PARTING COMPANY
Thank heaven for the instinct that silenced the welcoming “Billy!” before
it broke from my lips. Thank heaven also for that numbness all over me
that allowed me to say in a voice as detached as if it had been the
piano-tuner to whom I’d just opened the door, “Oh! good morning.”
“Good morning.” A tone as blank as a whitewashed wall between him and me.
“I suppose you are surprised to see me.”
“Well, I—yes, I am, of course.”
“You didn’t expect me.”
“No.” We both glanced down at my sleeves, still rolled up from the
kitchen.
“I have something to say to you,” he went on in that same tone. His face
I couldn’t see in that little, dark drainpipe of a passage where we
stood. “That’s why I came.”
“Oh!”
What could it be that brought him an eight hours’ journey on my track?
Surely not that foolish old out-of-date apology still—or those unwanted
thanks for saving his life.
“Don’t you want to hear what it is?”
“Er—yes; oh, yes,” reluctantly. “But I’m sorry I can’t ask you to sit
down here; you see my friend is away——”
“Oh! She’s _away_. I’m glad she’s well enough. I thought she was ill.”
This I didn’t know how to meet.
“Where may I speak to you, then?” he added.
“Is it—about something very important?”
“Important enough to bring me up to London by the midnight train after
you’d left. I just had a bath and breakfast at an hotel and came on here.
So—”
Evidently there was no getting out of it.
—“Will you come out and talk? If it’s not troubling you too much,” he
added stonily.
“Well, if you will wait until I put on my hat and coat,” I said slowly,
“I will come out into Battersea Park with you. We can sit down there.”
In a few minutes we were sitting side by side on a couple of green-backed
wooden chairs on the path that faces the sluggish brown river and the
barges that slid slowly between us and the tower of Old Chelsea Church.
Why had he come?
“Important,” he’d said. Was it a recall? Must I go back for the five
remaining months of my year’s contract? I remembered, then, that it was
in writing—I’d forgotten that! Must I return to Porth Cariad to serve the
purpose of him and that girl?
If he insisted, I must.
I should be glad—(not, not to be with _him_ again! That passing feeling
I should no doubt manage to kill. I _must_ kill it)—to be back with his
mother and Blanche and Theo in that golden Anglesey, instead of in this
baked and dusty park, rowdy with Board-school children on holiday. For
the sake of the _place_ I could forget the man I was with; I could ignore
that morning when we painted the figure-head! Thank heaven I was feeling
so like “a wooden woman” myself.
For another moment I was kept waiting, wondering what he would say. Three
words told me everything.
They swept aside so many things that up to then had seemed real and
undeniable enough. They did away with hours in a music-room, of another
hour in the dusk under a copper-beech, when overtures were made of a
friendship that seemed as if it were going to work all right, (“_You
could be such a little brick to me!_”) but had broken down because,
after all, he was a man and I a girl—even though I didn’t happen to be
the right girl.... Those weeks of gay, open-air comradeship in Wales,
that morning of sunshine and hotly-snatched kisses on a cliff among the
gorse, that afternoon of a race and a struggle for life in the jade-green
waters of a bay.... All these were to be as though they’d never been.
It was all over in those three words:
“Now, Miss Trant!”
The unexpected sex? Oh, no! It’s we who can be trusted to do just what’s
expected of _us_ by our nearest man: to be heroic, petty, clinging or
capable. He meant me to be utterly business-like and formal. Well, he
found me so, my tone just matching his own.
“Now, Miss Trant!”
“Yes, Mr. Waters?”
“It’s about this nominal engagement of ours. That was to go on for a
year, I think.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be glad to hear it needn’t last so long, after all.”
“Not a year?”
“Not any longer at all. I’ve come to release you now.”
I found absolutely nothing to say. It was as if I’d been preparing to
walk down a long corridor that stretched before me, and had found, after
I’d gone a yard, that a door was slammed in my face. I seemed to stare
at blank walls in every other direction.... I’d better say something....
What was there?
