innumerable and everlasting. Now, take to-night. When I met Johnnie
last week at Mrs. O’Rane’s, we found that we danced rather well
together. He’s frightfully good at games and everything—”
“Do you know anything about him?” Eric interrupted.
“Not much. Do you?”
“Nothing at all. I’ve met him on and off for some years, but in all the
time I’ve never seen as much of him as I saw of you that night in New
York. On general principles, don’t you think it’s—imprudent; aren’t
your parents justified in thinking it’s imprudent for you to tumble
into an intimacy—not with Gaymer, but with any man of whom you know
absolutely nothing?”
“But women have instincts about men! I should be no better off if I
dragged him away and introduced him to mother and made her invite him
to dinner. I daresay that’s more conventional, but it doesn’t do any
_good_.”
Eric hesitated long enough to ask himself why he inflicted so much
advice on a very raw child, but not long enough to answer his own
question.
“It puts your relationship on a different footing,” he suggested. “When
a man’s been to your house and eaten your salt, he feels a
responsibility to the house. Look at it this way: during the last week,
how have you differed in essence from—let me say—a chorus-girl who
dines with a man and goes to a dance with him and lets him help her to
get taken on at a new theatre? I don’t suggest that there _are_ no
differences, but what differences are there for a man like Gaymer to
see?”
Ivy looked at him in perplexity which was too strong to allow
resentment to creep in.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and both were glad when the taxi was
reported to be at the door.
As he read his letters and looked with distaste at the work awaiting
him on the morrow, Eric reviewed with morose dissatisfaction the five
weeks that had passed since his return to England. He had sighed with
boredom at the cultured table of Lady Poynter; and in the
conscientiously Bohemian setting of Mrs. O’Rane the boredom had only
been complicated by amazement. (He scrawled a blue-pencil “Refuse”
across four invitations and tossed them into his secretary’s
letter-basket.) He had interested himself for a moment in Ivy Maitland,
at least to the extent of giving her some good advice; but her pert
assurance was a little tiresome, and he was now only interested to
wonder how soon John Gaymer would weary of it. At the Mill-House he had
tried to win his way back to a place in his own family, but they had
mysteriously stood still and he had wandered into a spiritual
wilderness of his own. Even his work no longer promised him a way out
of the wilderness, but it might keep him from brooding over the
astounding emptiness of life.
He had achieved a dull quiescence of spirit when he read in Christmas
week that Mr. and Lady Barbara Oakleigh had returned to London from
Ireland and were leaving England for the Riviera after a few days in
Hampshire. That night, on his way to Winchester, Eric chose a
compartment at the back of the train to avoid all chance of meeting her
in the Crawleigh or Southampton coaches. His window commanded
two-thirds of the platform, and, five minutes before the train was due
to start, he caught sight of Oakleigh and a footman hurrying by, with
Barbara half a pace behind him. Valentine Arden had christened her “the
haggard Venus”; her big sunken eyes and white cheeks had a morbid
fascination of their own, compelling as ever; physical delicacy and
nervous vitality still contended for possession of her tall, wasted
body; tragedy and defiance alternated in the swift changes of her
expression, as she flashed by the window of his compartment. For all
his resolution and training, Eric felt his heart stop as it had stopped
in Tokio, when he read the news of her marriage; when the red mist
lifted from his eyes, he looked at her again from behind the screen of
his paper, surprised to see no change: the green morocco
travelling-cushion still bore the old “B.N.” in one corner; he
recognized her fur-coat, and George was carrying the red leather
jewel-case which he had carried for her fifty times. At their first
meeting she had criticized his first play, offering to re-write it,
telling him that he knew nothing of ‘Life’ and proposing herself as
instructor.
“Oh, well... This is Life, I suppose,” Eric whispered to himself.
To have seen her would break the shock of meeting her on her return to
England, but he was glad that she was going abroad; the shock would
have to be broken by instalments, widely separated, if he was to acquit
himself without disgrace. He wondered how much she had ever told her
husband. He wondered how much she dared admit to herself... At
Winchester he jumped on to the platform, before the train stopped, and
ran out of the station, before any curious head could reconnoitre from
the windows of the Crawleigh and Southampton coaches.
