I
Samson Phillips was first and foremost a man of tenacious disposition. He
heard Antonia mention that Deb was to be found that Saturday afternoon
with a certain person of the name of llorraine, and that she intended
a visit to the same person, on her way home after the picture-show.
Therefore, by doggedly attaching himself to Nell and her friend during
the picture-show, as he was well able to do after Otto’s admonition
to conviviality; by dint of an afternoon’s complete boredom and stiff
discomfort; and by steadfast repetition of “Well—where do we go now?”
at every projected flight on the part of Antonia and Nell, when
circumstances offered a break in the concerted programme, as outside the
Redburys front door, or after the complete and lingering tour of the
Leicester Galleries: “No, I don’t care much for this kind of picture.” Or
after half an hour spent in some neighbouring and drearily respectable
tea-rooms; in fact, by simple dint of “hanging on,” Samson presently
found himself being welcomed by La llorraine, after the manner of a Royal
Mistress of the Robes receiving the Royal Master of the Staghounds....
She was in one of her “legitimate” moods; wit and not coarseness was
the passport for innuendo. They had rented a rambling underground flat
off Elgin Avenue, where their furniture had at last a chance to spread
itself; the vast drawing-room, lit by candelabra night and day, was
thick-carpeted and sparsely furnished by a Louis couch and chair, a
piano, and a table that held some delicate simpering miniatures. Manon
moved about the dim spaces, a solitary unchildlike little princess with
wide skirts and golden hair that was brushed high off her forehead and
piled into stiff curls.... Obviously, the more disreputable phase of
peroxide, clothes-line, and variety entertainment, was for the moment in
abeyance.
Samson awkwardly approached Deb and Cliffe Kennedy, who were talking
together by the window.
“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus.”
“You? How funny!” Deb began to laugh.
Samson _was_ funny, in juxtaposition with La llorraine and Cliffe
Kennedy. He was so unplastic.
“Who brought you here? Antonia?”
“I came to see Miss Verity home.”
“But she has only just come.”
He held to his point. She would some time or other be obliged to make
a departure, and then his services as an escort would naturally be
required. A girl should not traverse the dark streets unaccompanied. A
girl should be aware of perils besetting her, though ignorant of their
nature.
Samson enquired how Deb proposed to reach home. “This is the worst end
of Elgin Avenue,” he hinted darkly, and looked with suspicion at Cliffe
Kennedy, who passed his hand across his eyes as though brushing away a
hideous memory, and said abruptly: “I’ve never spoken to you of my little
sister—have I?”
Deb knew that he was an only child. But she also knew by now his
marvellous talent for fitting every subject that came up with local
interest of personal experience. What she did not know was exactly how
real was the momentary belief which inflated his account of the lovely
and cherished little sister—Beth, her name—whom Cliffe had once been
requisitioned to fetch from an evening party. There had been a woman—he
had not gone. “Someone else will see the Babe home.”... Beth, tired of
delay, having refused all other escort—“I’m waiting for my brother,
thanks,” with childlike pride—had at last started off by herself....
“It was months before we gave up the search. And it killed my
mother—spiritually,” Cliffe amended, recollecting that Deb had frequently
lunched with Mrs Kennedy. “Her hair went snow-white during those
months——” mournful eyes fixed on Samson’s aghast, attentive face. His
gaze wandered to Deb’s, read there a gentle reminder of the dear old
lady’s almost unpowdered dark brown coronal; and without the slightest
perceptible break in the narrative, sank his voice to the supplementary
explanation: “Yes—she dyed it for my sake. I simply couldn’t bear it.
My fault—damnable ego-ridden slothful beast!—and the perpetual sight
of that piled-up silveriness never let me forget for a moment what she
had suffered—what we all suffered ... she guessed it was driving me to
madness—Other women condemned what she did—called it preposterous vanity
... at her age. God! one of the divinest impulses of pure love——”
By now, Cliffe was so swathed about in self-spun illusion of tender
maternal sacrifice and a lost little sister, that Samson may have been
pardoned for horrified credulity:
“And you never heard anything—no news—no clue——?”
