Two hundred and thirteen Sloane Street. The address, Rosie reflected, as
she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous
person, was decidedly a good one. It argued a reasonable prosperity,
attested a certain distinction. The knowledge of his address confirmed
her already high opinion of the bearded stranger who had so surprisingly
entered her life, as though in fulfilment of all the fortune-tellers’
prophecies that ever were made; had entered, yes, and intimately made
himself at home. She had been delighted, when the telegram came that
morning, to think that at last she was going to find out something more
about this man of mystery. For dark and mysterious he had remained,
remote even in the midst of the most intimate contacts. Why, she didn’t
even know his name. “Call me Toto,” he had suggested, when she asked him
what it was. And Toto she had had to call him, for lack of anything more
definite or committal. But to-day he was letting her further into his
secret. Rosie was delighted. Her pink underclothing, she decided, as she
looked in the long glass, was really ravishing. She examined herself,
turning first one way, then the other, looking over her shoulder to see
the effect from behind. She pointed a toe, bent and straightened a knee,
applauding the length of her legs (“Most women,” Toto had said, “are
like dachshunds”), their slenderness and plump suavity of form. In their
white stockings of Milanese silk they looked delicious; and how
marvellously, by the way, those Selfridge people had mended those
stockings by their new patent process! Absolutely like new, and only
charged four shillings. Well, it was time to dress. Good-bye, then, to
the pink underclothing and the long white legs. She opened the wardrobe
door. The moving glass reflected, as it swung through its half-circle,
pink bed, rose-wreathed walls, little friends of her own age, and the
dying saint at his last communion. Rosie selected the frock she had
bought the other day at one of those little shops in Soho, there they
sell such smart things so cheaply to a clientage of minor actresses and
cocottes. Toto hadn’t seen it yet. She looked extremely distinguished in
it. The little hat, with its inch of veil hanging like a mask,
unconcealing and inviting, from the brim, suited her to perfection. One
last dab of powder, one last squirt of synthetic lilies of the valley,
and she was ready. She closed the door behind her. St. Jerome was left
to communicate in the untenanted pinkness.
Mr. Mercaptan sat at his writing-table—an exquisitely amusing affair in
papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and
painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern in the romantic manner
of Prince Albert’s later days—polishing to its final and gem-like
perfection one of his middle articles. It was on a splendid subject—the
‘Jus Primæ Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’—“that delicious _droit_,” wrote
Mr. Mercaptan, “on which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England
insist so firmly in their motto, _Dieu et mon Droit—de Seigneur_.” That
was charming, Mr. Mercaptan thought, as he read it through. And he liked
that bit which began elegiacally: “But, alas! the Right of the First
Night belongs to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as
those dismal epochs invented by Morris or by Chesterton. The Lord’s
right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque
imagination of the seventeenth century. It never existed. Or at least it
did exist, but as something deplorably different from what we love to
picture it.” And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that Council of
Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be
continent on their wedding-night. It was the Lord’s right—the _droit_ of
a heavenly Seigneur. On this text of fact, Mr. Mercaptan went on to
preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as
continence. How much happier we all should be if the real historical
_droit du Seigneur_ had in fact been the mythical right of our ‘pretty
prurient imaginations’! He looked forward to a golden age when all
should be seigneurs possessing rights that should have broadened down
into universal liberty. And so on. Mr. Mercaptan read through his
creation with a smile of satisfaction on his face. Every here and there
he made a careful correction in red ink. Over ‘pretty prurient
imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious
hesitation. Wasn’t it perhaps a little too strongly alliterative, a
shade, perhaps, cheap? Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicate
prurient’ would be better. He repeated the alternatives several times,
rolling the sound of them round his tongue, judicially, like a
tea-taster. In the end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right.
‘Pretty prurient’—they were the _mots justes_, decidedly, without a
question.
Mr. Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was
moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of
arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room.
“What is it, Mrs. Goldie?” he called irritably, for it was not difficult
to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones. He had given
orders that he was not to be disturbed. In these critical moments of
correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.
But Mr. Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon. The door
of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like
a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a
haggard and dishevelled person whom Mr. Mercaptan recognized, with a
certain sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt.
“To what do I owe the _pleasure_ of this unexpected...?” Mr. Mercaptan
began with an essay in offensive courtesy.
