Chapter IV

1

Late in the afternoon of the day following the meeting in the little lane, as Ivor sat reading over the fire in the sitting-room, Turner announced: “Lady Tarlyon, sir.” And there was a note akin to surprise in Turner’s voice.

“’E seemed pleased enough!” Turner said to Mrs. Hope in the kitchen.

“And I should think so indeed!” cried Mrs. Hope indignantly. “After all this time alone....”

2

“My movements,” said Virginia, in her slightly hoarse, low voice, “are cloaked in mystery. I’ve come to see you, Ivor.”

He was delighted to see her....

Virginia swiftly surveyed the comfort of the low-ceilinged room, and with a sigh of relief threw herself into one of the two deep arm-chairs on each side of the fire.

“A long and cold and lonely walk it was,” she complained. He gave her a cigarette.

Her hat, that so black and anarchichal hat, made a loose black stain on the polished table; and her golden-tawny hair shone bright between the firelight and the lamp. Lithe and long and slack this Virginia looked, deliciously at rest in the deep expanse of her chair. And her bright, yellow silk jumper coloured the room with a sudden luxury and meaning. Fantasy has come into the room, thought Ivor.

“I’m finding,” he told her, “that this room is not the complete room I had thought. I have liked the decoration of this room until this moment----”

“Thank you!” said Virginia.

“---- but now I see that the decoration it really needs, Virginia, is that yellow silk jumper--how nice it would be if you left it behind with me, so that I could hang it up on the wall! and every time I saw it I would think: ‘Virginia came to see me once!’”

Her face was laid sideways against her palm, and her eyes smiled faintly into the fire; and she held up a very little foot to the fire.

“I walked three miles on a winter day,” she said, “to hear you talk. That was my great idea for to-day, Ivor. I myself have not been doing very much talking of late--and, you know, I’m very tired of being with people whose main purpose in conversation is to massacre syntax and evade sense.”

“But it’s not quite fair to come to talk to a man who has been alone for weeks! Maybe you will be washed away in the raw stuff--and there will be headlines in the papers: Disappearance of famous beauty--thought to have been washed away in the froth of a hermit’s sudden speech.’ ...”

But she was silent, provoking him. She was yielding up her interest in him to him, to do as he liked with--on a January afternoon! And in the nervous stress of that moment he jumped up from his chair and stood by the fire, and bent to it to light a spill for his cigarette; and he stared into it, his face sideways to her.

Virginia watched him curiously.

“You told me yesterday that you were working, Ivor. Now I would like to hear about that--may I? Are you writing a new novel?”

He stood above her on the hearth, she sprawled lazily in the chair beneath him.

“I’m not writing anything, Virginia--I’m trying to learn how to play a game. It’s called a ‘game’ anyway--that one which it used to be the fashion for you and me and all cleverish young people to despise--the game of trying to understand the country we live in so that we might help in the working of it. It sounds a pompous business, and so we despised it.”

“Oh!” And Virginia made a little face, as though a little puzzled and a little bored. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you are going to stand on that hearth and talk politics to me? Oh, Ivor, _must_ you do that!” She put such pathos into her words that they laughed together.

“Yes, Ivor?” she asked gently.

“But I’m very serious about it, Virginia, so it’s no good your saying, “Yes, Ivor” at me as though I needed humouring. I’ve got a frightfully English feeling about me these days,” he explained, “and I can’t bear to think of the way we’ve all slacked--all we young and youngish people. Just utterly slacked!”

“But what about losing lives and legs and arms?” she put to him. “How did you manage to do all that and slack as well?”

“People are getting fat on that remark,” he told her darkly, “and are going to get still fatter--until one day something pricks them and then they’ll be all thin and miserable. I beg you not to play the fool with your lovely slim figure, Virginia. But I’m sure you said that as a way of sympathising about my arm, which is nice of you, but not an argument....”

“_I’m_ not arguing,” Virginia said. “I’m being treated like a public institution. Very queenly I feel....”

He wanted her to understand.

“But you do know, don’t you, that it’s as easy to fight for a country as for a woman, particularly if they are yours? And that it’s much easier to fight for a country or a woman than to understand either--or even want to, for the matter of that! Why, Virginia, they said the war was going to teach us things, they’ve actually got the cheek to say now that the war has taught us things, fine things. Well, I’m damned if I see what the war has taught us except that it’s pretty easy for every sort of man to die--and now the peace is mobilising to teach us that it’s jolly difficult for every sort of man to live. That’s a platitude, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true.” He seemed to be angry about it.

Virginia nodded. It wasn’t difficult for her to live, if having money is living, but she understood. This was fairly good sense, anyway, for politics. Virginia had always thought that politics were only interesting from a bad-tempered point of view.

