LILITH OF OLD
Roland made during this week the acquaintance of several members of the
family who had hitherto been only names to him. There was Gerald’s uncle
Arnold, a long mean-faced man, and his wife, Beatrice. Afterwards, when
he looked back and considered how large a part she had played, if
indirectly, in his life, and for that matter in the lives of all of
them, he could not help thinking that his first sight of her had been
prophetic, certainly dramatic. He had just arrived, had been met by
Muriel and Mr. Marston and his brother in the hall, and Muriel had
insisted on taking him away at once to see her rabbits. She had come to
regard him as her special friend. Gerald’s other friends were too stiff
and grown up; Roland was nearer to her own age and he did not patronize
her.
“Come along,” she said, “you’ve got to see my rabbits before dinner
time.”
“Will they have grown up by to-morrow?” he asked.
“Well, they won’t be any younger, will they? They are such dears,” and
she had taken his hand, pulling him after her. They ran down the curving
path that sloped from the house to the cricket field. “I keep them in
that little shed behind the pavilion,” she said. They were certainly
delightful, little brown and white balls of fur, with stupid, blinking
eyes. Roland and Muriel took them out of the cage and carried them on
to the terrace that ran round the field, and sat there playing with
them, offering them grass and dandelions.
A grass path ran between great banks of rhododendrons from the terrace
towards the garden, and at the end a pergola stretched a red riot of
roses parallel to the field. Suddenly at the end of the path, at the
point where it met the pergola, Roland saw, framed in an arch of roses,
a tall, graceful woman walking slowly on Gerald’s arm, her head bent
quietly towards him. At that distance Roland could not distinguish her
features, but the small oval face set in the mass of light yellow hair
was delicate and the firm outlines of her body suggested that she had
only recently left her girlhood behind her.
“Who’s that?” asked Roland.
“That! Oh, that’s Aunt Beatrice.”
“But who’s Aunt Beatrice?”
“Uncle Arnold’s wife.”
“What!”
Roland could hardly believe it: so young a woman married to that
shriveled, prosaic solicitor.
“Oh, yes,” said Muriel, “they’ve been married nearly three years now;
and they’ve got such a darling little girl: Rosemary; you’ll see her
to-morrow. She’s got the loveliest hair. It crinkles when you run your
fingers through it.”
“But--oh, well, I suppose it’s rather cheek, but he’s years older.”
“Uncle Arnold?” replied Muriel cheerfully. “Oh, yes, I think he must be
nearly fifty.” Then after a pause, light-heartedly as though the
possession of a family skeleton was something of an honor, “I don’t
think they like each other much.”
“How do you know?” Roland asked.
“They are always quarreling. I never saw such a couple for it. If
there’s a discussion he’s only got to take one side for her to take the
other.”
“Well, I don’t see very well how she could be in love with him, he’s
such a....” Roland paused, realizing that it would be hardly good
manners to disparage Muriel’s uncle. But she did not intend him to leave
the sentence unfinished.
“Yes,” she said, “such a.... Go on!”
“But I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t; really I didn’t. I’m sure your uncle’s awfully nice, but
he’s so much older, and you can’t be in love with someone so much older
than yourself.”
“I see; you’re forgiven”; then after a pause and with a mischievous
smile: “Have you ever been in love, Roland?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, how lovely!” and she turned quickly and sat facing him, her knees
drawn up, her hands clasped in front of them. “Now tell me all about it.
I’ve always wanted to have a talk with someone who’s really been in
love, and I never have.”
“What about Gerald?”
She pouted. “Gerald! Oh, well, but he laughs at me, and besides---- But
come on and tell me all about it.”
She made a pretty picture as she sat there, her face alight with the
eagerness of curious girlhood, and Roland felt to the full the
fascination of such a confessional. “It was a long time ago,” he said,
“and it’s all over now.”
“Never mind that,” Muriel persisted. “What was her name?”
“Betty.”
“And was she pretty?”
“Of course; I shouldn’t have been in love with her if she hadn’t been.”
