1
Naturally, they did not now hurry to Paris: or hurry anywhither, for the
matter of that. They had no plans, there was no hurry, the weather was
perfect; and the world was far too busy enjoying the lack of
killing--the spring of 1919!--to notice or care what two people were
doing. Ivor and Virginia had too much to talk about to discuss such
banalities as destinations. “We are going towards Paris? Very well then,
let’s go towards Paris.” Thus they motored gently towards Paris, staying
at places. _Nach Paris_ is the vaguest and most uncertain destiny in
history, as all men know; and the route these two adventurers took would
have broken the heart of a motoring-map, if they had consulted one. They
somehow got to Chartres, among other places. Chartres has about as much
relation to Paris from Avignon as Canterbury, and they got to it only by
the divine accident of seeing, one evening, the two towers of its
magnificent cathedral from the far distance. Ivor and Virginia never
forgot the catch in their hearts at the sudden beauty of the great
cathedral high against the evening sky. “Oh, it’s somehow like a great
horse!” Virginia whispered in the silence of their wonder at that great
shape high against the sky: for the cathedral of Chartres is built upon
an eminence in the town, and from anywhere on the straight roads that
lead out of Chartres to the four corners of the world you will see its
lofty genius against the sky.... From Chartres to Paris is but a three
hours’ drive at most, but it took them a week: part of which time they
spent at a hotel in the forest of Fontainbleau. A lovely and
indescribable fortnight, this from Avignon to Paris....
2
Virginia always stayed at the Ritz in Paris: it was just a habit: but
the habit was confined to the rue Cambon side of it, saying it was
quieter there. Ivor, who also stayed on the rue Cambon side, pointed out
that as a matter of fact it was much noisier than the Place Vendôme
side, but that as all hotels were beastly, it didn’t very much matter.
There are certain gentlemen of mean and truculent appearance, who, in
the early hours of every morning, enter the central streets of Paris,
and bang large tin cans against the walls on the thin pretence of
clearing out the dustbins.
Virginia had found a letter awaiting her at the bureau: and she had
looked at the envelope with that vague, far-away look. But when Ivor,
dressed for dinner, came into her room to see if she was ready, which of
course she was not, she gave him the letter with a mischievous laugh:
saying that it was a masterpiece of Tarlyonry, and an instructive essay
for any man on the perfect way to treat a vanished wife and a possibly
vanishing income. “Which, though, he wouldn’t think very much about,”
she conceded, “for no Tarlyon was ever quite penniless.”
“Am I, or am I not, going to like this letter?” Ivor asked her frankly.
“Because if not, I would much rather read it _after_ dinner, if I’ve got
to read it at all....”
Virginia was before her mirror, subduing “Swan and Edgar”; and she
turned to him in her chair, with her face sideways, holding that small
iron toy to Swan. She made a little face at him.
“It’s just an ordinary kind of letter,” she said.
It was addressed from Monte Carlo, and dated five days back. Ivor sat on
the edge of the bed and read:--
“DEAR VIRGINIA,--I hope you won’t mind the liberty I’ve taken with
the villa. I’ve closed it up and scattered the menials, as I
gathered that you won’t be returning to this part of the country
for some time, and being solitary host of a villa like a
wedding-cake isn’t my strongest suit. Hugo and I moved on here, and
haven’t enjoyed it as much as if you’d been here too. The ‘dicing’
hasn’t been going so well as it was--poor old Hugo came a crash the
other night, and has gone clucking back for to be a toy soldier at
Aldershot, saying that ‘dicing’ isn’t what it was in the early
seventies and that he’s going to fight the Bolsheviks instead, for
the only person who took his money with even a pretence of sympathy
was a Grand Duke, who probably needed it himself. I’m leaving for
London to-morrow, but as I’m only passing through Paris, where I
suppose you are--you might have written to me, I do think!--I
shan’t have time to look in on you. I shall stay at Belgrave
Square, and look at London for a period, and then go down to Rupert
Kare’s. In the meanwhile, should you suddenly feel the call of
England in your blood and want to come home, be a dear and send me
a wire to White’s, so that I can meet you with a couple of plovers’
eggs on a plate, it being the season for plovers’ eggs and you
adoring same. Virginia, don’t tell me that you and I aren’t going
to break an egg together at the Mont Agel this year! Remember that
you would never have married me if I hadn’t drugged you with
plovers’ eggs--and will so drug you again, Virginia, or my name
isn’t George St. George, ever your lord but never my own master.”
Ivor folded up the letter, rather slowly and clumsily, with his one
hand. Virginia was ready, radiant with the peculiar glitter of a very
fair woman in a sleeveless black dress, and looking at him with that
mischievous smile of hers. It put him rather on his guard, that smile.
“Odd man!” Ivor said thoughtfully. “Might have been written by a Dago,
parts of that letter--and yet he’s the most gallant man in England.”
