“_Mummy was surprised_,” she wrote to Frank from Ireland a few days
later, “_at the many underclothes you’ve given me. But when I said
it was a parting gift on account of my going away to Rome and Paris
with de Jones, she said it was all right. As for de Jones, Darling,
I am Furious; I told him all. And He is Furious. I told him all the
Truth that I never went on his errand to Edinborough University but
spent the day with you in London as well as the money He’d given me
for Travelling Expenses on sweets and things. And He says he is
going to dismiss me. Never mind, if I’ll flirt with Him he won’t
dismiss me. And I said to him that you bought me a box of
chocolates before you left, and a little book of poems to read in
bed. ‘Oh,’ says He, ‘that is a Consolation!’ I shall be in London
all next week, packing. We leave on Friday morning. Shall wait for
you on Thursday at Paddington at Eleven Sharp. It will be our last
day together._
_Your Eva._”
But she was not there at eleven. She was not there at twelve. As he
paced up and down he was conscious that all the porters and the waiting
taxi-cab drivers looked at him with interest. Shameless flag vendors
buttonholed him with pertinacity. He paced on, angry and exhausted, his
thick heavy overcoat on his arm, and a small fly flew straight into his
ear; and pacing up and down vehemently he stepped again onto some
slippery nastiness on the pavement. “Must tell Ottercove,” he made a
mental note of it. “Have this scandal ventilated in the House.” At one
o’clock he went into the station bar and drank a glass of beer on an
empty stomach, and suddenly he took courage, ceased to be concerned
about the formidable mass opinion of the porters on the subject of
himself, saw them as mere independent, ignorant at that, individuals.
The movement of the traffic, the sight of a girl stepping into a coach
and revealing a ripening, silk-stockinged leg--such sights and sounds
began to work on him, till his mind, with the beer and the oxygen
inhaled, hummed like music, and saw God.
“Well--!” he said; and then again: “Well--!”
“Why, darling, what has happened?”
The presence of John emphasised her crime and irritated him unspeakably.
“You ask me; you--you--you ask me--” He could not continue. He cast an
accusing look at the brother, who giggled bashfully.
“Zita said I must take John about with me and show him London for he is
so shy and it’s his last day, you know. To-morrow he is going on a farm
in Ireland. ‘And,’ says she, ‘you’ve only one young brother.’”
“And what of her? It’s our last day together.”
“Exactly! But she wants to be alone with Pilling all the time. How she
loves Pilling!”
“And why aren’t you wearing the nice new clothes I gave you?”
“Child: it won’t do.”
“It won’t do?”
“No, child.”
While John was looking into a shop window, Frank pleaded with her
whether they could not really spend this last day alone.
“I will telephone to her,” said Eva, as if struck by a brain-wave, “and
see what she says.”
She vanished in a telephone box, and Frank and John watched her mute
lips through the glass door assiduously explaining into the telephone
what looked a difficult, and at the other end an uncongenial,
proposition.
“No,” she said, emerging from the box, “she says John must come with us,
because he is so shy and would lose himself alone in London. ‘You have
only one little brother,’ she said.”
“This is damnable,” thought Frank. “At any rate let us go and have lunch
somewhere,” he said aloud, “and think it over.”
They lunched in embarrassed silence, broken here and there by an
embarrassed question. “You crossed over when?”
“Tuesday. Arrived in London very late, so went to a hotel. Travelled
with nine Catholic priests,” she said, “so all went to the same hotel,
and to the Cinema together, and we all held hands.”
“Nine Catholic priests, and you in the middle?”
“No, at one end. Father Michael and I holding hands, and all the other
eight, too, in a chain. Very intriguing.”
“Must have been.”
After lunch, as they were sauntering along, an idea occurred to Frank.
“John,” he said, “would you like to go to a theatre--by yourself?”
“Fancy! all by yourself like a grown-up man!” said Eva.
John giggled nervously.
“To a show of Maskelyne and Devant?”