“Thank you for letting me know.” Then, “As this has only lasted so much
less than the time you said, I will send back to you my cheque for——”
“You will do nothing of the kind, please,” curtly. “I made the
arrangement. I break it.”
“Yes, but that money——”
“I shall not take it, anyhow.”
“I shall send it somewhere, then,” I told him, and glanced round at the
nearest group of grimy little Cockneys on the brown grass. “The Fresh Air
Fund.”
“As you please.”
A pause. I was wondering if he meant me to say anything else. He began
again. “I expect you guess my reason for this change of arrangement.”
“I think—I do,” I said.
Yes, I thought, whatever it was that stood between him and an open
engagement to Mademoiselle Charrier must be at an end, and Miss Trant,
alias “Nancy,” is no longer needed for the rôle of the red herring on the
trail. But his next remark almost startled me out of my chair.
“Ah! You mean you quite realize that in breaking this contract, I’m
considering _your_ feelings. It is for _your_ sake.”
“_Mine?_”
“Naturally!” he said sharply. “When I saw that the arrangement had become
so irksome to you—when I saw _why_——”
I turned to stare up at his temper-set face, repeating “When?”
“Need you ask when? Last night,” he said, still more sharply, “at
Holyhead Station.”
Ah! Then he _had_ thought—what I’d wondered about. It was my turn to look
set with anger; I know I flushed. Let him go on.
“Yesterday, first thing in the morning, you get that wire, handed in at
Euston. A message that’s obviously—well, a fake. Didn’t you arrange to
receive it?”
“Yes,” I admitted shortly. “I did.”
“Ah. I knew that, Miss Trant. Following on that, I find you travelling
back to London the very same evening with that—that friend of yours, Mr.
Vandeleur. Rather a coincidence.”
“You mean,” I said, my heart thumping with rage, partly against Cicely’s
adorer for making this trouble, partly against this other man with his
savage tone and suspicious eyes, “that you think I told him to send the
wire!”
“There was the wire! And there _he_ was.”
“Even if it had been so, why not?”
“With you engaged to me?”
“Nominally!”
“Makes no difference to the circumstances!” he shot out. “Who knows that,
but you and I? To anyone else, it would have looked uncommonly——”
“I don’t see it!” I declared, but I saw the reason of his anger and it
made me angrier still. _His_ dignity compromised! His official dignity as
a _fiancé_! So I had heard of married men, with wives to whom they were
utterly indifferent, still showing that furious male jealousy of other
men. “But I should have been doing nothing against our contract.”
“Nothing against the letter of it, you think? But when I asked you to
enter into it, one of my first questions, you’ll remember, was whether
you were already engaged.”
“Well?”
“Well! I shouldn’t have troubled you if I’d known all this. I’m sorry.”
“Known all _what_?”
“Remember, it’s not the only time I’ve seen you with him!” he went off at
a tangent. “There was that first occasion—at the Carlton. I thought there
seemed something, when he congratulated me! And then that time at the
flat. He had eyes for nothing but you.”
“Oh, _hadn’t_ he!” I was breaking in, but my late employer went on with
his indictment.
“Even Montresor, at our house, seemed to know all about it! And now his
meeting you in Wales—You won’t tell me that wasn’t by appointment?”
“I will,” I said, lifting my head. “I do, Mr. Waters. It wasn’t.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Please take my word.”
“Of course, if you say so!” he agreed quickly. Then, more quickly still,
“But if he didn’t send that telegram, who did?”
“You saw it! It was signed.”
“Yes; by your friend Miss Harradine. That says nothing. You asked
her to send it—wired the night before, perhaps.... Didn’t you?” he
cross-examined me. “Didn’t you?”
“Well—if I did? Yes!”
“Why did you, Miss Trant?”
I looked away from him, mutinous but helpless, at the border of the
path in front, with its little clumps of heat-shrivelled purple
pansies, drooping over the powdery earth. There was something that no
cross-examination should get out of me! Let him know that I couldn’t bear
to stay in the same place with him—first, because he’d kissed me; next,
because there was no reason that he should ever kiss me again ... every
reason that he would not? Never!
