shewed that she had forgotten everything but a consuming need of him.
Eric had never before seen a woman lose all control of herself, he had
never imagined that Barbara was capable of such desperation; the
madness in her eyes and the delirium of her mood appalled him.
“My God, what are you thinking of, Barbara?” he whispered. “And what
d’you take me for? Your husband—”
“I’ll leave him and come to you! We’ll go away together! You once
said—d’you remember when I dined with you in an air-raid?—you said
you’d rather a bomb hit the house and killed us both than see me
married to any one else! I’m here... And I’m blind with misery, Eric. I
want to be happy. I want to make you happy. No one need know... Or, if
you like, you can let every one know. I’ve made my mistake, I’ll tell
George, I’ll ask him to forgive me. He won’t want to keep me, when he
knows I don’t love him. We can go away for a time—”
She was creeping inch by inch nearer to him, and Eric suddenly felt the
touch of dry and burning fingers on his wrist.
“Stop this nonsense!,” he cried, shrinking back.
The grating harshness of tone sobered her a little. She did not try to
touch him again, he could see her mentally preparing a retreat, an
escape, a means of saving her face, if he finally repelled her; he
could see, too, that she did not mean to be lightly repelled.
“You usedn’t to call my love ‘nonsense’ in old days,” she answered
quietly.
“Things have changed.”
“Your love has changed.”
“My love is dead.”
“And you used to say that I must marry you, because I’d spoiled all
other women for you.”
Eric nodded slowly. It was so characteristic of her to remember and
quote, even at the most critical moment of her life, a dog’s-eared
phrase of extravagant adulation.
“Yes. And I might add that you’ve spoilt me for all other women. If one
came to me now without blemish, straight from the right hand of the
Creator, I should expect to find treachery or ingratitude... Will you
please go back to your room?”
He was thankful that he had stopped without saying more. In her craving
for new sensations, Barbara had some perverted strain which made her
enjoy being scourged by the tongue of a man who loved her; and in
another moment he would have said something which would enable her to
put him in the wrong; and anything that he said gave her an excuse for
staying....
“I’ve never tried to defend myself, Eric. You were right... You were
always right. Isn’t there room in life for mistakes?”
“There’s sometimes no room to repair them.”
“You’re still thinking of George?”
“It’s time one of us did, Lady Barbara... I try to treat other men’s
wives as I should expect other men to treat mine.”
He reached for his dressing-gown and slipped his arms into the sleeves.
When it was too late, he saw that for a moment he was putting himself
at her mercy; in that moment she sprang forward and pinioned him:
“Eric!”
“Will you kindly let go and will you kindly leave my room?”
“Eric, you’re going to marry that child! You must be mad! You’ll be as
miserable as I am... If you do that, it _will_ be too late... Eric,
don’t struggle, you’re hurting me... Listen! I’ve told you it was a
mistake, but it’s not too late to put it right. We were made for each
other. You wouldn’t be blamed, and I—I should glory in it... Listen!
You _shall_ listen! The other day I was at a party, and a man I don’t
know said, ‘That woman looks as if she’d been through Hell.’ They’ll
say of us that we’re in Heaven. They’ll try to attack us—and they won’t
be able to. We shall be in the clouds, we shall be walking on air.
People who see us will go away hungry and envious. Eric, you remember
what it was like before that awful parting! I lived for you, and you
lived for me. Everything we did and thought... Whenever we were ill or
unhappy... There’s never been a love like ours; and, if I didn’t see
it, I see it now. God punished me to shew me what I was throwing
away... _You_ know what this last year has been, Eric; if _you_ threw
away your chance of happiness—Ah, you’re hurting me!”
He had wrenched himself free of her embrace and sprung out of bed.
Barbara fell forward with her face on the pillow. He listened for the
silence to be broken: though she had never raised her voice above a
whisper, it had vibrated with passion until he fancied that it must
ring and echo through the house. He opened the door, took a step
forward into the warm darkness of the passage and listened. When he
came back, the room seemed to be filled with the keen scent of
carnations. He saw Barbara slowly raising her head and brushing back
the hair which had fallen over her face; she looked distractedly round
the room through half-closed eyes and threw out her arms to him; then
she saw the open door, and her arms dropped to her sides.
“This is a funny way for it to end,” she murmured. Eric said nothing.
“I used to believe you, too. I thought you cared for me....”
His silence daunted her, and she walked out of the room with a sigh and
a half shrug.