But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely
interrupted him. “Look here, Mercaptan,” he said. “I want to have a talk
with you.”
“Delighted, I’m sure,” Mr. Mercaptan replied. “And _what_, may I ask,
about?” He knew, of course, perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk
disturbed him.
“About this,” said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a roll of
paper.
Mr. Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out. It was a copy of the
_Weekly World_. “Ah!” said Mr. Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted
surprise, “_The World_. You have read my little article?”
“That was what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Lypiatt.
Mr. Mercaptan modestly laughed. “It hardly deserves it,” he said.
Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to him, and
speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful
deliberation: “It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,” he
said.
“Come, _come_!” protested Mr. Mercaptan. “A critic must be allowed to
criticize.”
“But there are limits,” said Lypiatt.
“Oh, I _quite_ agree,” Mr. Mercaptan eagerly conceded. “But, after all,
Lypiatt, you can’t pretend that I have come anywhere near those limits.
If I had called you a _mur_derer, or even an _adul_terer—then, I admit,
you would have some cause to complain. But I haven’t. There’s nothing
like a personality in the whole thing.”
Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a pool
of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.
“You’ve merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a quack,
raving fustian, spouting mock heroics. That’s all.”
Mr. Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and
misunderstood. He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand.
“I _merely_ suggested,” he said, “that you protest _too_ much. You
defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic.
All this _folie de grandeur_, all this hankering after _terribiltà_——”
sagely Mr. Mercaptan shook his head, “it’s led so _many_ people astray.
And, in any case, you can’t _really_ expect _me_ to find it very
sympathetic.” Mr. Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked
affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery
within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked
at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin,
and so deep—for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as
broad as it was long—that when you sat right back, you had of necessity
to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length. It was under the
white satin that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate
days, a sympathetic home. He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over
the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls,
pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic
landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs. He looked at his
cabinet of _bibelots_ in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb
Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with
the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but
in any case was quite as good as any mediæval French original, and the
Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black
papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the “Jus
Primæ Noctis,” black and neat on the page, with the red corrections
attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost
invariable discovery of, the inevitable word. No, really, one couldn’t
expect _him_ to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic.
“But I don’t expect you to,” said Lypiatt, “and, good God! I don’t want
you to. But you call me insincere. That’s what I can’t and won’t stand.
How dare you do that?” His voice was growing louder.
Once more Mr. Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. “At the most,” he
corrected, “I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about
some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.”
Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control. All the accumulated anger
and bitterness of the last days burst out. His show had been a hopeless
failure. Not a picture sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good,
that had praised for the wrong, the insulting reasons. “Bright and
effective work.” “Mr. Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.”
Damn them! damn them! And then, when the dailies had all had their yelp,
here was Mercaptan in the _Weekly World_ taking him as a text for what
was practically an essay on insincerity in art. “How dare you?” he
furiously shouted. “You—how dare you talk about sincerity? What can you
know about sincerity, you disgusting little bug!” And avenging himself
on the person of Mr. Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him,
against the fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent,
Lypiatt sprang up and, seizing the author of the “Jus Primæ Noctis” by
the shoulders, he shook him, he bumped him up and down in his chair, he
cuffed him over the head. “How can you have the impudence,” he asked,
letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, “to
touch anything that even attempts to be decent and big?” All these
years, these wretched years of poverty and struggle and courageous hope
and failure and repeated disappointment; and now this last failure, more
complete than all. He was trembling with anger; at least one forgot
unhappiness while one was angry.
Mr. Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified surprise. “Really,
_really_” he repeated, “_too_ barbarous. Scuffling like hobbledehoys.”
“If you knew,” Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he
was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what
thought, what passion——But how could Mercaptan understand? And it would
sound as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy. “Bug!” he
shouted instead, “bug!” And he struck out again with the flat of his
hand. Mr. Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps,
blinking.
“Really,” he protested, “_really_....”
Insincere? Perhaps it was half true. Lypiatt seized his man more
furiously than before and shook him, shook him. “And then that vile
insult about the vermouth advertisement,” he cried out. That had
rankled. Those flaring, vulgar posters! “You thought you could mock me
and spit at me with impunity, did you? I’ve stood it so long, you
thought I’d always stand it? Was that it? But you’re mistaken.” He
lifted his fist. Mr. Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect
his head. “Vile bug of a coward,” said Lypiatt, “why don’t you defend
yourself like a man? You can only be dangerous with words. Very witty
and spiteful and cutting about those vermouth posters, wasn’t it? But
you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I challenged you.”
