Chapter 2

I didn't see them for five years. And then, I met her at Melton. She had taken a house for the winter. "So he won," I reflected to myself.

"Have you done much yachting lately?" I asked her.

"Yachting?" she said, "why it's my idea of hell. I'm the worst sailor in the world. A sea as calm as a pond finishes me."

"How is your husband?" I murmured weakly. "Is he coming down here to hunt?"

"Tommy?" she laughed. "Why he's never known a horse from a cow."

IV

"DO YOU REMEMBER----?"

[_To LESLIE HARTLEY_]

There are so many delightful things about being a bride besides actual happiness, little peaks of pleasure that gradually sink into the level of existence, unimportant, all-important things that never come again. To begin with, there is your wedding ring which keeps glistening up at you, unexpectedly making such an absurd difference, not only to the look of your hand but to everything else, as well. And there are your trunks, shiny and untravelled, with glaring new initials almost shouting at you, so very unlike other people's battered luggage with half obliterated labels sprawling over it.

And trousseau clothes are quite unlike other clothes--not prettier, often uglier--but different. Your shoes and stockings match, not yet having begun that uneven race which, starting from the same mole, ends with a fawn-colored shoe and a grey blue stocking. Your hats go with your dresses and your sunshades with both. You have an appropriate garment for all occasions, instead of always being--as you once were and soon will become again--short of something. Altogether, there is no other word for it--you are equipped.

And then you feel exhilarated and responsible--your jewels are still new and so is the strange, beautifully embroidered monogram on your handkerchiefs and underclothes. Also, for the first time in your life, you have a jet evening dress with a train and your maid calls you "Madam."

Lucy was extremely pleased about all of these things. She was pleased, too, to have married a foreigner, to be sailing away into a new milieu, where she would be surrounded by the strange exciting faces of her husband's friends. It would be delightful to have nothing to do, but make yourself liked, to be automatically disentangled from all of your own complicated, complicating relationships with nothing around you but a new world to conquer. And how thrilled and curious every one must be about her. What sort of a woman had succeeded in catching dear old Tony! Tony, who was so delightfully, so essentially, a man's man. There had been Vivian, of course, but no one quite knew the rights and the wrongs of that and it was over anyway. Tony was so deuced unsusceptible (Lucy prided herself on being able to think in English), unsophisticated, too, about women, but with a sense of self-preservation like an animal's. And now he had gone and married an American and a Bostonian. Americans, one knew, were heiresses and Bostonians were blue-stockings. The lady, it appeared, was not very rich, but of course, Tony would never have married for money. It was all very puzzling.

And then, Lucy imagined herself walking into a room full of strange, curious faces and some one murmured, "That is Tony's wife," and every one looked up. She was wearing a shimmering, silvery blue dress and she was looking her very, very best. An old lady told her that she ought still to be in school and a young man told her that she was a jolly lucky woman and Tony a jolly lucky man, by Jove.

Lucy was sure that that was the way Englishmen talked.

And on their way home, people agreed that they could understand any man's falling in love with her. Tony talked a lot about his men friends. Women meant nothing to him. He had, Lucy knew, once been engaged to a woman--Vivian, she had been called--rumour had woven a pattern of legends about it, but he had never seemed anxious to discuss it. People said he had behaved badly--but how was one to tell? Those things were always so complicated. Usually, every one ended by behaving badly. At any rate, the girl had made a brilliant marriage, which might or might not mean a broken heart. It was, Lucy thought tenderly, so characteristic of Tony to have sown such legitimate wild oats. An engagement contracted and broken off in gusty fits of honour.

"You look very lovely," he smiled at her.

She was shimmering in silvery blue, her eyes like cloudy star sapphires, her hair like primroses and ashes.

In the motor she leant against him, a discreet gentle pressure. She always gave you a feeling of delicately intertwined reticencies and avowals, a faint New England flavouring which she had never lost.

"I do hope they'll like me," she murmured.

Dinner was a great success. Lucy loved her neighbours and her neighbours loved her, while secretly congratulating themselves on having always been right about Boston (which they had never visited and of which they knew nothing).

After dinner a few guests trickled in for the tiny dance that was to follow. It was all very much as Lucy had imagined it, old ladies delighted by her youth, old men delighted by her prettiness. Every one saying that she was very un-American (by which they meant unlike the Americans they had known).