Eric locked the door and began filling a pipe. Then he turned on all
the lights and explored bedroom and bathroom on hands and knees. On the
middle of the floor he found a crumpled handkerchief, scented with
carnation; he fingered it irresolutely, then struck a match and tossed
it flaming into the grate. Imagination or reality still scented the
room with carnation, and he threw open the curtains, resting his arms
on the stone sill of the window and leaning out into a starless night.
A heavy dew was rising, and the stone was sticky with moisture. The
scent of carnations changed to a scent of stocks; then the reek of his
own pipe drowned both. He was wakeful but calm, surprised at his own
calmness before and now.
He wondered what Barbara was doing....
He wondered what she would do at their next meeting. Presumably she
would invent a letter from George in the morning, calling her to
Ireland, or recalling her to London, but they would meet later. A man,
after such a misfire, would surely go abroad for a year or two; woman
seemed to lie about these things to others—(“Eric Lane was staying with
the Pentyres. You know he used to be rather in love with me? I’m afraid
he still is, though I should have thought that, when I married, he’d
have faced facts... I wish he’d find some nice girl... Connie
Maitland’s little niece was there, but she’s hardly out of the
nursery...”)—until they could lie about them to themselves; in a few
years Barbara would convince herself that he had broken down the locked
door of her bedroom and entreated her to run away with him. Women could
make themselves believe anything, when they had to save their faces, to
ignore a rebuff and keep up their value in the sex-market. And, as a
matter of fact, a man did not always retire to decent obscurity; he
sometimes came, like John Gaymer, officer and gentleman, and stayed in
the same house as the girl whom he had seduced and deserted. Seemliness
of conduct, seemliness of feeling were dead....
Sleep was impossible; and he remembered with gratitude how Lady Pentyre
had arranged for him to work undisturbed. She had made a literary
picture of a preoccupied, irregular genius who wrote under the attack
of fitful inspiration; breakfast would come when he rang for it: he was
not expected, he was almost forbidden, to shew himself before luncheon;
and, if he wanted to work during the night, there awaited him a
touching equipment of electric stove, spirit-lamp, cocoa, biscuits, and
cold chicken. Eric went into the dressing-room and surveyed with a
smile her solicitous array of stationery; there was paper big and
small, plain and ruled, there were pencils and pens, india-rubber,
paper-fasteners and a chromatic riot of ink and sealing-wax. He
unlocked his despatch-box and glanced at a bundle of manuscript; a
character called Beatrice seemed to be speaking, but he read the name
as Barbara; and the lines that he had given her were overlaid as in a
palimpsest by the words that Barbara had spoken, was still speaking....
He wondered what she was doing....
Work was out of the question until he had thought a little more about
Barbara. However far she fell, there was always a lower depth. He
imagined that she had reached her own limits in marrying George, but
she was prepared to be faithless even to him, she was already faithless
in spirit. Barbara was too young and ardent of soul to exist without
loving and being loved; it was a question of time before she joined the
furtive, unsatisfied band of women who lived in more or less open
infidelity; she would go from one to another, encouraging George to do
the same so that he would have less cause for reproaching her.
And three years earlier she had seemed to walk clothed in a white flame
of purity. Was it another pose, like her extravagant talk of devotion,
gratitude, honour, sacrifice? Her romantic emotions and phrases were
culled from Italian operas and sentimental novels; and she treated them
seriously. He told her once that she lived in “the hall of a thousand
mirrors”, donning and discarding the dress and properties of a
character, watching her reflection, posturing, mouthing her lines—until
the personality of Barbara Neave lost outline and became a lay figure
for the clothes of others. Her own form and stature did not satisfy
her; she must be Isolde, Sarah Curran, Mrs. Blessington, Joan of Arc,
Lady Hamilton and, at a pinch, Messalina; which part she played hardly
mattered to her... She was without a sense of right and wrong... A
sensationalist, as Jim Loring called her while she was playing with
Jack, before she began to play with him... or George... An
emotion-hunter....
The night was paling to a grey-blue, and the dawn brought with it a
chill wind. Eric found his body shivering and his fingers stiff. He
looked lazily at the array of food, too tired to eat or drink; then he
got into bed and once more turned out the light. Was Barbara asleep
yet?... Apart from everything else, what a fool the girl was to run
such risks! If Lady Pentyre had looked into her empty room, if one of
the men had come to finish a cigar on the end of his bed!...