“Well, as a matter of _fact_,” said Mr. Mercaptan, peering up from under
his defences, “I didn’t invent _that_ particular piece of criticism. I
borrowed the _apéritif_.” He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.
“You borrowed it, did you?” Lypiatt contemptuously repeated. “And who
from, may I ask?” Not that it interested him in the least to know.
“Well, if you really _want_ to know,” said Mr. Mercaptan, “it was from
our friend Myra Viveash.”
Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his menacing
hand in his pocket, he turned away. “Oh!” he said noncommittally, and
was silent again.
Relieved, Mr. Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of his right
hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.
Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane Street,
looking at the numbers on the doors of the houses. A hundred and
ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred and one—she was getting near now.
Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and
disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a
secret, as delightful and amusing as hers. Rosie liked to think so; it
made life more exciting. How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie
reflected, she herself must look. Would any one who saw her now,
sauntering along like this, would any one guess that, ten houses farther
down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a young poet, was
waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival? Of course they
wouldn’t and couldn’t guess! That was the fun and the enormous
excitement of the whole thing. Formidable in her light-hearted
detachment, formidable in the passion which at will she could give rein
to and check again, the great lady swam beautifully along through the
sunlight to satisfy her caprice. Like Diana, she stooped over the
shepherd boy. Eagerly the starving young poet waited, waited in his
garret. Two hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen. Rosie looked
at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn’t after all be
very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely starving. She stepped in and,
standing in the hall, looked at the board with the names. Ground floor:
Mrs. Budge. First floor: F. de M. Rowbotham. Second floor: P. Mercaptan.
P. Mercaptan.... But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a real
young poet’s name! Mercaptan—she felt more than ever pleased with her
selection. The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice.
Mercaptan ... Mercaptan.... She wondered what the P. stood for. Peter,
Philip, Patrick, Pendennis even? She could hardly have guessed that Mr.
Mercaptan’s father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted,
thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur.’
A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie mounted the
stairs. Twenty-five steps to the first floor—one flight of thirteen,
which was rather disagreeably ominous, and one of twelve. Then two
flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front
door, a bell-push like a round eye, a brass name-plate. For a great lady
thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt her heart beating
rather unpleasantly fast. It was those stairs, no doubt. She halted a
moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.
The door was opened by an aged servant of the most forbiddingly
respectable appearance.
“Mr. Mercaptan at home?”
The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling, angry
complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make
out. Mr. Mercaptan had left orders, she gathered, that he wasn’t to be
disturbed. But some one had come and disturbed him, “fairly shoved his
way in, so rude and inconsiderate,” all the same. And now he’d been once
disturbed, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t be disturbed again. But she
didn’t know what things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way
in like that. Bolshevism, she called it.
Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark hall. Still
querulously denouncing the Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person
led the way down a corridor and, throwing open a door, announced, in a
tone of grievance: “A lady to see you, Master Paster”—for Mrs. Goldie
was an old family retainer, and one of the few who knew the Secret of
Mr. Mercaptan’s Christian name, one of the fewer still who were
privileged to employ it. Then, as soon as Rosie had stepped across the
threshold, she cut off her retreat with a bang and went off, muttering
all the time, towards her kitchen.
It certainly wasn’t a garret. Half a glance, the first whiff of
pot-pourri, the feel of the carpet beneath her feet, had been enough to
prove that. But it was not the room which occupied Rosie’s attention, it
was its occupants. One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie’s
very young eyes, quite old, was standing with an elbow on the
mantelpiece. The other, sleeker and more genial in appearance, was
sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window. And neither of
them—Rosie glanced desperately from one to the other, hoping vainly that
she might have overlooked a blond beard—neither of them was Toto.
The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet her.
“An unexpected pleasure,” he said, in a voice that alternately boomed
and fluted. “_Too_ delightful! But to what do I owe——? _Who_, may I
ask——?”
He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered hers. The sleek
man shook it with cordiality, almost with tenderness.
“I ... I think I must have made a mistake,” she said. “Mr.
Mercaptan...?”
