"It would have been so nice, so safe," she said. "But I never played
for safety." Then she made one of her quick turns.
"Frances Archdale ought to marry you. Why doesn't she?"
"How should I know? Frances's reasons would be exquisite. I suppose I
didn't appeal to her sense of fitness."
"Sense of fiddlesticks. She just hasn't got any temperament, that
girl."
"Any temperament for me, you mean."
"I mean pure cussedness," said Lena.
"Perhaps. But, you see, if I were unfortunate enough she probably
_would_ marry me. If I lost my eyesight or a leg or an arm, if I
couldn't sell any more pictures--"
"If you can understand Frances, you can understand me. That's how I
felt about Dickey. I wasn't in love with him. I was sorry for him. I
knew he'd go to pieces if I wasn't there to keep him together. Perhaps
it's the maternal instinct."
"Perhaps," I said. Lena's reasons for her behaviour amused me; they
were never exquisite, like Frances's, but she was anxious that you
should think they were.
"So you see," she said, "they don't count, and Norry really _is_ the
first."
I reflected that he would be also, probably, the last. She had, no
doubt, to make the most of him. But it was preposterous that she should
waste so much good passion; preposterous that she should imagine for
one moment she could keep the fellow. I had to warn her.
"Of course, if you care to take the risk of him--" I said. "He won't
stick to you, Lena."
"Why shouldn't he?"
I couldn't tell her. I couldn't say, "Because you're thirteen ears
older than he is." That would have been cruel. And it would have been
absurd, too, when she could so easily look not a year older than his
desiccated thirty-four.
It only took a little success like this, her actual triumph in securing
him.
So I said, "Because it isn't in him. He's a bounder and a rotter."
Which was true.
"Not a bounder, Roly dear. His father's Sir Gilbert Hippisley.
Hippisleys of Leicestershire."
"A moral bounder, Lena. A slimy eel. Slips and wriggles out of things.
You'll never hold him. You're not his first affair, you know."
"I don't care," she said, "as long as I'm his last."
I could only stand and stare at that; her monstrous assumption of his
fidelity. Why, he couldn't even be faithful to one art. He wrote as
well as he painted, and he acted as well as he wrote, and he was never
really happy with a talent till he had debauched it.
"The others," she said, "don't bother me a bit. He's slipped and
wriggled out of their clutches, if you like.... Yet there was something
about all of them. Distinguished. That's it. He's so awfully fine and
fastidious about the women he takes up with. It flatters you, makes you
feel so sure of yourself. You know he wouldn't take up with _you_ if
you weren't fine and fastidious, too--one of his great ladies.... You
think I'm a snob, Roly?"
"I think you don't mind coming _after_ Lady Willersey."
"Well," she said, "if you _have_ to come after somebody--"
"True." I asked her if she was giving me her reasons.
"Yes, if you want them. _I_ don't. I'm content to love out of all
reason."
And she did. She loved extravagantly, unintelligibly, out of all
reason; yet irrefutably. To the end. There's a sort of reason in that,
isn't there? She had the sad logic of her passions.
She got up and gathered herself together in her sombre, violent beauty
and in its glittering sheath, her red fox skins, all her savage
splendour, leaving a scent of crushed orris root in the warmth of her
lair.
Well, she managed to hold him, tight, for a year, fairly intact. I
can't for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the
fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was
something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course, have
appealed to her. And I can understand his infatuation. He was decadent,
exhausted; and there would be moments when he found her primitive
violence stimulating, before it wore him out.
They kept up the _ménage_ for two astounding years.
Well, not so very astounding, if you come to think of it. There was
Lena's money, left her by old Weinberger, her maternal uncle. You've
got to reckon with Lena's money. Not that she, poor soul, ever reckoned
with it; she was absolutely free from that taint, and she couldn't
conceive other people reckoning. Only, instinctively, she knew. She
knew how to hold Hippisley. She knew there were things he couldn't
resist, things like wines and motor cars he could be faithful to. From
the very beginning she built for permanence, for eternity. She took a
house in Avenue Road with a studio for Hippisley in the garden; she
bought a motor car and engaged an inestimable cook. Lena's dinners, in
those years, were exquisite affairs, and she took care to ask the right
people, people who would be useful to Hippisley, dealers whom old
Weinberger had known, and journalists and editors and publishers. And
all his friends and her own; even friends' friends. Her hospitality was
boundless and eccentric, and Hippisley liked that sort of thing. He
thrived in a liberal air, an air of gorgeous spending, though he
sported a supercilious smile at the _fioritura_, the luscious excess of
it. He had never had too much, poor devil, of his own. I've seen the
little fellow swaggering about at her parties, with his sharp, frayed
face, looking fine and fastidious, safeguarding himself with twinklings
and gestures that gave the dear woman away. I've seen him, in goggles
and a magnificent fur-lined coat, shouting to her chauffeur, giving
counter orders to her own, while she sat snuggling up in the corner of
the car, smiling at his mastery.
It went on till poor Lena was forty-nine. Then, as she said, she began
to "shake in her shoes." I told her it didn't matter so long as she
didn't let him see her shaking. That depressed her, because she knew
she couldn't hide it; there was nothing secret in her nature; she had
always let "them" see. And they were bothering her--"the others"--more
than "a bit." She was jealous of every one of them, of any woman he
said more than five words to. Jealous of the models, first of all,
before she found out that they didn't matter; he was so used to them.
She would stick there, in his studio, while they sat, until one day he
got furious and turned her out of it. But she'd seen enough to set her
mind at rest. He was fine and fastidious, and the models were all
"common."
"And their figures, Roly, you should have seen them when they were
undressed. Of course, you _have_ seen them. Well, there isn't--is
there?"
And there wasn't. Hippisley had grown out of models just as he had
grown out of cheap Burgundy. And he'd left the stage, because he was
tired of it, so there was, mercifully, no danger from that quarter.
What she dreaded was the moment when he'd "take" to writing again, for
then he'd have to have a secretary. Also she was jealous of his writing
because it absorbed more of his attention than his painting, and
exhausted him more, left her less of him.
And that year, their third year, he flung up his painting and was, as
she expressed it, "at it" again. Worse than ever. And he wanted a
secretary.
She took care to find him one. One who wouldn't be dangerous. "You
should just see her, Roly." She brought her in to tea one day for me to
look at and say whether she would "do."
I wasn't sure--what can you be sure of?--but I could see why Lena
thought she would. She was a little unhealthy thing, dark and sallow
and sulky, with thin lips that showed a lack of temperament, and she
had a stiffness and preciseness, like a Board School teacher--just that
touch of "commonness" which Lena relied on to put him off. She wore a
shabby brown skirt and a yellowish blouse. Her name was Ethel Reeves.
Lena had secured safety, she said, in the house. But what was the good
of that, when outside it he was going about everywhere with Sybil
Fermor? She came and told me all about it, with a sort of hope that I'd
say something either consoling or revealing, something that she could
go on.
"_You_ know him, Roly," she said.