“That’s what I meant,” he went on, “when I said all the youngish people are slacking. They are taking no hand in the work of the country, they are doing nothing about it and thinking nothing about it. At least our fathers tried to use what energy and intelligence they had left over from riding horses and talking about them; they tried to do something as a matter of course, even if they had to sandwich that something between a salmon and a grouse, and a pretty fine mess they made of it--but we don’t even make a mess, we sit and watch other people making a mess for us.”

The light of argument peeped faintly out of Virginia’s eyes.

“You don’t seem to realise,” she said, “that England expects every young man not to get in the way of other people doing their duty. So our young men have simply had to stand aside--or go into the Foreign Office, which is the same thing--for it’s been so dunned into them that they’re no use for anything that now they jolly well aren’t. You can’t tell the public-schools for years and years that they produce nothing but fatheads and then expect them to turn out geniuses....”

“It’s been made very difficult for us not to slack,” she said.

Ivor made an impatient gesture. He had heard that before.

“It’s got something to do with the will to enjoy,” she went on. “I heard some one say that....”

“And we did enjoy, too,” she added oddly, “just before the war and during the war--we and our lovely dead and dying men!”

And that is about the last word Virginia said. For Ivor talked--tremendously. Talk was seething darkly within him, and it had to come out--and this woman had asked for it! And so out came the “Ivory” intolerances and prejudices which Magdalen had used to tease and Rodney West to encourage, thinking that no man was good for anything if he wasn’t fierce about something. Here, in this animus of Ivor’s against the “young men of opportunity,” in that they strove to be so little worthy of it, spoke the Aunt Moira in him: “Whatever you do, you must do Something! For Heaven’s sake, Ivor, don’t be slack, don’t be shoddy, don’t be sodden! You must think Something, do Something!” That Aunt Moira who, ever mightily contradicting herself, had so efficiently helped that fine gentleman of promise, her younger brother, to do nothing at all, nothing but love....

And Ivor made a joke. The occasion, Virginia suggested, called for a little imagination on his part, so he had better imagine something. So Ivor imagined a revolution for her--oh, a very imaginary revolution! There was blood, of course. He told her how one day, with a crash and a bang and a mighty cry, the people of England rose in one body and hurled themselves at Whitehall. Of course there was a reason for this, as they tried to explain to Whitehall. They had come from factories and mills and mines and all the other places that rebels come from, all with the one mighty cry, “We’ll larn ’em to be gentlemen!” For this revolution was one of the people at last utterly sick of government by feeble gentlemen. A young man from Owens College headed the revolution, but he died soon after. And at that time the charming but sinister M. Caillaux was President of France....

