"I have _surprising_ news for you," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "Cyprian
is at Home! His Company has sent him to attend some _Conference_ in
connection with the _mines_. I have not seen him myself. He called
when I was out and of course _Peter_ is away at Wimbledon seeing your
father's cousin about that clerkship. Cyprian left a note to say he
had been _lent_ a flat by a friend. One of those self-contained
affairs in Jermyn Street. _Service-flats_, I think they are called,
with the kind of lift which always terrifies me that you are supposed
to work yourself by pressing buttons and _not_ a hall-porter. I
should not _dream_ of going there unless Peter were with me and, as
likely as not, poor Peter would forget _which_ buttons these days,
himself, and shoot us into the _wrong_ flat when it would be _most_
awkward to explain.
"Cyprian said he should be in all _Sunday_ if any of us cared to ring
him up. You had better write and tell him that I shall be at
Richmond this weekend myself, seeing your father in the _Home_. I
suppose you will be returning on Monday and can arrange to meet him
then and relate our _distressing news_."
For a wonder, Mrs. Carmichael did not forget to add Cyprian's full
address. Followed the plaintive reminder that Lord Clifford had
asked to be allowed to take Ferlie to a matinée on Monday; that the
poor fellow was looking very pulled down and she was quite certain
that if Ferlie put off Cyprian till Tuesday he would quite
understand. P.S.--"My new georgette was _ruined_ by that _horrid_
little dog of the Glennies' which cost _a hundred guineas_. I would
not pay that to have my carpet and my friends' dresses spoilt, and I
don't believe it, though Lady Cardew tells me it is a _fact_, but she
is never very lucid in these matters."
The strong point of this letter, also, being anything but its
lucidity, Ferlie did not waste time considering which of the canine
commandments framed for drawing-rooms had been violated at her
mother's expense. Three words, only, hammered at her brain: "Cyprian
is Home."
(1) That explained his silence of the past weeks.
(2) He would be in all Sunday.
(3) She must see him before Monday's matinée.
Her way instantaneously seemed to grow clear and hard, like a path on
ice. Perhaps Cyprian had escaped the rules of captivity away there
among his lonely scattered mines.
Cyprian, who had come to her rescue in nursery-days when Hell loomed
before her in the glowing grate, near the yawning tomb of the
toy-cupboard and when the night-light, which should have illumined
the tired pilgrim's path to a Heaven of sunny dreams, had blown
out.... "And ... you will always like me best, Cyprian?" ... "Of
course ... Of course."
If anyone could now prevent the barred gates from closing upon her,
it must be Cyprian. If he failed she would go to the matinée,
thought Ferlie. It would not matter where she went, if Cyprian
failed.
"But," protested Margery, later, "I thought you were motoring up with
Dad on Monday? The only possible train from here on Sunday does not
reach town till just before dinner."
"It will do quite well," said Ferlie. "And I really must go."
At the station Margery launched her parting shaft.
"Good-bye ... My Lady! ... Remember, you can be happy, plus money,
with many a person whom you could not live beside for an hour in a
little cottage with roses round the door."
And she slammed down the window of the compartment for the
traveller's last gestures of farewell.
So motionless sat Ferlie during the next two hours that an artist,
thus minded, could have made a detailed portrait of her before the
train sighed gustily up Victoria platform.
Rain, in the evening air, and black and gold puddles reflecting the
passing figures.
She made her way along to the cloak-room and deposited the box which
did duty for a week-end of light dresses, but her suit-case went with
her into the taxi. The man received indifferently her stammering
request to be taken to the Jermyn Street address.
Inside the taxi it was hot and steamy. The last occupant had mingled
scent and cigarettes. Ferlie dropped both windows and allowed the
rush of cool damp air from the flickering streets to whirl her hair
about her face. She passed a chamois leather over her eyelids and
nose, and shrugged impatiently at the reflection the narrow strip of
glass gave back to her under a withered spray of lilies-of-the-valley.
She paid the taxi and waited to watch the man drive away, before
turning into the bare stone hallway to read the minute directions on
the lift. Although a more adventurous spirit than her mother she
decided to walk up. Her watch told her that it was a quarter to
eight.
* * * * * *
Cyprian had spent most of the time, since a late cup of tea, in
writing. He was very busy. This could not be counted as coming home
on Leave and he did not expect to have more than six short weeks in
England.
Whimsically, he wondered, as the twilight deepened what it was all
about--this busy-ness with regard to somebody else's affairs. Since
he had chosen to turn his back upon a sheltered and unruffled peace
(or would it have been stultification?) and taken the sea-ways
towards more glowing suns than ever dawned upon the University towns
of England, what Grail had he been pursuing? He had earned his bread
and a little butter. For the rest there had remained the distant
echoes of a siren's singing, now without power to lure him closer,
and Ferlie's gradually maturing letters.