He rang for his tea at noon and looked curiously through his letters.
There were ten loving words from Ivy, who disdained concealment from
the servants, but he sought in vain for any note from Barbara. Perhaps
he was foolish to expect one, for she knew that she could trust him to
hold his tongue. The thorough-paced anarchist always expected the
police to protect him from the violence of an enraged mob....
It was a shock, after he fancied that he had diagnosed her so
exhaustively, to find an unsuspected depth of impudence. When Eric went
into the garden before luncheon, he was astounded to find her reading
under a tree. The others were working or playing golf; but she hailed
him and explained that she had stayed behind with a head-ache. Her
manner was free of challenge or appeal; she did not invite him to play
the accomplice; there seemed nothing to hide, and in all the time that
he had known her he had never understood her less than when she lay in
white skirt and knitted silk coat, bare-headed and bare-armed, smoking
cigarettes and turning the pages of a book which she was too indolent
to cut. Her movements and expression were gently provocative, as though
she were trying to tantalize him.
“I wonder—,” he began and stopped abruptly.
“Yes?”
Eric shrugged his shoulders and turned half away. He was wondering
where and what Barbara would be in five, ten, twenty years’ time,
wondering why he had ever been in love with her, why she still
attracted him and why he could not bear to touch or look at her.
“I was wondering how far it was to the links. I thought I’d go and meet
the others. They must have finished playing by now.”
“I think I shall stay here,” she answered lazily. “It’s cooler.”
Eric sauntered across the lawn and through the garden, stopping for a
moment to speak with Lady Pentyre and Madame Pinto de Vasconcellos, who
were cutting roses. He sauntered into a wood and sat down on a stile
commanding the pathway to the links. There was a sprawling group by the
eighteenth green, and he identified O’Rane, Pentyre and the general.
They were joined by a foursome, and he gradually distinguished Amy
Loring and Ivy, Gaymer and Mrs. O’Rane. The sprawling figures
straightened themselves, O’Rane collected the clubs of the women, and
the party ranged itself in single file and threaded its way along the
foot-path towards the wood. Eric had been thinking so much of Barbara
during the last twelve hours that he had not troubled about Gaymer,
but, as they drew near, he looked closely at Ivy for signs of annoyance
or distress. She was frowning a little, but it might have been a frown
of fatigue, and her face cleared at sight of him.
“How did you all get on?,” he asked.
“Lady Amy and I were beaten at the last hole,” Ivy answered. “Give me a
hand over the stile, Eric; I’ve blistered my foot.”
“All well?,” he asked in a whisper.
“Ye-es,” she answered doubtfully. “I had one bad moment. _He_—you
know—came up and pretended to look for my ball. He told me that he
wanted to have five minutes’ talk with me some time; he said he’d
invited himself here specially for that. I told him as politely as I
could that I never wanted to speak to him again.”
“What happened then?,” asked Eric.
“He said it would take less than five minutes. I said it could do no
good. He said that I couldn’t tell till I knew what he was going to
say... Then I said, ‘_If_ I give you five minutes, will you promise not
to bother me ever again?’”
Eric found his eyebrows involuntarily rising in uneasy wonder. Ivy had
shewn herself so much less valiant with Gaymer than she had boasted
beforehand; she seemed to be cowed by him, so that she bargained and
begged for mercy instead of standing up for herself.
“And then?”
“Well, he wouldn’t promise. He just repeated ‘Will you give me five
minutes?’ I told him I’d think it over. Eric, can’t _you_ explain—?”
He shook his head quickly:
“No, my dear! You can refuse to see him, if you think it’ll upset you;
or you can see him and tell him that everything’s over.”
“Eric, he _frightens_ me!”
“But you’ll have to get over that. Unless you fight him and beat him,
you’ll be troubled whenever he chooses to make a nuisance of himself to
you. When you’ve convinced yourself that he has no more influence over
you, he’ll go away and leave you in peace. You’d better see him, but
you mustn’t let him bully you.”
Ivy sighed and walked in silence to the house. At luncheon Lady Pentyre
began to make suggestions for disposing of her guests: if they did not
all know Melbury Cathedral, she said, they ought to take this
opportunity of seeing it. It was only an hour’s run in the car; they
could have tea there, drive on to Wilmington Abbey and be back in time
for dinner.
“Or, if you want to laze,” she added, “there are the two punts....”
