The Edwardians (27 page)

She wondered about Sebastian, but, being a woman, her speculations were confined to the adventures he had had with women. The greater adventure of his mind was of no interest to her. She had scarcely suspected his true perplexities; or, if she had noticed their outward signs in his sudden reticences, his ill humour, his cutting remarks, she had at once attributed them to some love affair gone wrong. Lucy's imagination could not move outside that orbit. She had all the inquisitiveness of a woman about a man's life, even when that man happened to be her son. Honey would have seemed less sweet than any revelation from Sebastian about himself; but as no revelation was ever forthcoming she had to be content with such pictures as she could secretly make. From her point of view, Sylvia had certainly been the most satisfactory of Sebastian's affairs; for, out of her own experience, she could build up a very detailed reproduction of the relations between them. She had dwelt with an almost incestuous pleasure upon the vision of her son in the role of Sylvia's lover. But what of the other women Sebastian had known? What, for instance, of the little model he was said to have picked up in Chelsea?

The little model was, in reality, the fourth of Sebastian's experiments. Looking back over his life, he saw that it took shape, and that, out of the welter, four experiments emerged. (The crowd of other women counted for nothing; they had been merely incidents; inevitable, nauseating in retrospect, and, above all, tedious.) Only four women had made any mark on him; and, now that he could contemplate them detachedly, he observed with interest and surprise that each one had been drawn from a different caste—Sylvia; Teresa; the keeper's daughter; and now the little model. Not one of them had given him satisfaction. He had been defeated by Sylvia's code; defeated by Teresa's; the keeper's daughter—a desperate expedient, undertaken in a moment of revolt against both the upper and the middle classes—had ruffled his sensibilities from the start by her personal habits. In vain had he told himself that such things ought not to matter. They did matter. She was a good girl, a wholesome girl, a friendly, sensible girl, whom he had first noticed going the rounds with a pail of boiled meal for his young pheasants; but she had dropped her aitches and she had sucked her teeth, and Sebastian, examining himself severely, had come to the conclusion that he would wince too acutely whenever she was presented to his friends. He was thankful, at least, that he had withdrawn from that experiment before he could possibly be said to have behaved badly. He had gone through a period of the blackest despair when he realised how tyrannically he—even he!—was bound by custom. He scorned himself for being no better than Sylvia or Teresa: they had their codes, and he had his; they were all prisoners, bound in hoops of iron. He wondered sceptically what Viola
would make of her new freedom. “But Viola is tougher than I,” he thought in his dejection; “I am too soft ever to carry my struggles through to their conclusion.” He felt
,
indeed, that he fiddled inconclusively at everything he undertook.

Then, at Viola's fiat, he had met Phil, his little model. Before he knew what was happening—such was the exaggeration of his moods—Sebastian somersaulted into a championship of Bohemia. The full torrent of excitement in his new discovery poured over Viola, towards whom since her emancipation he had relaxed something of his reserve. He did not specifically mention Phil, but all his lyricism extolled the independence of the artist; the gaiety, the moral courage, of the happy-go-lucky life. Viola listened, made no comment, smiled at him, guessed with great exactitude what had taken place, and privately prophesied exactly how the new whim was likely to end. Meanwhile, Sebastian trod on air; he thought that he had found his salvation; he had broken the bounds of his own world; he thought that he had discovered everything that was disenfranchised, liberal, free of spirit. His conviction was increased by the fact that, until his advent, Phil had led what is known as a virtuous life; was not in the least impressed by his worldly assets; and gave herself to him without any fuss, within twenty-four hours of their meeting, simply because he had taken her fancy. All this she explained to him in the frankest language, adding that the moment she tired of him she would throw him out. Sebastian, who was not accustomed to be treated in this way, delighted in such discourse. Lying on her divan amid the ruins of their supper, he prodded her on from statement to statement, from revelation to revelation. She had run away from home when she was seventeen; she had served in an A.B.C. shop; and there, Augustus John had seen her.

“Well, and what then?”