“Why had you to go?”
“Oh!” I cried, with a little stamp of my shoe on the gravel. “Why need
you pry into—into what’s my affair alone? Is even an _official fiancée_
allowed to keep nothing to herself?”
“Very well,” he said savagely. Then, off at another tangent, “But at
least you won’t tell me that the fellow didn’t want to marry you himself?”
“What difference does it make if he did? That was ages ago, months!” I
let out hastily. “Anyhow—one’s not supposed to tell these things, but,
as we’re talking business, I may tell you as a business-secret that I
refused him!”
“You did?”—quickly. “Was this before—before our arrangement was made?”
“N-no. Just afterwards.”
“Ah! You weren’t free, you thought. Otherwise——May I ask if you would
have accepted him?”
“You’ve no right to ask!”
“I know that,” he admitted angrily, “but have you—had you a right to make
me look foolish—about him?”
“I never have done that!” I snapped. “You believe me that last night was
an accident.”
“Yes,” he argued, “but you must confess that other things look rather
mysterious.”
“Mysterious? Need _you_ talk about things being mysterious,” I argued
back, “when the whole of what you wanted me for has been such a mystery
to me? You’ve never given me a hint of the reason!”
“I haven’t been able to! You were to have known later! But about this
other——”
He broke off as a mild-looking old man plumped himself down on the green
seat next his, and began to scatter crumbs out of a paper-bag to the
sooty sparrows twittering on the path.
“I can’t tell you, here——”
“I am rather deaf,” said the bird-feeder, mildly looking up, “and quite
elderly. Don’t mind me.”
Still Waters looked as if he could have choked him with his paper-bag.
“We’ll walk about a bit, if you don’t mind,” he said curtly to me.
And it seems to me now that for hours and hours we two walked Battersea
Park, talking, talking, still repeating ourselves over “_that wire_”
and “_nothing to do with you_” and “_yes, but I’d at least a right to
object to your making me look_——” ... Round the lake we went, up and down
the path of the river front, on the broad bald grass patches, passing
communities of little motherly girls with perambulators and picnic-bags
in the shadow of the elms, skirting little boys’ cricket-matches
conducted with crooked bats, shrill yells—it was all noise and glare and
dust that morning, and I couldn’t really say why we should be walking up
and down in it like this, endlessly discussing what had no point, now....
Hadn’t we come, long ago, to the end?
At last he did raise a fresh point.
“Anyhow,” he blurted out, “I stand in your way no longer.”
This roused me beyond all the rest.
“D’you mean,” I cried, exasperated, “in the way of my possibly marrying
Mr. Vandeleur?”
“Exactly!”
Was I to stand this? Was I to let him go away imagining _that_ was
the sort of girl I was? Was I to allow him, later on, to think of his
official ex-_fiancée_ (if he ever thought of her again) as being quite
contented to accept a dangling _dilettante_ with those tastes and that
tie, an indoor object who pottered amiably about Art-galleries and girls’
studios, between the Tiny Theatre and the Cave of the Cub, a pampered
amateur who couldn’t earn his living to save his life?... was a real man
to think of me, married to That? No—fear!
So I said, very distinctly, “Even if his extremely easy attention
_hadn’t_ been caught by another girl—the girl he was seeing off to the
Irish boat last night at Holyhead, if you must know!—even if he were
the only man left on board a—a desert-island, I shouldn’t want to marry
Sydney Vandeleur, so now you know!—And you needn’t think, as men always
_do_ think, that it’s sour grapes!” I rushed on before he could put in
a word. “You might ask my chum about that—the very afternoon we had
tea there I nearly offended her by letting her see what I thought of
_him_!—even though he still imagined himself in love with me——”
Here I broke off, for a flying cricket-ball from one of those shrieking
teams we passed had knocked off my companion’s straw hat. He had to pick
it up and then to sling the ball in back to the small and grimy bowler
before he could speak; and I, worked up to it now, didn’t see why he, the
man, should be allowed the passing of every vote of censure, so I went on:
“As for your accusing me of making you look foolish, Mr. Waters, what
about you, with me? What about the other girl? I was, after all, your
official _fiancée_. And—and in that capacity, I might just as well have
objected to your paying so much attention to _her_!”