Finality... Eric turned up his collar and sank lower in the seat of the
car. He did not want Sybil to see his face. Christmas Eve... Three
years ago to a day he had reached finality; Barbara was falling in love
with him, when she had sworn by the Cross to offer herself in
reparation to Jack Waring: and in those easy, sane, clear-cut days Eric
had decided to end their intimacy before either clouded it with
tragedy. And then she had appealed to his compassion and sent for
him... perhaps to see if he could continue to resist her. And he had
gone back; and his resistance had broken down. A man only paid for his
own weakness....
But it was finality to see her running along the platform arm-in-arm
with her husband....
“Basil’s home,” said Sybil, as they left the town. “He got back
yesterday and demobilized himself this morning.”
“Oh, good work! I’ve not seen him for three years.”
“It’s the first Christmas since the war that all three of you have been
home.”
His two brothers had walked out to meet the car, and at the sparse edge
of Lashmar Woods they sprang out like highwaymen and secured themselves
on the running-boards. Lady Lane and her husband were waiting for them
in the hall, and, when they sat down to dinner, no one could believe
that they had been scattered for nearly five years. The obliteration of
time was all that Eric needed to complete his sense of finality. For
three days they talked and chaffed one another, exhuming time-honoured
jests and bandying stories and experiences from four continents.
Half-consciously Eric realized that he was reviving an atmosphere of
the past to avoid thinking of the future; but, when each had told the
tale of his wanderings, all looked beyond the smoke and fire of the war
to a world which might be peaceful but would certainly be drab.
“What are you going to do now, Basil?,” asked Eric at breakfast on his
last morning.
“Well, if a grateful Government has kept open my job in the India
Office, I suppose I shall have to start in there—just as if there’d
been no jolly little war.”
“And I’m going back to the dear old China Station, just as if there’d
been no jolly little war,” added Geoffrey. “Everything’s going to be
rather flat... Hullo! Perfectly good postman with Yuletide greetings
for all of us!” He bounded out of the room and helped in the sorting.
“You’ve got more than your fair share, Ricky.”
“You can have them all, if you’ll pay the bills,” answered Eric. “Or
I’ll pay the bills, if you’ll accept the invitations and go in my
place. Would you like to lunch with Lady Poynter? Her husband had some
marvellous port a couple of years ago. Or dine with Mrs. Shelley? I can
give you a list of her _clichés_: a book always “creates an illusion”
with her, and modern poetry is “the pendant to a mood”. I can’t
_honestly_ recommend her. Misguided women who think I still dance... Or
you may dine with Mr. Justice and Lady Maitland; I don’t know them, but
you’re sure to get a good dinner, because their daughter says—here it
is, if you don’t believe me—‘My father is so anxious to meet you.’”
“Sounds as if you’d been trifling with her young affections,” said
Geoffrey. “Take my advice and don’t go.”
“I’ve no intention of going,” Eric answered. “I’ve work to do.”
In the New Year he shut himself up with the first draft of a play and
for three months only left his flat for an hour’s walk each day in the
Green Park. Sometimes, as he sat bent before his miniature theatre,
marshalling, drilling and dismissing his little card-board figures, he
could fancy Barbara’s eager, low voice at his side, her breath warm on
his cheek, and the keen, sweet scent of carnations once more, at each
lithe movement of her body, filling the room where in other years she
had argued out his plays line by line; sometimes, as he read his
speeches aloud, he caught himself pausing for her judgement of their
rhythm; and, when the first rehearsal was called, he knew that he would
find her ghost sitting with clasped hands on a stool by his feet; on
the first night it would await him in his box, defying him to bring any
one else to a seat already taken.
“But this is Life,” he whispered to himself. “I... I told Gaisford I
was going to forget about all this.”
As soon as the new play was mentioned in the theatrical gossip of the
press, he received the usual appeals from unknown men and women to be
given a trial. As usual he sent them bodily to Manders and, as usual,
instructed his secretary and servants to admit no one who called
without a satisfactory explanation. Manders hoped to begin rehearsing
in the late summer and to produce the play in the autumn; Eric had too
much other work on hand to waste his scanty leisure on stage-struck
amateurs; he had not seen a play since his return to England and was
beginning to forget the highly-charged, conventionally unreal
atmosphere of the theatre.
