Lover's Leap (13 page)

Most of the tables were unoccupied. As I paused before choosing one, someone touched my arm. I turned and found myself standing beside Jennifer. She was sitting at a table alone.

‘Won't you sit here, Philip?' she said.

My first impulse was to refuse, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do that and I stood hesitating.

‘Do!' she said, and as I sat down she asked ‘How are you, Philip?'

‘Is this a professional enquiry after a broken heart?' I asked. But my sourness did not provoke her to retaliation this time.

‘No,' she said; ‘it's pure unprofessional sympathy. How strange that we should meet here. I came in by the merest chance because I wanted a cup of tea. Martha's away on holiday and I didn't want the trouble of making it myself at home. You know, Philip, you've never been quite just to me. I nearly wrote to you after our last talk…. You remember our last talk?'

I nodded.

‘… to tell you that what you said of me was quite untrue. You said, you know, that I had been against you from the first and that I had set Rose against you. That wasn't true, Philip. From first to last I never made the slightest attempt to interfere. I didn't even want to. Why should I? As I told you, I was anxious about Rose's happiness at first, but as soon as I saw all was well, I was ready and anxious to be friendly. You were the unfriendly one, not I. You didn't like me, did you?'

‘Only because I thought you didn't like me.'

‘Well, I hope you'll try to believe what I've said.'

‘I do believe it,' I said; ‘and I hope you'll forget my beastly remarks. If I hadn't been in such a stew I should never have spoken as I did.'

We were silent. I longed to ask after Rose but I couldn't bear to mention her name. Even this meeting with Jennifer
had shaken me so severely that I had to keep a firm hold on my muscles to prevent myself trembling. Perhaps Jennifer realized what I was feeling, for a moment later she asked:

‘How are things going?'

‘O, all right,' I said.

‘You're happy, Philip?'

‘I've … I've recovered, if that's what you mean.'

‘I'm glad. She would be glad to know that. May I tell her?'

I hesitated. The thought that Rose should be told merely that bare fact was for a moment unbearable. A violent, obscure rebellion rose in me. That nest of blind snakes that Saltdyke had lulled to sleep, lifted their heads and writhed and hissed in my heart. But Jennifer was waiting for me to answer, and I mastered myself sufficiently to say: ‘Yes, tell her.'

‘Could I tell her, Philip,' Jennifer went on with gentle persuasiveness, ‘… could I say that you have come to feel that it was better for you to part? It would be a consolation to her to know that.'

I forced myself to ignore the final protest of my vanity, but I could not speak. I nodded my head and got up to go. Jennifer held out her hand. I took it.

‘Remember, I'm your friend,' she said.

I had told no one of my visit to London except Etherton. He had replied with an invitation to dine at his club, and I hurried to my flat now, determined not to leave it till it was time to join him. My one desire now was to get back to Saltdyke. To have come so near to Rose had been a severe trial of my strength: but I had learned from it that, though I was still vulnerable, I was at bottom my own master. The assurance of that enabled me to climb the stairs to my rooms, unlock my door and go in with a prepared callousness that protected me against all the
assaults of that too familiar place. My feelings had grown calm and cold, tinged only with a passive and sober bitterness like the flavour of iron in water.

My eyes fell on the piano I had bought for Rose. I opened the top. The newness of the inside surprised me: it still smelt of the factory. Yet surely years of happiness and pain had passed since the day I bought it. ‘I may as well try to sell it,' I thought coldly as I shut the lid and turned away.

Etherton received me with his usual friendliness. ‘Would it be tactful to remark on how well you look?' he asked.

‘I
am
well,' I said: ‘there's no denying it, though it's flying in the face of romantic convention,'

‘It's the realists who come off best on these occasions, Philip, and you're a realist at heart, I believe. But I'm glad you've recovered. These experiences are extremely painful.'

‘Well, you warned me, and you have every right now to tell me you told me so.'

‘But you notice I have refrained. After all, it was useless information. One can't learn a poem by being given a résumé in prose of its contents.'