“I spend regularly four nights a week in brothels,” Cliffe replied with
exquisite simplicity—and Samson checked a stern protest at use of a word
which, after all, Deb could not possibly understand.
“But I’m making you melancholy with all this. A chance word reminded
me—I’ll see you home to-night, Deb; but I hope you’re not relying
on me to pay your bus-fares; you still seem to cling to the outworn
tradition that gentlemen, beautiful glossy eligible gentlemen who live
in Kensington Palace Gardens, always pay the fare of the young lady
they’re walking-out with—or rather riding-out with. I’ve noticed a
semi-diffident, semi-expectant look that you always direct towards me
when the conductor comes round, and you pull out your modest little
purse—and I’m hypnotically compelled to the low rapid pained yet
masterful and at the same time unobtrusive utterance: ‘No—please—allow
me—I insist.’... And I can’t afford it, Deb. I’ll see you home to-night,
but you must pay your own fares.”
Samson favoured the speaker with a look so expressive of the “beautiful
glossy eligible gentleman who lived in Kensington Palace Gardens” that
Deb’s eyes, encountering Kennedy’s, were an elves’ dance of green and
grey merriment.
“I will accompany Miss Marcus home, if she allows me.”
“Are you pledged to see Nell home as well? Antonia and Nell and I all
live in different directions, you know.”
“David Redbury is calling for his sister.” Samson stationed himself
in an uncomfortable attitude beside the lounging intimate pair, and
remained there unbudgingly on guard, declining to be drawn into
their conversation; nor yet to be beguiled away by any inducement of
refreshment or music.
Meanwhile, La llorraine was making Nell welcome.
“My dee-urr, you are _that_ friend I have been wanting always for my
Manon ... she grows too old, too staid—She is with me and the Countess
and Stella Marcus and Mrs Verity—she hears us talk—it is not always
well that she should hear us talk. The Countess has a most tragic
business on the carpet, my dee-urr ... wait, I will tell you—or when we
have more time, perhaps. But my Manon—you shall see her every day—all
day—so she will grow a child again—healthy, romping children, you
and she.... You can eat your déjeuner here, and she her dinner with
you—ideal!—it shall be planned ... for listen:” She sank her voice to the
confidential pitch, holding Nell inexorably captive with one hand, and
with the other sweeping wide descriptive circles. “At present she muses
too much of marriage and what it brings. She sleeps badly. She put me
questions—_soch_ questions.... Wait, I will tell you my plans.... _That
marriage_, when it koms—ah, it will be somesing! superb! you see. But it
is essential she shall be fresh and unconscious and blooming.... Those
girls, Antonia, Deb, they are no more early-morning, ... They dream not
... they laugh at love. My dee-urr, it vos vonderful you should been
brought here for my Manon!
“Now tell me, my dee-urr, are you trobbled inside about _that_ question
of a hosband? Or your mother?”
“I don’t know ... I mean—I haven’t any....” And then, from the midst of
confusion, Nell pushed out a courageous: “I think it’s horrid to talk
about husbands and that sort of thing.”
La llorraine was switched off at the main. And Antonia, overhearing,
smiled at Nell encouragingly. She and Deb agreed that it took weeks of
hard labour to pierce young Nell’s creamy layers of impenetrability. As
one put out a tamer’s hand, swiftly her fugitive spirit darted away, in
a tremor of shadows and dreams; thoughts that frightened her, so like
couchant, half-slumbering beasts they seemed. Sweeter thoughts that
slipped from chill grey to silvery sheen—aspen-leaves stirred by a wind
from nowhere, and hushed again. It amused Antonia not a little that La
llorraine should in public and within the first five minutes of meeting,
demand an outburst of articulate confidence on the subject of Nell’s
troubled inside on _that_ question of a husband.
Nell and Manon, swept imperiously together by the opera-singer’s
enthusiasm, and expected to begin romping without delay, eyed each other
in furtive dislike ... till Manon’s demure sang-froid relieved the
situation.
“Would you like to see my canary?”