Muriel tossed back her head and laughed. “Oh, but how absurd, Roland!
Some of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen have managed to get husbands.”
“And some pretty hideous-looking men get pretty wives.”
“But I suppose the pretty wives think their ugly husbands are all
right.”
“And equally I suppose the handsome husbands think their plain wives
beautiful.”
They laughed together, but Muriel raised a warning finger. “We are
getting off the point,” she said. “I want to know more about your Betty.
Was she dark?”
“Darkish--yes.”
“And her eyes; were they dark, too?”
“I think so; they were bright.”
“What, aren’t you sure? I don’t think much of you as a lover.”
“But I can never remember the color of people’s eyes,” he pleaded. “I
can’t remember the color of my mother’s or my aunt’s, or----”
“Quick, shut your eyes; what’s the color of my eyes?”
“Blue,” Roland hazarded.
“Wrong. They’re green. Cat’s eyes. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
I shall write and tell your Betty about it.”
“But that’s all over long ago, I told you.”
“How did it end?”
“It never began,” laughed Roland: “she never cared for me a bit.”
Muriel pouted. “How unromantic,” she said; then added with the quick,
mischievous smile, “and how silly of her!”
As he dressed for dinner that evening Roland wondered what perverse
impulse had made him speak to Muriel of Betty rather than of Dolly; of
either of them rather than of April; of an unsuccessful love affair that
was over rather than of a successful one that was in progress. Muriel
would far rather have heard of April than of Betty. How she would have
pestered him with questions! Where had they met? When had he first known
he was in love with her? What had he said to her? How had she answered
him? It would have been great fun to confide in her. He had been foolish
not to tell her. She was such a jolly girl. She had looked charming as
she had sat back holding her knees, with her clear skin and slim boyish
figure, and her brightly tinted lips that were always a little parted
before her teeth, beautifully even teeth they were, except just at the
corner of her mouth where one white tooth slightly overlapped its
neighbor. She was the sort of girl that he would like to have had for a
sister. He had always regretted that he had not had one, and between
Muriel and himself there could have been genuine, open comradeship. She
would have been a delightful companion. They would have had such fun
going about together to parties, dances and the Oval. She would have
received so charmingly his confidence.
And yet, on the whole, he did not know why, he was rather glad that he
had not told her about April.
That night Roland sat next Beatrice at dinner, and was thus afforded an
opportunity of confirming or rejecting his first impression of her. She
was only twenty years old, but she looked younger, not so much on
account of her slim figure and small, delicate, oval face as of her
general pose and the girlish untidiness that made you think that she had
not taken very long over her toilet. Her light yellow hair was drawn
back carelessly from the smooth skin of her neck and forehead. It looked
as though it had been crushed all the afternoon under a tightly fitting
hat, and that when Beatrice had returned from her walk, probably a
little late, she had flung the hat on the bed, and deciding that she
could not be bothered to take down her hair and put it up again had been
content to draw her comb through it once or twice with hurried,
impatient fingers. This negligence, which might have been charming as
the setting for mobile, vivacious features, was out of keeping with the
tranquillity of her face, her quiet gestures and lack of action. She had
not learned how to dress and carry herself, and this was an omission you
would hardly expect in a woman who had been married for three years.
And yet she was beautiful, or perhaps not so much beautiful as
different. She suggested tragedy, mystery, romance. What, Roland asked
himself, lay behind the wavering luster of her eyes? And, looking at the
meager, uninspired features of her husband, he wondered how she could
have ever brought herself to marry him. He was a very good fellow, no
doubt, of whom one might grow fond--but love--to be held in his arms, to
be kissed by those dry lips! He shuddered, revolted by this dismal
mating of spring and autumn.