A week’s conscientious study of contemporary drama satisfied him that,
whatever else the critics might say of “The Gate of Horn”, they would
not degrade it by comparison with any of the plays that he had felt
constrained to see. On the last night of his penance he was escaping
into the Strand from the unknown people who persisted in bowing to him,
when a girl, standing by herself a few paces ahead, turned carelessly
and bade him good-evening in a diffident and rather surprised voice.
“I’m afraid I can’t see who it is,” Eric had to confess. “I’m as blind
as a bat, when I come out of a theatre.”
“It’s Ivy Maitland. You wouldn’t remember me.”
“Indeed I do. Are you all by yourself?”
“Yes. I came with a man, but he—he had to go before the end.”
“Then you must let me see you home,” said Eric after a moment’s
hesitation which he hoped she would not notice. “It’s the Cromwell
Road, didn’t you tell me?”
“Not now. I—in spite of your advice... I really couldn’t stand it any
longer at home. But you mustn’t come out of your way; I’m only a step
from here—at the back of the Adelphi.”
“Let me see you as far as the door... Well, I hope it’s a success.”
They crossed the Strand and dived through a hidden courtyard and down a
flight of steps before she answered:
“I can’t say it is—so far.”
“Come! that’s honest!,” said Eric. “If you’ve the moral courage to
admit it’s a failure, why don’t you have the greater moral courage to
chuck the whole thing up?”
“Ah! I can’t do that.” She stopped in front of a door and felt for her
latch-key. “I suppose you wouldn’t come in, if I asked you?”
Eric pretended to look at his watch and even walked away to the nearest
lamp-post, where he looked at it again. He had still two hours’ work to
do, but the girl’s dejection of voice and her candid admission of
failure touched him.
“Are you all alone?” he asked.
“Yes. You won’t compromise _me_; and I shouldn’t mind if you did,” she
added with a touch of her old impatience. “I was thinking of you.
You’re so well-known—”
“If you’re all by yourself... _I_’m thinking of _you_—”
“Ah, I was afraid you wouldn’t come!”
She sighed gently and held out her hand. Loneliness and the sense of
failure seemed to have taken away all her vitality: her hand was cold
and limp, and her head drooped as though she lacked the strength to
keep it erect.
“Let me come to tea some day,” Eric suggested.
“Oh, you’re too busy. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I’m not too busy for that.”
“Aren’t you?” She made a pitiful attempt to collect the fragments of
her pride; but the drooping head and unsteady lips belied the valiance
of her voice, and haughtiness passed quickly into petulance. “You were
too busy to dine with us, when I invited you; you were too busy to see
me when I called on you, too busy even to answer my letter.”
Eric stared at her in amazement:
“Miss Maitland, I simply don’t understand! I couldn’t dine with you,
because I never dine out when I’ve a play on hand. But the call and the
letter—”
“Your maid said you couldn’t see me, as I hadn’t an appointment.”
“I must apologize for her. She probably thought you’d come to ask for
an engagement.”
“I had. And that’s what I wrote about. You said in New York that I
might come to you for help; I couldn’t go to your club, because
father’s a member. Didn’t you get my letter?”
“If it had anything to do with the theatre, I don’t suppose I finished
it; all those things are sent on to Manders. I’m sorry, Miss Maitland;
I wouldn’t have disappointed you for the world.”
“I began to feel desperate,” she answered dully. “It seemed needlessly
unkind. Of course, I ought to have known that you were very famous—”
“Please! I’ve apologized. I hoped I’d cleared myself. Won’t you choose
your own time for coming,—if you think I can do any good?”
She swung her latch-key reflectively and then touched his arm with her
fingers.
“Won’t you come in—just for a moment?” she pleaded.
“I’m thinking of you,” he repeated.
“You’ll do me more good by coming in for five minutes than by thinking
of my reputation... I’m desperate.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that word; you oughtn’t to know the
meaning of it.”
“Ah, if you come in, don’t treat me like a child.”
Eric followed her into a narrow, ill-ventilated hall, lighted by a
pin-point of gas. The house was old and full of half-heard noises and
dry, distant scents; the first floor was let to a solicitor, the second
to a dramatic agent; above that was a double flat and at the top,
crushed squat under the roof and pared by sloping ceilings, Ivy
Maitland’s own roomy attic. As she turned up the gas, he saw a round
table and wicker chairs, a piano and book-case and, in an alcove, a
cupboard, bed and chest of drawers. While she slipped off her cloak and
pulled the curtains over the alcove, he read the titles of the books
and glanced at the photographs on the piano. The place of honour was
given to an officer in the uniform of the Air Force, and Eric guessed
its identity almost without looking at the face or at the “Yours
always, John Gaymer,” scrawled across one corner.
