Chapter III

1

They were back on the other side of the closed folding-doors: almost as they had been before, standing together as on an island in artificial twilight. The occasion was not, somehow, one for sitting down.

“I’ve made a great demand on your patience, haven’t I?” she asked him. “All this mystery....”

“But you’ve made it very easy for me to meet that demand,” he told her sincerely.

“And now I’ll explain--something, anyway. You’ve a right to know something--after my strange behaviour.” And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but he had nothing to say: the thing was too mysterious.

“Yes?... Well, listen. There, in that room, lies my oldest and dearest friend--though I don’t know why I put it that way, for I’ve never had another. But it’s not to be pathetic I’m being so expansive to you. And it’s not for grief at Aram’s death. I’m being selfish, my friend. I am thinking only of myself--and there’s a great horror in that word, myself, when there’s not another to put beside it....”

She stopped, and seemed to consider him; and she made a slight, helpless movement of her hand, so that a sense of her impotence touched him closely.

“I’ll understand, whatever you say,” he begged her to believe. “Anyway, I think I will.”

“If you’ve ever been lonely you will,” said Pamela Star. “Though even so it may be difficult, for I’ve only been lonely since seven o’clock this evening. But I am suffering from all the loneliness of my future life, I don’t see how it can be mended. That’s hysteria, maybe. You have met many women, I’m sure, and so you may know this for hysteria....”

“I have met many women,” Ivor said, “and I don’t know anything.”

“Listen,” she said again: and spoke impulsively, swiftly. “I’ve been with Aram Melekian since I was ten. I’m twenty-eight now--eighteen years in that wise old man’s care, for he was very wise, you know. I was a grubby little girl playing about in the Fulham Road, the daughter of a plumber’s foreman and the sister of a little boy who was even grubbier than me, when Aram saw me on his way to the studio of one of his _protégées_ in Redcliffe Road. He saw me several times, he said, and was amazed at my beauty....” She smiled faintly. “I think he has been amazed at it ever since. And of course I’ve been only too pleased to be able to return, if only like that, a little of the great debt I owe him.”

“At first,” she said, “he was my guardian. He had arranged things with my father--who would never receive any help for himself, dear father is such an independent kind of plumber! And a great success he’s made of plumbing, too, he and my brother--Snagg & Son, of the Fulham Road. For my name was Pam Snagg, but Aram changed it to Pamela Star, saying it was more apt for me....”

“And indeed it is,” said Ivor.

“Yes, Aram had a _flair_,” she agreed. “And, though he was so bitter, he could make even plain things beautiful by understanding them. That’s surely very rare....”

“At first he was my guardian,” she repeated, “and then, when I was twenty, he was my lover. And then, after that, he was my friend. He was my lover for a year, and he said that that year was the great mistake of his life--the only mistake of his life, he said. For one day he cried--Aram cried, hard Aram!--and after that he was my friend. My great friend.... The great mistake of his life! Well, I don’t know. It’s easy to judge these things by morality, so easy that morality must be sometimes wrong. It’s too cocksure.... I’m glad to have been his mistress. I feel I would have been very--small and little, without that. You understand? It somehow balances one--the knowledge. And I’m sure you wouldn’t be here and I talking to you so frankly but that once upon a time I let Aram love me--oh, yes, it was just that, there’s no excuse for me at all except that I’m glad of it.”

“But surely that’s just enough!”

“Yes?” she asked softly; and he had a conscious moment of wondering what she was going to say. “And was it enough excuse, my friend, for him to leave all his property, _every bit_, to me, to do just as I liked with? Me, Pamela Star!”

“Well!...” said Ivor in amazement. It was amazing....

“Oh, but it was dreadful!” she suddenly cried.

“Why do you say ‘it was’?,” he asked--sharply.

She stared at him in deep bewilderment.

“Quick you are!” she murmured. She passed a hand across her forehead. “I don’t know,” she said. “I should have said ‘it is,’ I suppose. But you’re here, after all--aren’t you?”

That evident fact seemed to astonish him to silence.

