Chapter XVIII

1

On the morning of the day on which they were to dine at the Mont Agel--Virginia having said that she would risk it, muffled there and back in the car--Ivor in Upper Brook Street received a letter by hand. The letter was addressed in pencil, a pencilled scrawl, and Ivor fingered it with a smile. He had never before received a letter from Virginia--what occasion had there been, indeed! And what occasion was there now? for he had left Virginia at the mausoleum but the night before, indeed only a very few hours ago. Thoughtfully he weighed the letter in his hand, and it was a heavy letter. The Smith had brought it, Turner told him.

Yes, it was a long letter, several sheets scrawled over on both sides, in Virginia’s careless way. To read it he sat, in his dressing-gown, on a chair by the window. September was carrying on August’s tradition; it rained dispassionately.

“I’m writing to you, Ivor, because I can’t talk to you sometimes. I mean, dear, that I can’t talk of certain things without you getting very, very dark; and then, you see, I get frightened for us both, of what will happen--to you and me, Ivor, in those dark moments! You prowl about so, you know! And so I’m sitting up in bed now, just after you have left me, to write to you about a most important and tiresome matter--what the papers so rightly call ‘that much vexed question of divorce.’ Keep your eyebrows straight, Ivor! Don’t bring your eyebrows down into the darkness! Keep your eyebrows straight, my darling, and listen to Virginia. For although you are intelligent and I am not, I am very wise, Ivor. Sometimes. And this is what I know----”

“Breakfast on the table, sir,” Turner reminded him. Ivor looked up and stared at Turner for several seconds. “Yes, yes,” he said at last.

“Ever since we spoke of marrying, that first night in Paris, I’ve known somewhere deep down that I should sometime have to write this letter. But that doesn’t make it any easier, dear, for you can be very difficult. Ivor, I can’t marry you. I won’t. And I’ve known that all the time--and haven’t you known it too? I could have stopped you thinking of it right at the beginning, by saying that George wouldn’t dream of divorcing me or letting me divorce him, but I can’t tell little lies, Ivor, so I told you a big lie. I’ve been pretending, Ivor. Darling, tell me that you knew I was pretending, just so that we could be happy--and that it doesn’t now come as a shock to you? I told you, that night, that I didn’t think any woman would, or could marry you. I don’t know now.... Maybe there is such a woman. Maybe your mother, as you’ve described her to me, was such a woman. But I don’t think so, for she let your father quite lose himself in her, she changed him from a man into a lover, and he was so lost to the world that he might just as well have died ten years before he did. But you, Ivor, want things both ways, and that’s why I can’t marry you. We would choke each other. Don’t you see? I’m not strong enough and you simply aren’t casual enough--you aren’t casual at all! I’m not trying to make any music-hall comparisons between husbands and lovers, but there must be some capacity for casualness in a husband, else people would go mad. I don’t mean that I’d go mad with you--it’s you who would go mad. I love you. Too much, maybe--oh, yes, Ivor, too much! And I’ve never loved any one before, except George, and that was a defiant kind of thing: I’ve just let men touch me, because they so wanted to. I’m thinking of you in all this, much more than of myself. I know I’m not strong enough to marry you. You want to do things, you will not be happy unless you are doing things and writing things. You think you want to do things, anyway. And in your mind you are never really at rest, you are always striving about something, sometimes quite unimportant things. And you say to yourself that you will be able to strive tremendously when we are married, but I say you will not, and I’m very wise about some things. For, I tell you, I’m not strong enough inside to cope with your love and the burden of mine, I just sink under them and you sink with me--you are not casual enough, Ivor! You don’t push one back, ever! Why, among your many impatiences, haven’t you got that of sometimes pushing one away? And if we many we will sink, and you will never do the work you want to do--have you had a thought about it all this time, you who despise slackers so much? Just loving a woman--even me!--isn’t enough for you. You only think it is, dear. Dear Ivor, I can see you prowling about my life with a smile nailed on your face, wondering why it is that you can’t do or write anything ‘nowadays.’ Your father must have been a different man to you, I think, for he just damned everything and lost himself in love and Italy, quite lost to the world that had hoped such things from him. You are stronger than your father, and you want to master the world and mould it to your desire--and me too! and you almost have, but not quite. And that’s why our marrying can only make us unhappy in the end, for under your strength lies your father’s weakness of loving too completely--your ambitions are just added to you, poor Ivor, to make you unhappy! I am your mistress, and you are my lover. I am your woman and you are my man. Oh, Ivor, let’s go on like that, let’s go on as we’ve done, free to come and go, free to love and work--let me be free, Ivor, to keep your love for me by letting you be free--isn’t that how you once described the ‘patrician idea,’ dear? Well, it’s hitting you back now.... I get weak in your arms, and so I am writing this to you. I will not marry you, Ivor. And you will be glad, sometime. But I shall be sorry if you are angry now.”

Turner had lied about the breakfast, for it was not on the table; he had kept it warm, but that availed the breakfast not at all, for it was not eaten.