“Won’t you sit down? It’s a miserable fire, I’m afraid,” she
apologized, dropping on to her knees and battering unscientifically
with a bent poker on the top of three sadly smouldering lumps of coal,
each too big for the tiny grate.
“I’m not cold, thanks... How long have you been in these quarters?”
“Two months.”
“And who looks after you?”
“A woman comes in and cooks my breakfast and cleans the place. I
usually have my other meals out.” Eric was not conscious that his
expression had changed, but the girl looked up piteously and turned
away to the fire. “Don’t look so disapproving! I’m not defending
myself!”
“My dear child, I’m not attacking you. Haven’t I come here solely to
find out if I can be of any assistance to you?”
She jabbed at the fire in reflective silence, and Eric, watching her
through half-closed eyes, seemed to see rippling waves of unhappiness,
disappointment, loneliness and discomfort rising until they submerged
her and she ceased to struggle. She was white and tired; her arms were
thin and her shoulder-blades sharply outlined under the green gauze of
her dress, as she stolidly poked the fire and refused to look at him.
The air of assured efficiency which she had worn in New York never
seemed more than the assertive protest of extreme youth against
patronage; her abandonment of it now suggested that she habitually
attacked and then ran away, first disregarding advice, then admitting
her mistake where a stronger woman would have converted it into success
and where a prouder woman would have preserved silence. Perhaps it was
too much to expect great strength or pride in a girl of nineteen whose
head was still fermenting with unassimilated catch-words.
“It was very good of you to come. And it was awful cheek of me to ask
you.”
“Imagine—for one night—that I’m quite human,” Eric suggested.
She jumped up and ran to the door.
“You’d like a drink!,” she exclaimed.
“Is that the differentia of the human man?” he laughed.
There was a clink of glasses outside, and she returned with a bottle of
brandy and a box of cigars. While he was mixing himself a drink, she
slipped with apparent aimlessness behind him, and he heard something
drop. When he looked round, the signed photograph of John Gaymer had
disappeared, and she was holding out a tumbler for him to fill.
“I’m not going to give you brandy,” he said, picking up the syphon of
soda-water.
“Just a little! I’m so tired.”
“Not a drop! If you start drinking brandy at nineteen—because you’re
tired—, where d’you think you’ll be at thirty?”
“I don’t much care!” she answered. “I believe those cigars are quite
good. Won’t you try one?”
“Not if you’re going to sleep in this room, thanks,” he answered.
“I don’t mind it—honestly,” she said.
“As a matter of fact I’ve been smoking all day.”
Eric composed himself as comfortably as possible in a room where
everything jarred upon him. She ought not to have been living there by
herself, she was lonely, uncomfortable and probably ill-fed; she ought
not to allow a man to come and see her, she ought not to dream of
drinking a brandy and soda, she ought not to have brandy or cigars in
the house, she ought not to know that she did not mind inhaling
cigar-smoke in her sleep. The incident of the photograph recurred to
his mind, and he wondered whether he was being offered refreshment
which she had provided for Gaymer... and whether she had dropped the
photograph behind the piano because she was ashamed of him... or
whether they had quarrelled, whether it was Gaymer who had taken her to
the theatre and abandoned her....
“I haven’t seen you since that night at the Carstairs’,” she began.
“You remember?”
“When I gave you good advice. Yes.”
“Well, I tried to follow it. I’m not altogether a fool and, thinking it
over, I thought I saw what you meant. After the dance Johnnie asked me
to go to another... It was very hard to do, but I tried to let him see
that, though it was all _right_, of course... I invited him to come and
dine with _us_. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“I thought it was better, certainly. Though, why you think my advice—”
“Because you know about things, you’re clever, you’ve met everybody,
you can understand people and write about them. Father’s in such a
rut... Well, Johnnie came. That was when I wanted you to meet him. He
wasn’t much of a success, I’m afraid.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, I don’t know! He _argued_... and father always expects an enormous
lot of deference from boys. Father said afterwards that Johnnie had
drunk much too much for a young man and had become very impertinent.