“No,” said Nell, in a passion of pity for the artificial life any bird
must lead, in that hectic twilight atmosphere.
After a pause Manon tried again. “The young man who has just entered the
drawing-room has beautiful eyes. Do you not think so?”
“He’s my brother David. And he’s only a boy. He’s the youngest of us.”
Her prospective friend shrugged plump shoulders semi-bare in her quaint
early Victorian frock. “Too young for me, bien entendu. Doubtless he
will be infatuated with Mama. The men of her age who visit her, take
no notice of Mama, comme femme, you understand, but try always to play
with me. And they pretend it is as a child that they make a pet of me,
and I pretend too, and Mama. But we all know it is not so,” she nodded
wisely. Certainly, if Nell were to attempt the task of preserving
Manon’s early-morning dreaminess, here was an excellent opportunity to
start. Instead, she sped across the room to David; pulled imperiously,
desperately at his arm. “David, I’m ready to go home with you. Quite
ready.”
But David was not to be beguiled. He had found in La llorraine what had
been so poignantly missing from his life since the outbreak of war. He
had re-found his Continent. She embodied all the thraldom of a tour
abroad; all the lost delights he had described to Richard. Her looks,
her voice, her setting, her clothes and perfume even; the outflung
movements of her long white ringed hands, her bits of richly suggestive
reminiscences, with ejaculations given in all languages. Sudden
familiarities; her exhaustive and professional acquaintance with foreign
music, foreign artists and their very questionable careers; of foreign
cities—their opera-houses and their royalties; gossip, garlic-spiced and
succulent, or else melodramatic and sonorous—her whole attitude towards
life, towards the _ingénue_, towards David himself——
He vowed afterwards to Antonia, in ecstatic gratitude for her share in
bringing him hither, that never again while he had the freedom of the
flat near Elgin Avenue, would he fret at island limitations. “She’s
simply incredible. When she talks, I can smell hot coffee and those
jolly bright brown lengths of bread that one plunged for at the buffet,
arriving at Boulogne or Dieppe....”
“I’m glad you’re happy, at least. My other two introductions to the
party look simply sodden with misery. I think we must be unselfish, and
get them away.”
She indicated Nell and Samson, the former still being entertained by
Manon; the other, an obstinate misfit in the company of Deb and Kennedy.
Antonia Verity was Cliffe’s only fixed territory; his spiritual
headquarters. He returned to Antonia after all his zig-zagging spurts
of enthusiasm. But Deb was his present caprice. He took Deb with him
everywhere; displayed her proudly to such fragments of his circle as
were handy; told her all the stories of all his loves; telephoned her
before and after meals; wrote her long and blasphemously witty letters,
or postcards that were the scandal of Montagu Hall; made her free of his
home and his books and his mother, teased her and argued with her and
shocked her and bullied her and—did not make love to her.
It was an enervating existence—for Deb. There was a peculiarly flattering
quality to Cliffe Kennedy’s absorption in her, even in its impermanence.
Other queens had reigned ... other queens would reign.
She was not in the least infatuated by Kennedy, in spite of occasional
efforts to believe this the cause of the diffused glamour on all her days
and nights. His personality was not quite that of a real man ... it was a
vivid tricky personality—wantonly elusive—wantonly exacting. He had to be
forgiven half a hundred lapses of manners—even of humanity—per instant.
He was a veritable lob of mischief-making, untrustworthy, with not even
that one point of reliable consistency of being a law unto himself. No
one could ever hope to pin him down to any statement or opinion. Yet,
with these traits, there was nothing womanish about Cliffe Kennedy.