“We are the New Gentlemen,” the rebels cried. Men of the lower sort had everywhere raised their heads, and behold! they had seen England as one vast knighthood, but what knights were those! Whereupon men made a great cry that the land of England was being sloppily governed and that something must be done about it. And of course there was no lack of agitators to point out, with plausible arguments, that the war had helped the British Lion to find out the British Ass--which last, the agitators insisted, was an immaculate man, hitherto known as a gentleman, with red tabs and gold braid about him, a long tradition behind him, and a bloody fine mess all round him. “It is up to you,” the agitators cried, “to put the lid on all that.” Which thing was done, so that traditions were instantly withered into offal, the mad dream of Master Jack Cade came true at last, and the hapless middle-class had more reason than ever to wail, “What shall we do with our sons?” for no one cared what they did with them so long as they made them work. And Chivalry, most shy and most beautiful of all the birds that grace the aviary of human virtues, was found at last with broken wings in the gutters of Fleet Street, was tenderly nursed back to life and on a memorable holy-day was released from Hyde Park Corner--a lovely thing to entrance the eye and stir the heart of Britain, from Cornwall to Aberdeen and even farther. The king was escorted in exceeding splendid state to Windsor, the route thither being lined by such a vast concourse of cheering people as had never before been seen gathered together but at a football match. And there was instantly begun the building of a National Opera House, in which Sir Thomas Beecham could conduct for evermore without breaking his heart or his purse. And there was organised a massacre of _maîtres d’hôtel_, who have gone so far in making English youth obsequious. Many of the old order were tried for their lives before an extraordinary tribunal especially got together to try people for their lives on the capital charge of whether they had or had not been gentlemen: of course there was the usual controversy as to the exact definition of a gentleman, and many suggestions were put forward, among which that “a gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude to any one,” was accorded the most favour; but in the end Mr. Bernard Shaw’s definition was unanimously adopted, as being both brief and practical, that “a gentleman is a man who puts more into life than he takes out.” Good old Shaw, people cried. Mr. Churchill and some few others were finally acquitted on their disarming plea, that they belonged to a different age from this, a feudal age, and were therefore not responsible for their actions in this; it was further pleaded on behalf of Mr. Churchill that he had been educated without heed to cost, in that England had spent more than a hundred million sterling in giving him a thorough working knowledge of geography alone, particularly as regards Gallipoli, Antwerp, Mesopotamia, and Russia; and that England could not afford to waste, but must rather reserve for the highest office, one to whom she had given the most expensive public-school education obtainable. But there were many who did not discover so much ingenuity, and were never heard of again. While there were some who proved their worth by banding themselves together with warlike cries, to the effect that though they might not have put more into life than they had taken out, they had taken out of their banks a good deal more than they had put in, and so did not mind dying. And these straightway entrenched themselves within Devonshire House and the Ritz, the last a very stout and solid building in the manner of the old Bastille, originally conceived, no doubt, with a fearful eye on class-prejudice. Devonshire House was stormed through a breach on the Stratton Street side, and many were killed but none taken, but the siege of the Ritz was long and bloody, as of course it would be. Both sides were fertile in invention, and Piccadilly was a shambles from Bond Street to Clarges Street; but both in bravery and invention the besieged had something of the advantage, for they were led by the men of White’s, the most gallant of all those who asserted their right to be gentlemen when and how they pleased: and were, moreover, greatly assisted by their exact knowledge of every corner of the building, which was of course known to the New Gentlemen only from passing buses or from the Green Park on Sunday afternoons. But one night Wimborne House, which lies behind the Ritz and was valiantly held by my lord Viscount Wimborne and his men, all veterans of his Irish vice-royalty, was betrayed by a Hebrew gentleman lately black-balled from the Royal Automobile Club: the New Gentlemen poured through the breach, and the defenders of the old order were slain to the last man--and he a gay and handsome man of stuttering speech and many parlour-tricks, now at last dying formidably on the steps of the _foyer_ with a great laugh and a cry, “For King and Cocktail!” And when again the old order raised its head it was only to be finally crushed at the rout of Kensington, where the flower of Oxford and Cambridge, marching to the relief of London, was surprised and overthrown while awaiting the issue of a dog-fight at the corner of Church Street....

“At what time will you dine, sir?” Turner asked patiently from the door.

“Lord, it’s half-past eight!” Virginia cried.

“Do you think,” she asked shyly, “that I could share your homely kipper! ‘Now I’m here’ sort of thing, you know....”

“Turner,” cried Ivor to the man at the door, “you heard that? What are you going to do about it?... You see,” he explained, when Turner had gone out, “you are my first guest in this house.”

“Well, you are an odd man, I do think!” Virginia suddenly attacked him. “Do you mean to say that you aren’t in the least curious to know what my host, friends, and husband will think at my not turning up to dinner?”

“But, Virginia, they wouldn’t be your host, friends, and husband if they were very surprised at a little thing like that, would they? Of course we can send a message,” he added. “I’ve got a kind of car somewhere about the house. It’s an American car----”

“Oh, no! To send a man three miles to say I’m not turning up for a dinner which they’ll have eaten by then--oh, no! They’ll just think I’m lost, that’s all.”

“And so I am!” she added, with a sudden smile.

She touched her hair, she jumped up and looked into the mirror, and she made a face at what she saw.

“If you will show me to your bedroom, Ivor,” she turned to him to say, “I will somehow or other put the fear of God into ‘Swan and Edgar’....”

3

It was after eleven when they heard the rustle of a car on the little gravel drive. The rustle stopped.

Ivor grandly waved a hand towards the curtained windows: “Here come the messengers of Kare and Tarlyon to demand a very fair lady.”

Virginia, again in the depths of her chair after dinner, looked mildly surprised; but just a little more than mildly when her husband came in almost on top of Turner. George Tarlyon stood grinning at Virginia from the doorway, and at Ivor. And Ivor couldn’t help smiling back at the “clever fellow” expression on the handsome face.

“Here we are, you see!” Tarlyon cried; and the grin was all over his face, a gay, mocking grin.

“Well, I’m very pleased,” Ivor met him in the middle of the room. They were of a height, dark and fair, but Tarlyon was much the stronger set of the two. His extraordinarily fair hair was crisply curly from his wide, reddish forehead; he looked clean and scrubbed and weathered--always as though the salt of the sea had just whipped his face. And so gay, with that attractive smile that never left the slightly frozen blue eyes....

Virginia vaguely introduced the two men. And she examined her husband, rather severely.

“This is very odd, I do think,” she said.