“He painted me. He said I was his type.” So she was, with her black hair cut square; her red, generous mouth; her thick white throat; and brilliant colours; especially when she crouched, gipsy-like, over her guitar.

“And what then?”

“Lots of other people painted me.”

“But you never lived with any of them?”

“You
ought to know that I didn't.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't like them enough. I was awfully
hard up at times, too.”

“What do you mean by hard up?”

“
Well
,
I hadn't enough to eat”

“Literally?”

“Literally.”

“You were hungry?”

“
Horribly
hungry. I used to
faint.”

For the first time it dawned upon Sebastian that people
,
other than the rheumy old
women who sat under arches selling matches, did not have enough to eat. He remembered the
meals
at Chevron; the endless meals that he had sat through.

“You used to faint? From hunger?” he said incredulously
.

His
incredulity made her laugh. “But of course. Lots of people do. Whenever I was flush, I used to bring
people
back here and give them a meal. “

“What sort of a meal?”

“Oh, eggs—sardines—sausages. It depended. When I was very flush there might be a bit of cold meat.”

“And didn't they do the same for you when you weren't flush?”

“Of course they did. We all helped each other. Only, sometimes we were all down and out at the same time. But why do you want to know? It's all very sordid, and not very interesting. It's only interesting to you because it's
something you've never known.”

“That,” said Sebastian gravely, “is the essence of romance.”

Phil stared. “Oh, you're too clever for me. You wouldn't think it romantic if you knew it. But don't let us talk about all that. I don't have to worry about that kind of thing now.”

“You never will again,” said Sebastian resolutely.

“Oh yes,” said Phil lightly; “when you're tired of me, or I'm tired of you. But why bother about the future? Let's put on the gramophone. Let's dance. Let's do something. Or shall we go out?” “Go out” meant the Café Royal. “We might meet Viola.”

“Is Viola often there?” asked Sebastian with curiosity. The truth about Viola's life was gradually, very gradually, becoming apparent to him.

“Oh yes,” said Phil unconcernedly; “she's been there for years. She used to go under another name. We used to call her Lisa, because she looked so smooth—like the Gioconda, you know. But since she came to live in London she goes under her own name. I can't think why she ever bothered to conceal it. Everybody knew quite well who she was.”

Sebastian recoiled before the task of explaining to Phil why Viola should have troubled to conceal her name. Such explanations, as he had already learnt, meant less than nothing to Phil. He wished that his mother could have heard some of her comments in the days when he had been so ill-advised as to endeavour to explain certain things to her.

“Don't let us go out,” he said, though there were times when he liked sitting at the café in her company. “I like talking to you.” It was true. He wondered now how he could ever have endured the conversation of Mrs. Levison or the Duchess of D. Phil was rough and frank, when she was neither frivolous nor sensuous; she had brought herself up in a hard school, reinforcing her native candour. Beside her, he felt that his own experience had been banked with cushions. She had estimated him shrewdly when she compared him to the princess who felt the pea through four-and-twenty mattresses. He had to adjust himself to her scheme of values, for nothing that he said made the slightest impression upon her. Physically fragile, she was spiritually tough; she had made up her mind, long ago—she was now twenty-two—as to what she considered worth while or not worth while; and her judgement was extraordinarily pure. Sebastian was guiltless of a lover's delusion when he decided that her nature was without dross. The best in him had recognised the best in her. Her taste, too, in letters, art, or music, though uneducated, was direct and right; the second-rate, to her thinking, was excluded from consideration; in those matters, as in life, no compromise was possible. But often her lack of sentimentality hurt him, even while it braced him; he could not grow accustomed to her unflinching brutality. “But I like the truth,” she said when he upbraided her; “facts are facts, why shirk them?” Yes, facts were facts to her, as sprouts were sprouts to old Turnour, or winter sales to Mrs. Tolputt, or reputation to Sylvia. “You won't love me forever,” she said, “so I may as well make up my mind to it now. And I suppose I shan't love you forever, though for the moment I could almost believe it. You and I are as different as chalk from cheese”—that was one of her favourite, stereotyped phrases, that contrasted so oddly with her independent nature. “One day I shall love somebody of my own sort. Then I shall probably stick to him till I die. I love you, but you aren't my sort. You love me, but I'm not your sort. We can't help it. Why worry? Why not enjoy the present? We may all be dead tomorrow, or there may be a war, or an earthquake,” she added vaguely; “personally, I don't much care whether I live or die—do you? What I like better than anything, is driving with you in that racing motor of yours; then I feel we might be dashed to death at any moment. I think one never enjoys life so much as when it becomes dangerous. Meantime, I love you like anything,” she said, putting her arms round him as though to make up in passion what she had lacked in tenderness, “and that's enough for me; it makes me feel like a real thing, a tree, or a stone; a thing that you can see and touch and hold; a thing which you know doesn't exist only in your imagination. It may be gone tomorrow, but it's here today—here now,
now,”
she said, holding him closer and emphasising the word as though inspired by some superstitious terror to catch the second even as it ticked away.