His tastes were masculine; his language forcible; his brain elastic
but brilliant. Other men—ordinary men—liked and sought his company,
while deploring his fantastic appearance, the leathery spider-webbed
face and the two bits of blue inset with the vividly light effect of a
chimney-sweeper’s eyes among the soot; his abandonment of yellow hair;
his wild sad thin legs that were like that kind of poem which having
no end or beginning, straggles on and on in various shapeless forms of
incoherence. It was a pity, with those legs, that he should favour so
strongly the tweed knickerbocker style of clothing. He would have been
better suited by a jester’s motley of red and yellow, or a picturesque
costume of fluttering rags and slouch hat and knotted staff. He resembled
that sort of concentrated allegory in pedestrian form which a few
years ago meandered variously through novel and drama as the Wanderer,
the Pilgrim, the Minstrel, the Fiddler, the Vagabond, the Gypsy, the
Tramp, the Pedlar, the Just-Outsider, the Never-Coming-Quite-in-er. He
was the vanguard of that type with which Deb was presently to become
so familiar—the young male of the transition period, who, perhaps in
self-defence, rose to match the half-and-half girl; young male who
required neither extreme of mistress nor wife, but accepted, in a
spiritual sense only, the semi-privileges accorded him—the licence of
speech confidential or witty; and temporary rights of appropriation—by
an unspoken avowal that he might be trusted in all situations not to
transgress limits; but in return it must be clearly understood that he
was on his guard against the responsibilities of wedlock:
“Shouldn’t we be miserable together, Deb?” And she wondered what reply
etiquette dictated to this ardent declaration of no-marriage in the
various forms it was offered her. “Please, I wasn’t even trying ...”
occurred to her as the likeliest.
Amongst the tricks of this twentieth-century style of liaison was a
totally unembarrassed delight in hoodwinking such of the older generation
who still took propinquity at its face value, to the belief that the two
concerned were indeed formally engaged; wantonly depositing raw material
for scandal, where it would be easiest picked up by the person for whom
intended.
Cliffe was enchanted when Deb reported to him grandfather’s indelicate
enquiries _re_ that young Kennedy’s prospects and declarations; or
sentimental Trudchen Redbury’s eagerness to discover when congratulations
might be allowed to cast off their decent veilings, and appear on the
doorstep in the form of a large basket of flowers, white and pink. He
even insisted on propping up all such suspicion by escorting Deb to a
formal Sunday afternoon call at the Redburys. “Und nun,” Trudchen babbled
to her husband, as Cliffe’s decorous top-hat passed up the street in
devoted juxtaposition with Deb’s best white fox furs—“it may at any
moment ... how happy the dear Stella will be!”
Ferdie and Stella, true to resolve, put no direct questions to Deb.
The child was enjoying herself ... she was always out—that affirmed
enjoyment. Stella was as rapacious of Deb’s conquests as though her own
sterile girlhood were thus being avenged.... A gleam of triumph shot
from her narrow dark eyes in the direction of Hermann Marcus, as Deb
indifferently thwarted his industrious research. Here, at all events,
the despot had no powers of destruction. Ferdie’s lenience rose from
different motives. He prided himself on his lack of insistence that
each succeeding episode should result in an eventual son-in-law. Plenty
of time—plenty of time. His little Deb was flirting ... only natural!
The younger generation governed themselves by new laws; how unlawful
these laws Ferdie was happily ignorant. According to him, if “it did
not come off,” then either one of the pair was indifferent to the
other’s love, or else they were “just good friends, nothing more”—no
reason why a man and a girl should not be comrades, in these enlightened
days. But that any working arrangement could exist whereby passion was
deliberately and even verbally harnessed with comradeship, and held
in check, and given rein, and expelled again—no, that certainly never
occurred to Ferdie Marcus. His outlook was just half a generation ahead
of his own; half a generation behind his daughter’s. Deb, in a sort of
wilful despair at her vain search for control and supervision either
from the authority she would have been quick enough to defy, or by some
innermost spiritual compass she lacked, Deb went where she pleased, in
what company she pleased, at what hours she pleased; rubbed her spirit
in pioneer literature, pioneer drama and pioneer discussion, till it was
mournfully sterile of glamour or amazement; and for some inexplicable
reason, played up to all assumptions on the part of the Studio gang,
that she was even as they were in experience of sin ... only it was not
the fashion to call it sin, except when the term was used humorously.
