end--trying to count your pulse by a watch without a second-hand. . . .
But you've changed so! I used to catch sight of you before the war----"
"I've travelled a lot since then," she interrupted. "The whole way
through Purgatory to Hell."
Eric tried to remember whether the war had robbed her of any one but Jim
Loring.
"_Since_ that day you've changed so much again."
"Perhaps I'm taking a holiday from Hell. And, as you know, I'm not a
good traveller."
He let down the window and threw away the end of his cigarette.
"I thought you were going to die that day," he murmured half to himself.
"When I handed you over to your maid. . . . Lady Barbara, why don't you
take a little more care of yourself?"
"D'you think I should be missed?"
"I can well imagine---- Here! He's going wrong!"
The carriage had overshot Berkeley Street; but, as Eric leaned towards
the open window, Barbara caught him suddenly by the wrist and shoulder
until she had turned him to face her.
"Where d'you live?" she demanded peremptorily; and, when he had told
her, "Put your head out and tell him to go there."
"But we're almost in Berkeley Square now."
"Do as I tell you! I'm coming to pay you a call."
He disengaged her hands and lay back in his corner.
"It's a little late for you to be calling on me," he said.
With a quick tug and push she had opened the window on her own side
before he could stop her.
"Oh, will you drive to 89 Ryder Street first, please," he heard her say.
Then she sank back with a pursed-up smile of triumph. "I've _no_
intention of going to bed yet," she explained.
"I've no intention of opening the door till I've taken you home," he
rejoined.
She made no answer till the carriage drew up opposite his flat.
"It would be deplorable if you made a scene on the pavement," she
observed carelessly.
Then she stepped out and told the driver to go back to Belgrave Square
for Mrs. O'Rane.
It was a moon-lit night between half-past eleven and twelve. Ryder
Street had roused to life with a widely-spaced but steady stream of men
returning to bed from Pall Mall and sparing the fag-end of their
attention for the unexpected tall girl who stood wrapped in a long silk
shawl in the shadow of a bachelor door-way. The brougham turned round
and drove away. Eric lighted another cigarette.
"Am I right in thinking that you're being obstinate?" Barbara enquired
after some moments of silence.
"If you want me to take you home, I'll take you home. Otherwise I shall
leave you here, go round to the club, explain that I've lost my
latch-key and get a bed there."
"You're almost oriental in your hospitality," she laughed.
"I've no hospitality to spare for a girl of twenty-two at this hour of
the night."
She stretched out her arm to him. In observing the beauty of her
slender, long fingers and the whiteness of her arm against the long
fringe of the shawl, Eric forgot his guard. She twitched the cigarette
from his lips and laughed like a child, as she blew out a cloud of
smoke. Cigarette, shawl and manner suddenly reminded him of Carmen.
"You're so conventional," she sighed.
Eric became suddenly irritable.
"Lady Barbara, you're behaving idiotically!" he cried. "I know you'd do
anything for a new sensation, but I'm not going to help. Possibly I'm
old-fashioned. If you think----"
"I'm so thirsty," she interrupted. "Have you any soda-water?"
"You're sure to find plenty in Berkeley Square."
"But you're _afraid_ to give me any, afraid of being compromised?"
"I've too many things to be afraid of without bothering about that. Lady
Barbara, you've several brothers, I've one sister. If one of your
brothers saw fit to invite _my_ sister to a bachelor flat----"
"But you _haven't_ invited me!"
"I should horsewhip him," Eric resumed jerkily.
She considered him curiously with her head on one side.
"You know, I don't feel afraid of you," she told him. "I could trust you
anywhere. You're not old enough to understand that yet, but you will."
"Then for the present it's irrelevant. Come along, Lady Barbara."
He advanced a step, but she only smiled at him without moving. Eric
looked angrily round, but the stream of passers-by, though sluggish,
shewed no signs of drying up. A clock inside the hall began to chime
midnight, and he turned on his heel. As he did so, a taxi turned into
the street, and an officer climbed gingerly out and hoisted himself
across the pavement on two crutches. Barbara coughed and drew her shawl
round her until half her face was hidden.
"But, Eric dear, you can't have _lost_ the key," she expostulated,
purposefully clear.
Over the shawl her eyes were gleaming with mischief and triumph.
The officer looked quickly from one to the other.
"Hullo! You locked out?" he enquired sympathetically. "Rotten luck!