‘A poem? In the present case it was a poem that went to pieces rather badly at the end.'

‘Not a bit of it, my dear boy. At present you're hardly in a position to appreciate the closing verses. But you'll be surprised how it will improve later on. When one is able, at last, to contemplate one's tragedies with detachment, they become, you'll find, extraordinarily fascinating. One returns to them, as one does to
Hamlet
, again and again, studying them act by act and finding, at each new reading, new revelations.'

‘Revelations, in my case, that I'd rather not receive; revelations of my own absurdity.'

‘What does that matter? They're all the more valuable.'

‘If you knew how much time I've wasted during the last few years in poking and prying into my mental and emotional machinery, you'd tell me, I'm sure, that it was time I turned my attention to other things.'

‘Not I. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom: it is the only way of approaching the knowledge of human nature. But your poking and prying must be relentless: there must be no favouritism, no sparing your vanities, no winking at your absurdities. That kind of inspection is mere morbid egotism. You can't know yourself till you have seen through yourself. O I assure you, Philip, you'll find your tragedy a gold-mine when you get to work on it. Meanwhile, take a holiday.'

‘O, I'm taking a holiday all right,' I said. ‘I'm working like hell.'

‘At your paintings?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah, then you're getting at the gold already.'

Three months later. It is now the middle of March and I have been to London again. I found it no longer formidable. My old affection for it had returned. At the thought of the friends I had there, of the pictures, concerts, theatres, old interests and excitements began to stir in me. I actually regretted that I was going back to Saltdyke next day and I ended by postponing my return for nearly a week. It was delightful to wake up in my flat once more and feel that London was swarming round me, waiting for me. I revisited my old haunts, feeling that I had returned home after travels that had made home a new and absorbing experience. In the Cafe Royal I found my old friends. They had met there, apparently, during all the huge lapse of time since I had left them. The revolution which had turned my world upside down had not altered their routine by a hair's breadth. And what Etherton had foretold about my tragedy was already, it
seemed, beginning to come true. It was beginning to take on the quality of a poem: I no longer fought shy of it. When memories of Rose waylaid me as I passed through our old haunts, I did not repel them, for now they shed on my daily existence and the London in which I moved a subtle and mysterious beauty as of those lilac-coloured evenings of late autumn in which London takes on the loveliness of a city of dreams.

When spring was beginning to show on the marshland I left Saltdyke and returned permanently to Brunswick Square.

Well, that's over, anyhow. and I don't repent; no, not for a minute. It had to be, as I told Geordie.

‘If it has to be, Meriel, you'd better get on with it,' he said. ‘You'd better go to London and get it out of your system.'

Get it out of my system! That shows how little he understands me. He can't understand that I should have ideals and ambitions of my own. He's so wrapped up in his wretched business that he has no interest in other things. Art means nothing to him. From first to last he ridiculed the theatricals. Whenever I talked to him about my part or got him to act as prompter when I tried it over in the drawing-room, his face wore a tolerant, sarcastic smile that was simply maddening. He refused to take it seriously. One evening, for instance, I was trying over different ways of doing that entry in the third act when I have to come suddenly into the Desmonds' drawing-room and say: ‘The will has been found, Arthur.' It is the most dramatic moment in the play, and the actress— that was me, of course—has to express a terrific excitement. First I tried rushing on with my hair all untidy and almost shouting the phrase. Then I tried coming in slowly with a sort of pent-up intensity and saying the words in a hissing whisper. I showed Geordie the two methods and asked him which he thought most effective. At first he didn't reply but just looked at me as if I were a child trying to get him to play some silly game. Then he said:

‘Why not try a couple of cartwheels, Meriel?'

I was so exasperated that I burst into tears, and then of course he was sorry. That was the end of it. I didn't bother him any more. After all, Mr. Seaton-McPherson, our producer, had said I had the makings of a fine actress, and when the day came for our performance in St. George's Parochial Hall I really had an immense success. The
applause was quite deafening. I had to appear before the curtain—with the others, of course—again and again. Next day there was a notice in our local paper. It said: ‘Mrs. Filmer played the part for all it is worth.'