Then, suddenly, a hushed silence grabbed hold of all the various conversations. Tony got up. His hostess was saying, "I want to present Mrs. Everill." Some one in a corner gave a little suppressed laugh, Lucy looked.

She saw a thin, dark woman with charming irregular features and a figure which looked as if it had been put into her black velvet dress with a shoehorn, and she heard her say in a low voice which somehow seemed to creep inside shut parts of you, "Tony and I are very old friends." They were coming straight to her and then, next thing she knew was that voice again, saying, "Mrs. Everill, you must forgive me if I say that, for the moment, you are to me, just Tony's wife. But, of course, I know that to be that you must be a great many other things besides."

Lucy knew that every one was looking at them, not at her, Lucy, the bride (and she had been so proud and happy--childishly happy--to be a bride), not at Tony, not even at Lady Dynevor, but at _them_, at the situation. It seemed to Lucy so indecent, so vulgar.

"You will love Lucy, Vivian," Tony said quietly, and Lucy looked up at the charming, gracious apparition so dominant, with her beautifully friendly manner. Her eyes looked as if she could never find the bottom, as if tears were just going to well up and drown them.

"Of course I shall," she said, and there was a little edge on her voice, as if it were going to break. That was the feeling she gave you, Lucy thought, of being on the brink of something, a tenseness like the moment when the conductor's baton is raised before you have been released by the music.

"How ill you look," Tony was saying. Vivian laughed,

"You always said that, do you remember----?"

Conversation was buzzing again. Lucy turned to her neighbour. Through what he was saying, she could hear Tony--"your white velvet dress--do you remember...?"

She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she stood quite still.

"Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings--and brides," he added, smiling.

Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa. As she passed, she heard Vivian laugh, "Do you remember?"

The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony was very good. He did his duty very nobly, dancing with every one, even his wife.

At half-past one they went home.

"How charming Lady Dynevor is," Lucy murmured.

"Charming?" Tony looked puzzled. "Vivian?"

It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant, inadequate word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him, "She is a wonderful woman, loyal, faithful, a real friend."

"She is very pretty," Lucy said.

"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.

"You're not _jealous_, sweetheart, are you?"

"No," she lied.

"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And Lucy knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she had used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to him equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love with his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving, teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.

She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre hair--shadows shot with sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely snapshots, full of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and expressions. They might, she thought, have been taken by a loving detective.

Tony came in.

"Do you remember," she said--and then, suddenly, with a wave of misery, she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.

V

THE MARTYR

[_To H.G. WELLS_]

I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are for all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of imminent adventure. If you say to him, "I saw a policeman," his face lights up and so it would if you said "I saw a dog," or a cat, or a donkey-cart. To him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are always just about to do something dramatic or absurd or unexpected. Nor is he discouraged by unfailing regularity in their behaviour. Faith is "the evidence of things not seen."

And then, too, he is so very welcoming. Not, of course, that he makes you feel you are the only person in the world because a world with only one other person in it would be inconceivably horrible to him, but he does make you quite sure that he is most frightfully glad to see you--all the gladder because it is such a surprise. Delancey always makes a point of being surprised. Also, though he is invariably in a hurry--being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life--he as invariably turns round and walks with you, in your direction, to convince himself that having met you in Jermyn Street is an altogether unexpected and delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do, that a five minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too long for mere civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes are filled to the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little more tired and leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul of a party--or perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating and drinking and talking to women and talking to men and smoking and telling a story. And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she were a meeting at a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never addresses her as if she were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss her.

To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and clergymen's wives adore him.

I don't know what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was his name--Delancey Woburn sounds like the author--or the hero--of a serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for self-expression had burst through the four walls of practical professions. He had, I believe, considered the stage and the church. Journalism would have seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred literature. "Creation is such _fun_," he would explain, beaming. And, of course, he was tremendously successful. Delancey was designed on a pattern of success.

That was one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey has missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He has only known happy endings.

Naturally he is not an interesting writer. How could he be? And, naturally, he is a successful one. How could he help it? Delancey writes for magazines in England and America. I, myself, never read magazines, but occasionally he sends me one and every twenty stories (I think it is twenty) become a book. The English ones were about scapegraces and irresistible ne'er-do-wells, ancestral homes with frayed carpets and faded hangings in which penniless woman-haters (the last of a noble line) sit and brood, living alone with equally gruff, woman-hating family retainers. Sometimes, too, there was an absent-minded dreamer, and villainous business men worked indefatigably in the interests of their own ultimate frustration.