Here, let me put you out of your misery! Hope you haven't been waiting
long?"
"That _is_ sweet of you," said Barbara. "Long? I seem to have been
standing here all day. Come on, Eric; I'm frightfully tired; I want to
sit down."
She walked into the hall, beckoning him with a jerk of her head. The
officer bade them good-night and limped to a ground-floor flat at the
end.
"I'm going to my club, Lady Barbara," said Eric with slow distinctness
from the door-step.
"Then I shall bang on every door I see until I find your flat," she
retorted promptly. "I've told you, I want some soda-water. And,
Eric----"
"Yes, Lady Barbara."
"Eric, I always get what I want. Who lives here, do you suppose? We'll
try his door first."
Eric came in and walked to the foot of the stairs. Barbara slipped her
arm through his, but he shook it away.
"I'm tired," she explained. "I wish you wouldn't be so rough with me."
She replaced her arm, and, rather than engage in a childish brawl, Eric
left it there, though the touch of her fingers on his wrist set his
blood tingling. They walked slowly, for he was trying to set his racing
thoughts in order. This, then, was the true Lady Barbara Neave. He had
never believed the fantastic stories about her, but she was now
gratuitously shewing him that she was of those who stopped at nothing.
He felt the sudden unpitying disgust of a disappointed idealist. She
was very young, with expressions which made her wholly beautiful at
times. . . . "Virginal" was the word he was trying to find. . . . He
wondered how to rid himself of her without a scene.
"If you'll let go my arm, I'll open the door," he said with stiff
patience.
She walked into the small inner hall and looked round her with
unaffected interest.
"I've never been in a man's rooms before," she remarked and Eric knew
that she was speaking the truth. An extraordinary sense of power came to
him, rushing to his head. The tired eyes and wistful mouth, the haggard
cheeks, the cloud of fine hair, the white arms and slender hands fed his
hungry love of beauty. And he had attracted her until she lay at his
mercy. . . .
"I want to see everything, Eric," she said gently.
He hardly heard the words; but her tone was confiding, and she slipped
her hand into his. A latent sense of the dramatic came to his rescue.
"You seem to have put yourself pretty completely into my power," he
observed, closing the front door behind them.
"I know you so much better than you know me," she answered.
"I don't quite follow."
She laughed gently to herself, then put her arms round his neck and
kissed him.
"No. . . . And you won't for years . . . not till I've educated you. . . .
Am I right in thinking that you've forgotten all about my soda-water?"
5
Eric led her into the dining-room and gave her a tumbler of soda-water
with a hand that trembled.
She had taken him by surprise as much as if she had struck him in the
face. Incuriosity and fastidiousness, partly timid, partly romantic, had
conspired to let him reach the age of two-and-thirty without ever
kissing or being kissed. The act, now that he had experienced it, was
nothing. A warm body, yielding in self-surrender, had pressed against
him for a moment; two hands had impelled his head forward; he had been
blinded for an instant by a scented billow of hair; then his cheeks had
been touched as though a leaf had blown against them. That was the
temperate analysis of kissing. . . .
"It's a nice room, Eric," she murmured, glancing slowly round over the
top of her tumbler at the panelled walls and shining oak table. "And I
like your invisible lighting. It's restful, and I hate a glare. What
other rooms have you?"
"Kitchen next door," he answered with intentional abruptness; "then the
servants' room--you won't make a noise, will you? or you'll wake them
up. Bathroom, spare room, my own room, smoking-room. No, the limits of
my unconventionality are soon reached; you can finish your soda-water in
the smoking-room, and then I'll take you home."
"But I should _like_ to see your room," she answered with the grave
persistence of an unreasonable child. "Mine's purple and white in
London--purple carpet, purple curtains, purple counterpane--and nothing
but white--except the rose-wood, of course--at Crawleigh."
"This is the smoking-room," said Eric, conscientiously firm and
unimpressed.
Barbara gave a little gasp of pleasure as he flooded the room with
light. Book-cases surrounded three walls, stretching half-way to the
ceiling and topped with rose-bowls and bronzes. The fourth was warmed by
long _rose Du Barry_ curtains over the two windows; between them stood
a Chippendale writing-table. The rest of the room was given up to an
irregular circle of sofas and arm-chairs, white-covered and laden with
_rose Du Barry_ satin cushions, surrounding a second table.