“Fancy!” said Eva. “Acrobats, John! Acrobats and things. Eh? John?”
“I don’t mind,” said John.
They jumped into a taxi, and Frank bought a stall ticket, and John,
accepting it with a kind of nervous misgiving, was ushered into the
darkness (the performance having already begun), the attendant like a
gaoler on his heels. “Tell him, tell him to look after John, who is so
shy!” Eva cried. But John and his gaoler had vanished in the dark.
Freedom at last! They were free, free, free; free of all but the
exigence of their freedom. He avoided the shops with her, but she must
have a bottle of scent and let him buy all that the saleswoman
insinuated. She gave in completely to the saleswoman’s idea of what was
the proper thing for her. The saleswoman seemed to have no doubt, and
appreciating Frank’s secret loathing of her and her sex, made it a point
of honour for him to comply with Eva’s tutored wishes.
“And I just want to look at these gowns.”
“Better come out and look at Nature. A lovely day!”
“I’d like that gown.”
“No doubt. I’d like a new suit.”
“Must have another gown to go about with de Jones, you know. In Paris
and Rome.”
“I got old Ottercove to stop his payments too soon, it would seem. Too
soon, too damned soon!”
“Couldn’t you borrow, perhaps?”
“Couldn’t I!... Women will sell their bodies and souls for a vivid rag,”
he said bitterly.
He looked at her and read her thought. With a melancholy twinge, she
reflected that she had evidently sold hers without any such extenuating
material compensation. “You are an awful old miser,” she said.
He suffered hell. Damn it all, she seemed to have no idea about the
value of money! She did not know that the number of pounds in his
pocket-book was strictly limited.
Through the Park they drifted into Kensington Gardens and walked across
the grass towards the Serpentine. Eva wouldn’t let him take her arm.
“Bad form,” she explained.
They hired a boat, and as he rowed he watched her steer. She steered
intently but very badly, zig-zagging needlessly all the way, while he
puffed and sweated at the oars; which provoked him into biting sarcasm.
“Crooked again!”
“Why don’t you put it straight with the oars?”
“Can’t you see me,” he said, puffing, “otherwise employed?”
“Now don’t get ratty, darling, or you will feel sorry afterwards.”
“Why sorry?”
“When you think of it--remember, I mean.”
By the time they had rowed back, it was time, she judged, to go and
fetch John from the matinée. “If we are not there, he won’t know where
to turn to: he is so shy,” she said. “And Zita said to me, ‘Take care of
John; you won’t always have your little brother with you.’”
This solicitude on behalf of John angered him. “Damn it all, we thought
nothing of leaving him alone at the inn.”
“What inn, darling?”
“On the top of the Patscherkofl mountain in the Tyrol. Don’t you
remember?”
Her eyes darkened and lightened again. “I remember, darling, I
remember.”
“And it’s our last day together.”
“I am thinking--”
“What?”
“I have no real travelling costume for my Continental trip.”
“I have no proper overcoat, damn you.” Oh, why were there no girls as
beautiful as Frances Doble and as intelligent as Henry James!
“Well, John, did you enjoy the performance?”
“Great fun,” stammered John.
“Tell us all about it, John.”
“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring and another man on the ring--”
“That will do, John. Wait till we are settled down in the café,” she
said.
“Now then, John.”
“There was a ring and a man held on to the ring and a girl held on to
the man and--”
“Wait, John. I was just thinking, if Zita asks me all about the
performance I must tell the same story as John.”
“All the more reason why John should be allowed to disclose his
impressions,” said Frank.
“Yes. Go on, John.”
“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring--”
“What will you have, John,” she asked, “tea or chocolate?”
On the way home, John talked of the performance. “There was a man,” he
would say, “with a ring, and a girl held on to the man.”
“Shut up, John. That will do.”
