1
He was interrupted.
One very cold and overcast afternoon towards the end of that January, he
was walking up one of the lanes that skirted the parkland of the Kare
estate. The lane led gently up the hill for a long and twisting way, and
the hill led gently down to the Thames valley. Ivor was walking
bareheaded, for his thick dark hair was covering enough on the bitterest
day; and his remaining arm was deep in his trouser pocket. He looked a
curiously still figure, walking thus: walking swiftly but nowhither,
taking thought and air, taking very deep thought: a lonely and defiant
man of affairs. How Aunt Percy would have chuckled to see him now!...
And then a sudden crash to break his thoughts, a rustling crash of angry
leaves and broken boughs, the wintry crash of a raped hedge! Three yards
in front, almost on top of him, a horse pirouetted in the little lane;
it pawed the air and ground, it made gestures towards equilibrium after
its sudden dash through the barrier of Kare Park on to a strolling man.
A sleek and quivering picture, drawn with a fine point against a dour
background. The horse snorted, it quivered, it eyed the astonished Ivor,
and then it pawed the ground with an arrogant air. And a woman laughed.
“Oh, Ivor Marlay!” the woman cried.
Thus Virginia happened--she who had been Virginia Tracy, then Mrs.
Sardon, now Lady Tarlyon. But the years that had passed sat as lightly
on her as pearls about her throat, her years decorated Virginia; and yet
where was the young poet among the many young poets she knew, to take
folly by the horns and sing of her complexion, crying that white samite
was black beside its sheen?
They grinned at each other, she above and he below. Fairly caught they
both were.
“I say, Virginia!” he cried with amazed pleasure.
“That’s me!” she laughed at him. The horse doubtfully came to rest, and
it breathed contemptuously into Ivor’s face.
“After all these years, these long years!” she exclaimed wonderingly,
staring down at him. Her eyes were clear, blue lights in the gloom. “Did
I frighten you, Ivor Marlay?”
“You nearly killed me, that’s all. But I would have died happily,
Virginia, saluting you with my pleasure at seeing you again....”
“You see,” he explained, “I had no idea you were so lovely. Someone
should have told me....”
“Oh, you’ve changed, Ivor Marlay!” Virginia mocked him deftly. “You are
being nice to Virginia. You are not despising Virginia....” That
slightly hoarse, breathless voice of hers--so pregnant somehow!
His happy gesture answered her. They were very pleased with each other.
“So I please you now, do I?” Lady Tarlyon gravely asked him.
She was so fair and straight and cleanly drawn; and there was gallantry
in her poise and in the way she dared his eyes. Was this the sharp,
antagonistic Virginia, this woman ...?
“I simply can’t tell you,” he said, from her stirrup, “how pleased I am
to see you, Virginia. And it’s a heartfelt truth dragged out of me by my
surprise at seeing you, by my pleasure at being nearly killed by
you....”
“That’s all very well, my friend, but it’s up to me to say that kind of
thing to you.” She swayed, and waved an intimidating gauntlet across his
eyes. “I’ll say them too, but later. People talk about you here and
there....”
He was beside her, beneath her. The horse and the lady, a warm picture.
She swayed above him in her saddle, she was exquisite. And there was
that clearness over her small face, that clear, dry sheen of chill air;
and the taut lips, bitten dry by the winter air, hard riding.... The
same Virginia, but how different! The same little white face, so white
and firm-featured, so proudly set and lightly carried; the same tiny
little flesh spot in the furrow of the chin--an inconsiderable little
chin it was, you remember?--the same wide blue eyes, so lazy in look, so
quick to retort, so light and dark, so kind and mocking, so hard and
soft: a soldier’s eyes they were really, but a soldier of fortune. And
“Swan and Edgar,” there they were! Ivor laughed to see them, he asked
after their unruly health--those twin Virginian curls, tumbling down
each cheek in golden-gay cascades from the wide-brimmed, so very rakish,
black felt hat! And how it became her in her severe habit, that wide
anarchist hat set gallantly about her golden hair!
This sudden meeting of the two former antagonists seemed to bring all
the sweetness out of each. It was in their eyes as they smiled at each
other in the January gloom of that little lane, with darkening Kare Park
on their right, on their left the wintry rolling land of Berkshire, and
all about them the pungent smell of sodden earth.
“Do you realise, Ivor, that we’re people of thirty now? Thirty, Ivor!”
“I’m glad enough for you,” he said. She understood. She charmed him by
her quick little smile of understanding. He admired her frankly....
