Lover's Leap (18 page)

I sat immovable, paralysed. I heard him cross the room and open the door, and then he came back carrying his hat and stick.

‘Good night,' he said. ‘It's been delightful.'

I rose feebly to my feet. ‘Need you go yet?'

‘Yes, really I must..'

He went to the open door: I followed him.

‘Have something, have an apple, before you go.'

‘No, there's no time. I shall probably miss the last bus, as it is.'

I put my hand on his arm. ‘Then don't go, Philip.'

He hesitated. A sudden flush spsread over his face. He stood doubtful, uncertain. Then his eyes, dark and questioning, looked down into mine.

‘Don't go,' I whispered, feeling all the strength ebb from my body. My hand was still on his sleeve: but for that I should have fallen. For another moment he did not move. Then he turned and hung up his hat and stick.

A Month Later. I suppose ordinary people, if they knew that Philip and I are lovers, would be horrified and would look upon me as utterly shameless, just like any other woman who leaves her husband and becomes another man's mistress. But that would be only because they didn't know the whole truth. They don't know, of course, that we were destined for each other. I tell myself sometimes
that I'm living in sin. I say it over and over, to make myself realize it; but its only effect is to give me a feeling of immense joy. Well, doesn't that prove that I'm not living in sin? Because if I were, I should feel terribly unhappy and ashamed. When people love as we do they cannot sin. I am sure that in the eyes of God Philip and I are married. I have never for a moment repented that I gave in to him that night a month ago, for I know I was obeying my destiny and his.

Philip pretends not to believe that we were destined for each other. He laughs when I speak of it. But that is only his old way of withholding himself, for even now he does that, in speech at any rate. If he were to admit that he had realized the meaning of our meeting in the train, or that when he first invited me to tea it was anything more than the most casual politeness, he would be giving himself away. So he just laughs and teases me, and he's so enchanting, when he does, that I can never hold out for long. And why should I try to? So long as I am with him I am content; more than content, blissfully, blessedly happy. Ah, if only we could always be together. It is so painful to part from him, even for only a short time. When he leaves me, I shut down my shell, like a limpet when the tide goes down, and lead a life of darkness and thirst till he returns.

A Fortnight Later. How terribly upsetting. I've just received a telegram, reply paid, from Geordie. ‘Coming to London on business to-morrow. Lunch with me one fifteen. Criterion.'

I can't refuse. I can't possibly wire back: ‘Sorry engaged.' And yet Philip and I have arranged to lunch together and go to the Tate afterwards. He's going to show me the modern French pictures, and I simply can't bear to put him off. If I made some vague excuse he would think I didn't mind whether I lunched with him or not,
and if I told him the truth he would, of course, be furiously jealous. What
can
I do? I'm at my wits' end. And here is Geordie's telegram waiting to be answered. How I hate having to make decisions, especially when I shall feel dreadfully upset whichever I make.

I decided at last that the only thing to do was to go straight to Philip, tell him everything and ask him to decide what I ought to do. I reached his flat at about eleven o'clock this morning. It was the first time I had been to see him in the morning and unexpected. When he opened the door he had a paint-brush in his hand and was wearing an old blue jersey instead of a coat. Of course he was very surprised to see me.

‘Are you very busy?' I said.

‘Yes,' he replied, ‘as a matter of fact I am.' But he stood aside to let me in.

I felt very guilty and very agitated. ‘I'm so sorry, Phil, but it's very important. It's about to-morrow'; and I explained the whole thing to him. ‘Do tell me what I ought to do?' I said. ‘I'll do whatever you tell me.'

He frowned. ‘But, my dear Meriel, of course you must meet him. How on earth could you refuse? What a business you're making of a perfectly simple thing. Why couldn't you simply have rung me up?'

‘But what about our lunch? Can it be next day?'

‘The day after to-morrow, that's Thursday. No, let us make it Friday.'

I felt the tears rush to my eyes: I couldn't speak and I turned to go.

But Philip patted me on the shoulder. ‘Very well, very well, you little goose, we'll make it Thursday.'

‘But are you sure, Phil …?'

‘Be off with you at once, or perhaps I'll change my mind'; and he pushed me to the door.