Sebastian had exulted; he thought he had found the thing for which he had been searching ever since Sylvia first aroused him. He adopted Phil's standards, Phil's expressions; while their connection lasted, she really did something to break down his conventions, to loosen the inevitable rigidity of his creed. Things which he had thought important she swept aside as cobwebs. Any form of punctiliousness provoked her laughter; any sense of social obligation, her impatience and derision. Thus if Sebastian had an appointment, she would compel him to break it, so that telephone messages frequently went to various ladies, saying that Sebastian much regretted he was unable to come to luncheon, or tea, or dinner, after all; and instead of fulfilling his engagement he would picnic with Phil in her studio, or would take her in his car, down to Kew or Richmond. At first, such was his intoxication that he enjoyed these truancies, regarding them as an act of defiance, a snap of the fingers; he loved Phil the more for her power to make him do things which outraged all his upbringing. Sylvia had never been able to make him do anything he did not want, or to prevent him from doing anything he proposed to do. But after a while Phil's laxness of conduct began to irritate him. The habit of courtesy was too deeply rooted in him; also he liked a certain order in his life; when he had made a plan he liked to adhere to it; Phil's harum-scarum methods really went too sharply against his grain. Then the extreme disorder of her life began to jar upon him; he would arrive at her studio at four o'clock in the afternoon, to find her having breakfast, while the dirty plates of last night's supper had not yet been cleared away and a thick film of dust layover everything. Phil was incapable of understanding his distaste. “You're so correct,” she would sneer at him. According to her ideas, one ate when one was hungry, slept when one was drowsy, dressed when one felt inclined, sat up all night if so disposed, threw letters into the fire if not in the mood to answer them, turned people out of the house if one had had enough of them. “Get out now,” he had heard her say to her friends; “I'm sick of you.” When he remonstrated, she pointed out with perfect truth that her friends did not mind. They were “her sort,” and they were used to her. They knew that she meant no offence, and so took none. Her complete frankness as to her relations with himself also embarrassed him; he had been accustomed to people who, whatever their private lives, observed the decencies in public; no one seeing him and Sylvia together could have suspected anything but friendship between them, but Phil treated him quite openly as her lover when her friends had invaded the studio; she kissed him impetuously, lavished endearments on him, and came to nestle beside him on the divan, or to sit on his knee. Sebastian felt that, since she was not a prostitute, she should not behave like one. He could not be angry with her, for he knew that under this distressingly frank surface she owned the most honest soul he had ever known, save Leonard Anquetil's, but gradually he was coming to the conclusion that his excursion into Bohemia had not been a success, Birds of a different feather had best remain apart. At any rate—even though she made him break his engagements—she would let him go as soon as he gave any indication of his wish to do so. It had always been understood that no obligation existed on either side. Phil would never seek to hold him against his will. She might grieve—he shrank from that thought—but she was gallant, she was proud; she would not whine; she would tell him to go, and get it over quickly. She would wave to him before shutting her door behind him, even though she might then throw herself down on the divan and weep, and tear the cushions with her teeth. It was this very conviction which held him and made him hesitate.