The Complete Stories (33 page)

  "Did she talk about it much, before she came to lunch?"

  "Oh no, she just said ‘I'm afraid I've got to leave you today as Roger wants me to lunch with one of his old friends.' So I said, ‘How rotten, who?' and she said, ‘John Plant,' just like that, and I said, ‘John Plant,' and she said, ‘Oh, I forgot you were keen on thrillers.' Thrillers, as though you were just anybody. And I said, ‘Couldn't I possibly come,' and she said, ‘Not possibly,' and then when I was crying she said I might come with her to the lounge and sit behind a pillar and see you come in."

  "How did she describe me?"

  "She just said you'd be the one who paid for the cocktails. Isn't that just like Lucy, or don't you know her well enough to tell?"

  "What did she say about the lunch afterwards?"

  "She said everyone talked about Kipling."

  "Was that all?"

  "And she thought Roger had behaved badly because he doesn't like smart restaurants, and she said neither did she, but it had cost you a lot of money so it was nasty to complain. Of course, I wanted to hear all about you and what you said, and she couldn't remember anything. She just said you seemed very clever."

  "Oh, she said that?"

  "She says that about all Roger's friends. But, anyway, it's my turn now. I've got you to myself for the evening."

  She had. We were sitting at dinner now. Lucy was still talking to Mr. Benwell. On my other side there was some kind of relative of Roger's. She talked to me for a bit about how Roger had settled down since marriage. "I don't take those political opinions of his seriously," she said, "and, anyway, it's all right to be a communist nowadays. Everyone is."

  "I'm not," I said.

  "Well, I mean all the clever young people."

  So I turned back to Julia. She was waiting for me. "D'you know you once wrote me a letter?"

  "Good gracious. Why?"

  "Dear Madam, Thank you for your letter. If you will read the passage in question more attentively you will note that the down train was four minutes late at Frasham. There was thus ample time for the disposal of the bicycle bell. Yours faithfully, John Plant," she quoted.

  "Did I write that?"

  "Don't you remember?"

  "Vaguely. It was about The Frightened Footman, wasn't it?"

  "Mm. Of course I knew perfectly well about the train. I just wrote in the hopes of getting an answer and it worked. I liked you for being so severe. There was another girl at school was literary too, and she had a crush on Gilbert Warwick. He wrote her three pages beginning, My Dear Anthea, all about his house and the tithe barn he's turned into his workroom and ending, Write to me again; I hope you like Silvia as much as Heather, those were two of his heroines, and she thought it showed what a better writer he was than you, but I knew just the opposite. And later Anthea did write again, and she had another long letter just like the first all about his tithe barn, and that made her very cynical. So I wrote to you again to show how different you were."

  "Did I answer?"

  "No. So then all the Literary Club took to admiring you instead of Gilbert Warwick."

  "Because I didn't answer letters?"

  "Yes. You see, it showed you were a real artist and didn't care a bit for your public, and just lived for your work."

  "I see."

  After dinner Roger said, "Has little Julia been boring you frightfully?"

  "Yes."

  "I thought she was. She's very pretty. It's a great evening for her."

  Eventually we returned to the drawing room and sat about. Roger did not know how to manage this stage of this party. He talked vaguely of going on somewhere to dance and of playing a new parlour game that had lately arrived from New York. No one encouraged him. I did not speak to Lucy until I came to say good-bye, which was very early, as soon as the first guest moved and everyone, on the instant, rose too. When I said good-bye to her, Julia said, "Please, I must tell you. You're a thousand times grander than I ever imagined. It was half a game before—now it's serious."

  I could imagine the relief in the house as the last of us left, Roger and Lucy emerging into one another's arms as though from shelter after a storm ... "So that's over. Was it as bad as you expected?" "Worse, worse. You were splendid" ... perhaps they—and Julia too?—were cutting a caper on the drawing-room carpet in an ecstasy of liberation.

  "That," I said to myself, "is what you have bought with your five pounds."