Had he wanted Ferlie to grow up? She had shown precocious signs of
it during his last Leave. If he had lost his little companion of the
Zoological Gardens England must now become as lonely as Burma. There
was the influence of that strange woman who had had tea with them:
the aunt. Her name had made him think of hair-oil. Cyprian laid
down his pen. In the brightness of the firelight he had not noticed
his omission to turn up the electric reading-lamp; and the East ages
the eyes. He ought to feel younger than he did. One had to take
malaria into account. How old was Ferlie now? Nearly eighteen?
Still a child to thirty-nine....
No one had rung him up. He particularly refrained from asking Ferlie
to do so in his note, in case she too should be very busy these days.
There would be gaieties in town for the Carmichaels' daughter at
eighteen, and hordes of young men who did complicated things with
their feet in ball-rooms. Young men, so much younger than Cyprian,
that they could not have shared his short career as a soldier, early
invalided out in the first push.
Sometimes now, when he coughed, he wondered whether the surgeon had
succeeded in extracting quite all the bits of shrapnel.
Ferlie, in those days, had not even attained the dignity of
flapperdom. Too small for khaki-worship. And it was during those
years, he had heard, that Muriel began to lose her silver-fair head.
He remembered his one last futile attempt to win her before returning
to Burma. His hand, the forefinger stained with ink, stretched
irresolutely towards the telephone. As if in direct answer to the
impulse a bell rang. The electric bell of his flat. Curious. The
valet of his rooms used a latch-key, discreetly, when the flat's
occupant was out, and had already taken his dinner order. The
hand-lift would do the remaining work of the evening in bringing up
the meal and taking it down.
He crossed the room and switched on the crimson-shaded lamp in the
lobby. The dim silhouette of a feminine figure was outlined on the
frosted glass of the staircase door. He slipped back the catch.
She stood in the frame of the dark fluted doorway.
White fox furs at her throat, fresh violets nestling in them from
some country hot-house; above, the hair of a Beata Beatrix escaped
from under her soft grey suede travelling hat.
So this was Ferlie. Ferlie, whose letters had grown mature.
"How long do we have to stand here and look at one another, Cyprian?"
The tremulous laughter of her greeting broke the spell.
Cyprian, blinking in the red lamp-light, was beginning to believe her
an apparition. He stood aside to let her pass and slipped back the
travelling wrap from her shoulders with hands which were not quite
steady.
"I did not think you would be coming so late as this," he said. "You
never rang up, Ferlie."
"No." ... She curled into a chair beside the narrow fireplace and
held out chilled fingers to the blaze.
"I have been in the country all this week. I only came up this
afternoon; the first train after I got Mother's letter. You wrote to
Mother; not to me."
He ignored that.
"But, my dear--where are you dining?"
("Men," thought Ferlie. "Oh, Men!") She repudiated the thought of
food with a gesture.
"Turn up the light, Cyprian. I want to look at you."
He obeyed and, kneeling, stirred the fire. She noticed the hair upon
his temples, iron-grey; the little tired lines about his eyes and
mouth; the quick nervousness of the sensitive hands. The East had
taken its toll of the scholarly dreamer who had allowed his life to
drift out on the tide rather than remain upon smooth shores to face a
woman's "No."
With lightning rapidity the impression was registered on her heart
that Cyprian wanted taking care of. She was not absolutely right.
He was a giver himself. He wanted someone to take care of. Another
flash, this time searching out the exact truth: Cyprian was not used
to women.
"There has been no one since Muriel," decided Ferlie; and feared that
name no more.
A gust of wind through the open door fluttered to her feet a sheet of
close fine writing, the Greek e's betraying his classics and every
letter standing out in equal value. It was the report on which he
had been engaged that afternoon. She stooped and handed it back to
him.
"I have interrupted you, Cyprian."
"Of course you have. What else have I ever existed for but to keep
my temper under your interruptions, Ferlie?"
"There is so much to say," and she drank him in with happy eyes.
He ran one thumb along the edge of the paper, still faintly worried.
"But I must arrange something. You can't go without any dinner at
all. I've ordered 'for one' up here and, of course, you must eat
mine. I'll see if it's what you like."
There was a hint of exasperation in her voice as she checked his
advance upon the bell.
"Do they allow you such small helpings? I can share your dinner when
they send it up, if you will insist upon making me eat when I don't
want to."
She pulled him down beside her, by his sleeve, into the other chair.
"Do you know you have not even said that you are glad to see me?"
"Glad? Why, Ferlie, you know----" he broke off to stare back at her,
and then repeated, "Glad?"
"You have not changed," said Ferlie slowly, "I suppose I have?"