Not one of them, girl or man, would have believed Deb, had she chosen
suddenly to discard her pose of sophistication. She had experimented
just enough for this—no more. Her passionate little face, poised on
its thick column of neck; the heavy lids that were never quite drawn
back from her eyes; slow-smiling mouth, the rich blood veiled by skin
crinkled and transparent as poppy-petals in the sun-rays; above all, a
quality in each supple movement she made, which a dancer once defined as
“limb-consciousness”—combined to uphold the lie that vanity in her had
started.
“What can it matter—my life is my own affair!” thus Deb, who hoped hers
was a wayward soul, and knew it was merely slipshod....
What _can_ it matter?—why, nothing had mattered much since she had
kissed Burton Ames ... and he had been called away to the telephone. She
had broken bounds then ... entered on forbidden country. Of what avail
afterwards to turn and crawl tamely back through the gap, resume an
existence where girls did not cheapen themselves?
If he had made it worth while ... he had not made it worth while, or
worth anything. One had heard of girls who, disappointed in love,
had flung themselves headlong “to the bad.” Deb did not do that. She
merely meandered bad-wards; her steps, like those of a very intricate
dance, advancing and retreating with sideway darts and curvetings and
inexplicable rushes for cover and sudden boldnesses ... all the haphazard
effect, to an onlooker, of a dance without the accompanying inspiration
of music. But the onlooker could not have guessed that Deb had seen Jenny
die with all the eagerness of her being unfulfilled, baulked....
“I never knew it was so easy to die—while one still wanted things as
much. One must take—take—and take quickly!”
She was wont to tell Cliffe of her adventures and escapes on Debatable
Ground. He listened with proprietary zest, and many oaths of secrecy. And
then betrayed her to Antonia or Zoe or Timothy—whomever the object of his
next momentary death-or-nothing spasm of intimacy. Deb, following after,
cleared up the litter of her character, agreed with Antonia or Zoe or
Timothy that Cliffe was simply impossible and deserved to be forthwith
discarded ... and then went off with him for the week-end to his country
cottage near Wycombe.
No—that was how Kennedy himself would have described the incident. As a
matter of fact she went with him for the Saturday, as she had often done
before, and they were to return in time for supper at Zoe’s flat, where
Deb had arranged to stay for what was left of the night, because it was
easier just to roll over on to the sofa in the sitting-room, than to
worry about busses or trains to South Kensington. She was shedding the
fundamental home-instinct that the black hours must necessarily be spent
in one’s bedroom with all accompanying accessories of property. Really,
once the sacred custom was broken, one could tumble to sleep anywhere;
at an inn, or on a divan with two or three other girls, or—in hot
weather—out of doors.... Yes, she had grown lax over the geography of her
nights. It was easy enough to ’phone Aunt Stella and say: “I’m staying
with so-and-so till to-morrow.” “Very well, child—have a good time.”
Stella supposed that so-and-so had a spare bedroom, and could lend Deb a
nightgown. Gradually Deb trained them not to worry even if she omitted to
’phone her whereabouts; a ’phone was not always handy—“You’ll know I’m
all right.”
And all this—for nothing at all. The girl’s behaviour, submitted to the
essential interrogation, was as orthodox as her circumstances might be
the reverse. That night at Seaview for instance—the sea was entirely
a matter of fiction, but Cliffe insisted that such a name must shed a
disguise of Philistine respectability over any dwelling. It was not even
the dramatically inevitable outcome of a swiftly discovered passion
setting them aflame and beyond all reason and remembrance; or else to be
explained by a set of automatic coincidences, such as misunderstanding
with the rest of the party, or a faulty time-table or a fog. Certainly
it was raining rather drearily; and Cliffe declared that the prospect
of Zoe and her surrounding aura of Soho waiters and impresarios and
macaroni-merchants rendered him faint with boredom ... and they were
having rather a jolly talk about something-or-other ... and there was
plenty of cold-stuff supper in the larder.... And Deb was in a sort of
fancy dress—she had discarded her wet and muddy tweed skirt for a pair of
white knickers of Cliffe’s, which, with her own loose red-bordered white
serge sailor smock, gave her the look of a trim and dashing principal boy
in pantomime. She disliked the bother of resuming her skirt again.
