1
Late in the afternoon of the day following the meeting in the little
lane, as Ivor sat reading over the fire in the sitting-room, Turner
announced: “Lady Tarlyon, sir.” And there was a note akin to surprise in
Turner’s voice.
“’E seemed pleased enough!” Turner said to Mrs. Hope in the kitchen.
“And I should think so indeed!” cried Mrs. Hope indignantly. “After all
this time alone....”
2
“My movements,” said Virginia, in her slightly hoarse, low voice, “are
cloaked in mystery. I’ve come to see you, Ivor.”
He was delighted to see her....
Virginia swiftly surveyed the comfort of the low-ceilinged room, and
with a sigh of relief threw herself into one of the two deep arm-chairs
on each side of the fire.
“A long and cold and lonely walk it was,” she complained. He gave her a
cigarette.
Her hat, that so black and anarchichal hat, made a loose black stain on
the polished table; and her golden-tawny hair shone bright between the
firelight and the lamp. Lithe and long and slack this Virginia looked,
deliciously at rest in the deep expanse of her chair. And her bright,
yellow silk jumper coloured the room with a sudden luxury and meaning.
Fantasy has come into the room, thought Ivor.
“I’m finding,” he told her, “that this room is not the complete room I
had thought. I have liked the decoration of this room until this
moment----”
“Thank you!” said Virginia.
“---- but now I see that the decoration it really needs, Virginia, is
that yellow silk jumper--how nice it would be if you left it behind with
me, so that I could hang it up on the wall! and every time I saw it I
would think: ‘Virginia came to see me once!’”
Her face was laid sideways against her palm, and her eyes smiled faintly
into the fire; and she held up a very little foot to the fire.
“I walked three miles on a winter day,” she said, “to hear you talk.
That was my great idea for to-day, Ivor. I myself have not been doing
very much talking of late--and, you know, I’m very tired of being with
people whose main purpose in conversation is to massacre syntax and
evade sense.”
“But it’s not quite fair to come to talk to a man who has been alone for
weeks! Maybe you will be washed away in the raw stuff--and there will be
headlines in the papers: Disappearance of famous beauty--thought to have
been washed away in the froth of a hermit’s sudden speech.’ ...”
But she was silent, provoking him. She was yielding up her interest in
him to him, to do as he liked with--on a January afternoon! And in the
nervous stress of that moment he jumped up from his chair and stood by
the fire, and bent to it to light a spill for his cigarette; and he
stared into it, his face sideways to her.
Virginia watched him curiously.
“You told me yesterday that you were working, Ivor. Now I would like to
hear about that--may I? Are you writing a new novel?”
He stood above her on the hearth, she sprawled lazily in the chair
beneath him.
“I’m not writing anything, Virginia--I’m trying to learn how to play a
game. It’s called a ‘game’ anyway--that one which it used to be the
fashion for you and me and all cleverish young people to despise--the
game of trying to understand the country we live in so that we might
help in the working of it. It sounds a pompous business, and so we
despised it.”
“Oh!” And Virginia made a little face, as though a little puzzled and a
little bored. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you are going to
stand on that hearth and talk politics to me? Oh, Ivor, _must_ you do
that!” She put such pathos into her words that they laughed together.
“Yes, Ivor?” she asked gently.
“But I’m very serious about it, Virginia, so it’s no good your saying,
“Yes, Ivor” at me as though I needed humouring. I’ve got a frightfully
English feeling about me these days,” he explained, “and I can’t bear to
think of the way we’ve all slacked--all we young and youngish people.
Just utterly slacked!”
“But what about losing lives and legs and arms?” she put to him. “How
did you manage to do all that and slack as well?”
“People are getting fat on that remark,” he told her darkly, “and are
going to get still fatter--until one day something pricks them and then
they’ll be all thin and miserable. I beg you not to play the fool with
your lovely slim figure, Virginia. But I’m sure you said that as a way
of sympathising about my arm, which is nice of you, but not an
argument....”
“_I’m_ not arguing,” Virginia said. “I’m being treated like a public
institution. Very queenly I feel....”
He wanted her to understand.
“But you do know, don’t you, that it’s as easy to fight for a country as
for a woman, particularly if they are yours? And that it’s much easier
to fight for a country or a woman than to understand either--or even
want to, for the matter of that! Why, Virginia, they said the war was
going to teach us things, they’ve actually got the cheek to say now that
the war has taught us things, fine things. Well, I’m damned if I see
what the war has taught us except that it’s pretty easy for every sort
of man to die--and now the peace is mobilising to teach us that it’s
jolly difficult for every sort of man to live. That’s a platitude, of
course, but that doesn’t make it less true.” He seemed to be angry about
it.
Virginia nodded. It wasn’t difficult for her to live, if having money is
living, but she understood. This was fairly good sense, anyway, for
politics. Virginia had always thought that politics were only
interesting from a bad-tempered point of view.
