Friends and Lovers (21 page)

The Embankment and gardens, south of West almost deserted at this hour. The river, swollei September tides, was running smoothly and ge the sandbags propped up against the Embank] their weaker points. The bright lights of the strung above the dark water, a glittering neck displayed against velvet as black as that of calculated window.

Occasional tugs and bar^ slow, steady progress; if it were not for the refl lights on the water, broken and lengthened as over the uneven surface of its deep currents, y have guessed the strength of the river which hell constant struggle. The stars were clear and high tors, evenly spaced along the city streets, had d eyes from the real beauty of the night sky. But here, above the dark water, the sky was dominant again. The individual noises of a great city merged with each other into the steady hum of some giant dynamo, into a background of droning power against which you could hear the gentle insistent rhythm of the lapping water below your feet. Here, on the Embankment, with its feeling of distance from noise and light, was a sense of escape from the machine of living.

They reached Gower Street ten minutes before Baker House barred its door for the night. So they walked slowly round the quiet Bloomsbury square which lay behind Gower Street, unwilling to leave each other a minute before they must.

“When am I going to see you again?” David asked.

“The difficulty is,” he explained, “I am as tied down by rules and regulations as you are.

I can come up for an evening, provided I catch the Flying Fomic—the train that gets me back to Oxford in time before the gates are locked. The colleges are all locked up by twelve, you see. After then you climb over the wall in a dark patch where you won’t be spotted easily.”

Penny looked at him worriedly.

“What about tonight?”

“Term hasn’t begun yet, and I’m in digs with no more walls to climb, and my landlady seems to be a decent sort. Only, when term does start she will have to stick to the rules or lose her licence.”

“You mean she has got to see that you are safely inside her house?”

“Or she would not be allowed a licence to rent her rooms to undergraduates.

There is nothing like the economic screw to tighten up the good old moral standards.”

“What happens if you break the rules?” It seemed all so fantastic somehow.

The undergraduates looked like men; they talked like men.

Was something wrong with them that they couldn’t be treated like men?

“You are up on the carpet before the Dean of your college. You can be gated—which is a sort of confined to barracks— for a week or so, or you can be fined. If you collect one interview too many with the Dean you can be sent down. Permanently if the Dean’s patience has worn out.”

“Lord, David Will you be able to catch the next train?”

“I’ll make it. Don’t worry. Penny.” He smiled at her anxiety, but he was ridiculously pleased by it.

“I only told you all this so th; Sunda Is it a Pen He!” Da\ bidding happy two: again.

“Bet tow arc She for thi closed, He looked to spe which At las turned away then, smiling. He began to walk quickly towards Tottenham Court Road. He glanced at his watch again, and he began to run.

Chapter Fifteen.

NEW PERSPECTIVE.

By February the strangeness of Penny’s new life in London had settled into the appearance of routine. It seemed simple enough on the surface, falling into three neat, separate worlds: there was David, there was her work at the Slade, there was the group of new friends and acquaintances. But it was David’s world round which the other two circled.

At Christmas, in Edinburgh, she had tried to introduce the subject of David.

But the family somehow had always so much totell her about Moira’s great social success this winter, about all the fun that Penny was missing by living in London, that she had stopped trying.

It was discouraging to start talking about an interesting evening at Sadler’s Wells with her friend Lillian Marston, when Moira would cut in with long descriptions of three plays she had seen in Edinburgh that winter. Or, when she mentioned lunch with David at the Cafe Royal, her mother would start talking about the Charity Ball which Penny would have so enjoyed if she could have been there: Moira had met the most charming young men. So after a while Penny did not mention London or her life there, and the family did not even seem to notice. They all agreed that it had been a very enjoyable Christmas, and how Penelope must be missing Edinburgh really, although she had tried to be very brave about it, and once or twice it had to be admitted had given herself little airs about London. Giving oneself airs, Mrs. Lorrimer had said, was a thing she would not tolerate, not for one moment. Secretly she was inclined to worry about the number of letters which Penelope had received that Christmas and about the much too casual way in which David Bosworth had been mentioned. Still, better to cut off all conversation about David Bosworth and show that he was of no importance at all. Mrs. Lorrimer was of the school of thought which finnl believed that if you didn’t talk about the nasty pain it would-just go away.

And so Penny returned to London after the New Yea: convinced that as long as she appeared to be the same girl it voice, face, health, and mannerisms she would always be considered the same. But there had been changes within changf too. Strangely enough, the things she had been most assure about in September—her work at the Slade, for instance were those that had caused her the greatest worry this winter And what she had worried about in September had becomi completely decided by January: once the major change o: Penny-without-David into Penny-with-David had been made it had become a steady progression of excitement and joy, i climbing graph of happiness curving up into infinity.

But her work at the Slade had been otherwise: here then had been changes within change with a vengeance. The class rooms, the wandering corridors of University College t( which the Slade was attached, the library and cafeteria, well no longer bewildering places where the newcomer felt ver] much alone and very lost. The art students no longer seemec the forbidding group of genius into which the first-year mar could never penetrate. Now she knew that at least three quarters of them were either young men and women whosf talents, if they learned and worked hard enough, would sec un them a job in teaching, or in design, or in illustrating; or thel were rather decorative young things who, judging by the minimum of work which they did and the number of parties which they attended, were only marking time aesthetically until they married. The rest of the students were those deter mined few whose whole lives, for better or for worse, well going to be linked permanently to pure art.