“Oh, well, let’s stop on here,” said Cliffe impatiently. “Why do I pay
a high rent if not to be able to talk quietly with a pal now and then,
without interruption?”
“Five-and-six a week, isn’t it?” Deb indolently let lapse the question of
their imminent return.
“Six-and-six. And cheap at that.”
“I suppose the baby-farm next door reduces the price. They do seem to
make more noise than ordinary home-babies.”
Cliffe grinned. “The landlord tried to argue that out as a special
convenience ... ‘So handy just to drop it over the wall!’”
“When you first mentioned your country cottage to me, Cliffe, I pictured
it with a thatched roof and an orchard and roses round the door.”
“‘Make me love mother more’” he hummed. “Curious psychological effect
some vegetation seems to have! But what a hopelessly conventional
imagination is yours, Deborah. Is it likely I’d be found dead in one
of those old-fashioned traps for sentiment and earwigs? Seaview is a
futurist conception of what a country cottage ought to be, in its stark,
splendid ugliness.”
Seaview was a yellow-brick workman’s house, standing in a row with five
others of the same build ... bare of ornamentation, and with the straight
road to High Wycombe directly outside the door.
Deb balanced one bare tan leg across the knee of the other, clasped her
slim ankle caressingly, and dangled a caked and clammy stocking near the
fire, which, with the reckless squandering of much paraffin, Cliffe had
at last wheedled to a ruddy pyramid.
“I wish you hadn’t tramped me through all the sploshiest fields, Cliffe.”
“‘Where there are cows there is dung!’—simple Russian proverb,” he
replied sententiously. “I’m compiling a book of them. Besides, you
shouldn’t have forgotten your umbrella.”
“I’ve never had an umbrella.... Think of it—never a little umbrella of
my own—and sometimes my arms are empty—oh, so empty.... I have to watch
other women dandling their umbrellas ... and wonder why such happiness
should have been denied just to me. Sometimes, at night, I dream that I
have, after all, one dear little golden-headed umbrella ... and then I
wake up to find it all a dream—all a dream——perhaps I shall never have an
umbrella now ...” Mournfully she wriggled her toes down into the foot of
her stocking.
He watched her from his sprawling posture on the horsehair sofa, and
smiled....
“Highly improper conversations.... Wonder if Samson Phillips would
approve of it? Does he still write you those compromising letters about
running brooks and Ella Wheeler Wilcox?”
“Every Friday. EllaWheelerWilcox sounds like an oath, the way you say it.”
He swung himself upright, striking the pillow-sausage with his fist.
“It _is_ an oath. Yes, I might have been a good man if some confiding
aunt hadn’t roused my worst passions by a gift of those eleven white,
innocent-looking vellum volumes.... ‘And they were wed on a horsehair
bed, and the dying day was their priest.’ Deb, would Samson Phillips
consider the dying day an adequate priest for you and me?”
“I’ll ask him if you like. I’m a privileged person with Samson; he used
to kiss-in-the-ring with me at children’s parties—a very serious young
man unbending to play with the little ones—and acquired a taste for me
that way.”
Cliffe hummed:
“Now that you’re married we wish you joy
First a girl and then a boy—
Seven years after comes son and daughter—
Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”
He repeated the last line softly ... and a funny little smile pranced at
the corners of his mouth. “Is the game old-fashioned, Deb, for present
company? Here you are, hopelessly compromised—entirely at my mercy——”
She shook her head. “Much too old-fashioned!” but was nevertheless not
quite sure how far the jocund spirit held sway.... There was an element
of primitive commonplace in man which baffled all her utmost powers of
histrionics—and she knew it; expecting its most unexpected appearances.
When the invariable happened, she had hitherto been able to cope with
it in all its forms so triumphantly as to surprise even herself—using
alternatively the weapons of pure wonderment, appeal to good comradeship,
elfin irony, pathos of reminiscence.... So far, she had had better luck
than she deserved. But each averted peril left her a little wearier of
wayside incident, a little more restless for the good thing which brought
rest.
And now—Cliffe. Or was it merely her fancy that his eyes threatened?