“That’s what I meant,” he went on, “when I said all the youngish people
are slacking. They are taking no hand in the work of the country, they
are doing nothing about it and thinking nothing about it. At least our
fathers tried to use what energy and intelligence they had left over
from riding horses and talking about them; they tried to do something as
a matter of course, even if they had to sandwich that something between
a salmon and a grouse, and a pretty fine mess they made of it--but we
don’t even make a mess, we sit and watch other people making a mess for
us.”
The light of argument peeped faintly out of Virginia’s eyes.
“You don’t seem to realise,” she said, “that England expects every young
man not to get in the way of other people doing their duty. So our young
men have simply had to stand aside--or go into the Foreign Office, which
is the same thing--for it’s been so dunned into them that they’re no use
for anything that now they jolly well aren’t. You can’t tell the
public-schools for years and years that they produce nothing but
fatheads and then expect them to turn out geniuses....”
“It’s been made very difficult for us not to slack,” she said.
Ivor made an impatient gesture. He had heard that before.
“It’s got something to do with the will to enjoy,” she went on. “I heard
some one say that....”
“And we did enjoy, too,” she added oddly, “just before the war and
during the war--we and our lovely dead and dying men!”
And that is about the last word Virginia said. For Ivor
talked--tremendously. Talk was seething darkly within him, and it had to
come out--and this woman had asked for it! And so out came the “Ivory”
intolerances and prejudices which Magdalen had used to tease and Rodney
West to encourage, thinking that no man was good for anything if he
wasn’t fierce about something. Here, in this animus of Ivor’s against
the “young men of opportunity,” in that they strove to be so little
worthy of it, spoke the Aunt Moira in him: “Whatever you do, you must do
Something! For Heaven’s sake, Ivor, don’t be slack, don’t be shoddy,
don’t be sodden! You must think Something, do Something!” That Aunt
Moira who, ever mightily contradicting herself, had so efficiently
helped that fine gentleman of promise, her younger brother, to do
nothing at all, nothing but love....
And Ivor made a joke. The occasion, Virginia suggested, called for a
little imagination on his part, so he had better imagine something. So
Ivor imagined a revolution for her--oh, a very imaginary revolution!
There was blood, of course. He told her how one day, with a crash and a
bang and a mighty cry, the people of England rose in one body and hurled
themselves at Whitehall. Of course there was a reason for this, as they
tried to explain to Whitehall. They had come from factories and mills
and mines and all the other places that rebels come from, all with the
one mighty cry, “We’ll larn ’em to be gentlemen!” For this revolution
was one of the people at last utterly sick of government by feeble
gentlemen. A young man from Owens College headed the revolution, but he
died soon after. And at that time the charming but sinister M. Caillaux
was President of France....
“We are the New Gentlemen,” the rebels cried. Men of the lower sort had
everywhere raised their heads, and behold! they had seen England as one
vast knighthood, but what knights were those! Whereupon men made a great
cry that the land of England was being sloppily governed and that
something must be done about it. And of course there was no lack of
agitators to point out, with plausible arguments, that the war had
helped the British Lion to find out the British Ass--which last, the
agitators insisted, was an immaculate man, hitherto known as a
gentleman, with red tabs and gold braid about him, a long tradition
behind him, and a bloody fine mess all round him. “It is up to you,” the
agitators cried, “to put the lid on all that.” Which thing was done, so
that traditions were instantly withered into offal, the mad dream of
Master Jack Cade came true at last, and the hapless middle-class had
more reason than ever to wail, “What shall we do with our sons?” for no
one cared what they did with them so long as they made them work. And
Chivalry, most shy and most beautiful of all the birds that grace the
aviary of human virtues, was found at last with broken wings in the
gutters of Fleet Street, was tenderly nursed back to life and on a
memorable holy-day was released from Hyde Park Corner--a lovely thing to
entrance the eye and stir the heart of Britain, from Cornwall to
Aberdeen and even farther. The king was escorted in exceeding splendid
state to Windsor, the route thither being lined by such a vast concourse
of cheering people as had never before been seen gathered together but
at a football match. And there was instantly begun the building of a
National Opera House, in which Sir Thomas Beecham could conduct for
evermore without breaking his heart or his purse. And there was
organised a massacre of _maîtres d’hôtel_, who have gone so far in
making English youth obsequious. Many of the old order were tried for
their lives before an extraordinary tribunal especially got together to
try people for their lives on the capital charge of whether they had or
had not been gentlemen: of course there was the usual controversy as to
the exact definition of a gentleman, and many suggestions were put
forward, among which that “a gentleman is one who is never
unintentionally rude to any one,” was accorded the most favour; but in