“Don’t you see that that is the way of his pride?” she pointed out. “He
has a great deal of pride, and common sense too, but they’ve both
somehow got motheaten in him. And so he writes in that casual and
bantering way, as though nothing in particular had happened----”
“Well, it has,” Ivor said sharply.
“Now don’t be snappy, Ivor,” she begged him mischievously. “You and I
know something _most_ particular has happened, and so does George
really, but he wouldn’t give that away, even to himself, not he! He
thinks and writes about it in that unimportant way just so as to make it
seem unimportant, something not at all serious. You see, he’s always
been quite sure of his hold on me, and he can’t get out of that
conceited habit all at once. Some Englishmen never think their wives can
be unfaithful to them, not because they think so well of their wives but
because they think so well of themselves. And so George simply can’t
help thinking that I am only playing--we must give him a little time to
realise that I’m not playing, Ivor,” she added gently.
“For him to realise that, or for you to realise that?” he asked, and put
the light out of her eyes.
“You’ve got no right to say that!” Virginia cried.
He had meant to hurt, on a sudden impulse to lance a grievance that had
risen within him; and now was shamed by her sincere anger, and would
have pleaded his reason and begged her forgiveness, but she turned her
head from him, and her face was set. And he told her unlistening face
how he had noticed during the last two weeks, and divine weeks they had
been, that she had avoided the subject of what they were going to do,
the definite thing which was essential to people who weren’t babies.
“Every time I wanted to talk about it,” he told her, “you somehow
stopgapped me, and sometimes so cleverly that I forgot what I wanted to
say in admiring you--but all the time I couldn’t help wondering why you
avoided the subject, and feeling you must have some reason for that, a
reason so weak that you didn’t dare let it out, for fear I might just
laugh at you.” He smiled a little. “It’s been an uncomfortable feeling,”
he explained. “Like a cold hot-water bottle.”
But there was no response in her set face. She had sat down with her
back to him, on the chair by the toilet-table, and was playing with the
lid of a little ivory box. Never before had she looked like this; for
the face he saw in the mirror was set in an inexplicable anger, a deep
and almost venomous anger which amazed him; and he had a curious feeling
that this Virginia’s spine was made of steel, it would bend and bend and
bend until one day it snapped up straight and stayed straight, rigid and
unyielding. He felt, as it were psychically that there were wastes in
this Virginia unexplored by man, wastes where she roamed in utter
disregard of human laws, wastes where she could wander untrammelled by
human emotions. Give her an inch of excuse, and she would become a
snake, to swish away with implacable and unfathomable face. American
women were said to get like that when angered, hard. He knew, quite
dearly, that she wasn’t now angry at what he had said, but that her
whole nature had been given a twist to anger at some hidden aspect of
him.
“Well?” he asked softly, from behind her. She had humoured him often,
after all....
She turned her head and looked directly at him.
“I’ve got nothing to say,” she said steadily. “You say that I haven’t
wanted to discuss what we are going to do. Having discovered that I
don’t want to, I’m merely wondering why you are insisting on it--that’s
all.”
He laughed a little at that.
“Don’t try to bully me, Virginia, and I’ll not try to bully you,” he
warned her. “You see, dear, I think we ought to discuss it, whether you
want to or not. It’s really rather important--and you can’t just get out
of it by looking like an angry queen and saying, ‘I have nothing to
say.’ I’m in love with _you_, Virginia, and not with love, so I want us
to be sane about it. There’s a great deal more pleasure in sanity than
people think--for, you know, one doesn’t have to be mad because one is
in love....” And then, from behind, he bent down and gently tilted up
her chin with his hand and kissed her lips; and, surprisingly, they held
to his lips!
“Is that the way sanity takes you?” she asked.
“It was a proposal of marriage,” he said gravely. It was the first time
that word had occurred between them; but it had occurred within them for
now two weeks. Virginia stared at him seriously, and her hand gently
brushed his forehead, a very fond gesture. The curious anger in her had
died as suddenly as it had come.
“That’s what I was being angry about,” she explained. “And that’s why
I’ve made you avoid the subject these glorious two weeks, these lovers’
weeks. I don’t think I want to marry you, Ivor. In fact, I don’t think
any woman has ever wanted to marry you.”
“I’ve only asked one,” he told her darkly. “But I’m afraid you will have
to marry me, Virginia. Things seem to point that way. I am not
philandering with you, I’d have you know. I have finished with
philandering. It doesn’t matter a button to me if we are married or not,
and I’ve no one in the world to consider but you--but marriage seems to
be indicated, for several weighty reasons which I will explain to you if
you’ll cease laughing at me.”
“I was trying to look like a woman yearning for dinner, that’s all.”
“You must yearn,” he said firmly. “We can always dine, but we can’t
always talk sense----”
“Not even now,” she interrupted with a great weariness. “As far as I can
make out you are trying to make an honest woman of me. Well, you can’t
do it. No one can do it. And I want my dinner, please.”