She did not talk very much, though occasionally, when her husband made a
particularly definite statement, she would raise her head and say rather
contemptuously: “Oh, Arnold!” to which he would reply with heavy worded
argument: “My dear girl, what you don’t understand is....” It was
uncomfortable, and Roland, looking round the table, wondered whether the
family was aware of it. They did not appear to be. At one end of the
table Mr. Marston was discussing, in his jovial, full-blooded manner,
the prospects of the cricket week, and, at the other, Mrs. Marston was
informing a member of the Harrow XI. that their opponents of the morrow
had recruited a couple of blues from a neighboring village. Gerald and
Muriel were both laughing and chatting, and the other members of the
party seemed equally not to notice the close atmosphere of impending
conflict. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to it.
Roland listened carefully to all that Arnold Marston said, both during
dinner and afterwards when the ladies had gone upstairs and the port had
been passed for the second time round the table. He was hard, dogmatic
and, at the same time, petulant in his talk. He quickly assumed that
everyone who did not agree with him was ignorant and a fool. As he
talked his fingers performed small gestures of annoyance; they plucked
at the table cloth, fingered the water bowl, heaped the salt into small
pyramids upon his plate. They were discussing the pull shot, then
something of an innovation, and Roland maintained that it was absurd for
school coaches not to allow boys to hit across long hops. “Why, do you
know that at Fernhurst you are expected to apologize to the bowler if
you make a pull shot.”
“And quite right, too,” said Mr. Arnold.
“But, why?” Roland answered him. “The pull’s perfectly safe; it’s a four
every time and you can’t get more than a single if you play back to it
with a straight bat.”
“I daresay, I daresay, but cricket’s cricket, and you have got to play
it with a straight bat. You’ve got to play according to rules.”
“But there’s no rule that says you mayn’t hit a long hop with a crooked
bat.”
Mr. Arnold fidgeted angrily.
“My dear boy, it’s no good arguing. I’ve been playing cricket and
watching cricket for forty years, and the good batsmen always played a
straight ball with a straight bat.”
“There are a good many who don’t.”
“That means nothing. A big man’s a rule to himself. The pull’s a
dangerous stroke; it’s all right in village cricket perhaps, but no one
who doesn’t play with a straight bat would get into a county side.”
“But isn’t it the object of the game to make runs?”
“Not altogether--even if you do get four runs from it instead of one,
which I am prepared to doubt. We wear our clothes to keep our bodies
warm, but you wouldn’t be pleased if your tailor made your coat button
up to the throat, and said: ‘It covers more of you, sir; you’ll be
warmer that way, and the object of clothes is to keep you warm.’”
There was a general laugh at Roland’s expense, and before it had
subsided Mr. Marston had introduced another subject. Roland was annoyed;
he had a distaste for anything that savored of cleverness. He regarded
it as an unfair weapon in an argument. An argument should be a weighing
of facts. Each side should produce its facts, and an impartial witness
should give judgment. It was not fair to obscure the issue with an
untrue, if amusing, simile. And once the laugh is against you it is no
good continuing an argument. Arnold Marston had learned this on his
election platform. He had once been asked what his party proposed to do
for the unemployed; it was an awkward question, that gave many
opportunities for adverse heckling. But he had obscured the issue with a
laugh: “When my party gets in there will be no unemployment.” And the
meeting had gone home with the opinion that he was a jolly fellow--not
too serious--the sort of man that anyone could understand. It was a good
trick on the platform, but it was very annoying at the dinner table, at
least so the discomfited found. And Roland felt even more aggrieved as
they were leaving the room and the silly ass in the Harrow XI. slapped
him on the back and informed him that, “The old man got in a good one on
you there.” He could understand Beatrice hating him.