It had been arranged that Ivor should lunch at Belgrave Square that day; but he told Turner to ring up and say that he would be unable to lunch, but would call in the afternoon if he might. Not casual enough, he thought grimly.... He did not want to go to lunch, not because he was angry, but because he wanted to think. He wanted to do any amount of thinking. And he prowled about his flat all the morning, thinking.

September still rained.

One of the greatest mistakes Ivor ever made in his life was not to go to luncheon with Virginia that day, so that he could “think.” It was, in fact, the great mistake of his life. For a man of his impatient temper does not, at certain times, think. He broods. And how far that brooding can take a man from the reality of a thing! How venomously it colours a thing or a woman, so that they would be unrecognisable to a clear eye! What beastliness it unfolds, what lies it verifies, what disloyalties it makes bitterly reasonable!...

To be “messed about” by Virginia! by, of all the people in the world, Virginia! “Let’s go on as we have done,” she had written. “But how the devil can we?” he tried in his mind to answer reasonably. “We can’t go on, we grown-up people, playing a game of loving in corners, beastly corners--oh, you want to make this thing a _liaison_, Virginia! and that I won’t have. I’d rather----” What would he rather? he pulled himself up to wonder. And because he couldn’t face the words that might come after that “rather” he suddenly became furious with himself, with Virginia, with everything. He was being bullied, somehow....

2

He went out, at last, in the afternoon. He hadn’t, in his flat, noticed the closeness of the day, but as soon as he was out it met him very uncomfortably. “Damn!” he said. September had ceased to rain, but soon would again, it was so close and gray. He walked into Park Lane and down Hamilton Place. There weren’t many people about, somehow.... The Bachelor’s, at the corner, was closed for cleaning, and it looked frightfully closed. And then, at Hyde Park Corner, he had a vision. The vision held him up as he was about to cross to St. George’s and thus to Belgrave Square, it held him on the curb staring at the navvies tearing up the road. The vision was of another young man on another gray afternoon, but wintry gray. That other afternoon, that other walk, that other young man! Was it like that again? There the buses were by the Park Gates, and the people crowding into them; then there had been a young girl with a very white and serious face, and maybe there was one now; and it had been raining then, and it had been raining now.... Was the only difference between that young man and himself that the young man had had two arms whereas he had only one? Oh, ass.... Whereat he smiled, and crossed Hyde Park Corner. He felt suddenly quite gay. Oh, it was so different! He had admired Magdalen, he had admired her with his heart, as he still did. But he loved Virginia. And he would talk to her now--dear Virginia!--and make her take it all less, well, dramatically. That’s just what was wrong, they were both taking it too dramatically. Lovers are idiots, he thought. He would point out that it was fearful rot about his ever growing to hate her because she made him slack--“Why, my dear,” he’d say, “it’s only with you I can conceive doing anything at all!” And he would tell her again how impossible it was for them to go on as they had been doing, that they had so far only been on holiday, and that holidays must end. And then they would easily arrange something.... And then, to-night, they would dine at the Mont Agel, in the upstairs room. And how surprised M. Stutz would be to see them together again, for he hadn’t seen them together since 1912, and then only in crowds....

3

“The Smith is rather odd,” Ivor thought. He saw her on the stairs of “the mausoleum,” as he climbed to the upstairs drawing-room where Virginia would be. The Smith was on her way out, it seemed. “To the cleaners, I’ll bet,” thought Ivor, seeing the parcel under her arm.

“Good-afternoon, Smith,” he smiled in passing.

“_Milady vous attend, monsieur_,” she told him seriously; and left him almost gaping at her as she toddled quickly down the wide stone stairway.

4

_Milady_ was playing the piano. She played very seldom, and not at all well. As she sat at the piano, at the far corner of the room, her back was to him; she was in a loose, low-cut, crimson gown, not the appalling crimson of velvet but the soft, enchanting crimson of georgette, and on its loose folds were strewn large golden squares of cabbalistic import; and the whiteness of her slender neck above the crimson gown was a more than human whiteness, it was the legendary whiteness of those Greek boys who lead Greece astray; and her hair, which had been waved that morning, was more golden than gold, even on such a dull September day. And his feet lingered with his eyes, while she played absent-mindedly, as one who knew she did not play well....

“Oh, Virginia!” he cried from behind her, softly, gaily. Everything suddenly seemed so easy.... Her fingers hung absently on the notes, they loitered, they fell; and she turned on the stool, not quickly. She looked up at him, standing happily there.

“How quietly you came in,” she said. And he was amazed at her looks. Virginia was startling white to-day--not ill particularly, but just white, so that her red mouth looked wanton and peculiar, a carmine, flaunting mouth. It looked quite strange to him, her mouth: she had put on too much lip-salve, being ill. And her eyes were dark, dead blue, like inland seas in sultry weather.

“I didn’t come to lunch, dear, because----”

“Oh, yes, yes!” she abruptly stopped him; and abruptly got up from the stool. She took a cigarette from a box on a little table.