Next day. I dreaded meeting Geordie. I was afraid of his questions—when was I coming home? What was I doing?—all the questions I couldn't answer; and I was afraid, too, of being torn between him and Philip. Not that I have any doubt which I would choose; but it is dreadful to be torn, and I hoped that he would be at his most irritating so that I should feel how much better it is for us to remain apart.

But Geordie was at his very best. He didn't ask any of the questions I had feared and he was as affectionate and amusing as he used to be years ago. He annoyed me a little once or twice by not answering properly the questions I put to him about Mrs. Jackson and the housekeeping and by brushing aside some hints I wanted to give him which I knew would be useful.

‘Don't you worry your little head,' he replied. ‘Everything's running like clockwork.'

Except for that, we got on beautifully. He is really a dear old thing—that is, when he chooses to be. He told me he was going home by the four-twenty, so I went with him to Victoria to see him off.

‘Well,
au revoir
, Chicken,' he said, as he leaned from the carriage window. Chicken is one of his names for me. ‘It was a jolly lunch, wasn't it? I don't often lunch with ladies nowadays.'

‘Don't sit in a draught,' I shouted to him as the train started. But what's the use of telling him? He always does, and he always gets a cold afterwards.

Poor old Geordie. I could see, of course, that he misses me dreadfully, in spite of his pretending that everything is all right at home. For a few minutes after leaving the station I felt quite sad. Then I remembered that I was lunching with Philip to-morrow and all was well again.

‘A love affair,' said old etherton as we sat talking after dinner in the smoking-room of his club, ‘is a highly skilled business. Above all, it must never be allowed to become too serious. It should always be regarded as a charming diversion, a respite after the heat and burden of the day. Try always, my dear Philip, to retain something of the charm, of improvisation about it: beware of falling into a routine.'

‘Or it may degenerate into mere marriage?' I suggested.

‘Certainly not,' he said. ‘For an affair to become wedlock would not be a matter of degeneration but of complete transformation. You might as well speak of a Capriccio or an Étude or a Rhapsody or any other of those free, indefinite types of music degenerating into a Sonata or Fugue. Or a wild rose, let us say, degenerating into a wistaria. The thing's an absurdity.'

‘You're implying now that an affair is a simple thing; but you began by saying it is a highly skilled business.'

‘And so it is. Its very simplicity makes it difficult. That's not so paradoxical as it sounds. Your wild rose is by nature very transitory. The difficulty in a love affair is to preserve its freshness and fragrance beyond the brief normal limit: that can be done only by a good deal of art and artificiality on both sides. Routine and convention are its enemies, whereas they are all on the side of marriage. Marriage is a permanent edifice which takes a good deal of demolishing. A love affair is one of those charming and romantic pavilions which one sees at an Earl's Court Exhibition: unless you treat it rather gingerly you'll bring it about your ears, and as a ruin it's a very sordid and unsightly object, a wreckage of plaster and scrap-iron. Whereas a marriage that has fallen into disrepair can present an appearance of some dignity. So
remember, Philip, to break off the moment your affair shows signs of going to pieces. Agree to part while you can each retain some charming memories. Meanwhile, it's a delicious state, isn't it?'

‘It is indeed. I'm sorry to learn it's so short-lived.'

He chuckled. ‘O, come. With a little philosophy, Hedonism for choice, on both sides it will last some years. Is the lady inclined to philosophy?'

‘I'm afraid not. She's a child, though she's older than I am.'

‘A pity!' he said. ‘A grown-up child is a very unaccountable and formidable animal.'

Perhaps so. But a part of Meriel's childishness is her delightful gaiety. She has a great capacity for innocent enjoyment, for turning the most simple occasion into a festival, and she has a saving sense of humour which, by its unexpected incursions, frequently rescues her, and me too, from conflicts and complications. I have never before felt so contented, never spent such idyllic, light-hearted weeks as these last autumn weeks since the evening when I failed to try to catch the last bus. It seems, after all, that to be in love is a gay and simple affair; that is, if I am in love with Meriel. But am I? If I had been asked on the afternoon of that fateful evening I should unhesitatingly have said not. But on the following morning and every day since—well, what other term could I have used? After all, there are, I suppose, many ways of being in love. I am certainly not in love with her as I was with Rose. If she were to vanish, go suddenly back to her home leaving a polite note of apology, I should be sorry, horribly sorry, horribly disappointed and put out, but I should not be inconsolable. My attitude towards her is what I used to think Rose's was, in a lesser degree, towards me in the first weeks of our friendship. When we meet I am delighted to see her, I enjoy being with her, and I leave her without regret.