She went in with John, and Frank said he would wait for her in
Kensington Gardens to take her out to dinner. He was tired and glad to
be alone. He sat down on a bench, and a nasty little girl of ten or so
disengaged herself from a group of urchins and sat down between him and
an old lady and began to tease him, pointing at him with her dirty
forefinger. “You funny-looking bloke, you. Now why don’t you smile?” and
all the other urchins crowded round and giggled at him. “Come on! Let’s
see a smile!” the girl went on, encouraged.
The old lady at his side saw fit to intervene. “Behave yourself,” she
said, “or go away and leave the gentleman alone.”
“It’s ‘im I’m torking to, not yer; you ‘old yer tongue.”
“Disgraceful girl!” said the old lady. But the little girl went on at
Frank:
“Come, show us you can smile. Now then!”
“Shut up, will you!” suddenly Frank roared at her.
The girl went red and shrivelled up on the bench. “It’s ‘er,” she said
tearfully, pointing at the old lady, “not me. None of ‘er bloomin’
business.”
One of those nasty winter fogs was descending on to London when Eva,
late by an hour, appeared at the gate.
“Is sweet’eart!” jeered the girl, and all the urchins giggled with her.
“Well,” he said, rising, “I _have_ had a time, waiting for you.”
“Zita and Pilling kept me back with their nonsense about my getting de
Jones to talk to Ottercove about Pilling’s dancing place. I told them
I’d be late and keep you waiting, but Pilling said: ‘Ferdinand will
wait.’”
They were rattling along in a taxi, and he was telling her all about the
cheeky girl in Kensington Gardens.
“Darling, I am not interested.”
“In anything that happens to me.”
“That isn’t true, darling. When I am away from you I always talk about
you. This evening, for example, while you were waiting for me, I asked
them if they thought you were very beautiful, but Pilling said: ‘I
shouldn’t say he was beautiful to look at, but he is very clever. I wish
I had his brains.’”
To Frank, who for years had been regarded as the fool of the family,
this universal discovery of his brains was stimulating and refreshing.
At dinner Eva was crotchety because he would not take her out to the
Savoy to dance. “It isn’t really at all expensive, darling. It really
isn’t. I only want to go so as to tell Zita how you don’t mind throwing
away money on me. Because Pilling is so careful, and she hates it so.
Only to be able to tell her, you see.”
“Well, tell her.”
“What?”
“Anything you like.”
“H’m. That’s an idea. I never thought of that.”
“Tell her we dined with their Majesties.”
“Zita,” she confided to him, “doesn’t seem to like you much. She said,
‘The one good thing about him is that he has pots of money.’”
“Pots! Barrels full! Brains and money. Beauty, too! Oh, what a lucky man
am I! But why is it that I feel I’d like to go and blow my brains out?”
“If you don’t stop quarrelling,” she said, “I will leave immediately,
and you will be sorry all your life.”
“Then we shall leave together.”
On their way back he stopped the taxi-cab a few doors away from
Pilling’s house and walked on with her into a more deserted lane. They
walked in silence. Suddenly it came to him that he might be seeing her
for the last time. And what was it that she resented? That he had so far
omitted to say the fateful word? He guided her to a sort of blind door
in the masonry of a house, and took her in his arms. But a policeman
hove in sight and said, “Move on, please. You’re not allowed to stand
here.”
They went on and turned into another lane. She hurried him, saying that
Pilling and Zita were surely anxious that she was not yet home. It
angered him, and at the thought of the last inadequate hours together,
full of bickerings and vexations, tears flooded his eyes as he suddenly
kissed her good-bye. He stood in the darkness, watching her as she
walked to the end of the lane and, without turning to him, disappeared
behind the corner.
He walked away at an accelerated pace. He said: “No. Never again. It’s
finished as if it had never been! I am glad, and nothing that may come
will wipe out the memory of my saying here, deliberately, immediately on
parting, that I am glad I did not say the word.” He walked the length of
Bayswater-road into Oxford-street and all the way to his club, and on
entering his room pulled out his diary and wrote:
“ ... _I put it down on record_....”