But this, of course, would never do for America where there isn't a market for ne'er-do-wells, frayed carpets inspire no glamour, and dreamers who before the war were despised as harmless, are now damned as dangerous. No, America must have her special line and no one better than Delancey knew how to mix the fragrance of true love with the flavour of Wall Street and serve at the right temperature.

He wasn't proud of his writing--or, rather, he wasn't proud of it with every one. In his heart of hearts, what he wanted was not the applause of the public, but the faith of a coterie, to be a martyr, misunderstood by the many, worshipped by the few. A Bloomsbury hero, a Chelsea King! "We confess that as a writer Mr. Delancey Woburn is altogether too rarefied for our taste. His work is far too impregnated by the stamp of a tiny clique of rather self-conscious superintellectuals. Reading his books, we feel as if we had suddenly entered a room full of people who know one another very well. In other words, we feel out of it."

What would not Delancey have given for a review that began like that! Instead of which the best that he could hope for in "shorter notices" would be an announcement that "Mr. Woburn's many admirers will no doubt find his last book eminently to their taste. He provides a lavish supply of the features they are accustomed to look for in his work."

Poor Delancey, his stories _did_ sell so well! And there was his flat in Grafton Street with the beautiful new taffetas curtains and the cigars that had just arrived from Havana, with his own initials on.

So from week to week he put off becoming an artist and one year (after a four-month love affair and two lacquer cabinets) he made a lecture tour in America.

"Was it a success?" I asked wearily (Delancey's success is always such a terribly foregone conclusion).

"Tremendous," he beamed. "I was careful to be a little dull because then they think they're learning something." But he was out of love, the flat was overcrowded, money continued to pour in and he knew terribly well that he was not making a contribution to contemporary literature.

He had always assured me at intervals that some day he would write his "real book" but I think it was after his tour in America that the dream became a project. He burst in to tell me about it. Delancey always begins things with a sudden noisy rush.

"Charlotte," he said, "I have made up my mind."

"It sounds very momentous," I teased. He decided years ago that I was grave, fastidious, whimsical, aloof and (I suspect) a little faded. I have long given up fighting my own battle (to be known) because I realise that Delancey never revises the passports given to old ideas. There is always, to him, something a little bit sacred about the accepted. "I can't go on with it any longer," he explained.

"Go on with what?"

"My damned stories."

"How ungrateful you are," I murmured, thinking of the lacquer cabinets, "you have a market, you can command a price. Each of your love affairs is more magnificently studded with flowers than the last----"

"Be quiet," he said. "I came to you because I knew that you would understand."

"You are trying to blackmail me."

"Do be serious," he pleaded. "I am going to give all that up. I have determined to settle down and dedicate myself entirely to my book."

"But," I expostulated, "have you thought of the yearning _Saturday Evening Post_, of the deserted _Strand_?"

"I have thought of everything," he said, "I shall be sacrificing 5,000 pounds a year, but what is 5,000 pounds a year?"

I thought of the taffetas curtains and the cigars, but I answered quite truthfully.

"I don't know."

"You see, Charlotte," he dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in my other work. How could I? It would have seemed--you will think me ridiculous--a kind of prostitution."

"Yes," I said.

"But they were clamouring for expression all the time. And I have kept them down till I couldn't keep them down any longer. Of course, I know my book won't be a success--a popular success, I mean--but it won't have been written for the multitude but for the few--the people who really care, who really understand. It may be even thought," there was exultation in his voice, "dull."

"Well," I said, "I think it is very brave of you--and quite right. Truly I do."

"I think I shall take a tiny cottage in a fishing village in Devonshire," Delancey was as usual seeing things pictorially--bare white-washed walls, blue and white linen curtains and a pot of wall flowers.

A week later he came to see me again.

"When are you off to Devonshire?" I asked.

"I have decided to stay here," he answered, "there is a roar of life in London, a vibrating pulse, a muffled thunder." I began to be afraid that Delancey's book would be very bad indeed. It was, it appeared, to be a novel. "Not exactly a novel," he explained, "a large canvas with figures moving on a back-ground of world conditions." I thought of "War and Peace" and was silent. It doesn't matter being silent with Delancey because he doesn't notice it.