  That evening, next day and for several days, I disliked Lucy. I made a story for all who knew him, of Roger's dinner party, leaving the impression that this was the kind of life Lucy enjoyed and that she was driving Roger into it. But for all that I did not abate my resolve to force my friendship upon her. I can give no plausible account of this inconsistency. I was certainly not, consciously, in love with her. I did not, even, at that time find her conspicuously beautiful. In seeking her friendship I did not look for affection nor, exactly, for esteem. I sought recognition. I wanted to assert the simple fact of my separate and individual existence. I could not by any effort of will regard her as being, like Trixie, "one of Roger's girls," and I demanded reciprocation; I would not be regarded as, like Basil, "one of Roger's friends"; still less, like Mr. Benwell, as someone who had to be asked to dinner every now and then. I had little else to think about at the time, and the thing became an itch with me. I felt about her, I suppose, as old men feel who are impelled by habit to touch every third lamppost on their walks; occasionally something happens to distract them, they see a friend or a street accident and they pass a lamppost by; then all day they fret and fidget until, after tea, they set out shamefacedly to put the matter right. That was how I felt about Lucy; our relationship constituted a tiny disorder in my life that had to be adjusted.

  That at least is how, in those earliest days, I explained my obsession to myself, but looking at it now, down the long, mirrored corridor of cumulative emotion, I see no beginning to the perspective. There is in the apprehension of woman's beauty an exquisite, early intimation of loveliness when, seeing some face, strange or familiar, one gains, suddenly, a further glimpse and foresees, out of a thousand possible futures, how it might be transfigured by love; the vision is often momentary and transient, never to return in waking life, or else precipitately succeeded by the reality, and so forgotten. With Lucy—her grace daily more encumbered by her pregnancy; deprived of sex, as women are, by its own fulfilment—the vision was extended and clarified until, with no perceptible transition, it became the reality. But I cannot say when it first appeared. Perhaps, that evening, when she said, about the Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste, "I can't think why John should want to have a house like that," but it came without surprise; I had sensed it on its way, as an animal, still in profound darkness and surrounded by all the sounds of night, will lift its head, sniff, and know, inwardly, that dawn is near. Meanwhile, I moved for advantage as in a parlour game.

  Julia brought me success. Our meeting, so far from disillusioning her, made her cult of me keener and more direct. It was no fault of mine, I assured Roger, when he came to grumble about it; I had not been in the least agreeable to her; indeed towards the end of the evening I had been openly savage.

  "The girl's a masochist," he said, adding with deeper gloom, "and Lucy says she's a virgin."

  "There's plenty of time for her. The two troubles are often cured simultaneously."

  "That's all very well, but she's staying another ten days. She never stops talking about you."

  "Does Lucy mind?"

  "Of course she minds. It's driving us both nuts. Does she write you a lot of letters?"

  "Yes."

  "What does she say?"

  "I don't read them. I feel as though they were meant for somebody else. Besides they're in pencil."

  "I expect she writes them in bed. No one's ever gone for me like that."

  "Nor for me," I said. "It's not really at all disagreeable."

  "I daresay not," said Roger. "I thought only actors and sex-novelists and clergymen came in for it."

  "No, no, anybody may—scientists, politicians, professional cyclists—anyone whose name gets into the papers. It's just that young girls are naturally religious."

  "Julia's eighteen."

  "She'll get over it soon. She's been stirred up by suddenly meeting me in the flesh after two or three years' distant devotion. She's a nice child."

  "That's all very well," said Roger, returning sulkily to his original point. "It isn't Julia I'm worried about, it's ourselves, Lucy and me—she's staying another ten days. Lucy says you've got to be nice about it, and come out this evening, the four of us. I'm sorry, but there it is."

  So for a week I went often to Victoria Square, and there was the beginning of a half-secret joke between Lucy and me in Julia's devotion. While I was there Julia sat smug and gay; she was a child of enchanting prettiness; when I was absent, Roger told me, she moped a good deal and spent much time in her bedroom writing and destroying letters to me. She talked about herself, mostly, and her sister and family. Her father was a major and they lived at Aldershot; they would have to stay there all the year round now that Lucy no longer needed their company in London. She did not like Roger. "He's not very nice about you," she said.

  "Roger and I are like that," I explained. "We're always foul about each other. It's our fun. Is Lucy nice about me?"