the end Mr. Bernard Shaw’s definition was unanimously adopted, as being
both brief and practical, that “a gentleman is a man who puts more into
life than he takes out.” Good old Shaw, people cried. Mr. Churchill and
some few others were finally acquitted on their disarming plea, that
they belonged to a different age from this, a feudal age, and were
therefore not responsible for their actions in this; it was further
pleaded on behalf of Mr. Churchill that he had been educated without
heed to cost, in that England had spent more than a hundred million
sterling in giving him a thorough working knowledge of geography alone,
particularly as regards Gallipoli, Antwerp, Mesopotamia, and Russia; and
that England could not afford to waste, but must rather reserve for the
highest office, one to whom she had given the most expensive
public-school education obtainable. But there were many who did not
discover so much ingenuity, and were never heard of again. While there
were some who proved their worth by banding themselves together with
warlike cries, to the effect that though they might not have put more
into life than they had taken out, they had taken out of their banks a
good deal more than they had put in, and so did not mind dying. And
these straightway entrenched themselves within Devonshire House and the
Ritz, the last a very stout and solid building in the manner of the old
Bastille, originally conceived, no doubt, with a fearful eye on
class-prejudice. Devonshire House was stormed through a breach on the
Stratton Street side, and many were killed but none taken, but the siege
of the Ritz was long and bloody, as of course it would be. Both sides
were fertile in invention, and Piccadilly was a shambles from Bond
Street to Clarges Street; but both in bravery and invention the
besieged had something of the advantage, for they were led by the men of
White’s, the most gallant of all those who asserted their right to be
gentlemen when and how they pleased: and were, moreover, greatly
assisted by their exact knowledge of every corner of the building, which
was of course known to the New Gentlemen only from passing buses or from
the Green Park on Sunday afternoons. But one night Wimborne House, which
lies behind the Ritz and was valiantly held by my lord Viscount Wimborne
and his men, all veterans of his Irish vice-royalty, was betrayed by a
Hebrew gentleman lately black-balled from the Royal Automobile Club: the
New Gentlemen poured through the breach, and the defenders of the old
order were slain to the last man--and he a gay and handsome man of
stuttering speech and many parlour-tricks, now at last dying formidably
on the steps of the _foyer_ with a great laugh and a cry, “For King and
Cocktail!” And when again the old order raised its head it was only to
be finally crushed at the rout of Kensington, where the flower of Oxford
and Cambridge, marching to the relief of London, was surprised and
overthrown while awaiting the issue of a dog-fight at the corner of
Church Street....
“At what time will you dine, sir?” Turner asked patiently from the door.
“Lord, it’s half-past eight!” Virginia cried.
“Do you think,” she asked shyly, “that I could share your homely kipper!
‘Now I’m here’ sort of thing, you know....”
“Turner,” cried Ivor to the man at the door, “you heard that? What are
you going to do about it?... You see,” he explained, when Turner had
gone out, “you are my first guest in this house.”
“Well, you are an odd man, I do think!” Virginia suddenly attacked him.
“Do you mean to say that you aren’t in the least curious to know what my
host, friends, and husband will think at my not turning up to dinner?”
“But, Virginia, they wouldn’t be your host, friends, and husband if they
were very surprised at a little thing like that, would they? Of course
we can send a message,” he added. “I’ve got a kind of car somewhere
about the house. It’s an American car----”
“Oh, no! To send a man three miles to say I’m not turning up for a
dinner which they’ll have eaten by then--oh, no! They’ll just think I’m
lost, that’s all.”
“And so I am!” she added, with a sudden smile.
She touched her hair, she jumped up and looked into the mirror, and she
made a face at what she saw.
“If you will show me to your bedroom, Ivor,” she turned to him to say,
“I will somehow or other put the fear of God into ‘Swan and Edgar’....”
3
It was after eleven when they heard the rustle of a car on the little
gravel drive. The rustle stopped.
Ivor grandly waved a hand towards the curtained windows: “Here come the
messengers of Kare and Tarlyon to demand a very fair lady.”
Virginia, again in the depths of her chair after dinner, looked mildly
surprised; but just a little more than mildly when her husband came in
almost on top of Turner. George Tarlyon stood grinning at Virginia from
the doorway, and at Ivor. And Ivor couldn’t help smiling back at the
“clever fellow” expression on the handsome face.
“Here we are, you see!” Tarlyon cried; and the grin was all over his
face, a gay, mocking grin.
“Well, I’m very pleased,” Ivor met him in the middle of the room. They
were of a height, dark and fair, but Tarlyon was much the stronger set
of the two. His extraordinarily fair hair was crisply curly from his
wide, reddish forehead; he looked clean and scrubbed and
weathered--always as though the salt of the sea had just whipped his
face. And so gay, with that attractive smile that never left the
slightly frozen blue eyes....
Virginia vaguely introduced the two men. And she examined her husband,
rather severely.
