Part 9
To kiss and to be conscious of conferring a favour, to feel ashamed of it, and to wonder when, where, _your_ satisfaction came in--was now his melancholy lot. She was, he felt, shy of him, had always been, fundamentally, shy of him. Only in the taxi on their long drive back to the hotel she let herself go. She wanted that love which he could only feel when he had lost her. Women want it there and then, and men cannot give it till it is too late....
The railway porter, carrying her box of clothes to the London train next morning, looked as though he did not think much of them, anyhow. Frank bought himself a copy of _The Nation & Athenaeum_, and Eva, asked what she wanted to read, said, with some hesitation: “Buy me ... _Home Chat_.” It gave him a pang--a twist of the heart.
She read it stealthily and looked up at him. All the way to London Eva attracted everyone’s attention on account of her unusual hat and dowdy skirt coming down nearly to her heels and keeping off, Frank thought, possible lewd glances at her legs.
Arrived in London, she went straight away to the Dublin lady’s daughter. She had a rattling good time with them, went off for the week-end with them in motor-cars to picnics, races, shows and theatres, attracting great attention by her extraordinary new clothes and the enormous plumed and fruit-clad hats (the married man who shared a flat with Mlle. Lapin visibly seduced by Eva’s charms), and, on passing home through Dublin, she reported nothing to the mother; only said she had forgotten to deliver the eggs and butter, but otherwise had had a rattling good time.
Lord de Jones, whom she had met in London, had given her money to go on a learned errand for him to Edinborough University in connection with their forthcoming mission to the continent. But, after lunching with her lover, she decided she had better spend the day with him.
The day was bright. The shops beckoned invitingly.
“Buy me--”
“You know Lord Ottercove has stopped all my money.”
“Buy me all the same a little book of poetry.”
“What poetry?”
“Any poetry. A little book--to read in bed. It mustn’t be heavy, you know.”
“Well--yes.”
“I saw a nice little book in blue leather in a shop window the other day. I am sure it’s poetry. Buy me that.”
“Anything else?”
“Chocolates. To read in bed and eat and think of you, Ferdinand.”
“Yes.”
“And do send me roses for my birthday.”
“Yes. The fifteenth of this month. I won’t forget.”
She saw him off at the station, but left before the train went to meet de Jones, who had telephoned for her that morning.
“Remember: _roses_. All other flowers, Pilling says, are vulgar.”
She waved to him at the corner, and was gone.
XVI.
THE FAREWELL
“_Mummy was surprised_,” she wrote to Frank from Ireland a few days later, “_at the many underclothes you’ve given me. But when I said it was a parting gift on account of my going away to Rome and Paris with de Jones, she said it was all right. As for de Jones, Darling, I am Furious; I told him all. And He is Furious. I told him all the Truth that I never went on his errand to Edinborough University but spent the day with you in London as well as the money He’d given me for Travelling Expenses on sweets and things. And He says he is going to dismiss me. Never mind, if I’ll flirt with Him he won’t dismiss me. And I said to him that you bought me a box of chocolates before you left, and a little book of poems to read in bed. ‘Oh,’ says He, ‘that is a Consolation!’ I shall be in London all next week, packing. We leave on Friday morning. Shall wait for you on Thursday at Paddington at Eleven Sharp. It will be our last day together._
_Your Eva._”
But she was not there at eleven. She was not there at twelve. As he paced up and down he was conscious that all the porters and the waiting taxi-cab drivers looked at him with interest. Shameless flag vendors buttonholed him with pertinacity. He paced on, angry and exhausted, his thick heavy overcoat on his arm, and a small fly flew straight into his ear; and pacing up and down vehemently he stepped again onto some slippery nastiness on the pavement. “Must tell Ottercove,” he made a mental note of it. “Have this scandal ventilated in the House.” At one o’clock he went into the station bar and drank a glass of beer on an empty stomach, and suddenly he took courage, ceased to be concerned about the formidable mass opinion of the porters on the subject of himself, saw them as mere independent, ignorant at that, individuals. The movement of the traffic, the sight of a girl stepping into a coach and revealing a ripening, silk-stockinged leg--such sights and sounds began to work on him, till his mind, with the beer and the oxygen inhaled, hummed like music, and saw God.