“Damn dinner! It’s no good being funny about this, Virginia, because I’m
frightfully serious. I will not have us slopping about Europe in this
hole-and-corner way. You are too fine and I am too old.”
“So this is ‘slopping about,’ is it?” she asked, ever so quietly.
“Don’t, please, drive me into being disloyal to all this----” he was
begging her impatiently, when she swiftly interrupted him with a
gesture.
“Oh, got you!” she cried, laughing into his astonished eyes. “Don’t you
see, you poor Ivor? No possible or prospective husband could have said
that--only a lover could have said it, in just that particularly idiotic
way! Oh, Ivor, you are too sweet! And that’s why it’s perfectly absurd,
all this talk about our marrying. You simply don’t look or think or talk
like any possible husband; it’s perfectly obvious to the meanest
intelligence that you are a lover and always will be. You simply aren’t
casual enough to be anything else, Ivor. I assure you, dear. You will
never make any woman feel, deep down in her, that you could be anything
so casual as her husband. Anyway, you can’t be mine--oh, please don’t
insist!” she pathetically begged him. “For I will give way, and then we
will look so silly as husband and wife--or rather, feel silly. Oh, my
dear, it’s ever such an impossible relation for Ivor and Virginia!...”
But he insisted that they must be reasonable and responsible people, not
vague drifters on the scum of life.
“It’s just a matter of orderliness,” he explained earnestly, “our
getting married. You are quite right, it is an effort to see myself as
your husband and you as my wife--but we needn’t make the effort once
we’ve committed the fact. When I said that you were too fine and I was
too old to slop about Europe in a hole-and-corner way, I meant that this
disorderly kind of life is unworthy of you, and that I’m not young
enough any more to enjoy doing no work _all_ the time. For, you know,
one never can do any real work unless there’s some stability in the way
of life--one simply must be a responsible person, even a lover must be a
responsible person, if he is ever to get any work done. And the idea
that a man and a woman of your position can live together and say, ‘the
devil take the world’ is bosh, there’s never any conviction about that
‘devil take the world’ remark. I know you don’t care anything about
social position, I know you quite sincerely don’t ever want to do social
things again--but, Virginia, there’s something displeasing and slack,
like two people being in dressing-gowns all day long, in a state about
which people can make remarks--and in which you can get mocking letters
from Tarlyon! I’m talking sense, Virginia, so don’t argue with me
because I want my dinner as much as you do and it’s my turn to be angry
next....”
Her silence was serious, her eyes wide with thought. He waited, close
beside her, staring at her with a crooked little smile. Then, suddenly,
she nodded, just once.
“All right,” she said, almost absently. “George will let me divorce
him--yes, we can manage that. He’s got a lot of common sense hidden away
somewhere....” She got up from her chair with a sudden little shake.
“That’s settled then, Ivor. No more talk about it, please--oh, please!”
she suddenly pleaded in her breathless little voice. “Let’s have our
summer, and then in the autumn we can get down to this business of
arrangement and divorce--down from our mountains, Ivor, right down!” Her
eyes seemed clouded, he had a queer idea that she was going to cry; but
she didn’t, she picked up a tube of lip-salve from the toilet-table and
took it to her lips, and then on a sudden thought held it away again.
“Will you kiss me before or after?” she asked.
And he did whatever it was suitable for him to do.
3
The corridors of a hotel at the hour of nine-fifteen at night are
consecrated to the activities of _valets de chambre_: it is at that
mysterious hour, when the quality are at dinner or the play, that the
white-aproned _valets_ raid their bedrooms and rudely snatch away their
clothes; and, with jackets and trousers screwed deftly under their arms,
go searching the most noisome holes of the hotel for boot-brushes and
oily rags with which to dust and clean them.
But to-night the last of _messieurs et mesdames_ were late in their
descent. And it was as the _valets_ were waiting in a little group about
a bedroom door, in final gossip before the raid, that there passed them
down the corridor two silent dandies: a very fair lady--“_Ah, ce type
anglais!_”--and a very tall, beak-nosed, clean-shaven man with one arm
and a white flower brave on the silk lapel of his _smoking_. The
white-aproned group stared after _monsieur et milady_; they saw the hand
of the fair lady suddenly laid upon the sleeve of the tall gentleman,
and the way she raised her head to him and spoke words which, they saw,
the dark profile was quite helpless to answer.
“_Elle l’aime, vous savez_,” said the _doyen_ of the _valets_, a wise
man.
“_Elle s’amuse, mon vieux_,” sneered a young Italian with a broken nose;
but his heart had been broken too, several times.
Now these were the sudden words of the fair lady, which her companion
was quite helpless to answer.
“I want a baby,” she said. “I need a son--frightfully!”
“And I think,” she said, “that there’s somewhere a son of yours who
needs _me_--frightfully!”
“_Comedia!_” whispered the young Italian with the broken nose, as the
lift swallowed up the silence of _monsieur et milady_.