He did not have another opportunity of speaking to her that evening, but
as he sat in the big drawing-room among the members of the house party
his attention drifted continually from the agreeable, superficial
conversation that had been up to now so sympathetic to him. These
trivial discussions of cricket, their friends, their careers, and, in a
desultory manner, of life itself, had been invaded by a stern, critical
silence. His eyes kept turning towards Beatrice as she sat in a deep
arm-chair, her hands folded quietly in her lap; they followed her when
she walked to the window and stood there, her arm raised above her head,
looking into the garden. He would have liked to go across the room and
speak to her; but what would he have been able to say? He could not tell
what thoughts were passing beneath the unruffled surface; was she
fretting impatiently at the tedious cricket shop? Was she criticizing
them all?--she, who had seen deeper and farther and come nearer to
tragedy than any of them--or was she what she appeared--a young woman
moved by the poetry of a garden stilled by moonshine? When she turned
away he thought that he detected a movement of her shoulders, a gesture
prompted by some wandering thought or gust of feeling, that would have
been significant to one who knew her, but for him was meaningless. And
that night he lay awake for nearly an hour, a long time for one who
thought little and to whom sleep came easily, remembering her words and
actions, the intonation of her voice, and that movement by the window.
As he began to lose control over thoughts she became transfigured, the
counterpart of those princesses, shut away in high-walled castles, of
whom he had dreamed in childhood; her husband became an ogre, leering
and vindictive, who laughed at him from the turrets of impregnable
battlements.
Breakfast at Hogstead was a haphazard business. It began at eight and
ended at ten. No one presided over it. There were cold things on the
sideboard to which you helped yourself. As soon as you came down you
rang the bell and a maid appeared to ask you whether you would prefer
tea or coffee and whether you would take porridge. You then sat down
where you liked at the long, wide table.
When Roland came down the next morning at about a quarter to nine he
found the big rush on; from half-past eight to half-past nine there were
usually six or seven people at the table. Before that time there was
only Mrs. Marston and anyone who had been energetic enough to take a dip
in a very cold pond that was protected from sunshine by the northern
terrace of the cricket field. By a quarter to ten there was usually only
a long table, covered with dirty plates, to keep company with Mr.
Marston, who, strangely enough, was a late riser. There were eight
people in all having breakfast when Roland arrived, or, to be more
exact, there were seven, for Gerald had finished his some time before,
but as he had had a bathe he preferred to remain at the table and inform
everyone of his courage as they came down.
“I can’t think why everyone doesn’t bathe in the morning,” he was
saying; “makes one feel splendidly fit. I’m absolutely glowing all
over.”
“So you’ve told us before,” said Muriel.
“I’ve told you, but I haven’t told Roland. Roland, why didn’t you come
and have a bathe this morning, you old slacker? Do you no end of good.”
“Puts one’s eye out,” said Roland, repeating the old Fernhurst theory
that cricket and swimming are incompatible.
“Rot, my dear chap; nothing like a bathe, nothing like it. I bet you I
shall skittle them out this afternoon, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t
make a few runs either.”
Roland had by this time satisfied the maid’s curiosity as to his
beverage and had helped himself to a plate of tongue and ham. He turned
round with the plate in his hand and looked to see where he should sit.
There was a vacant place beside Gerald to which he would have been
expected to direct himself; there was also a vacant place beside
Beatrice: he chose the latter, and hardly realized till he had drawn
back the chair that Gerald was at the opposite end of the table.
Several thoughts passed with incredible swiftness through his brain. Had
anyone noticed what he had done? Would they think it curious? More
important still, would Beatrice resent it? From this last anxiety he was
soon freed, for Beatrice, without apparently having observed his
presence, rose from the table and went into the garden. He was left with
an empty chair on either side of him and no one for him to talk to;
Gerald and Muriel were beyond the reach of anything less than a shout.
He finished his breakfast hurriedly in an enforced silence and walked
out into the garden in the secret hope of finding Beatrice. In this he
soon succeeded. She was playing croquet with her daughter on the lawn.
Roland stood watching them for a moment and then walked slowly across
the lawn. Beatrice glanced up at him and then went on with her game. She
did not even smile at him. It would have been too much perhaps to have
expected her to ask him to join them, but she might surely have made
some sign of comradely recognition. After all, he had the night before
taken her down to dinner; he had endeavored to be as nice as he could to
her, and it annoyed him and, at the same time, attracted him to feel
that he had made absolutely no impression on her.
Roland was not one of those who analyze their emotions. When he was
attracted by some new interest he did not put himself in the
confessional, and he did not now ask himself why or how Beatrice had
appealed to him.