“Well--!” he said; and then again: “Well--!”
“Why, darling, what has happened?”
The presence of John emphasised her crime and irritated him unspeakably. “You ask me; you--you--you ask me--” He could not continue. He cast an accusing look at the brother, who giggled bashfully.
“Zita said I must take John about with me and show him London for he is so shy and it’s his last day, you know. To-morrow he is going on a farm in Ireland. ‘And,’ says she, ‘you’ve only one young brother.’”
“And what of her? It’s our last day together.”
“Exactly! But she wants to be alone with Pilling all the time. How she loves Pilling!”
“And why aren’t you wearing the nice new clothes I gave you?”
“Child: it won’t do.”
“It won’t do?”
“No, child.”
While John was looking into a shop window, Frank pleaded with her whether they could not really spend this last day alone.
“I will telephone to her,” said Eva, as if struck by a brain-wave, “and see what she says.”
She vanished in a telephone box, and Frank and John watched her mute lips through the glass door assiduously explaining into the telephone what looked a difficult, and at the other end an uncongenial, proposition.
“No,” she said, emerging from the box, “she says John must come with us, because he is so shy and would lose himself alone in London. ‘You have only one little brother,’ she said.”
“This is damnable,” thought Frank. “At any rate let us go and have lunch somewhere,” he said aloud, “and think it over.”
They lunched in embarrassed silence, broken here and there by an embarrassed question. “You crossed over when?”
“Tuesday. Arrived in London very late, so went to a hotel. Travelled with nine Catholic priests,” she said, “so all went to the same hotel, and to the Cinema together, and we all held hands.”
“Nine Catholic priests, and you in the middle?”
“No, at one end. Father Michael and I holding hands, and all the other eight, too, in a chain. Very intriguing.”
“Must have been.”
After lunch, as they were sauntering along, an idea occurred to Frank. “John,” he said, “would you like to go to a theatre--by yourself?”
“Fancy! all by yourself like a grown-up man!” said Eva.
John giggled nervously.
“To a show of Maskelyne and Devant?”
“Fancy!” said Eva. “Acrobats, John! Acrobats and things. Eh? John?”
“I don’t mind,” said John.
They jumped into a taxi, and Frank bought a stall ticket, and John, accepting it with a kind of nervous misgiving, was ushered into the darkness (the performance having already begun), the attendant like a gaoler on his heels. “Tell him, tell him to look after John, who is so shy!” Eva cried. But John and his gaoler had vanished in the dark.
Freedom at last! They were free, free, free; free of all but the exigence of their freedom. He avoided the shops with her, but she must have a bottle of scent and let him buy all that the saleswoman insinuated. She gave in completely to the saleswoman’s idea of what was the proper thing for her. The saleswoman seemed to have no doubt, and appreciating Frank’s secret loathing of her and her sex, made it a point of honour for him to comply with Eva’s tutored wishes.
“And I just want to look at these gowns.”
“Better come out and look at Nature. A lovely day!”
“I’d like that gown.”
“No doubt. I’d like a new suit.”
“Must have another gown to go about with de Jones, you know. In Paris and Rome.”
“I got old Ottercove to stop his payments too soon, it would seem. Too soon, too damned soon!”
“Couldn’t you borrow, perhaps?”
“Couldn’t I!... Women will sell their bodies and souls for a vivid rag,” he said bitterly.
He looked at her and read her thought. With a melancholy twinge, she reflected that she had evidently sold hers without any such extenuating material compensation. “You are an awful old miser,” she said.
He suffered hell. Damn it all, she seemed to have no idea about the value of money! She did not know that the number of pounds in his pocket-book was strictly limited.
Through the Park they drifted into Kensington Gardens and walked across the grass towards the Serpentine. Eva wouldn’t let him take her arm.
“Bad form,” she explained.