“What’s this?” he took up very sharply, stopping on the path. “When have
you seen me with another girl?”
“Why! Yesterday! The day before, too!”
“_What——?_” he said, long drawn-out. “Can you mean—_can_ you mean the
daughter of Monsieur Charrier?”
(What did he imagine? Could I mean the figure-head of the _Gwladys
Pritchard_?)
“Of course I mean Mademoiselle Cha——”
“Object to Odette Charrier?” he cried, almost as loudly as Theo might
have done.
And, staring up at him, I saw that the set mask of his face had broken up
into its broadest, most boyish smile. His eyes were full of laughter and
delight....
Ah! How she must hold him, I thought, for her very name so to irradiate
him in a moment!
“_That_,” he said, with the laughter running through his voice,“was so
utterly different.”
“Ah, yes! It’s always ‘different’ in one’s own case. You and another girl
can do as you choose—but you wouldn’t have allowed an inch to me and
another man—_you_ mustn’t be compromised. Well, you should know your own
side of it. All that, I suppose, is what you can’t tell _me_.”
“Exactly!” he said again, and all the smile went out of his face. “This
_dashed_ tangle!”
“But considering it’s all at an end now,” I said reasonably enough, “why
need we go on talking about it?” And then I found that I was holding my
breath in suspense.
Terrified suspense lest he should take me at my word....
I knew then. I knew why I felt so. If we _could_ only “go on”! I asked
for nothing more.
More clearly with each minute, these hours had been showing me one thing
at least. Whatever he chose to say, however he rated me, dictated to me
what I should or should not have done—to listen to his voice was pure
joy. Just to be—in Battersea, Anglesey, anywhere!—the sea itself, but
_with him_, was like coming out of a stifling tunnel into sunshine and
air.
He didn’t want me, but I was helplessly his.
A mere summer-holiday attraction? No, so much the worse for me. _That_
wouldn’t have meant this sense that every thread of me was knit up and
together into one strand that drew me, tied me to him; and must be broken
or unravelled now; for neither broken nor unravelled threads are much
more good for working!
A passing fancy? Not it; not this helpless enchantment that had been
growing and growing over me—for how long I didn’t know. It didn’t even
allow me to wish that I’d never known the man beside me except as Still
Waters of the Near Oriental, that I’d never seen him in his home, never
listened to tones of his voice unknown before, never realized what a
perfect darling he could be, this “real Billy,” or how it would be heaven
to be made love to by him!
His hand up the cliff-path once or twice....
Three kisses ... three-and-a-half, if I count that Sevenoaks time, were
all I should have to think of for the rest of my life.... Wildly I
thought that, if he suggested it, I’d be humbly content to remain his
official _fiancée_ for ever. Only not to be sent away! Not to be cut off
from the sight and sound of him! Not left to a life that must be all
echoes and shadows; desperate, threadbare memories of everything he’d
looked and said, every note of his songs, the very gestures with which
he’d feel in his coat-pocket for matches, each movement of his lips and
eyes!
I had to keep my own eyes resolutely from his as we turned away from the
cycle-track, afraid that even he might notice.
Presently he stopped again.
Already?
I daren’t look at him. I looked down at his shadow on the dusty road,
a pool of black—the sun was high above us, time was getting on. And I
mustn’t show him how desperately I would have clutched it back if I
could. (Oh, to think of those other hours, days—a whole long week of
them!—that I had wasted in sulks, in “baiting” him, at The Lawn!)
We were standing by one of the bridges. Here, where I had once thrown
away flowers of his—oh! how could I?—I remembered something else that
must come into our parting. A smaller thing, but a more barbed one. Not
to be shirked, though.
“Your ring!” I said.