"I want," he said, "to picture the very earth in the agonies of labour giving birth to a new world." Later, the theme was (to my secret relief) narrowed down to England.

"I have changed my motif a little," he said. "I simply want to portray the quicksilver of after-war conditions--England in transition." At this time Delancey seemed to me the least little tiny bit depressed. The income he was sacrificing rose (in his conversation) from 5,000 to 7,000 pounds. He dined out less, avoided his club and Christie's. Also, he kept out of love. For ten years, Delancey had always been in love. Managed by him, it was a delightful state, ably presided over by head waiters and florists. It made, he once explained to me, all the difference to walking into a room.

But everything was changed now. The masterpiece was a jealous god. Jealous and, I sometimes thought, apt to be a little tiresome. It had to be referred to so very deferentially, with such carefully serious respect. Also, it cast a shadow of gravity over Delancey--Delancey who was never meant to be a high priest, but rather a young man in white flannels, with a cigarette in his mouth, punting a young girl with a red sunshade--like an illustration to one of his own stories.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting. But never have my patience and endurance been more severely tested than during the year of Delancey's masterpiece. He finally decided that in the foreground, there was to be the clash of two human souls and in the background, the collision of two worlds--the old (pre-War) and the new. In fact, a partie carrée of conflicts.

"You with your love of form," he explained to me, "will appreciate the care I have given to the structure. It is," he added, "difficult to mould vast masses of material."

As the months went by I began to be horribly afraid that Delancey's novel would be very, very long indeed. And even if nobody read it through, not even a reviewer, I should have to without skipping a word or a comma.

"The sentences," Delancey told me, "are rather long. I find the semicolon very useful for cumulative effects." A vast array of words policed by semi-colons. I felt a little dizzy. Would they be able to keep order?

"Of course," he continued, "the interest is very largely psychological, but I regard the book mainly as a document--a social document. The fiction of to-day is the history of to-morrow."

This seemed conclusive. The book could not have less than 700 pages. A social document with psychological interest and a double conflict. Why, it would be short at that. And then, one day, when Delancey's book had become to me a form of eternity, he arrived, breathless with excitement.

"To all intents and purposes, it's finished," he gasped.

"Thank God," I murmured faintly.

"It will be an awful loss to me," he stated mournfully.

"It isn't dead yet," I said with feeble jocularity.

"It is sad to see your children leave you. To watch them step out into a cold, inhospitable world," he went on.

"A warm, welcoming world," I amended dishonestly. "You haven't told me what it is called yet."

"It isn't called anything. I want you to be its god-mother, Charlotte. What about 'Whither'?"

"Too like a pamphlet," I was glad to be on firm ground again.

"I thought about 'Fate's Laboratory,' but it isn't very rhythmical, is it?"

"Not very," I agreed.

"The question mark after the 'Whither' would look nice on the cover," he reflected regretfully.

I brightened. This was the old Delancey. The Delancey of the _Saturday Evening Post_ and the _Strand_, of the taffetas curtains and the cottage in Devonshire. By my sudden glow of gladness I realised how much I had missed him. But I couldn't say, "Dear, _dear_ Delancey, please be your old self and never, never, whatever you do, write another 'good' book," so I confessed that a question mark _would_ look very nice, but that I still thought that "Whither" sounded rather like a religious tract.

"Well, we must think it over," he said.

A week later, he announced to me in a tone which indicated clearly that my opinion was only wanted if it was approval, "I have decided to call my book 'Transition.'"

"I always like single word titles," I said.

"No one will read it," he said. "One bares one's soul to the public and they throw stones at it. But at any rate, now I can hold my head high."

I didn't laugh, but it was the effort of a lifetime. Dear Delancey was so very absurd as a self-made martyr. It was somehow impossible for him to give an impression of having been persecuted for righteousness' sake. His shiny, rosy face had never looked rounder, his trousers had never been more perfect or his shoes more polished. And there were still the same little outbursts of childish prosperity, his watch, his tie-pin, his links were all redolent of a vitality that had ever been just the least little bit blatant.

"Delancey," I said, "I want you to have just the sort of success you want for yourself."

"Thank you," he said, wondering if I knew what I was talking about.