They hired a boat, and as he rowed he watched her steer. She steered intently but very badly, zig-zagging needlessly all the way, while he puffed and sweated at the oars; which provoked him into biting sarcasm.
“Crooked again!”
“Why don’t you put it straight with the oars?”
“Can’t you see me,” he said, puffing, “otherwise employed?”
“Now don’t get ratty, darling, or you will feel sorry afterwards.”
“Why sorry?”
“When you think of it--remember, I mean.”
By the time they had rowed back, it was time, she judged, to go and fetch John from the matinée. “If we are not there, he won’t know where to turn to: he is so shy,” she said. “And Zita said to me, ‘Take care of John; you won’t always have your little brother with you.’”
This solicitude on behalf of John angered him. “Damn it all, we thought nothing of leaving him alone at the inn.”
“What inn, darling?”
“On the top of the Patscherkofl mountain in the Tyrol. Don’t you remember?”
Her eyes darkened and lightened again. “I remember, darling, I remember.”
“And it’s our last day together.”
“I am thinking--”
“What?”
“I have no real travelling costume for my Continental trip.”
“I have no proper overcoat, damn you.” Oh, why were there no girls as beautiful as Frances Doble and as intelligent as Henry James!
“Well, John, did you enjoy the performance?”
“Great fun,” stammered John.
“Tell us all about it, John.”
“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring and another man on the ring--”
“That will do, John. Wait till we are settled down in the café,” she said.
“Now then, John.”
“There was a ring and a man held on to the ring and a girl held on to the man and--”
“Wait, John. I was just thinking, if Zita asks me all about the performance I must tell the same story as John.”
“All the more reason why John should be allowed to disclose his impressions,” said Frank.
“Yes. Go on, John.”
“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring--”
“What will you have, John,” she asked, “tea or chocolate?”
On the way home, John talked of the performance. “There was a man,” he would say, “with a ring, and a girl held on to the man.”
“Shut up, John. That will do.”
She went in with John, and Frank said he would wait for her in Kensington Gardens to take her out to dinner. He was tired and glad to be alone. He sat down on a bench, and a nasty little girl of ten or so disengaged herself from a group of urchins and sat down between him and an old lady and began to tease him, pointing at him with her dirty forefinger. “You funny-looking bloke, you. Now why don’t you smile?” and all the other urchins crowded round and giggled at him. “Come on! Let’s see a smile!” the girl went on, encouraged.
The old lady at his side saw fit to intervene. “Behave yourself,” she said, “or go away and leave the gentleman alone.”
“It’s ‘im I’m torking to, not yer; you ‘old yer tongue.”
“Disgraceful girl!” said the old lady. But the little girl went on at Frank:
“Come, show us you can smile. Now then!”
“Shut up, will you!” suddenly Frank roared at her.
The girl went red and shrivelled up on the bench. “It’s ‘er,” she said tearfully, pointing at the old lady, “not me. None of ‘er bloomin’ business.”
One of those nasty winter fogs was descending on to London when Eva, late by an hour, appeared at the gate.
“Is sweet’eart!” jeered the girl, and all the urchins giggled with her.
“Well,” he said, rising, “I _have_ had a time, waiting for you.”
“Zita and Pilling kept me back with their nonsense about my getting de Jones to talk to Ottercove about Pilling’s dancing place. I told them I’d be late and keep you waiting, but Pilling said: ‘Ferdinand will wait.’”
They were rattling along in a taxi, and he was telling her all about the cheeky girl in Kensington Gardens.
“Darling, I am not interested.”
“In anything that happens to me.”
“That isn’t true, darling. When I am away from you I always talk about you. This evening, for example, while you were waiting for me, I asked them if they thought you were very beautiful, but Pilling said: ‘I shouldn’t say he was beautiful to look at, but he is very clever. I wish I had his brains.’”
To Frank, who for years had been regarded as the fool of the family, this universal discovery of his brains was stimulating and refreshing.
At dinner Eva was crotchety because he would not take her out to the Savoy to dance. “It isn’t really at all expensive, darling. It really isn’t. I only want to go so as to tell Zita how you don’t mind throwing away money on me. Because Pilling is so careful, and she hates it so. Only to be able to tell her, you see.”
