I knew Carlotta Fell in the early days before the war. Then she was
escaping into art, and was just "Fell." That was at our famous but
uninspired school of art, the Thwaite, where I myself was diligently
murdering my talent. At the Thwaite they always gave Carlotta the
Still-life prizes. She accepted them calmly, as one of our conquerors,
but the rest of the students felt vicious about it. They called it
buttering the laurels, because Carlotta was Hon., and her father a
well-known peer.
She was by way of being a beauty, too. Her family was not rich, yet she
had come into five hundred a year of her own, when she was eighteen; and
that, to us, was an enormity. Then she appeared in the fashionable
papers, affecting to be wistful, with pearls, slanting her eyes. Then
she went and did another of her beastly still-lives, a cactus-in-a-pot.
At the Thwaite, being snobs, we were proud of her too. She showed off a
bit, it is true, playing bird of paradise among the pigeons. At the same
time, she was thrilled to be with us, and out of her own set. Her
wistfulness and yearning "for something else" was absolutely genuine.
Yet she was not going to hobnob with us either, at least not
indiscriminately.
She was ambitious, in a vague way. She wanted to coruscate, somehow or
other. She had a family of clever and "distinguished" uncles, who had
flattered her. What then?
Her cactuses-in-a-pot were admirable. But even she didn't expect them to
start a revolution. Perhaps she would rather glow in the wide if dirty
skies of life, than in the somewhat remote and unsatisfactory ether of
Art.
She and I were "friends" in a bare, stark, but real sense. I was poor,
but I didn't really care. She didn't really care either. Whereas I did
care about some passionate vision which, I could feel, lay embedded in
the half-dead body of this life. The quick body within the dead. I could
_feel_ it. And I wanted to get at it, if only for myself.
She didn't know what I was after. Yet she could feel that I was It, and
being an aristocrat of the Kingdom of It, as well as the realm of Great
Britain, she was loyal--loyal to me because of It, the quick body which
I imagined within the dead.
Still, we never had much to do with one another. I had no money. She
never wanted to introduce me to her own people. I didn't want it either.
Sometimes we had lunch together, sometimes we went to a theatre, or we
drove in the country, in some car that belonged to neither of us. We
never flirted or talked love. I don't think she wanted it, any more than
I did. She wanted to marry into her own surroundings, and I knew she was
of too frail a paste to face my future.
Now I come to think of it, she was always a bit sad when we were
together. Perhaps she looked over seas she would never cross. She
belonged finally, fatally, to her own class. Yet I think she hated them.
When she was in a group of people who talked "smart," titles and _beau
monde_ and all that, her rather short nose would turn up, her wide mouth
press into discontent, and a languor of bored irritation come even over
her broad shoulders. Bored irritation, and a loathing of climbers, a
loathing of the ladder altogether. She hated her own class: yet it was
also sacrosanct to her. She disliked, even to me, mentioning the title
of her friends. Yet the very hurried resentment with which she said,
when I asked her. Who is it?--
"Lady Nithsdale, Lord Staines--old friends of my mother," proved that
the coronet was wedged into her brow, like a ring of iron grown into a
tree.
She had another kind of reverence for a true artist: perhaps more
genuine, perhaps not; anyhow, more free and easy.
She and I had a curious understanding in common: an inkling, perhaps, of
the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which
we call life; and hence a tacit hostility to the commonplace world, its
inert laws. We were rather like two soldiers on a secret mission in an
enemy country. Life, and people, was an enemy country to us both. But
she would never declare herself.
She always came to me to find out what I thought, particularly in a
moral issue. Profoundly, fretfully discontented with the conventional
moral standards, she didn't know how to take a stand of her own. So she
came to me. She had to try to get her own feelings straightened out. In
that she showed her old British fibre. I told her what, as a young man,
I thought: and usually she was resentful. She did so want to be
conventional. She would even act quite perversely, in her determination
to be conventional. But she always had to come back to me, to ask me
again. She depended on me morally. Even when she disagreed with me, it
soothed her, and restored her to know my point of view. Yet she
disagreed with me.