As a matter of fact, she did not attract him physically. Her beauty
added to the glamor that enriched her loneliness, but did not touch him
otherwise. It was interest he felt for her, a compelling interest for
someone outside the circle of his own experience, who was content to
disparage what he admired and had filled her own life with other
enthusiasms. She was remote, inscrutable. She lived and ate and talked
and moved among them, but she had no part there. And because he was so
interested in her he was desperately anxious that she should feel some
interest in him. She was a mystery for him, but he was not content she
should remain a mystery; he wanted to understand her, to become friends,
so that in her troubles she should turn to him for sympathy and
guidance. How wonderful that would be, that this aloof and beautiful
woman should share with him an intimacy that she denied her husband. He
would watch her as he had watched her the previous evening moving among
her friends, indifferent and apart from them, and they would sit, as
they had sat, hardly noticing her, talking of their own affairs, perhaps
casting towards her a glance of casual speculation: “What is she
really?” they would say, and then put her from their mind and return to
their bridge and their billiards and their cricket shop. But he would
know, and as she turned from the window he would appreciate the
significance of that little movement, that hesitation almost of the
shoulders, and she would turn her eyes to him, those sad, disdainful,
dove-colored eyes of hers, that invited nothing and offered nothing, but
would become for him flooded with sympathy and gentle friendship; there
would be no need for words--just that meeting of the eyes across a
crowded drawing-room.
Immersed in reverie, he walked up and down the long grass path that ran
from the cricket field to the rose garden, and when his name was shouted
suddenly, shrilly and from very close, he approximated to that condition
of dismay that the vernacular describes as “jumping out of one’s skin.”
He turned, to see Muriel standing two yards behind him, her hands upon
her hips, shaking with laughter.
“I have been watching you for ten minutes,” she said as soon as she had
recovered her breath, “and it’s the funniest sight I’ve seen; you’ve
been walking up and down the path with your head in the air, and your
hands clenched together behind your back, and your lips were moving. I’m
certain you were talking to yourself. I couldn’t think what you were
doing. I sat behind that bush there and watched you going up and down
and up and down, your hands clenched and your head flung back, and your
lips moving, and then at last I guessed----”
“Well, what was it?”
“You were composing poetry. Now, don’t laugh, I’m serious, and I want to
know who you were composing it for.”
“Well, who do you think it was?”
“That girl, of course.”
“What girl?”
“Why, the girl you told me about yesterday!”
“Oh, that----”
“Yes; oh, that! But you were now, weren’t you?”
“No, I wasn’t. You can’t see me wasting my time on poetry. Besides, I
couldn’t do it.”
“Then, what were you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Who about?”
“You, of course.”
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head, the light hair scattering in the
sunlight. “Oh, no, no, no! If you had been thinking about me, it might
have occurred to you that I had no one in this large party to amuse me
and that I might very likely be lonely. And if you had thought of that,
and had gone on thinking that, with your head flung back----”
“Yes, I know all about that head.”
“Well, if you had been thinking of me all that time, and hadn’t
considered it worth your while to come and see what I was doing, I
should be very cross with you. But as I know you weren’t I don’t mind.
But come along now; what was it all about?” And, sitting down on the
garden seat, she curled herself into a corner and prepared herself for
catechism. “Now, come on,” she said, “who was it?”
“Well, if you want to know, it was your Aunt Beatrice.”
Muriel pouted.
“Her! What do you want to think about her for?”
“I don’t know. She’s rather interesting, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t,” and Muriel spoke sharply in a tone that Roland had never
before encountered.
“But----” he began.
“Oh, never mind,” she said, “if you’ve been thinking about Aunt Beatrice
for the last ten minutes you won’t want to talk about her now. Come and
have a game of tennis.”
And she jumped up from her seat and walked up towards the house. Roland
felt, as he prepared to follow her, that it was an abrupt way to end a
conversation that she had forced on him.