“This is very odd, I do think,” she said.
Lord Tarlyon turned very frankly to Ivor, appealing to him:--
“I say, you know, I’m awfully sorry to have rushed in on you like this.
But, don’t you see----”
“Will you have a drink?” asked Ivor.
“Certainly. Used to hear about you, you know, from a man in my mess
called Transome. Thought no end of you, he did. I was sorry he went....”
He turned to Virginia, still appealing: “What I mean to say is, my dear,
that I knew you’d be grateful for a lift home in the car, so I brought
the blessed thing along....” He took the glass from Ivor. “Damned good
husband I am, I do think,” he teased Virginia. Splendid he was, standing
there by the table between the two, simply glowing with the pleasure of
the moment, laughing at them, teasing Virginia with that sideways little
grin under his fair, clipped moustache. He mocked Virginia. He toasted
Virginia....
“Yes, but how did you find out I was here?” Virginia asked. “For I left
no word as to where I would be, and my footprints are too small to be
visible to the human eye....”
“Easy, my dear, dead easy! On your not turning up for dinner, with every
excuse, I must say”--he bowed to Ivor--“Kare put inquiries through the
butler to the servants’ hall to find out whether anything had been heard
of any dark, handsome strangers of superior mentality in the
neighbourhood. On the name Marlay being mentioned we all naturally stood
to attention at once. That’s our man, we cried with one voice. Anyway, I
cried and they echoed. And so here I am! Easy, Virginia, dead easy!”
“But it won’t be so easy to get home,” Virginia remarked, “if you have
another drink....”
George Tarlyon leaned against the edge of the table: enjoying himself
immensely, it seemed. So gay, so slack.... Ivor was immensely amused by
him; anyway, he thought he was. He gave him another drink.
But Virginia looked tired, staring into the bright fire. She seemed
suddenly to have lost all interest in the two men in the room.
“I say, I liked that book of yours,” Tarlyon said comfortably to Ivor.
He stretched his legs out a little, towards the fire. “You know, that
one called--something about a courtesan....”
“_The Legend of the Last Courtesan_,” Virginia said into the fire.
“That’s it, Virginia! Splendid book, I thought. I don’t have time to
read as a rule, but I finished that--Virginia saying she knew you once,
you know, and that you were clever.... Just the kind of book I’d like to
write myself if I wasn’t a half-wit....”
“Which half?” asked Virginia softly. “So that I’ll know....”
“There you are, Marlay!” Tarlyon cried; and he laughed with his head
thrown back and his eyes wrinkled up. “Virginia thinks I’m a most
consummate ass, but when I do try talking the clever stuff for which
I’ve a natural aptitude she quickly puts the lid on me.... But,
seriously, Marlay, I did like that book of yours. You got the eighteenth
century uncommonly well, I thought. And I think that word ‘courtesan’ is
a considerate word--what I mean is that it was very decent of you to
trouble to write a long word like ‘courtesan’ time over again, when you
could have used a couple of short but septic ones just as well.
Virginia, are you with me in this?... She yawns at me! Marlay, my wife
yawns at me! All women yawn at the men they love--did Oscar Wilde say
that, Marlay, or have I said a marvellous thing?”
“A marvellous thing, I think,” Ivor just managed to say. “Wilde said
something like ‘All men kill the thing they love....’”
“Oh, that’s just a quibble--they come to the same thing. The man loves,
the woman yawns, and then the man kills her! So I have said a marvellous
thing after all! Are you listening, Virginia?”
Virginia looked very tired indeed. She smiled at him sleepily. George
always made her smile in the end.
“I feel myself getting more brilliant every moment,” Tarlyon said
comfortably. “It’s this room, Marlay, that’s having a witty effect on
me, I think. And I also think it’s pretty clever of you to have a quiet
little house like this, where you can receive the lovely ladies who get
bored with our conversation at Rupert Kare’s....”
“But their husbands can come too,” Ivor pointed out, “if they behave
themselves.”
“Oh, I say!” Tarlyon stared, and laughed.
Virginia suddenly jumped up. In desperation, it seemed. And with a
gesture the black anarchical hat crowned her head, her coat was to hand,
and she was ready to go; and she was gone. Tarlyon followed reluctantly.
As he started off the car, she said to Ivor, in the front doorway:
“We’ve had a lovely talk, Ivor--I’ve loved my evening with you. I’ll try
to come again, only we are due off to the South any day----”
“Come on, Virginia!” came Tarlyon’s voice from the glistening shape of
the car--charming young Charles Rolls’s legacy to England.
“Good-night, Ivor,” she said, and went swiftly.
“Good-night, Marlay, good-night,” came the gay waving voice of George
Tarlyon, as the car curved softly round the drive and away to the London
road. Ivor heard his laugh in the distance. An amusing man. Those two,
out there....