"I _am_ glad I came!" she cried. "You know how to make yourself
comfortable, Eric! Of course, the first cigarette I drop on your
adorable grey carpet--you see how it matches my dress?--the first
cigarette spoils it for ever. _And_ the roses!" With a
characteristically impulsive jerk she dragged the tulle band and
artificial flower from her hair, tossed them to Eric and stretched her
hand up for a red rose to take their place. "Ah! beloved celibate! not a
mirror in the room! I shall _have_ to----"
"Please stay where you are, Lady Barbara."
She crammed the rose carelessly into her hair and dropped on the nearest
sofa.
"_Do_ take that coat off and sit down here!" she begged him.
"I'm waiting to take you home."
"But I'm not going home yet. I'm enjoying myself, I'm happy."
"I'm waiting to take you home," he repeated.
She pouted and glanced up at him through half-closed eyes.
"You don't care whether I'm happy or not. You're _soullessly_ selfish!"
She looked round and helped herself to a cigarette; then her hand crept
invitingly, with the shy daring of a mouse, along the sofa. "I want a
match."
Eric took the cigarette and replaced it in its box.
"Bed-time," he said. "This meeting was not of my contriving, Lady
Barbara, and, when you've learned the meaning of words, you'll find that
it won't affect your _happiness_----"
His flow was arrested by a startling gasp.
"Oh, it's no good!" Barbara cried. "You're hopeless, hopeless."
To his amazement she had sprung to her feet, angry and disfigured,
forgetting to break through his guard, tossing her weapon away; no
longer teasing, imperious or purposely reckless; and without one of her
disarming lapses into simplicity. It was the mingled pain and anger of a
flesh-wound clumsily reopened. The next moment she had collapsed on the
sofa, stiffly upright, staring at him with hot eyes. Then the set cheeks
and compressed lips relaxed like the scattering petals of a blown rose;
her mouth drooped, her eyes half-closed, and she began to cry.
Eric looked in consternation at her puckered, pathetic face, suddenly
colourless save for dark rings round the big, hollow eyes. Then he sat
down and drew her to him, patting her hand and talking to her half as if
she were a child, half as though she were capable of understanding his
weighty diagnosis.
"Lady Barbara! Lady Barbara! Are you listening to me? You mustn't
cry--_really_. . . . It takes away _all_ your prettiness. Now, you were
fairly hard on me at dinner, weren't you? But I do possess _some_
intelligence; I didn't need to have Lady Poynter shouting from the
house-top that you were ill. You're worn out, you ought to be in bed and
you ought to stay there, instead of exciting yourself. Lady Barbara,
_please_ stop crying! I don't know what I said, but I'm very humbly
sorry. Won't you stop?"
She stiffened herself with a jerk and smiled as abruptly.
"It was my fault. I've not been well and I've been very miserable. Give
me a little kiss, Eric, to shew you're not angry with me."
She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders again.
"Why should I be angry with you?" he asked with a defensive laugh.
Her hands dropped into her lap.
"You won't kiss me?"
"What difference would it make?"
"I ask you to. What difference would it make to you?"
Eric fumbled industriously with a cigarette.
"It so happens that I've never kissed any one," he said, "except my
mother and sister, of course." Then, as she sat hungrily reproachful, he
repeated: "What _difference_ would it make?"
"You wouldn't understand . . ." she sighed. "And yet I thought you
would. Where did you get that tray from, Eric? You've never been to
India, have you?"
"It was given me by an uncle of mine. Lady Barbara--If it will give you
any satisfaction. . . ."
He kissed her forehead with shame-faced timidity and became discursively
explanatory.
"The candle-sticks were looted during the Commune," he began hurriedly.
"I was given them as a house-warming present. The clock . . ."
Barbara was wandering listlessly round the room and paying little
attention to what he was saying. She explored the book-cases, ransacked
the writing-table and looked curiously at the horse-shoe paper-weight.
"You can give this to me, Eric," she suggested over her shoulder.
"I'm afraid it was a present. Given me on my first night."
"It would still be a present, if you gave it to me. I had one, but I
broke it. All my luck's left me since then. Are you superstitious?"
"Not--in--the--_least_! I keep this for associations and a toy. If I
_could_ bring out a play on Friday the thirteenth----"
"If you're not superstitious, there's no excuse for not giving it to
me."
She tossed the horse-shoe into the air and caught it neatly with her
right hand.