I took it off and handed it to him.
It flashed its green and blue and orange sparks in the sunlight as it lay
in his palm. He looked at it, hard. No harder than I did. I was looking
my good-bye to something that had meant so little—and so much. Too much.
I didn’t know how I was going to bear another second of this; and then,
quickly, he closed his brown hand over his diamonds and dropped them into
his jacket-pocket. Gone.
Then, looking eastward over the bridge, he said, “We’d a discussion about
this before.”
“Had we?” I said.
I wondered what had become of my pride, so frantically was I hoping that
this might lead to another “discussion” now. Anything to keep him for
another few minutes.... That gesticulating _trèfle_-scented French beauty
would have him for the rest of her life; she might spare him to me for
just one more squabble!
“Yes: don’t you remember how you informed me you’d send the ring back at
the year’s end? I said then——But look here!” he broke off, “isn’t there
anywhere near here where we could get some lunch while we settle about
this?”
Ah! Then I should have my few minutes longer!
* * * * *
There’s a little creamery in the King’s Road where he and I lunched
together again: this time off rolls and butter and boiled eggs. There he
began again. “An engaged girl who had been _really_ engaged,” he said,
“would insist upon sending back the ring as a matter of course; but why
in this case?”
And so on.
It was just because I was so afraid of seeming to linger, as I longed to
do, that I appeared to be in such haste to finish the meal that nearly
choked me, and to draw a glove over that ringless finger that felt,
suddenly, so bare and unfamiliar—and lonely.
“You’ll have coffee, won’t you?”
“No, thanks.” Oh, why hadn’t I said, “Yes”?
He’d lost that scowl, he seemed so much nearer the old friendly terms
again, and it was for the last time!
“I will; unless you’re in a hurry, Miss Trant? Just a moment—”
Yes! Just a moment! It was all I asked, that, and that my heart should
not beat so fast and make me feel so weak and dizzy.
—“Here, boy!”—this was to a newspaper-boy who was strolling past the shop
behind a large pink poster and a bundle of early evening editions.
“D’you mind if I just look up something——”
The man opposite to me unfolded the still damp sheet; his eyes on the
paper gave mine the chance of one more direct, long, hungry look at his
face.
Then came surprise on surprise.
I saw his face change utterly, turn blank, agitated. An odd-sounding
“_Ah!_” broke from his lips. Then he looked up again alert, decisive.
He stuffed the paper into his pocket, paused one instant, frowning in
thought. Then counter-ordered the coffee.
“No time for it,” he said. Then rose to take his hat from the rack beside
the little mirror.
So soon? Oh, so soon? What had brought this about? Why “no time”? It
seemed scarcely a minute since I’d opened the door of our flat to him,
and now he was off! In this hurry! Why?
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that, after all, I was a
soldier’s daughter: that it was expected of our family that they should
show no sign of being under fire, and that I’d got to go through what was
coming without a tremor or glance to betray the sick sinking of the heart
within me; lightly and steadily, holding myself well in hand. Afterwards
I could get back to the flat....
So, as one tells the dentist, “I’m ready—_now!_” before a wrench, I
picked my minute and was holding out my hand to him as he turned from the
waitress.
I must say it first.
“Well, good-bye, Mr. Waters!”
He didn’t seem to hear that.
“Miss Trant, I find I’ve got to get down to the City at once.”
“Oh, yes?” (It sounded all right, I think.) “Then here we part company.”
Sharply concise, in his old orders-for-the-day voice, came Still Waters’
“No. If you don’t mind, I want you to come on with me.”
With him?
And presently I was whizzing down King’s Road to Sloane Square in a taxi
beside him, wondering, as even he had never made me wonder yet, what this
further unexpectedness might mean. He said nothing. He was intent upon
the paper he had taken out again.
Business, of course—but why take me with him?
At the post office he stopped the cab, got out and strode to the
telephone, then out again.
“As quick as you can,” he told the driver, “to the Near Oriental Shipping
Company’s offices, Leadenhall Street.”