The sleek man smiled. “I am Mr. Mercaptan.”
“You live on the second floor?”
“I never laid claims to being a mathematician,” said the sleek man,
smiling as though to applaud himself, “but I have always calculated
that ...” he hesitated ... “_enfin, que ma demeure se trouve, en effet_,
on the second floor. Lypiatt will bear me out, I’m sure.” He turned to
the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had stood all
the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily at
the ground.
Lypiatt looked up. “I must be going,” he said abruptly. And he walked
towards the door. Like vermouth posters, like vermouth posters!—so that
was Myra’s piece of mockery! All his anger had sunk like a quenched
flame. He was altogether quenched, put out with unhappiness.
Politely Mr. Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the door for
him. “_Good_-bye, then,” he said airily.
Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall. The front door
banged behind him.
“Well, _well_,” said Mr. Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where
Rosie was still irresolutely standing. “Talk about the _furor poeticus_!
But _do_ sit down, I beg you. On Crébillon.” He indicated the vast white
satin sofa. “I call it Crébillon,” he explained, “because the soul of
that great writer undoubtedly tenants it, _undoubtedly_. You know his
book, of course? You know _Le Sopha_?”
Sinking into Crébillon’s soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she didn’t
know _Le Sopha_. She had begun to recover her self-possession. If this
wasn’t _the_ young poet, it was certainly _a_ young poet. And a very
peculiar one, too. As a great lady she laughingly accepted the odd
situation.
“Not know _Le Sopha_?” exclaimed Mr. Mercaptan. “Oh! but, my dear and
mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once. _No_
education can be called _complete_ without a knowledge of that divine
book.” He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume
bound in white vellum. “The hero’s soul,” he explained, handing her the
volume, “passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa. He is
doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon
his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves. The book is the record of
the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.”
“Dear me!” said Rosie, looking at the title-page.
“But now,” said Mr. Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of
Crébillon, “won’t you please explain? To what happy quiproquo do I owe
this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?”
“Well,” said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to
explain. “I was to meet a friend of mine.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Mercaptan encouragingly.
“Who sent me a telegram,” Rosie went on.
“He sent you a telegram!” Mr. Mercaptan echoed.
“Changing the—the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him at this
address.”
“Here?”
Rose nodded. “On the s—second floor,” she made it more precise.
“But _I_ live on the second floor,” said Mr. Mercaptan. “You don’t mean
to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?”
Rosie smiled. “I don’t know what he’s called,” she said with a cool
ironical carelessness that was genuinely _grande dame_.
“You don’t know his name?” Mr. Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of
delighted laughter. “But that’s _too_ good,” he said.
“S—second floor, he wrote in the telegram.” Rosie was now perfectly at
her ease. “When I saw your name, I thought it was his name. I must say,”
she added, looking sideways at Mr. Mercaptan and at once dropping the
magnolia petals of her eyelids, “it seemed to me a very charming name.”
“You overwhelm me,” said Mr. Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful,
snouty face. “As for _your_ name—I am too discreet a _galantuomo_ to
ask. And, in any case, what _does_ it matter? A rose by any other
name....”
“But, as a matter of fact,” she said, raising and lowering once again
her smooth, white lids, “my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any
rate, Rosie.”
“So you are sweet by right!” exclaimed Mr. Mercaptan, with a pretty
gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. “Let’s order tea on the
strength of it.” He jumped up and rang the bell. “How I congratulate
myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!”
Rosie said nothing. This Mr. Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even
more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.
“What puzzles me,” he went on, “is why your anonymous friend should have
chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me,
or, at any rate, know about me.”
“I should imagine,” said Rosie, “that you have a lot of friends.”
Mr. Mercaptan laughed—the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo.
“_Des amis, des amies_—with and without the mute ‘e,’” he declared.
The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.
“Tea for two, Mrs. Goldie.”
Mrs. Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. “The other gentleman’s
gone, has he?” she asked. And having assured herself of his absence, she
renewed her complaint. “Shoving in like that,” she said. “Bolshevism,
that’s what I——”
“All right, all right, Mrs. Goldie. Let’s have our tea as quickly as
possible.” Mr. Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the
gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.
“Very well, Master Paster.” Mrs. Goldie spoke with resignation and
departed.