  "Lucy's an angel," said Julia, "that's why we hate Roger so."

  Finally there was the evening of Julia's last party. Eight of us went to dance at a restaurant. Julia was at first very gay, but her spirits dropped towards the end of the evening. I was living in Ebury Street; it was easy for me to walk home from Victoria Square, so I went back with them and had a last drink. "Lucy's promised to leave us alone, just for a minute, to say good-bye," Julia whispered.

  When we were alone, she said, "It's been absolutely wonderful the last two weeks. I didn't know it was possible to be so happy. I wish you'd give me something as a kind of souvenir."

  "Of course. I'll send you one of my books, shall I?"

  "No," she said, "I'm not interested in your books any more. At least, of course, I am, terribly, but I mean it's you I love."

  "Nonsense," I said.

  "Will you kiss me, once, just to say good-bye."

  "Certainly not."

  Then she said suddenly, "You're in love with Lucy, aren't you?"

  "Good heavens, no. What on earth put that into your head?"

  "I can tell. Through loving you so much, I expect. You may not know it, but you are. And it's no good. She loves that horrid Roger. Oh, dear, they're coming back. I'll come and say good-bye to you tomorrow, may I?"

  "No."

  "Please. This hasn't been how I planned it at all."

  Then Roger and Lucy came into the room with a sly look as though they had been discussing what was going on and how long they should give us. So I shook hands with Julia and went home.

  She came to my rooms at ten next morning. Mrs. Legge, the landlady, showed her up. She stood in the door, swinging a small parcel. "I've got five minutes," she said, "the taxi's waiting. I told Lucy I had some last-minute shopping."

  "You know you oughtn't to do this sort of thing."

  "I've been here before. When I knew you were out. I pretended I was your sister and had come to fetch something for you."

  "Mrs. Legge never said anything to me about it."

  "No. I asked her not to. In fact I gave her ten shillings. You see she caught me at it."

  "At what?"

  "Well, it sounds rather silly. I was in your bedroom, kissing things—you know, pillows, pajamas, hair brushes. I'd just got to the washstand and was kissing your razor when I looked up and found Mrs. Whatever-she's-called standing in the door."

  "Good God, I shall never be able to look her in the face again."

  "Oh, she was quite sympathetic. I suppose I must have looked funny, like a goose grazing." She gave a little, rather hysterical giggle, and added, "Oh, John, I do love you so."

  "Nonsense. I shall turn you out if you talk like that."

  "Well, I do. And I've got you a present." She gave me the square parcel. "Open it."

  "I shan't accept it," I said unwrapping a box of cigars.

  "But you must. You see, they'd be no good to me, would they? Are they good ones?"

  "Yes," I said, looking at the box. "Very good ones indeed."

  "The best?"

  "Quite the best, but ..."

  "That's what the man in the shop said. Smoke one now."

  "Julia dear, I couldn't. I've only just finished breakfast."

  She saw the point of that. "When will you smoke the first one? After luncheon? I'd like to think of you smoking the first one."

  "Julia, dear, it's perfectly sweet of you, but I can't, honestly ..."

  "I know what you're thinking, that I can't afford it. Well, that's all right. You see, Lucy gave me five pounds yesterday to buy a hat. I thought she would—she often does. But I had to wait and be sure. I'd got them ready, hidden yesterday evening. I meant to give you them then. But I never got a proper chance. So here they are." And then, as I hesitated, with rising voice, "Don't you see I'd much rather give you cigars than have a new hat? Don't you see I shall go back to Aldershot absolutely miserable, the whole time in London quite spoilt, if you won't take them?"

  She had clearly been crying that morning and was near tears again.

  "Of course I'll take them," I said. "I think it's perfectly sweet of you."

  Her face cleared in sudden, infectious joy.

  "There. Now we can say good-bye."

  She stood waiting for me, not petitioning this time, but claiming her right. I put my hands on her shoulders and gave her a single, warm kiss on the lips. She shut her eyes and sighed. "Thank you," she said in a small voice, and hurried out to her waiting taxi, leaving the box of cigars on my table.