After that, of course, he wasn’t invited again, and mother kept nagging
and trying to make me give up my job in his office. We had an awful row
one day, just because I dined with Johnnie and came back rather late
after the theatre. Father said I wasn’t to go out with him and that, as
long as I lived at home, he expected me to obey him. I decided that I
couldn’t live at home any longer. Johnnie found me these rooms....”
She coughed and took a sip of her soda-water.
“You consulted him?”
“Yes. He made me see that the only thing to do was to leave home....”
Eric sat suddenly upright and then relaxed to his former attitude,
noting with quick thankfulness that his movement had been unobserved.
“What made you write to me?” he asked.
“Well, you see, everybody in my department is being demobilized, so I
wanted a job. I saw you had a new play—”
“Already cast,” Eric interrupted. “And we could cast the third footman
five times over with people who’ve played respectable parts for years.
There’s nothing there, Miss Maitland, I’m afraid. Even if there were,
I’d sooner see you living with your parents again—”
“I can’t go back.”
“I see. Well, what are you living on?”
“I saved a little money when I was with Sir Matthew. When that’s gone—”
“Oh, Gaymer would see you didn’t starve or get turned into the street,”
said Eric with soft irony.
“Yes. At least he said he would—”
“Before you quarrelled,” he suggested.
She looked at him wonderingly.
“Who told you we’d quarrelled?” she asked.
“You did. Miss Maitland, however unconventional you want to be, you
can’t take money from a man. I’d most gladly lend or give you fifty
pounds to-night, but you couldn’t possibly accept it. You see that?”
“Of course! I hardly know you.”
Eric shook his head in bewilderment, as he tried to determine whether
she was naturally stupid or wholly unsophisticated.
“Are you in love with Gaymer?”
Ivy hesitated before answering, and Eric felt that he was not going to
hear the truth.
“I like him when he’s nice to me,” she answered indifferently.
“Is he in love with you?”
“He likes me. He likes so many people,” she said, as carelessly as
before.
Eric nodded slowly and held out his hand.
“Well, good-night. I’ll do what I can.”
Though he could promise her little, she was better for the
companionship and talk. In opening the door, he turned and saw her
watching him; but now she was spiritless again, her hands were clasped
in front of her, her shoulders were bowed, and she looked crestfallen,
limp and fragile. Remembering how irritation at her pertness had warmed
to impatient dislike on board the _Lithuania_, Eric blamed himself for
intolerance towards a child whose worst crime was her childishness.
“Have you a telephone here?” he asked.
“There’s one downstairs that I use. Shall I shew you?”
“Oh, no, thanks.” Impulse sent him back into the room; and he shook
hands with her again, as though to postpone for an instant the silent
chill of loneliness which he could feel already settling upon her.
Gaymer had contrived to make the girl uncommonly miserable; and, though
unhappiness was a universal distemper of the soul, though Eric had told
himself that Ivy’s relations to Gaymer were their own business, he knew
that he could comfort her spirit by putting an arm round her thin
shoulders, by kissing her forehead and allowing her to sob out her
simple perplexity and pain of heart. A hundred anguished memories
warned him of the price that he had already paid for compassion; common
sense cried out that this was not his affair. And yet, unless he made
it his affair, no one would; and he had now learned wisdom and knew
where to stop. “What I meant was: if you ever feel lonely, ring me up
and have a talk. I’m nearly always at home, night and day. I’m not too
busy for that. Suggest a day for lunch. I lead a fairly solitary life
myself.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER FOUR
EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS
Qui monet amat.
PROVERB.
“_Can you spare a moment to see me some time? You may remember Mrs.
O’Rane’s party and a young man whom we agreed not to like. I want to
find out all I can about him...._”
Amy Loring lay in bed, frowning over Eric’s note and weaving
interpretations of its discreet brevity. After telephoning to invite
him to tea, she read the letter again with mingled curiosity and
misgiving. Obviously the man in question was John Gaymer; no less
obviously John Gaymer had been up to mischief. It was not easy,
however, to establish a connection between him and Eric, unless he had
been up to mischief with the little Maitland girl; Amy had overheard
enough of a conversation between them at the Carstairs’ dinner to
realize that a certain intimacy existed; and she had not failed to
detect in Eric at least a paternal attitude towards a girl whose eyes
just perceptibly brightened when he spoke to her.