This was frank coquetry and she felt a little ashamed when, with
unsuspecting disregard of the fact, he said,
"Stand up again. I haven't made any of the correct remarks. Why,
your skirts are as short as they were before!"
"Shorter, Silly! Fashion now decrees that one must put up one's
skirts and let down one's hair on leaving school."
"I am glad they have left your hair alone."
"There was not much sense in trying to 'put up' a head, bobbed by
Nature, when Art was busy bobbing all Nature's long locks. This bush
will never grow beyond my shoulders, if I live to be eighty. I
inherit it from Aunt B. That was why she shingled, you know."
His scrutiny came to rest on the widely set grey irises, circled by
their dark golden fringe.
"No. You have not grown up," he decided. "You will probably eat all
the ice-cream to-night and leave me the cutlets. We were always Jack
Spratt and his wife."
She nodded gravely and he added, "Also, you will not want your wine
dry."
"I am ignorant enough to have imagined, hitherto, that all wine must,
of necessity, be wet. However, water out of your wash-stand carafe
will do for me. I expect your tooth-glass is luxuriously patterned
to be in keeping with the rest of things here."
They chattered inconsequently till the lift arrived with its first
burden of dishes, and not until the dessert had returned to the
depths whence it had mysteriously emerged and after they had made
themselves as ridiculous as two picnicking children, did Ferlie get
down to the Family news.
She touched very lightly upon her "dancing partner," Clifford
Greville-Mainwaring, but the deepened tinge of her face did not
escape Cyprian because, by then, he was finding it difficult not to
look at her all the time.
"I am incredibly sorry about your father," he said, shying away from
an uncomfortable idea. "You all strike me as being wonderfully
plucky."
"It's worst for Peter," said Ferlie. And sat silent for a while
considering the problem of Peter.
Quite by chance, Cyprian glanced at the clock and remarked in
startled tones that it was past eleven.
"Is it?" she asked indifferently.
Her arms were clasped round her knees and her chin resting on them.
Sometimes she rocked herself gently backwards and forwards. He
smiled to himself, remembering the pose since she was seven.
"I am thinking it is about time I saw you home," he said. "Mrs.
Carmichael will be wondering what on earth we are doing."
"No she will not. There is no one at home, Cyprian, and I am not
expected back till to-morrow."
"But where have you arranged to spend the night?"
She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of
fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.
"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.
Cyprian laughed. Then he protested, in his amusement, at the
simplicity of Ferlie grown-up. Presently, he sobered and began to
attempt explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately
deaf ear.
"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.
"Where to?"
Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in
very sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate
her; if she would lend herself to extrication. He was honestly
puzzled.
Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not
another couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable. Ferlie and he.
A law unto themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream
because her surroundings were dark and lonely. A law unto themselves
when he received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of
men in general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of
that farcical avuncular status. A law unto themselves in their
unnaturally unusual correspondence with its sprawled confidences on
one side and its restrained admissions on the other of his need of
her in the background of his life.
That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it
now that she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship
and--and normalize it.
"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even
now, an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside
the walls of which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always
intended to remain?"
This was utter nonsense. Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen,
was not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at
eighteen, was, most distinctly, to be brought up short.
He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.
"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of
years with the big price of experience, but others are born free. If
you have not bought yours yet you will some day. But I was born
free. Peter, too, I think. He has the courage of his beliefs; he is
no captive to past customs, nor is the fear of the neighbour the
beginning of his wisdom. If we walk into cages it will be of our own
free will, and not because any stale bait can tempt us from within,
nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."
"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell
me exactly what you mean?"
She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the
gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his
hands with sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her
hair. Involuntarily, he touched the ruffled rebellious head.
"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.
She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.
"It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became
friends. Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly
reach me, you have always come. We have had to face separation for
what has seemed a vitally long time to me since your last leave. To
you, already mentally settled and developed, it may not have seemed
so long. But I have been half afraid that your return would separate
us more surely than, so far, has the sea. To test that fear, I came
to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian. To-night, not
to-morrow. When I was little, what help could you have given me by
waiting for the daylight? I used to think you could save me from the
tomb which was all ready to close on me. Now it is a cage of which I
am afraid. I want to stay with you until that fear is past. I want
to assure myself of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased
knowledge of life. To-night, not to-morrow. For to-morrow I have to
make a decision concerning that cage, and the decision depends upon
what I may learn of you in the little time we have together to-night.
I knew how you would shrink from offending Convention; therefore I
have frustrated Convention. We have only a few more free hours in
which to pick up the threads which may have got dropped and twisted.
Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of to-morrow. I have
gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very natural thing
for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep--at rest, in
one another's presence again. I need you, Cyprian, just now. And I
want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."