“That sounds more like me,” said Gaymer. “Ivy, what do you say to
exploring?”
She hesitated for a moment, but Eric gave her no lead.
“I don’t mind what I do,” she answered.
“I think I ought to put in a little work,” Eric told Lady Pentyre.
An hour later he watched the party dispersing. Amy Loring had
undertaken to punt O’Rane to Croxton for tea; and, if he still
entertained doubts of Gaymer, he was reassured at feeling that Ivy
would have help within call. General Maitland and Carstairs retired to
their rooms with letters to answer; the others drove away in the car.
“We shall be back for tea,” Ivy announced with an air of summoning
witnesses. “I promised to help Aunt Connie with her letters.”
Eric went to his room and tried to write, but his broken night and the
flooding heat of the afternoon sun made him drowsy. He fell asleep in
his chair and awoke with a start to find Ivy bending over him and
kissing his forehead.
“My dear, there’s nothing wrong, is there?,” he asked.
“No! But you looked so anxious at lunch that I thought I’d come and
tell you everything was all right. What a darling room Lady Pentyre’s
given you to work in! Or sleep in. Were you frightfully tired,
sweetheart, and did I wake you?”
“I was only lazy. Is it tea-time?”
“We’ve had tea. And I’m supposed to be writing letters. Don’t you think
I’ve written them long enough? Don’t you think you might take me on the
river now?”
She held out her hands, and Eric jumped up and caught her in his arms.
He had dreamed of many things, not all of them pleasant; when he felt
the light brush of lips on his forehead, he could have sworn that
Barbara was kissing him; and the sight of Ivy puzzled him, recapturing
for an instant the fleeting cloud-wreath of a fancy that something had
happened to her, that he had lost her....
“You _were_ anxious, Eric?”
“I didn’t want you to be upset; and I didn’t want even a shadow to come
between us.”
“It hasn’t.”
They ran downstairs hand in hand, separating decorously in the hall and
then slipping through a side-door into the garden. Reaction over her
fright, the ever-new sense of security had elated Ivy until she was
happier than at any time since their magical return to London from the
river. In a week their month’s waiting would be over; he was already
beginning to think how the announcement should be made....
“One week more!”
Eric was startled:
“_I_ didn’t say anything!”
“I know you didn’t. I was just thinking—”
“I was thinking, too—of that. Well, Ivy?”
“Bless you, Eric!... As if I didn’t know all along! As if there’d ever
been the faintest shadow of a doubt. But I shan’t marry you unless you
swear to me that you want me. I feel I shall disappoint you so
terribly, Eric; you’re so clever and so _wise_. I never _think_... You
were quite right about Johnnie; I feel much better now that it’s all
over.”
He helped her into the boat and paddled into mid-stream.
“It went off all right?,” he asked. “I don’t want to know what
happened.”
“But I want to tell you, I like telling you everything.” She thought
critically over her story before beginning it. “It was curious. He
seemed to start again as though nothing had happened...” She was
looking dreamily at the nodding blue and orange irises wading a third
of the way across the stream; she did not see Eric’s involuntary
shudder and stiffening. “He began again from the time when I asked him
when we were going to be married; he actually said, ‘You remember that
talk we had one night before I took you to the Vaudeville. You asked me
how long I thought I should take to get demobilized...’ I said ‘Yes’.
Eric.., well, I’ll come to that later. He said he’d had a very
bothering time, because sometimes, when he’s not well, he doesn’t seem
able to make up his mind about anything; and no one in his wretched
ministry seemed to know what anybody wanted to do... He’d thought it
over and he’d decided to come out. You know his uncle, Lord Poynter,
don’t you? Well, Lord Poynter had offered him a job—a very good job, I
imagine—in the Azores Line....”
She paused and regarded the irises with a puzzled frown, still trying
to examine her narrative critically.
“Go on,” said Eric.
“Well, he stopped short there... He was very quiet... He seemed to be
saying that he’d made all arrangements and everything was right and I’d
been rather impatient. I didn’t know what to say... Well, then he said,
‘The last time we were together you seemed to have a pretty low opinion
of me. I told you that I couldn’t marry you then. I can’t marry you
now. I can’t marry you till I’ve got the job and held it. But I’m going
to get it and I’m going to hold it.’”
“Ah!”
Ivy looked up in surprise at the rasping interjection.
“What d’you mean, Eric?”