“Well, tell her.”
“What?”
“Anything you like.”
“H’m. That’s an idea. I never thought of that.”
“Tell her we dined with their Majesties.”
“Zita,” she confided to him, “doesn’t seem to like you much. She said, ‘The one good thing about him is that he has pots of money.’”
“Pots! Barrels full! Brains and money. Beauty, too! Oh, what a lucky man am I! But why is it that I feel I’d like to go and blow my brains out?”
“If you don’t stop quarrelling,” she said, “I will leave immediately, and you will be sorry all your life.”
“Then we shall leave together.”
On their way back he stopped the taxi-cab a few doors away from Pilling’s house and walked on with her into a more deserted lane. They walked in silence. Suddenly it came to him that he might be seeing her for the last time. And what was it that she resented? That he had so far omitted to say the fateful word? He guided her to a sort of blind door in the masonry of a house, and took her in his arms. But a policeman hove in sight and said, “Move on, please. You’re not allowed to stand here.”
They went on and turned into another lane. She hurried him, saying that Pilling and Zita were surely anxious that she was not yet home. It angered him, and at the thought of the last inadequate hours together, full of bickerings and vexations, tears flooded his eyes as he suddenly kissed her good-bye. He stood in the darkness, watching her as she walked to the end of the lane and, without turning to him, disappeared behind the corner.
He walked away at an accelerated pace. He said: “No. Never again. It’s finished as if it had never been! I am glad, and nothing that may come will wipe out the memory of my saying here, deliberately, immediately on parting, that I am glad I did not say the word.” He walked the length of Bayswater-road into Oxford-street and all the way to his club, and on entering his room pulled out his diary and wrote:
“ ... _I put it down on record_....”
XVII.
It was thus that soon after Eva’s departure with the mystical de Jones, Frank found himself one afternoon strolling vacantly down Oxford-street. A crowd of people. Bustling, frolicking folk. Women, gay, charming, so beautiful, so tender, whose arms, if they could guess, might open for the kiss--and who passed him without a look! Flitting by on what was the latest in footwear, thin ankles, swelling into glossy silken calves--oh, rapture! oh, seduction! How lonely one could be in a crowd. For it wasn’t--he reflected--that there was any one cohesive and receptive sensibility in that crowd, which frolicked and enjoyed life while he suffered, into which he could have merged with any profit. Groups of laughing young voices.... Why could he not talk to them without causing them to feel they had been slighted, or landing himself at Marlborough-street Police Station? Why could he not join them without very soon being bored? There they were, groups on the face of it, but really solitary, yearning, suffering souls like himself. There was no sort of one central well in all this diffused accidentally accumulated hilarity from which one could draw. All came out to look at the feast--and all looked without being filled.
He saw rich men in furs and motor-cars, and wished them joy of it; he read the New Year’s Honours list, and sensed no pang; he watched old colleagues overtake him on the road to fame, and felt no jealousy; he had seen his father’s fortune blown to smithereens, without a blink: but that every woman whom he looked at twice did not immediately yield herself to him was something he found hard to bear, harder to forgive. To possess all the comely women in the world, the female portion of the universe, in a sort of cumulative, consummative kiss--it was his dream. For--indisputably--one woman was not like another; and how? how enjoy them all? While lying, as he thought appeased, in one woman’s arms, the thought that there must be another in some particular different from his own would at once renew his restlessness and send him searching, searching round the globe. Content at last, content and happy at Port Said, the thought of what he must be missing in Calcutta was sufficient to uproot him and send him on his onward quest over plain and mountain, dune and sea, continent and ocean, till, with ever greater frequency, he would rebound in London, in Piccadilly Circus, the reputed centre of the world, with his heart still burning, with hot tears in his parched throat. “I can’t bear it,” he said, looking with a kind of stupor at the fountain he had seen before. “I will kill myself....”