But even that didn't convince Geordie. ‘Ah, but what
is
it worth? That's the point, Meriel,' he said with his dry, provoking smile.

I had always felt that acting was my true vocation and after the performance I consulted Mr. Seaton-McPherson about taking it up professionally. I asked him if I couldn't go to London and get a part there. He said it was very uphill work; but at last, when he saw that I was determined, he said I might get a walking-on part, without pay, and I made him promise to give me letters to one or two London producers. I didn't mention it to Geordie. What would have been the good? Besides, I hadn't really come to any decision. Of course I knew it would make me miserable to leave Geordie. We are really devoted to each other, though on the whole we get on very badly. What he would do if I left him I simply couldn't imagine, but whenever I had threatened to do so he just laughed. He didn't believe I would really go. But why, I asked myself, should I go on sacrificing my career for someone who didn't appreciate me?

Well, no doubt he appreciates me now, poor Geordie, now that it's too late. He didn't believe, till the last minute, that I was really going. ‘Geordie,' I said on our last evening, ‘it has dawned upon me that for the last eight years I've been living here with a strange man.' That comes out of Ibsen's
Doll's House
, you know. But even that Geordie wouldn't take seriously. He smiled his sarcastic smile.

‘My dear Meriel,' he said, ‘I have known for some years that I was married to a very strange woman.'

Of course it was an awful wrench, but as soon as I got started I knew how right I had been. It was wonderful
to feel free, to be setting out, as it were, to seek my fortune. As good luck would have it my friend Hilda Chepstow was going abroad for a year or more, so I took her flat in Powis Square. I was armed with Mr. Seaton-McPherson's letters of introduction.

How excited I felt as I got into the train. I had the feeling that all sorts of thrilling adventures were going to happen to me. ‘Even before I get to Victoria,' I thought to myself, ‘something thrilling is going to happen.' I felt so certain of it that, looking back on it now, I half believe I must have had second sight, that I really did know beforehand that Philip Marling—charming name!—was going to get into my carriage when the train stopped at Beresford. Anyhow, the moment I saw him I knew that something new and thrilling had come into my life. It was his eyes that told me so, those deep, quiet, brown eyes whose gaze seems to be at the same time absent-minded and terribly penetrating. At the very first glance my heart began to beat furiously; I almost felt I was going to faint and I turned away and looked through the window at the people on the opposite platform.

But isn't it extraordinary to be so deeply affected at a first glance? It must mean something, something almost supernatural. I knew, without looking, that he had chosen the corner at the other end of the carriage, facing me but it wasn't till long after we had left Beresford that 1 had the courage to bring my eyes back into the train. Even then I daren't look at him, but I knew he was sitting quite still, so still that I was sure he must be reading, and when at last I ventured a quick glance at him I saw he was deep in a book. Till that moment I hadn't noticed, though I had divined, how handsome he was; but now I allowed myself to take a good look at him. He had taken off his hat. His thick, wavy hair and his eyebrows were almost black; his face very brown, his mouth large, sensitive and sad. The strong brown hand with which he held his
book set my heart beating again. He was like some beautiful, sad animal. I wondered if he was an actor. I am sure he too had been thrilled at our meeting: that was why he had buried himself in his book, for fear I should be offended by his too obvious interest. I turned away: it was too agitating to look at him for long. But though I pretended to be watching the view that slid past the window, I was really watching his faint, shadowy reflection that dawned and faded on the glass between me and the view. But he never so much as moved his head. All he did was now and then to flick over a page of his book. Every time he did so my heart jumped into my mouth. I began to feel dreadfully restless and at last I got up to open the window. But I couldn't manage it.

Then with a leap of the heart I heard him move. He stood up. He was coming. ‘I'll do it for you,' he said.