All but mesmerized, he listened. That which was hide-bound in him,
and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked
simplicity of her words. He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young.
You do not understand."
"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled
over with quick mockery. "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither
distresses nor shames me. This isn't the Victorian era. But all
that I understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of
Life,' affects neither of us with regard to this situation. We have
cherished our hours in the past, scattered here and there, each like
a desert oasis. We have come to another now. Later, very much
later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in this chair and then
you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to bed. And
to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just come
upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear that
we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."
Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility
to her moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.
"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural
and ordinary."
"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle,
abruptly.
His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.
"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking
more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge
when a thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."
And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing
silence.
The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was
beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of
comfort. Let him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and
did not merely drug. What, for all her dreams, could she have
grasped of the Powers which spin the dice for good or evil? Eighteen
to thirty-nine! Supposing he yielded to this childish defiance of
the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know? He got up and crossing to
the window, flung it wide. The roar of London traffic rushed upwards
on the rising wind. He stood, his profile directed at the struggling
smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a
little bowed. Far below him, the haunches of a large black
draught-horse lumbered towards a mews. Its heavy deliberation
touched a chord of memory: a fragment of verse--Yeats, wasn't
it?--assailed him in warning.
"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the
Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?
There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round
the theme, and he had seen it filmed.
Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.
At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God,
the Ploughman..." Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen.
The inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on. Eighteen
to thirty-nine. How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal
faith and unanalysed affection? If her words veiled the faint
suggestion that her need of him was as great as his need of
her--wonderingly, reverently, he repeated it to himself, "his need of
her"--he must pretend, for the present at any rate, that he did not
hear it. He must be just to her Youth, that glorious jewel of Life
which she wore with such careless indifference.
"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the
Herdsman goads them on behind."
That was it....
"Cyprian." Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed
the window with a slight sense of chill. "Cyprian, look at me."
He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.
"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it
would be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in
the way I choose, to-night?"
He shook his head at that but he would not answer.
"Cyprian, look at me." Nor would he do that again. His eyelids
blinked--their old short-sighted trick--over her head, at the
sapphire resting against her white throat, at the dying embers, at
the hearth-rug where lay, kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled
Cinderella shoe.
And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so
much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every
flutter of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked
from her another window of his soul.
* * * * * *
"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion,
"Would you mind going?"
Instantaneously, Ferlie turned her back and thrust her foot into the
errant shoe. In the doorway she faced him, her cloak over her arm.
"You have never asked that of me before," she said, "and you will
never be required to say it again."
Half paralysed he heard the front door bang. In another moment the
wave of reaction set in. What in thunder was he thinking of to allow
her to go out into Jermyn Street at this hour of the night, alone?
He snatched his hat and followed, gaining on her by the fact that he
could take the lift. She was passing under the stone arch leading to
the pavement as he crashed back the gates.
"Ferlie!" he called after her, "Wait." But she did not stop nor turn
her head at the sound of his footsteps hurrying along behind her. A
taxi crawled near with its flag up. He was just too late to prevent
her getting into it. With feverish presence of mind he noted the
number. Fortune favoured him, for it was caught in a block of cars
returning from the theatres, as another car ejected its passenger on
the other side of the road.
Cyprian, too fiercely anxious at the moment to see the humour of the
situation, gave his penny-novelette directions. The driver awarded
him an indifferent glance and held out his hand for earnest money.
He was used to minding his own business in his profession.
Once in full pursuit of Ferlie's taxi Cyprian found himself on the
verge of unnatural mirth. His third night in England; and he and
Ferlie playing hide-and-seek, in and out of the London traffic, like
any hardened human satyr and some nymph of the by-streets. And why?
What was this intangible, invisible Thing which had suddenly
interposed itself between them? A silly whim on her part, an
instinct-driven refusal on his and the shadow had assumed these
gigantic proportions.
Outside the Carmichaels' town residence, with its Sale-advertising
boards and closed blinds, Ferlie alighted.
From the prompt departure of her driver one might divulge that she
paid him without examining the fare. On her own front door-step,
wrestling with her latch-key, Cyprian reached her.
"Ferlie, don't be a little goose!"
Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as
hard as pebbles.
"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and
he has put up the chain. Since you must let me in for a silly
betrayal of my unexpected return you had better come down into the
basement and see if you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if
he sleeps with it open. His room is next to the pantry and
silver-chest. If I set an alarm going accidentally, he will only
think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head further under the
clothes."
"But, Ferlie----" She was half-way down the area steps and he, less
familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.
Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel. She
tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.
"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover
his breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel. An
instant she swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a
pipe running down from the bathroom window. She was now only a
shadowy shape poised above him in the darkness.
"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she
drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said
that 'to the pure all things are impure.'"
The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at
Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of
its owner, in his arms.