“I say, Virginia,” he said eagerly, “we must talk a good deal. I want to
hear all about your life since we last spoke together at the Hallidays’
that night. I’ve seen you often in the distance since then, but we’ve
somehow never come to grips, it’s just not happened. And whenever I go
to the Mont Agel, M. Stutz always tells me that you were there the
evening before or that you will not be there for a long time for you
are abroad. M. Stutz worships you, Virginia, and quite right he is. But
he never tells me anything about you--and now I’ve found you I want an
official account of your life, for the rumours about you are so
conflicting....” He seemed to plead; and he was really pleading for her
to intrude upon his loneliness.
“You haven’t believed the nasty things, have you, Ivor?” she asked him
very suddenly. Her eyes were very serious on him. Hard eyes they were,
sometimes. Lady Tarlyon knew a lot.
“Oh, stuff!” he smiled at her. “Didn’t we make a pledge, Virginia, the
very last time we met? We’ll be friends, we said. Those were our exact
words. Well then!”
She pointed a finger dramatically down at him. “That pledge,” she said,
“is going to be redeemed. See if it isn’t!”
“I always thought,” he mocked, “that a man and a woman didn’t meet in a
lonely place for nothing.”
And then she thought to ask him how he came to be _there_ anyway, in
that little lane. He told her of his house by the bridge, and of the
Misses Cloister-Smiths, remembering how in the old days Virginia had
been amused by the oddities of names. And as she listened, her first
gaiety at seeing him seemed somehow to leave her, she grew very quiet
and silent, as though a cloud from the bleak sky had sombrely caressed
her; and her eyes, so clear and merry but a moment before, wandered
about the bleak countryside, beyond his shoulder. Virginia’s eyes were
like sentinels, put there to beguile you while Virginia was far away, in
some curious unknown place. Only once she swayed to a sudden step of her
horse: she was quite immobile, a little sad. He watched her.
Then she told him what he had already guessed, that she and her husband
were staying with Rupert Kare for a week or so. No one in the place, she
remarked, had said a word about his living round above.
“I doubt if they know,” Ivor said. “I’m living a frightfully private
life.”
“So you never go up there, then?” she wondered curiously. “Though I seem
to remember your knowing Rupert quite well once upon a time.”
“Oh, yes!” But he might just as well have said, “Oh, no!” for all the
real answer he gave. But he knew that Virginia was peculiarly able to
understand people’s dislikes and distempers, and that she allowed for
them; it used commonly to be her own feeling about a good many people.
Yes, she understood.
“But it isn’t so easy for me--to outlaw myself like that,” she told him
gravely. “For there I am, you see, still in it. Same men, same women,
same places, same baubles. And only dress and dancing changes.... And so
I insisted on escaping this afternoon for an hour or so.”
“You are very wise, Ivor,” she suddenly said, “to have left all that as
suddenly as you did, so long ago. You annoyed us, but then you wanted to
annoy us, and you were wise. And do you know, I’ve always said that you
are very wise. Whenever your name is mentioned, whether it’s about a
book or a woman, I always say I knew you once and that you are very
wise. He knew us all once, I add, but now he is very wise and exclusive.
He is indiscriminately exclusive, I say....”
“It’s only that I’m trying to work,” he earnestly explained, looking up
at her. And she stared down at him, and under the shadow of her hat her
mouth seemed twisted into a queer little smile which puzzled him.
It was darkening; and it was as she was about to leave him that he
suddenly asked her:--
“I say, Virginia, do you remember being made to copy out in your first
copy-book as a child that marvellous sentence: ‘When gentlefolk meet,
compliments are exchanged’? Do you remember, Virginia?”
“That’s us to-day,” he explained.
Her eyes contracted just a little, quizzically. And with her head a
little sideways, she examined him. She was curiously detached, this
Virginia, yet curiously warm....
“Yes, but that’s not _me_, Ivor. It’s not _my_ nature.” And it was as
though she wanted to tell him an ulterior something; but there was no
time, it was quickly darkening; the horse stamped eagerly, and she swung
away with it. “I’m not like that at all, really, Ivor,” she said
swiftly. “It’s you who draw it out of one ... maybe.”
“That’s your particular quality, Ivor,” she cried to him, a woman on a
horse, going away. Strangely come, strangely gone! He stared after her
through the hedge, a swaying figure through the darkening parkland. A
shadow astride a horse ... so fair and gallant! She turned and waved a
hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn’t hear it, it was a lost
word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the
dolorous crypt of winter. She was a symbol for something....
And Ivor thought: “O mystic and sombre Virginia....”
And he wondered if he would see her again. He wondered.... And he didn’t
know. He knew nothing about this Virginia--whom he had thought he had
judged so well! And as he strode homewards through the chill gloom he
mocked the judgments of his early “twenties” a little viciously.
“Christ, how they must have loathed me!” he thought.