“But tell me,” Mr. Mercaptan went on, “if it _isn’t_ indiscreet—what
does your friend look like?”
“W—well,” Rosie answered, “he’s fair, and though he’s quite young he
wears a beard.” With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic
bosom the contours of Toto’s broad blond fan.
“A beard! But, good heavens,” Mr. Mercaptan slapped his thigh, “it’s
Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!”
“Well, whoever it was,” said Rosie severely, “he played a very stupid
sort of joke.”
“For which I thank him. _De tout mon cœur._”
Rosie smiled and looked sideways. “All the same,” she said, “I shall
give him a piece of my mind.”
Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr.
Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly
did look a bit comical.
After tea Mr. Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round
the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans,
the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, the
Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures,
the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of
Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had
been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr.
Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr. Mercaptan began
to read her his little middle on the “Droit du Seigneur,” it was poor
everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views;
poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his _Hibbert Journal_, his
letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.
“Bravo!” she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in
one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled
snake’s leather tucked up under her. “Bravo!” she cried as Mr. Mercaptan
finished his reading and looked up for his applause.
Mr. Mercaptan bowed.
“You express so exquisitely what we——” and waving her hand in a
comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious
ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at
this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, “what we all only
feel and aren’t clever enough to say.”
Mr. Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk,
crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. “Feeling,” he
said, “is the im_port_ant thing.”
Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank verse: ‘The
things that matter happen in the heart.’
“I quite agree,” she said.
Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr. Mercaptan’s
brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and
kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.
It was only the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa—a poor,
hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr. Mercaptan’s grand affair
in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa—lay with her
feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping
of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading
the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr. Mercaptan had
given her when he said ‘good-bye’ (or rather, ‘_À bientôt, mon amie_’);
given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of
their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications
inscribed on the fly-leaf:
To
BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,
WITH GRATITUDE,
FROM
CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.
_À bientôt_—she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the
essay on the “Jus Primæ Noctis”—ah! what we’ve all been feeling and none
of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and
fastidious....
“I am proud to constitute myself”—Mr. Mercaptan had said of
it—“_l’esprit d’escalier des dames galantes_.”
Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very
witty indeed.
She read the book slowly. Her French, indeed, wasn’t good enough to
permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps it
if were better she wouldn’t be yawning like this. It was disgraceful:
she pulled herself together. Mr. Mercaptan had said that, it was a
masterpiece.
In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative
functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding.
Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he
suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril
had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the
coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more
attentively.
She’s bored with me. Already. It was obvious.
Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes,
the nails _were_ dirty. He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat
pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange
sticks that morning.
Determinedly he took up his pen. “The hydrogen ion concentration in the
blood ...” he began a new paragraph. But he got no further than the
first seven words.
If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if—if—if—— Past
conditionals, hopelessly past. He might have been brought up more
elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead
of a barrister’s clerk. He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he was
young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women.
If he had met her years ago—during the war, should one say, dressed in
the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards....
He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they had no
effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile!
He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys.
He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a
physiological necessity.
O God, what a fool he had been!
And then, what about Rosie? What sort of a life had she been having
while he was being above that sort of thing? Now he came to think of it,
he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite
incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about
the physiology of frogs. Having found that out, he had really given up
exploring further. How could he have been so stupid?
Rosie had been in love with him, he supposed. Had he been in love with
her? No. He had taken care not to be. On principle. He had married her
as a measure of intimate hygiene; out of protective affection, too,
certainly out of affection; and a little for amusement, as one might buy
a puppy.
Mrs. Viveash had opened his eyes; seeing her, he had also begun to
notice Rosie. It seemed to him that he had been a loutish cad as well as
an imbecile.
What should he do about it? He sat for a long time wondering.
In the end he decided that the best thing would be to go and tell Rosie
all about it, all about everything.
About Mrs. Viveash too? Yes, about Mrs. Viveash too. He would get over
Mrs. Viveash more easily and more rapidly if he did. And he would begin
to try and find out about Rosie. He would explore her. He would discover
all the other things besides an incapacity to learn physiology that were
in her. He would discover her, he would quicken his affection for her
into something livelier and more urgent. And they would begin again;
more satisfactorily this time; with knowledge and understanding; wise
from their experience.