But isn't that really the ideal state? It combines the freshness and simplicity of the animal with the bland sagacity of the philosopher. It has nothing of the torturing intensity, the deep, disturbing hunger of my love for Rose.

Three months later. ‘Whatever we do,' I said to Meriel to-day, ‘don't let us become intense.'

‘What do you mean?' she asked. ‘Love each other intensely?'

‘Yes.'

‘But I do love you intensely, Phil.'

‘Then you mustn't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because if you do, we shall end by coming to grief.'

‘Then you don't love me intensely?'

‘Certainly not.'

She eyed me resentfully. ‘All you feel about me, I sometimes think, is that I do very well to play with.'

‘Quite right,' I said. ‘So you do. And I hope you feel the same about me.'

She ignored my levity. ‘And when I've served your purpose …'

‘My vile purpose,' I prompted.

‘… you'll just fling me aside …'

‘Yes, how does it go on? A poor, broken little …?'

‘Phil,' she burst in, ‘are you never serious?'

‘Not on these occasions,' I said, and at that point her gaiety came to the rescue.

At such times we skate on very thin ice, but fortunately the water under it is not very deep. Yet it might very easily become so, for I have discovered already that there are two Meriels, one the gay, charming, pleasure-loving child, the other a dark, romantic, almost melodramatic person. I see now why she dreamed of being an actress. She is always dramatizing herself. It appears that we
were destined for one another from the beginning of time; and when the times were ripe, God, Fate, the stars, or whoever or whatever it is that supervises these matters, tore her from her home and husband and flung us into each other's arms, ‘in a third-class smoker on the Southern Railway,' I added, as she explained these matters to me. But my facetiousness never checks her for long. She is determined that the whole thing shall be regarded in a highly romantic light, and in order that this should be possible I must be the masterful pursuer and she the shrinking pursued. Over and over again she has tried to make me confess that at the first glance in the third-class smoker I recognized her as my predestined mate and resolved to make her mine. She is quite serious about it, and although she ends by laughing when I explode it, I find, a day or two later, that the whole fantastic edifice has been re-erected.

‘But Meriel,' I say, ‘if I had recognized you as my predestined mate, wouldn't it have been superfluous for me to resolve, as you say I did, to make you mine, when Fate had already fixed that up, willy-nilly? You can't have it both ways.'

‘Then which way was it?' she asks eagerly.

‘Neither,' I promptly reply. ‘I hadn't a ghost of a notion, when I got into the train, that my Fate was seated in the opposite corner in a Saxe-blue serge.'

‘Saxe-blue serge?' There was a note of amazement in her voice. ‘But I wasn't wearing Saxe-blue serge.'

‘There now!' I said. ‘Doesn't that convince you of how little I was aware of the occasion? And as for resolving to make you mine, I shouldn't dream of such behaviour in a railway carriage.'

She frowned: she was not at all amused. ‘I wish you wouldn't say things like that, Philip.'

‘But why not?'

‘Because they're … well, they're improper.'

‘On the contrary, they're a declaration of propriety. You might as well say that the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” is dishonest. But consider, Meriel; isn't our whole existence, yours and mine, improper?'

She looked at me with a beautiful and disarming gravity that put an end to my teasing. ‘Not for me,' she said.

It is not out of mere frivolity that I tease Meriel. It's the only way that occurs to me of replying to her romantic attitude, and the only way of being honest with her and bringing her back to reality. I feel responsible for her, though God knows it was she who collared me, not I who collared her. But, after all, I allowed myself very willingly to be collared, and that, I suppose, might be taken by a romantically minded person to imply much; more, indeed, than I myself intended. That's what makes me feel responsible. Old Etherton in his neat little disquisition on the love affair described very accurately the spirit in which I entered into this relationship with Meriel, and so it alarms me when I find her taking it too … what shall I say? … too zealously. If only she had some absorbing work, as I have, to keep her independent and prevent her from focusing herself too exclusively on
us
. She seems to have given up all idea of the stage. I have raised the subject several times recently and last time I did so she frowned and fixed suspicious eyes on me.