We had then a curious abstract intimacy, that went very deep, yet showed
no obvious contact. Perhaps I was the only person in the world with whom
she felt, in her uneasy self, at home, at peace. And to me, she was
always of my own _intrinsic_ sort, of my own species. Most people are
just another species to me. They might as well be turkeys.
But she would always _act_ according to the conventions of her class,
even perversely. And I knew it.
So, just before the war she married Lord Lathkill. She was twenty-one. I
did not see her till war was declared; then she asked me to lunch with
her and her husband, in town. He was an officer in a Guards regiment,
and happened to be in uniform, looking very handsome and well-set-up, as
if he expected to find the best of life served up to him for ever. He
was very dark, with dark eyes and fine black hair, and a very beautiful,
diffident voice, almost womanish in its slow, delicate inflections. He
seemed pleased and flattered at having Carlotta for a wife.
To me he was beautifully attentive, almost deferential, because I was
poor, and of the other world, those poor devils of outsiders. I laughed
at him a little, and laughed at Carlotta, who was a bit irritated by the
gentle delicacy with which he treated me.
She was elated too. I remember her saying, "We need war, don't you
think? Don't you think men need the fight, to keep life chivalrous and
put martial glamour into it?"
And I remember saying, "I think we need some sort of fight; but my sort
isn't the war sort." It was August, we could take it lightly.
"What's your sort?" she asked quickly.
"I don't know: single-handed, anyhow," I said, with a grin. Lord
Lathkill made me feel like a lonely sansculotte; he was so completely
unostentatious, so very willing to pay all the attention to me, and yet
so subtly complacent, so unquestioningly sure of his position. Whereas
I was not a very sound earthenware pitcher which had already gone many
times to the well.
He was not conceited, not half as _conceited_ as I was. He was willing
to leave me all the front of the stage, even with Carlotta. He felt so
sure of some things, like a tortoise in a glittering, polished
tortoiseshell that mirrors eternity. Yet he was not quite easy with me.
"You are Derbyshire?" I said to him, looking into his face. "So am I! I
was born in Derbyshire."
He asked me with a gentle, uneasy sort of politeness, where? But he was
a bit taken aback. And his dark eyes, brooding over me, had a sort of
fear in them. At the centre they were hollow with a certain misgiving.
He was so sure of _circumstances_, and not by any means sure of the man
in the middle of the circumstances. Himself! Himself! That was already
a ghost.
I felt that he saw in me something crude but real, and saw himself as
something in its own way perfect, but quite unreal. Even his love for
Carlotta, and his marriage, was a circumstance that was inwardly unreal
to him. One could tell by the curious way in which he waited, before he
spoke. And by the hollow look, almost a touch of madness, in his dark
eyes, and in his soft, melancholy voice.
I could understand that she was fascinated by him. But God help him if
ever circumstances went against him!
She had to see me again, a week later, to talk about him. So she asked
me to the opera. She had a box, and we were alone, and the notorious
Lady Perth was two boxes away. But this was one of Carlotta's
conventional perverse little acts, with her husband in France. She only
wanted to talk to me about him.
So she sat in the front of her box, leaning a little to the audience and
talking sideways to me. Anyone would have known at once there was a
_liaison_ between us, how _dangereuse_ they would never have guessed.
For there, in the full view of the world--her world at least, not
mine--she was talking sideways to me, saying in a hurried, yet stony
voice:
"What do you think of Luke?"
She looked up at me heavily, with her sea-coloured eyes, waiting for my
answer.
"He's tremendously charming," I said, above the theatreful of faces.
"Yes, he's that!" she replied, in the flat, plangent voice she had when
she was serious, like metal ringing flat, with a strange far-reaching
vibration. "Do you think he'll be happy?"
"_Be_ happy!" I ejaculated. "When, _be_ happy?"
"With me," she said, giving a sudden little snirt of laughter, like a
schoolgirl, and looking up at me shyly, mischievously, anxiously.
"If you make him," I said, still casual.
"How can I make him?"
She said it with flat, plangent earnestness. She was always like that,
pushing me deeper in than I wanted to go.
"Be happy yourself, I suppose: and quite sure about it. And then _tell_
him you're happy, and tell him he is too, and he'll be it."
"Must I do all that?" she said rapidly. "Not otherwise?"