Shearwater got up from his chair before the writing-table, lurched
pensively towards the door, bumping into the revolving bookcase and the
arm-chair as he went, and walked down the passage to the drawing-room.
Rosie did not turn her head as he came in, but went on reading without
changing her position, her slippered feet still higher than her head,
her legs still charmingly avowing themselves.
Shearwater came to a halt in front of the empty fireplace. He stood
there with his back to it, as though warming himself before an imaginary
flame. It was, he felt, the safest, the most strategic point from which
to talk.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“_Le Sopha_,” said Rosie.
“What’s that?”
“What’s that?” Rosie scornfully echoed. “Why, it’s one of the great
French classics.”
“Who by?”
“Crébillon the younger.”
“Never heard of him,” said Shearwater. There was a silence. Rosie went
on reading.
“It just occurred to me,” Shearwater began again in his rather
ponderous, infelicitous way, “that you mightn’t be very happy, Rosie.”
Rosie looked up at him and laughed. “What put that into your head?” she
asked. “_I_’m perfectly happy.”
Shearwater was left a little at a loss. “Well, I’m very glad to hear
it,” he said. “I only thought ... that perhaps _you_ might think ...
that _I_ rather neglected you.”
Rosie laughed again. “What is all this about?” she said.
“I have it rather on my conscience,” said Shearwater. “I begin to
see ... something has made me see ... that I’ve not.... I don’t treat
you very well....”
“But I don’t n—notice it, I assure you,” put in Rosie, still smiling.
“I leave you out too much,” Shearwater went on with a kind of
desperation, running his fingers through his thick brown hair. “We don’t
share enough together. You’re too much outside my life.”
“But after all,” said Rosie, “we are a civ—vilized couple. We don’t want
to live in one another’s pockets, do we?”
“No, but we’re really no more than strangers,” said Shearwater. “That
isn’t right. And it’s my fault. I’ve never tried to get into touch with
your life. But you did your best to understand mine ... at the beginning
of our marriage.”
“Oh, _then—n_!” said Rosie, laughing. “You found out what a little idiot
I was.”
“Don’t make a joke of it,” said Shearwater. “It isn’t a joke. It’s very
serious. I tell you, I’ve come to see how stupid and inconsiderate and
un-understanding I’ve been with you. I’ve come to see quite suddenly.
The fact is,” he went on with a rush, like an uncorked fountain, “I’ve
been seeing a woman recently whom I like very much, and who doesn’t like
me.” Speaking of Mrs. Viveash, unconsciously he spoke her language. For
Mrs. Viveash people always euphemistically ‘liked’ one another rather a
lot, even when it was a case of the most frightful and excruciating
passion, the most complete abandonments. “And somehow that’s made me see
a lot of things which I’d been blind to before—blind deliberately, I
suppose. It’s made me see, among other things, that I’ve really been to
blame towards you, Rosie.”
Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly disguised. So
James was embarking on his little affairs, was he? It seemed incredible,
and also, as she looked at her husband’s face—the face behind its
bristlingly manly mask of a harassed baby—also rather pathetically
absurd. She wondered who it could be. But she displayed no curiosity.
She would find out soon enough.
“I’m sorry you should have been unhappy about it,” she said.
“It’s finished now.” Shearwater made a decided little gesture.
“Ah, no!” said Rosie. “You should persevere.” She looked at him,
smiling.
Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy detachment. He had
imagined the conversation so very differently, as something so serious,
so painful and, at the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did
not know how to go on. “But I thought,” he said hesitatingly, “that
you ... that we ... after this experience ... I would try to get closer
to you....” (Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) ... “We might start again, from
a different place, so to speak.”
“But, _cher ami_,” protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the
preferred tongue of Mr. Mercaptan, “you can’t seriously expect us to do
the Darby and Joan business, can you? You’re distressing yourself quite
unnecessarily on my account. I don’t find you neglect me or anything
like it. You have your life—naturally. And I have mine. We don’t get in
one another’s way.”
“But do you think that’s the ideal sort of married life?” asked
Shearwater.
“It’s obviously the most civ—vilized,” Rosie answered, laughing.
Confronted by Rosie’s civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.
“Well, if you don’t want,” he said. “I’d hoped ... I’d thought....”
He went back to his study to think things over. The more he thought them
over, the more he blamed himself. And incessantly the memory of Mrs.
Viveash tormented him.