, now! He saw that, because she didn’t hide it; she didn’t hide it because she hadn’t that kind of restraint, she was deplorable. She wanted to “find out.” He had knowledge of her as a woman without shame and without pride in love. He called it love, because he was certain that it was love, as far as he was concerned, anyway. She had no pride, she said. “There is no pride in love, Ivor. Not really. To be proud in love is the mark of little people. Pride is for women who go to balls or night-clubs every night, and who, because they are always tired, bring the worst out of their men; they need pride. But your great lover is so proud that he takes no thought of pride.” But, on top of that, she had no shame either--and that he shamelessly loved! He adored the honest quality of her shamelessness, its elegance and its clear shades of candour. Thus, every minute increased his longing for her, every minute increased his feeling of her nearness; and the slim, soft lines of her body maddeningly suggested the coil of her limbs--but it couldn’t, it simply couldn’t, happen like “this”! “This” was all wrong, in this particular instance. She was too splendid, he wanted her too utterly, to allow it to happen like “this.” He wanted her--oh, vastly! She was wanton, he knew that. He felt that, but he could not understand it--she who was so absolutely right, so sensible! She was amazing. She wanted to be ravished, like a woman in a dream....

“Ivor!” she said suddenly. “I wish for a peach.”

There was a basket of them on a little table, in the shadows of the room; and, in the shadows, the peaches that had that morning graced the Piccadilly windows of Messrs. Solomon’s were changed into lovely baubles, they looked like Oriental things of beauty and significance: they looked like the peaches that are found in books, ruddy and ripe and bejewelled.

“And, if you please,” she said, “I’d like it peeled or skinned, or whatever the process is called that uncovers a peach.”

He had it on a plate on his knee, and a toy knife and fork. He set to work on it delicately. But there are peaches and peaches, and some can be very wayward about being undressed.

“This isn’t the sort of peach I’m used to,” said Ivor at last, in disgust.

“Are you making a mess of it, Ivor?” her whisper mocked him; for her head had stealthily left its corner, it was by his shoulder now, and her body encircled him, her body made a prison around him, and her breath and hair were warm on his cheek.

“Yes,” he said--and kissed her, lightly. Their first kiss, that light, flimsy thing! It was his tribute to her enchantment, it wasn’t fired of passion--it wasn’t the sort of kiss a woman of thirty had the right to expect from a very young man on such a divan. It was a pathetic kiss. A begging kiss it was really, that light thing born of a question about a peach, for Ivor was begging her to understand, to understand his hunger for the most absolute intimacy, the most perfect friendship, and not just the mortal thing. But there were depths in Magdalen stronger than her understanding....

Ivor made a movement to go. And he was going.

“Don’t go!” she said. And her arm swept to his shoulder--and suddenly fell back again to her side; and she looked up at the man standing feverishly above her, she looked at him as though she couldn’t see him for the darkness over her eyes. And suddenly, wantonly, she grimaced at him, oh so vengefully! Whereat they both fell to such a fit of giggling that Ivor was gone and Magdalen alone before either had realised the parting.

Perhaps those two had never been such great friends but for the curious issue of that remarkable dinner. Perhaps, if it had ended otherwise, Ivor would have walked away on air, as the saying is, or perhaps he would have crept away and never returned, for this was a queer moment in his life, and he might easily have done a caddish thing because of his foiled desire for a fine one. But if he had returned and enjoyed, this chronicle could not have been written--for never in the whole history of the world, neither in folk-tale or legend or romance, has there been a tale about a merely physical bond. To make a tale there must be a vow, of marriage, of celibacy, or of friendship; and to make a tale that vow must be upheld or broken. There are no other tales than those, there are only experiments.