“It was dreadful,” Pamela Star insisted. “This evening--all alone here! The doctor came and went--an impressive man. His patients always have bulletins about them in the morning paper--a most impressive man. He pressed my hand most encouragingly as he went away. Then the secretaries came and went--automata, just automata! They seemed to find a tremendous lot to do, though I’m sure I don’t know what it was, for I couldn’t find anything to do at all. One automaton whispered to me that he would see ‘about the Press’--the silly man, as though I cared what he saw about! And at last he went too, the last automaton, with whispering feet. The servants seemed more human--Rose, the butler, is a very nice old man, but the plumber’s daughter wasn’t somehow able to put her head on his shoulder and say that she was very, very miserable. Then he went to bed at last, I suppose, and I was left all alone with Aram and all this money: ... left all alone with to-morrow and all the to-morrows! Don’t you feel sorry for me, my friend--what shall I do with it all? Must I sacrifice all my life to that ghastly money--even as he did! Oh, I don’t despise money, but this is too much, it’s endless! I can’t sign it away, heap by heap--oh, delicious heaps of gold to give away! ‘Will you take it, sir, or shall I send it for you?’ But that’s no use, I can’t sign it away, for he trusted me with his millions to direct them to their best advantage. He educated me for that purpose, he said I was the one woman in the world who would be able to do it. Oh God, what a compliment! They will always be his, I will be their slave! That looks to be my life, my friend....”

She was deliciously frank with him, she did not try to deprecate her self-pity.

“But why did he keep you so--well, closed up?” Ivor asked. “It seems strange of him--not giving you a chance to know people, to make friends, to know things!”

“Oh, but I know such a lot!” she protested, with a vast, sweet arrogance. “I know a devil of a lot, sir, about life and things. He taught me, you see--and he was a most uncommon man, I assure you. And he didn’t keep me ‘closed up’ at all--I just took his advice, respecting him as I did. I was lonely sometimes, of course, but I was happy with him, we laughed together often, and then he would show me the world. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know a younger man than Aram was really--even his contempt for people was a young thing, don’t you see! And, as for me, I never had a desire to keep a _salon_ of my own or decorate some one else’s. I didn’t want all that. I’m of the people, and I always will be of the people, money or no money. And Aram always said that if I went about my face would make a mess of my life--forgive my being candid about my face, but living with him has made me so--for, he said, my beauty wasn’t the kind that men are just content to look at, they would want to touch it, being men. And I couldn’t remain untouchable, he said, being a woman and warm--that’s what he said, anyway, and he probably knew for he was once my lover for a year. A man will come, he said, who will also be your friend. He said that often, he seemed somehow to be certain about it. But by the time he died this evening no such man had come at all, not even the shadow of one. And so I wandered about the house, and then at last I put on this dress, just for something to do; and then, still for something to do, I crept out of the house and walked, and at last I stood by the Tube station, wondering if anything had ever happened to any one in Down Street. At last I decided it hadn’t--even though, you know, I didn’t expect anything to happen, and I don’t think I really wanted anything to happen, for I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if it did....”

“And then,” she said, “you happened, with your one arm. That made things ever so much easier. Somehow....”

“I just happened,” he said, quite sincerely, “as anyone else might have.”

“Don’t be silly!” she cried--so suddenly! And she laughed at his humility, shattering it--and then, shattering her laughter, came a great noise and thundering through the stone hall, so that they were shocked into staring silence.

“Good God, what’s that!” Ivor whispered.

They started to the door; and again that thundering through the stone hall shattered the stillness and marred the dignity of Sir Aram Melekian’s tomb.

“It’s the front door,” whispered Pamela Star.

2

A squat and surly shape confronted them in the night.

“I bin ringin’ this ’ere bell for the larst ’our,” explained the shape with commendable restraint. “And not jest for fun, but to know if you’ve fergotten me or going to keep me till the next war. Bein’ now parst four----”

A convulsive giggle came from behind Ivor’s shoulder in the doorway.

“We’d forgotten the taxi!” said the giggle, quite unnecessarily, for the taxi was very manifest to the eye.

“I’m so sorry,” said Ivor to the driver, and grinned at him. “I quite forgot you....”

“Oh, I don’t mind, if you don’t!” sneered the taxi-driver....

“Have you got enough change?” she whispered into his ear, still giggling.

“It’s not a question of _change_,” whispered back Ivor, pulling out notes.

“Good-night, sir,” said the taxi-driver, with _empressement_. “Sorry to ’ave woken you.”

Ivor stared at him.

“Not at all,” he said.

“Good-night,” said Pamela Star.

The taxi hurled itself down the hill of Hertford Street towards the blind turning to Shepherd’s Market. It was an astonishing taxi.

“I never been in a taxi before,” said Pamela Star childishly.

As they walked back through the wide and sombre hall of stone Ivor suddenly stopped; she stopped too. The light of a great idea was in his eyes.

“Let’s go out,” he said. “For a walk....”

And he swept a sudden gesture round the sombre hall.

“Out of this, Pamela Star....”