“It sounds to me very like his original promise. And I think he’s
making it for the same purpose. He’s trying to get you back.” He paused
and then hurried on for fear that prudence might restrain him. “He
wouldn’t have thought of you, if I hadn’t been in the way. It’s a trial
of strength against me. Go on.”
Ivy winced, and the pupils of her eyes dilated.
“I told him that things had changed,” she explained. “I said—it wasn’t
true—I said that I’d always believed in him, but there was a time when
I was frightened... I reminded him of everything—the night when he said
‘If _that’s_ your opinion of me, we’d better call the engagement off.’
I reminded him of the woman I’d seen him driving home with. He said....”
“Well?”
“He said, ‘I’ve never pretended to be a saint. When I was knocked out
in the war, I saw everything differently. Most people would cut me, if
they knew anything of my private life; I drink too much, I do this and
that... I _could_ put up a case, if I thought it worth while, but I
don’t. You knew all this the first night we met. I didn’t pretend to be
better than my neighbour, I daresay I’m a lot worse; I don’t know and I
don’t care. But I’m the same as I was that first night. I loved you
then—and I’ve never loved another woman before or since. I asked you to
marry me then; and I’m in a position—I soon shall be, at least—to make
good.’ Then he sort of left it to me... I’d thought of all kinds of
bitter, horrid things to say, but I didn’t want to. I think he meant
it. I felt the only thing to do was to be cold and dignified. I said,
‘There was a time when I thought I was in love with you. I’ve changed
since then. I thought you’d broken your promise to me, I lost faith in
you. Perhaps I never properly loved you, but, if I lived to be a
thousand, I could never love you or trust you again’... While I said
it, I felt that I might be terribly wrong, but it was—instinct. He
looked at me... Then he looked at his watch... Then he said, ‘We’d
better be getting back, or we shall be late for tea.’ Eric...”
“Yes.”
“_Then_ I felt free. I felt I’d won. I felt you were right and I should
never be troubled again. I’m happy now... Of course, I was happy
before, but, when he flung himself into the carriage at Euston... Eric,
you’ll despise me, but have you ever seen a dog being called simply to
be beaten? It _comes_. It _knows_ it’s going to be beaten. And it
_might_ run away. But it knows it has to come back later. I felt that,
if ever Johnnie... I felt it at lunch, when he suggested that I should
come on the river with him...”
The stream was carrying them two yards down for every yard that Eric
paddled towards home. He bent over the side for a merciful moment of
eclipse and unshipped a pole.
“And now?,” he asked.
“When he said we should be late for tea, if we didn’t get back, I knew
I’d won,” she answered promptly.
A serpentine rivulet of water ran down Eric’s arm; he turned his head
and industriously rolled up his sleeve.
“Good for that,” he commented. “Ivy, if you ever think I’m behaving
like a cold-blooded old man, I should rather like you to suspend
judgement for five seconds. Think of me as a man who might have
kidnapped you, when you were so miserable that you didn’t know whether
you were on your head or on your heels; think that I’m trying to play
fair when perhaps I might play foul and still win... I’ve forgotten
what I was going to say, but, if we don’t get back, we shall be late
for dinner.”
She looked at him fearlessly; and he realized that she had not looked
at him like that before.
“I can think of you as all that—and a lot more,” she answered.
For the second dinner Eric found himself between Lady Maitland and Amy
Loring; he observed that Ivy was between O’Rane and Gaymer, but he felt
no uneasiness. She had emerged morally stronger and with enhanced
personality from her encounter of the afternoon. Gaymer shewed no sign
of disappointment or rebuff, but he was silent and preoccupied. Eric
would have given much to know what was going on inside his head and
what he made of a girl who yielded to him and then refused to marry
him....
Resentment was swamped in curiosity. The fellow might be genuinely in
love with Ivy, though he modelled himself too closely on the
dramatically strong, silent man who bluffly admitted that he was of
flesh and blood like other men, that others must take him as they found
him. Or he might be trying only to re-establish his ascendancy for a
few days or weeks until some other woman came his way. Ivy might boast
that she had won free of him, but at least she half-believed in him, at
least she had let him off without a word of reproach, at least she was
susceptible and even in danger, if he set himself to win her back. Was
this new assurance and elation more than the response of a woman’s
vanity when she found two men equally desirous of marrying her? Eric
looked impatiently on the week which still lay ahead of him. When their
engagement was announced, Gaymer must inevitably take himself off, but
it was possible to compress a great deal of mischief into one week.