"I'll see if I can get you another one," he promised, "but I don't know
whether they're made in England."
"It might make all the difference to me," she pleaded, catching the
horse-shoe with her left hand. "It's only a toy to you--a child's toy."
Eric shook his head at her. Barbara pouted and threw the horse-shoe a
third time into the air, bending forward to catch it behind her back as
it dropped. Eric, watching apprehensively, saw a flash of apprehension
reflected for an instant in her eyes; then there was a tinkle of broken
glass.
"Oh, my _dear_! I wouldn't have done that for the world!" she cried,
pressing her hands against her cheeks. "I've destroyed your luck now!
What a fool I was! Abject fool!"
"What _does_ it matter?" Eric laughed.
"I wouldn't have done that for the world," she repeated with a white
face.
"And you're living in the year of grace nineteen-fifteen? It's
only--What did we call it? A child's toy. And, between ourselves, it
wasn't a very efficient paper-weight. I can assure you I shan't miss
it."
"Perhaps you will some day. And then you'll lift up your hands and curse
the hour when you first met me."
Eric looked complacently at the airy room, the crowded book-cases, the
soft chairs, the bellying curtains and the neat pile of manuscript on
his writing-table:
"Aren't you perhaps exaggerating your potential influence on my life?"
he suggested.
Barbara went back to her sofa and helped herself to a cigarette without
hurry or fear that this time it would be taken from her; she smiled for
a match--and smiled again when it was given her.
"Aren't you perhaps boasting too soon, my self-satisfied young friend?
Your education's only just beginning."
Eric lighted a cigarette and sat down beside her. He no longer insisted
that, for health or propriety, she must go home at once; and in some
forgotten moment he had involuntarily taken off his overcoat.
"I wonder what you think you can teach me," he mused. "I wonder what you
know, to start with."
"I know life."
"A considerable subject."
"I've had considerable experience."
The clock on the mantel-piece chimed one. Neither seemed to notice it,
for Barbara was becoming autobiographical. Her story was ill-arranged
and discursive, with personal characteristics of Lord Crawleigh
sandwiched between her life at Government House, Ottawa, and a thwarted
romance between her brother and a designing American. She flitted from
her four years in India to Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, with a procession of
damaging encounters with her father as stepping-stones in the narrative.
(From her account it was Lord Crawleigh who sustained most of the
damage.) He could never shake off a certain pro-consular manner in
private life and had reduced his sons to blundering and untrustworthy
_aides-de-camp_ and his wife to a dignified but trembling squaw. Barbara
alone resisted him.
"What can he do?" she asked. "He whipped me till I was ten, but I'm too
big for that now. He can't very well lock me in my room, because the
servants would leave in a body. They adore me. If he'd tried to stop my
allowance, I should have gone on the stage--we've settled _that_ point
once and for all with Harry Manders, half-way through the stage-door of
the Hilarity. Now I've got my own money. Mind you, I _adore_ father,
and he adores me; most people adore me; but I must do what I like. _You_
see that now; but I had to shew you, I had to break my way in here by
main force."
Eric looked up in time to catch a glint in her eyes. It was unexpected
and disconcerting. He had been imagining that she was merely
over-indulged; but the glint warned him that Barbara would make a bad
enemy, cruel perhaps and unscrupulous certainly. The next moment she was
again like a child, grown haggard with fatigue; and he gave her a slice
of cake and some milk, which she accepted obediently and with a certain
surprised gratitude.
"Where d'you imagine all this is going to end?" he asked her, though the
question was addressed more to himself. "You're twenty-two, you've been
everywhere, seen everything, met everybody. You're utterly uncontrolled
and so sated and restless that, rather than go to bed, you'll compromise
yourself by sitting talking to me half the night in a bachelor flat."
"Poor Val Arden used to talk like that. He always called me Lady Lilith,
because I was older than good and evil. I'm sorry Val's dead; he was
such fun. 'In six years' time--one asks oneself the question. . . .' It
wasn't 'rather than go to bed,' not altogether."
"It's a nervous disease," Eric interrupted shortly.
"Because I cried just now? I was very unhappy, Eric."
"My dear Lady Barbara, you live in superlatives. You don't know what
happiness or unhappiness means. You were badly overwrought then, so you
cried and said you were miserable."
She looked at him and raised her eyebrows without speaking.