And that night, as he undressed, Roland had to own to himself that
altogether it had not been a satisfactory day. There had been the
incident at the breakfast table, the rebuff on the croquet lawn, the
coldness that had arisen between himself and Muriel, and then, although
he had done fairly well in the cricket match, he had not achieved the
goal which, he had to confess, had been his great incentive to
prowess--namely, the approval of Beatrice.
He had made twenty-seven in the first innings--a good twenty-seven, all
things considered. He had had two yorkers in his first over. He had
played a large part in the gradual wearing down of the bowling, that had
paved the way for some heavy hitting by the tail. He had made several
very pretty shots. There had been that late cut off the fast bowler--a
beauty; he had come down on it perfectly, and it had gone past second
slip out of reach of the third man for three; and then there had been
that four off the slow bowler who had tied up Gerald so completely; he
had played him quite confidently. Mr. Marston had, indeed, complimented
him on the way he had placed the short-pitched balls in front of
short-square for singles. It had been a pretty useful innings, but
though he had kept turning his eyes in the direction of the pavilion,
and especially to the shaded side of it, where the ladies reclined in
deck-chairs, he had failed to discover any manifestation of excitement,
pleasure or even interest on the part of Beatrice in his achievements.
True, he had once seen her hands meet in a desultory clap, but that clap
had rewarded what was, after all, a comparatively simple hit, a
half-volley outside the off stump that he had hit past cover to the
boundary, and as that solitary clap came a full thirty seconds after the
rest of the pavilion had begun clapping, and ceased a good thirty
seconds before anyone else clapping in the pavilion ceased, he was
obliged to feel that the applause was more the acquittal of a social
duty than any recognition of his own prowess, and when he was finally
given leg before to a ball, that would certainly have passed a foot
above the stumps, she did not smile at him with congratulations nor did
she attempt to console him, though he gave her every opportunity of
doing so had she wished by walking round three sides of a rectangle, and
reaching the dressing-room by means of the shaded lawn on the left of
the pavilion. No. His cricket had not interested her in the least, and
it was exasperating to see her face kindle with enthusiasm when the
wicket keeper and the slow bowler put on fifty runs for the last wicket
through a series of the most outrageous flukes that have ever disgraced
a cricket field.
Not a single ball was hit along the ground and only rarely did it follow
the direction in which the bat was swung. Length balls on the off stump
flew over the head of mid-on, of point, and second slip, to fall time
after time providentially out of reach. The fielding side grew
exasperated; slow bowlers tried to bowl fast and fast bowlers had a shot
with lobs; full pitches even were attempted, and these, too, were
smitten violently over the heads of the instanding fieldsmen and out of
reach of the deeps. It was a spectacle that would at ordinary times have
flung Roland into convulsions of delight, but on this occasion it
annoyed him beyond measure. He felt as must a music-hall artist whose
high-class performance has been received with only mild approval when he
watches the same audience lose itself in caterwauls of hilarious
appreciation at the debauched antics of a vulgar comedian with a false
nose and trousers turned the wrong way round who sings a song about his
“ma-in-law and the boarding-house.” For there was Beatrice, who had
hardly taken the trouble to watch his innings, laughing and clapping the
preposterous exhibition of this last wicket pair. It was a real relief
to him when the slow bowler, in a desperate effort to hook an off ball
to the square by boundary, trod on his middle stump and nearly collapsed
amid the débris of the wicket.
Altogether it had been an unsatisfactory day and it was typical of the
whole week. He had looked forward to it eagerly; he had meant to enjoy
himself so much--the quiet mornings in the garden, the inspection of the
wicket, the change into flannels, the varying fortune of cricket, the
long enchantment of a warm, heavy afternoon, and afterwards the good
dinner, the comradeship, the kindly interplay of talk, till finally
sleep came to a mind at harmony with itself and full of agreeable
echoes. How good these things had seemed to him in imagination. But,
actually, there was something missing. The weather was fine, the cricket
good, the company agreeable, but the harmony was broken. He was
disquieted. He did not wake in the morning with that deep untroubled
sense of enjoyment; he had instead, a belief that something was going to
happen; he was always looking to the next thing instead of abiding
contentedly in the moment.