“And I don’t want to hear about that,” she said sharply, right at him. “So don’t, please, go on about it....”

“But I say, Virginia----” he began out of his surprise, and then had to stop because of it. He stared at the white face a yard away from him, and at the eyes. Good God, they were quite livid--with something! He tried to smile. This was too silly....

“We’ll make it quite all right about that--that letter, you know,” he assured her, rather lamely. “We’ll find a way out, somehow....”

“Oh, for pity’s sake don’t go on about it!” she cried bitterly. “You’re always pestering and pestering, Ivor. You never let a thing alone--but never! You get on my nerves....” Her voice was sharp, and it hurt, like a silken thread ripped across a finger.

“I’m bored with the whole subject,” she added wearily, turning away. “And if you’ve read my letter there’s no more to say.”

And then she turned back to him with a queer, strained look. Maybe she was trying to appear reasonable--in spite of him!

“Now please let us talk of something else, Ivor.”

He wondered at his own calmness. He didn’t feel in the least angry--but he knew that somewhere in him there was a lot of anger. And he tried, consciously, to level away even the possibility of anger within him. “This is where sense comes in,” he thought. He was so surprised--at this Virginia! She seemed to want to insult. Her whole manner.... Queer! So she had been thinking, too--and away from him! She hadn’t given him a chance--writing that letter, and then, because he’d stopped away to think.... He hadn’t dreamt that her eyes could look at him like this, so curiously livid. But, of course, she was still weak--after that awful pain. And she had thought herself into a feverish state. He “got on her nerves.” ...

Virginia, standing by a little table, was cutting the pages of a French novel. Often, when her mind was absent, Virginia would cut the pages of a French novel....

“I believe you buy them only for that purpose,” Ivor suddenly said.

Virginia smiled a little, dimly.

“George rang up,” she said, “to say he would come in for a few minutes about five.”

“Ah,” said Ivor. It was nearly five now, he saw. He almost said that this wasn’t perhaps the most opportune moment for Tarlyon to call, but that would only make things worse.

He didn’t know what to say. Dinner at the Mont Agel, or going away to Galway, as they had finally arranged, were about the only things he could talk about now, and they would seem a little forced, he thought. Nothing would fit this stupid moment.... He didn’t want to make things worse; and he didn’t want to let her make him angry, certainly not that! If both of them.... He didn’t understand this Virginia. There’s a queer caddishness about her that I can’t understand, he thought. He felt terribly flat.... He stood by the open window and stared out at the wide, rain-soaked square and the thick plesaunce of trees that shone and smelled of rain. The leaves looked delicious, in a rich and rather beastly way, like green velvet shot with bronze. Nice to bury one’s face in wet leaves.... It was awfully close, and spitting again. He held the French windows as far open as they would go. The square was very still, expecting thunder maybe.... She’s thinking away from me, he thought. And I can’t stop her, somehow. She won’t let me. But I must.... He, no matter how angry he might be with her, was always thinking towards her. “Why don’t you ever push one back?” Well, why should he? He knew what he wanted ... one must live cleanly.... And suddenly he swung round into the room. She was not looking at him.

“But this is absurd!” he said violently to the bent head, to the golden hair. He passionately wanted to put this silly thing right--it was so silly! What right had she to write him that letter and then look _queer_ just because he hadn’t run to agree with her!

As she stood at the little table, her face was bent to it, to the book her paper-knife was absently cutting; and as she stood, she raised her face to his cry, and looked at him; she just looked, and her eyes were quite expressionless, as though she was not there. Oh, that unearthly look! But he didn’t care: he had suddenly felt his strength.

“This is absurd,” he repeated firmly, but almost gaily; and he took quick strides towards her. He didn’t know what he was going to do, how he would force her. But he felt his strength.

And George Tarlyon came in. Ivor stopped in his stride. Virginia turned her face to the door.

“Hallo!” Tarlyon said, so airily! And he came towards them.

“Better, my dear?” Tarlyon asked, taking Virginia’s hand; and to Ivor: “Septic weather, Marlay....”

Ivor somehow agreed that it was.

“Will you have tea, George?” Virginia asked, “or does this septic weather call for a brandy-and-soda?”

“It calls, Virginia. With a lump of ice in it, too.”

Virginia pressed a bell. And she asked him:--

“Are you doing anything this evening?”

Tarlyon laughed, as though she had made a joke.

“Nothing that I couldn’t do just as well some other eveni----”

“Then perhaps you’ll dine with me here?” Virginia cut sharply in. “I don’t want to go out, and----”

The door slammed to with a crash, and startled Virginia’s hand to her heart. Tarlyon stared, and then he laughed. He had an eighteenth-century kind of laugh; and he threw back his head a little, and his eyes wrinkled up, as he laughed. It really was rather funny, that sudden exit.... Far below them in the great house, like a cry in the bowels of the earth, a door slammed massively.