Even Cliffe, whose apparent happy sexlessness had been a subject of
such absorbing debate between herself and Antonia and Zoe. Cliffe—even
Cliffe—God’s understudy, who brought lovers together for his whimsy and
parted them for caprice; and whom no girl of them had caught in lover
mood himself—Even Cliffe—but he was a stranger to her now, as they all
were, the friendliest, when this thing touched to life some fundamental
antagonism.
“Behind the times, am I? Well, try the new way, then. Advanced theory,
and all that.... We don’t love each other, but let us experiment in
life’s stuff. We may ... please each other without loving. Why not? The
Youth of to-day refuses to squander itself in unsubstantial dreamings.
Here am I—here are you—brilliant young intellectuals. Eugenics—and
all that! Likewise, we are quite crudely frank about our respective
pasts; and render it fully clear that we have no intention of making
claims on sentiment or responsibility beyond the present hour. And I
am cynically epigrammatic about marriage, and you are fairly amusing
about chastity. And then, let me see—yes—then we become serious and
rather subtle; introspective psychology—passion and its effect on the
individual temperament.—God! deliver me from this modern fashion of
erotic promiscuity masquerading as Repertory Ethics! Give me instead the
old-fashioned blackguard and the out-of-date village maiden—and they’ll
play me a decenter scene than ever achieved by all this twentieth-century
tangle-talk. Deb—I know a man and a girl who consented to humour the
State and get married for no better reason than because they had saved up
the price of a divorce, to put in the bank—a sort of emergency exit. And
they asked me to admire their hideous sanity. ‘We’ll take each other for
better,’ the man sniggered—‘but why insist that two human beings should
take each other for worse?’ smug fool—as though his beastly Marriage
on a Reasonable Basis were worth while, anticipating dreariness and
weariness and satiety. To go in for it gallantly, with hope and a ray of
idealism—that’s marriage on a reasonable basis. But this fellow asked me
to _admire_ him....”
“Now, I wonder what you said to him to dispel that illusion?” Deb was
quite serene and comfortable again now that Cliffe was making speeches.
He could be reckoned to go on for hours, his out-thrust chin propped
on his clenched fists. She suspected he might be equally wrathful
and eloquent had he chosen to hold forth in defence instead of in
condemnation of his subject. But still....
“People think, because there’s a war on, it ought to reduce the human
psychology to a state of beautiful rustic Big Simplicity.... ‘We have
no time for minute dissections of idea in these times when——’ Idiots!
Windbags! As if war itself—now—were a beautiful rustic simple Big
thing. Everything’s complex to a verge of lunacy—it’s the tendency of
evolution—war and peace and character and morality—The war hasn’t made
a halfpenny-worth of difference—only a khaki embrace gives a fictitious
impression of bluff manliness.... Complexity is raging everywhere beneath
the surface layer of uniform, just the same—just the same. We’re all
victims to it—you, Deb, and I, Deb. And the immediate tormenting question
of me and you ... we don’t love each other, do we? You who know too much
and have done too little?—do we?”
He rose to his gaunt height, and pressed his large hands on her
shoulders, and stood looking down upon her ... she wriggled a trifle
uneasily. There was monotony in this procession of negative wooings, and
she would have welcomed a change. It might perhaps have been possible
to care for Cliffe—if he had not damped her ardour by presupposing the
contrary. If he had made love to her ... love, like the threshold of a
dim yet familiar garden fresh with the night-breath of drenched petals——
And instead they were ruling her round with geometrical lines and
angles—theories! She raised her dragging white eyelids and looked up at
him with an intimate appeal for the garden ... the garden back again....
His face grew suddenly stern.
“Go up to bed, child—I’m going for a walk on the Common——”
But he did not remove his hands—till, swooping, he kissed her gently on
the forehead. And strode abruptly out of the front door into the dark
dripping road.
An uncanny familiarity about his action ... a detached feeling of
having once been the spectator—then Deb remembered. She had seen Cliffe
treat Antonia in exactly the same way. It was his celebrated Kiss of
Renunciation, as performed before all the Crowned Heads of Europe....