Most of the students were young. All of them disparagec their own work publicly, privately hoped for recognition talked acidly of those who had become famous, and hid thei) seriousness under a cloak of superficial lightheartedness. the majority of them calculated the cost of their lunches at the cafeteria down to the saving of fourpence on the sweet (fiv< fourpences would buy a seat in the gods for a new play; three fourpences would take you into one of the less fashion able cinemas), and had a matter-of-fact knowledge of the last inch to which their narrow budgets might be extended In fact, there was nothing very much to distinguish them from the other students at University College except either the women’s conscious hair-styles (a good deal of brushing and sleeking down of hair to turn them into medieval pageboys) or the wandering about the quadrangle in oil-stained smocks. And that was counted slightly too much on the local-colour side, like the younger medical students who always appeared from the hospital across the road in short white jackets with stethoscopes bulging their pockets.

Even her teachers, who had at first seemed so formidable, so distant on their Olympian heights, lost their unapproachable air. They were good artists who could either be good or bad teachers. When they seemed withdrawn and silent that did not mean they were communicating with their souls in abstract patterns. It was much more likely that they were partly depressed about their own work, interrupted by teaching; partly thoughtful about the flashes of intelligence or the abyss of banality which their pupils could display; and partly worried about the mortgage on their home, the baby’s persistent bronchitis, the last bank statement.

In fact. Penny learned, only a very few of the teachers or students could afford the luxury of striking romantic attitudes. Work was quite as urgent as in her father’s law office; only, here, because people had chosen a career whose success would rarely be measured in money, but rather in doing as well as possible in what they liked to do, there was less feeling of being bound to a machine and more sense of freedom in behaviour and ideas. Money was counted as something useful, but it was always the means to the end, the means of being free enough economically to devote oneself entirely to painting or sculpture, and never an end in itself.

Penny began to learn these things in October, and she began to learn about her own work too, but hardly in the way she had imagined. After the first weeks of loneliness, shyness, and disturbing fears over her probable inadequacy she settled down to prove to herself that she was not an object for pity. It turned out to be an extremely painful process.

For after some weeks of proving that her work was not so bad after all, she found that nothing she was painting pleased her. Yet it was still the same kind of work, developed of course, which she had done last year. It had not changed. But it did not please her any more. It was then that she realized that she had changed, that her work had not, and that wa: the whole trouble. Somewhere, somehow, she had adoptei ideas and little tricks in painting which had seemed to maki her work promising. Now she was finding that these ideas these tricks, had carried her as far as they ever would.

Then was no possibility of growth in them. That was a very upsetting admission to make. Still more upsetting was the decision to start almost at thi beginning again, to change her conception of painting, to givi up much of what had once given her most pride. At first i was disheartening. She had abandoned ideas which, even i they had turned out to be limited, were certainly as good a any of those held by the average students. And it seemed a if she had found nothing to replace them. Then gradually something began to develop. Symington, the teacher whom she respected most (his owl work was excellent, and, strangely enough, was admired no only by his fellow-artists and pupils, but also by the public) was an interested observer of all this.

Because he was a gooc teacher as well as a. good painter he did not upset her witt advice, but waited until she was ready to come and ask fo: it.

“So you have cleared all the furniture out of the room?” hi said, with a smile, and that was the only reference he madi about the battle that had taken her twelve full weeks. But hi gave her a good deal of help—more than he usually gave t( women students.

By February she was happy in her work again, althougl she knew she was only at the very beginning. And she knew that she had still to find out whether it would be as good a-she wanted it to be; and that gave her just enough uncertainty to keep her from the fault of overconfidence, so that he] mind was open and willing to learn.

She would have been both pleased and amazed if she hac known that Symington had already picked her out as gooc material with more than average possibilities. And she woulc have been more than amazed to hear his comment on her to one of his colleagues.

“The pity of it is, she will marry. The; no more painting. As a teacher I find it deplorable,” Syming ton had finished, ‘but as a man I find it highly satisfactory. But then, some ten years ago, he had married one of hi; prettiest pupils, whose painting had since been confined t( funny drawings for four picture-loving children. His colleague, who was listening to this peculiarly masculine remark, had always been able to disprove most of Symington’s little philosophies.

But that day his arguing power had been weakened, for his mistress (who had never given up her career) had just left him, on the charge that he was ‘smothering her individuality.”

Penny might have been amazed and indignant, but it was perfectly true that, although she still took her work with complete seriousness, she had begun to think less and less of winning a scholarship to study in Rome. Or to live anywhere abroad which would separate her from David.

And it was not only her future ambitions which David had altered.

There was this strange reaction in making new friends. After the first week, when the students had eyed one another, hesitated, circled vaguely around, given offhand smiles, tried out a few casual remarks, and then suddenly had begun to form the little groups which ate together, went to concerts and theatres together, walked and talked together, Penny had had her share of masculine interest. There would be some one who would drift over towards her place in the classroom and look at her work and begin talking. Or there would be an oblique approach to the lunch-table where she sat. Or accidental meetings at the College gates which happened too regularly. She was flattered, for vanity, catlike, cannot resist purring when it is stroked.

But that didn’t let her fall into the delusion that she should accept any invitations ‘just to be kind,” as so many of the other girls looked at it.

What kindness was there in letting a man waste an evening of his life on you?

For that was the trouble: she liked several of the men, and some were attractive, but none of them raised more than a friendly smile in her, and none gave her what David gave her. That was the trouble: she would always make that comparison now.

Among the women there were those who sought out her company, and she accepted some of them more readily. They were safer. And yet, even with them, it seemed as if she couldn’t give them the same full interest that she would have given them a year ago. It was as if David used up so much of her thoughts and her emotions that there was little left to share out among others.

In Edinburgh she had made friends easily. But now she was neglecting them too. She forgot to write, and then would remember that with sudden attacks of remorse which were intense but brief. Apart from her letters to her family giving them the news of life in London (with mentions of David slipped in here and there to prepare them for the idea that she and David were in love), Edinburgh now seemed a piece of her life which had been amputated and thrown away.