Lord Tarlyon turned very frankly to Ivor, appealing to him:--

“I say, you know, I’m awfully sorry to have rushed in on you like this. But, don’t you see----”

“Will you have a drink?” asked Ivor.

“Certainly. Used to hear about you, you know, from a man in my mess called Transome. Thought no end of you, he did. I was sorry he went....” He turned to Virginia, still appealing: “What I mean to say is, my dear, that I knew you’d be grateful for a lift home in the car, so I brought the blessed thing along....” He took the glass from Ivor. “Damned good husband I am, I do think,” he teased Virginia. Splendid he was, standing there by the table between the two, simply glowing with the pleasure of the moment, laughing at them, teasing Virginia with that sideways little grin under his fair, clipped moustache. He mocked Virginia. He toasted Virginia....

“Yes, but how did you find out I was here?” Virginia asked. “For I left no word as to where I would be, and my footprints are too small to be visible to the human eye....”

“Easy, my dear, dead easy! On your not turning up for dinner, with every excuse, I must say”--he bowed to Ivor--“Kare put inquiries through the butler to the servants’ hall to find out whether anything had been heard of any dark, handsome strangers of superior mentality in the neighbourhood. On the name Marlay being mentioned we all naturally stood to attention at once. That’s our man, we cried with one voice. Anyway, I cried and they echoed. And so here I am! Easy, Virginia, dead easy!”

“But it won’t be so easy to get home,” Virginia remarked, “if you have another drink....”

George Tarlyon leaned against the edge of the table: enjoying himself immensely, it seemed. So gay, so slack.... Ivor was immensely amused by him; anyway, he thought he was. He gave him another drink.

But Virginia looked tired, staring into the bright fire. She seemed suddenly to have lost all interest in the two men in the room.

“I say, I liked that book of yours,” Tarlyon said comfortably to Ivor. He stretched his legs out a little, towards the fire. “You know, that one called--something about a courtesan....”

“_The Legend of the Last Courtesan_,” Virginia said into the fire.

“That’s it, Virginia! Splendid book, I thought. I don’t have time to read as a rule, but I finished that--Virginia saying she knew you once, you know, and that you were clever.... Just the kind of book I’d like to write myself if I wasn’t a half-wit....”

“Which half?” asked Virginia softly. “So that I’ll know....”

“There you are, Marlay!” Tarlyon cried; and he laughed with his head thrown back and his eyes wrinkled up. “Virginia thinks I’m a most consummate ass, but when I do try talking the clever stuff for which I’ve a natural aptitude she quickly puts the lid on me.... But, seriously, Marlay, I did like that book of yours. You got the eighteenth century uncommonly well, I thought. And I think that word ‘courtesan’ is a considerate word--what I mean is that it was very decent of you to trouble to write a long word like ‘courtesan’ time over again, when you could have used a couple of short but septic ones just as well. Virginia, are you with me in this?... She yawns at me! Marlay, my wife yawns at me! All women yawn at the men they love--did Oscar Wilde say that, Marlay, or have I said a marvellous thing?”

“A marvellous thing, I think,” Ivor just managed to say. “Wilde said something like ‘All men kill the thing they love....’”

“Oh, that’s just a quibble--they come to the same thing. The man loves, the woman yawns, and then the man kills her! So I have said a marvellous thing after all! Are you listening, Virginia?”

Virginia looked very tired indeed. She smiled at him sleepily. George always made her smile in the end.

“I feel myself getting more brilliant every moment,” Tarlyon said comfortably. “It’s this room, Marlay, that’s having a witty effect on me, I think. And I also think it’s pretty clever of you to have a quiet little house like this, where you can receive the lovely ladies who get bored with our conversation at Rupert Kare’s....”

“But their husbands can come too,” Ivor pointed out, “if they behave themselves.”

“Oh, I say!” Tarlyon stared, and laughed.

Virginia suddenly jumped up. In desperation, it seemed. And with a gesture the black anarchical hat crowned her head, her coat was to hand, and she was ready to go; and she was gone. Tarlyon followed reluctantly.

As he started off the car, she said to Ivor, in the front doorway: “We’ve had a lovely talk, Ivor--I’ve loved my evening with you. I’ll try to come again, only we are due off to the South any day----”

“Come on, Virginia!” came Tarlyon’s voice from the glistening shape of the car--charming young Charles Rolls’s legacy to England.

“Good-night, Ivor,” she said, and went swiftly.

“Good-night, Marlay, good-night,” came the gay waving voice of George Tarlyon, as the car curved softly round the drive and away to the London road. Ivor heard his laugh in the distance. An amusing man. Those two, out there....