"It's wonderful how wrong quite clever people can be," she said at
length. "I _was_ miserable, I _wanted_ to be kissed, I was _hungry_ for
the smallest crumb of affection. I wanted to be _happy_. . . . And you
can only see me as neurotic. D'you feel you're a good judge?"
"Of happiness?"
Eric smiled complacently and again glanced lovingly round the room.
Barbara sighed in pity and looked at her watch.
"_I_ seem to have come in the way rather," she interrupted.
"The butterfly that settles on the railway track may be said, I suppose,
to come in the way of a train. . . . I'm going to take you home now."
"You're not sorry I came? _I'm_ not."
"It was worth while meeting you," he laughed.
As Eric struggled with the sleeves of his coat, she twined her arms
round his neck. The scent of carnations was now faintly blended with the
deeper fragrance of the single rose behind her ear.
"And you'd never kissed any one before," she whispered.
It was nearly day-light when they found themselves in the street. Two
special constables, striding resonantly home, looked curiously at them;
but Barbara had again pulled up her shawl until it covered half her
face. Piccadilly was at the mercy of scavengers with glistening black
waders and pitiless hoses; otherwise they seemed to have all London to
themselves.
With a head aching from fatigue, Eric tried to reconstruct the fantastic
evening. Little detached pictures jostled their unconvincing way through
his brain--Lady Poynter's formal dining-room and the barren,
self-conscious literary discussion; Lord Poynter's wheezing confidences
about the wood port which should properly be taken as a liqueur. He saw
again the bridge-table with Gaymer, neat, immaculate and repellent,
calling in a high nasal voice for Barbara to rejoin them. The drive home
was a blank until he was galvanized by her leaning through the window
and directing the coachman to Ryder Street. Thereafter facts gave place
to emotions, and the other emotions to an incredulous elation that
Barbara Neave should have thrown herself at his feet. Perhaps, of
course, she was only emotion-hunting. . . . But she had lain at his
mercy. . . . Perhaps that, too, was an emotion to be wooed, enjoyed and
recorded. Any one less artificial could at least be glad that they were
passing out of each other's life, as they had come into it, without
expectation or regret.
"You'd better not come any farther," she advised him, as they reached
the end of Berkeley Street. "If anybody _should_ be awake and looking
out of the window . . ."
He nodded and held out his hand.
"You have your latch-key?"
"Yes, thanks. Good-night, Eric."
"Good-bye, Lady Barbara."
* * * * *
"_Between men on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can
only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between
men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a
paradox._"--From the diary of Eric Lane.
CHAPTER TWO
LADY BARBARA NEAVE
"CONSTANTINE: From seventeen to thirty-four . . . the years which a
man should consecrate to the acquiring of political virtue . . .
wherever he turns he is distracted, provoked, tantalised by the
bare-faced presence of woman. How's he to keep a clear brain for
the larger issues of life? . . . Women haven't morals or intellect
in our sense of the words. They have other incompatible qualities
quite as important, no doubt. But shut them away from public life
and public exhibition. It's degrading to compete with them . . .
it's as degrading to compete for them. . . ."
GRANVILLE BARKER: "THE MADRAS HOUSE."
1
The latest, costliest and most ingenious mechanical device in Eric's
bedroom was an electric dial and switchboard communicating with the
kitchen and so constructed that, by moving a clock-hand, the
corresponding dial abandoned the non-committal elusiveness of "_Please
call me at_----" for "_Please call me at 8.00 (or 9.00 or 9.30)._" There
was something calculatedly dissolute about the invention (which cost
L17.10 and had struck work four times in three weeks). After a long
night of work or frolic, the sybarite moved the hand on for twelve
hours--his last conscious act before collapsing into bed; if, again, he
had retired early or were so much debauched that he could not sleep, he
wearily set the hand for "_Please call me now._"
Eric looked with smarting eyes first at the luminous clock, then at the
dial. Half-past five, coupled with "_Please call me at eight._" He
undressed ruminatively, reheated his hot-water can at the gas-ring,
methodically folded his clothes, smoothed his trousers away in their
press, selected a suit for the following day, washed face and hands,
brushed teeth and hoisted himself into bed. The dial must stand as he
had left it. Lady Barbara Neave had come--and gone; she was not going to
disturb his work.
His sleep seemed to be interrupted almost instantly by the arrival of a
maid with tea, rusks, letters and _The Times_. His head was hot, but he
was singularly untired; that would come later.