And this mental turmoil could only be attributed to the presence of
Beatrice. She disturbed him and excited him. His eyes followed her about
the room. Whenever he was away from her he wondered what she was doing
and wished she would come back; but in her presence he was unhappy and
self-conscious. He hardly joined in the general conversation of the
table for shyness of what she would think of him. On the few occasions
when he sat next to her he could think of nothing to say to her,
nothing, that is to say, that was individual, that might not have been,
and as a matter of fact probably had been, said to her by every other
young man in the room.
He would hazard some remark about the weather--it was rather hot; did
she think there was any danger of a thunderstorm?
“I hope not,” she would answer; “it would spoil everything, wouldn’t
it?” She assumed the voice of a mother that is endeavoring to reassure a
small child. Cricket was like a plaything in the nursery. “That is what
she takes me for,” he said to himself--“an overgrown schoolboy”; and he
prayed for an opportunity of saying something brilliant and evocative
that would startle her into an interest for him. If only he could lead
the conversation away from heavy trivialities to shadowy conjectures,
wistful regrets; if only they could talk of life and its
disenchantments, its exquisite gestures; of sorrow, happiness and
resignation. But how were they to talk of it? If she thought about him
at all, which was doubtful, or in any way differentiated him from the
other young men of the party, she would probably consider that he was
flattered by her gracious inquiries about his batting average. How was
she to know what he was feeling; and how was he to introduce so
portentous a subject? He recognized with a smile what a sensation he
would cause were he to lean across to her and say: “What do you, Mrs.
Arnold, consider to be the ultimate significance of life?” His question
would be sure to coincide with one of those sudden silences that occur
unexpectedly in the middle of a meal, and his words would fall into that
pool of quivering silence, scattering ripples of horror and dismay. Mr.
Marston would stare at him, Muriel would giggle and say she had known
all the time he was a poet, and the other members of the party would
gaze at him in astonished pity. “Poor fellow!” their glances would say;
“quite balmy!” And Beatrice? she would dismiss the situation with an
agreeable pleasantry that would put everyone save Roland at his ease. He
did not in the least see how he was to win her confidence.
His looks had not impressed her, as, indeed, why should they? His
features were neither strikingly handsome nor strikingly ugly; they were
ordinary. He was not clever, at least his cleverness did not transpire
in conversational brilliance and repartee; and she was not interested in
cricket. He envied the ease with which Gerald talked to her, the way
they laughed and ragged each other. They were such good friends. It had
been in Gerald’s company that he had first seen her. Was Gerald in love
with her, he wondered. Gerald had never confided to him any recent love
affair, and perhaps this was the reason. It was not unlikely. She was
young, she was lonely, she was beautiful. He asked Muriel whether she
thought there was any cause for his anxiety.
“What!” she said. “Gerald and Aunt Beatrice in love with each other!”
“Yes; why not. She’s not in love with her husband, and I don’t see why
at all----” He stopped, for Muriel was fixing him with a fierce and
penetrative glare.
“No,” she said, “there’s not the least danger of Gerald falling in love
with Aunt Beatrice, but if you aren’t very careful, someone else will be
very soon!”
He laughed uncomfortably.
“Oh, don’t be silly!”
“So you know who I mean, don’t you?”
“You mean me, I suppose.”
“Of course.”
He tried to dismiss the subject with a laugh.
“And that would never do, would it?”
It was not successful. Muriel looked more annoyed than he had ever seen
her before. It was absurd of her. She must know that he was only
ragging. They had always been so open with one another, so charmingly
indiscreet.
“No, it wouldn’t,” she said.
He waited, thinking she was going to add some qualification to this
plain denial. Her lips indeed began to frame a syllable, when in
response to some swift resolution she shook her head. “Oh, well,” she
said, “it doesn’t matter.”
There was no use denying it: it had not been the week he had expected.