A practical man inessentially, Frank was impractical in essentials. He had a kind of vague idea that the whole universe and all that it held could, under favourable conditions, be embraced in a woman’s kiss, the consummation, _das Welt-Alles_! The all-in-all. There was a critic just then who wrote copiously in the _Adelphi_ about the One and the Many. Yes, perhaps the One was to be realised most clearly in one of the many. “Very likely,” he said, “very likely.” Was he already beginning to regret his Eva’s absence? No, he had weighed her kisses in the balance and had found them wanting. Except for that first virgin kiss upon the mountain-top when she came up close, close to him, took a long breath and closed her eyes....
He turned into Piccadilly, steadied his thoughts, and continued in a Tolstoyan mood of honest self-analysis: “Then what am I to do? Renounce the flesh and turn saint? Difficult. Difficult and uncongenial. Essentially the world is good and one ought to know how to be happy. But happiness is a strange thing: it is in two parts and is conditioned by an inner equilibrium. On the surface I oscillate in a kind of twilight, through black night into the dawn and back: but within, my soul sings like a lark and it is morning. And all is well and beyond implication. I knew it long ago. Yet I cannot sit down in the cool quiet of a pillared cathedral as I would by choice, with all my passions and lusts raging in me, raging in me! Essentially all is well. Certainly. Certainly. But that does not do away with the surface things being all wrong. Mere pinpricks. Perhaps. But the skin is a sensitive tissue.”
Tired out, he sat down on a bench in the Green Park and pulled out his _Times_. How it assumed that all was well and orderly in the world. With what propriety it examined and relegated to the requisite sections and columns the haphazard irrelevance of life. But how sane, how quiet and dignified and, withal, informed. Under a rubric headed “Science,” he read:
“ ...In the course of the year Jeans has explored the problem further, and has reached conclusions of immense significance in our conceptions of the universe. These are, in short, that the chemical elements of which we have knowledge are only one end of an indefinite series and that end a degeneration from an indefinitely more complex set of atoms in the distant stars and nebulæ. The conditions in which life is possible are an extreme case, possibly unique, and came about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time. The primary physical process of the universe is the conversion of matter into radiation, a process not even suspected until 1904. The primary matter of the universe consists of highly complex atoms, dissociated and incapable of association inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.”
He stopped reading and pondered. “Dissociated and incapable of association.” Significant.... Significant and suggestive. “The primary matter of the universe ... consists of atoms incapable of association ... inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.... Like me,” he thought. And came to the conclusion that he was, his salvation lay, in the primary matter of the universe.
Calmed down, appeased by a distant hope of merging into the primary matter of the universe and finding peace in changing his make-up with it millions of times in a second with more inward profit than heretofore and more pleasure than he found in his already frequent reboundings in London, he strolled on across the Park and called in to see Lord Ottercove.
Lord Ottercove, as he saw him, looked as though he had no wish to change his make-up millions of times in a second, but was indeed perfectly content with his make-up such as it was and, moreover, dissociated himself from the primary matter of the universe, being content to dwell and act within that end of the indefinite series of chemical elements come about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time and described by the paragraph in _The Times_ as an extreme, possibly unique, case in which life (and journalistic activity) was possible.
“Forgive me for not rising,” he said. “But all these things will fall off my lap if I do.”
“What need for me to forgive you,” thought Frank, “since you have already forgiven yourself?”
There was an air about Lord Ottercove as though he knew what a rich and splendid type he was for the imaginative novelist--and he was always ready to help the young and striving artist--but could scarcely comprehend the established novelists’ blindness to the riches lying at their feet. Now that he knew Frank had conceived him as the hero of his new novel he not only proved a willing sitter, but lent his own imagination towards bettering Frank’s plot. And this he did in a way that tended to enhance the prestige and lovableness of the hero by placing him in more favourable situations than those envisaged by the author. Frank, in relating the plot of his new novel, might say: “And here the scientist gets the better of the hero by an ingenious use of the latter’s newspapers to an end the hero cannot at this stage envisage.”
“Quite,” Lord Ottercove would say. “But by pretending not to see the scientist’s game the newspaper proprietor outwits him in the following chapter.”