Part 16

She abandons naturally her scheme of joining a touring company. For a few months, indeed, she forgets her ambition in her happiness, and by the time she has begun again to feel the lure of grease-paint and the footlights, the influence and affluence of her protector has found her a leading part in a forthcoming West-end production. Marvellously grateful she is, marvellously happy. The days of excitement as the first night draws near are almost more than she can bear, and it means much to her to have at such a time a strong arm about her shoulders, and in her ears the sound of a firm voice.

She need, though, have had no fears of failure. It is a good play, and she has talent. But it is at the very moment of her triumph that her lover is, for the first time, frightened. He stands in the shadow of the box and watches her in the front of the stage bending, over a bank of bouquets, to an audience hoarse with shouting. He sees suddenly into the heart of their relationship. He sees her a young woman at the start of her career--fresh, radiant, intoxicated with the sensation of a first success. And he is an ageing man, with the best of life behind him. How can he hope to keep her? She will find herself now the centre of a circle of brilliant and charming persons. She will be invited to houses where, for his good name’s sake, he can hardly accompany her. Now that she is a public figure he must be careful of her reputation and of his. He will not be able to go about with her so much. She will make her own friends. She will forget him. He will have been a stepping-stone in her life; nothing more.

For him there is in their love-making no longer a solid, satisfying comfort, only an occasional moment in which he may forget. Life catches her up. She has luncheon engagements and week-end parties. And, as soon as the curtain falls, she is being rushed away to dances at Murray’s or at Ciro’s. The names of her new friends, Christian names for the most part, trip from her tongue at every turn of her conversation. He knows none of them; they are strangers to him. And he realises that now she has found her feet in the world he has lost his hold over her. She needs his help no longer. He cannot exert the dominating influence of experience and success. Probably she has begun to think of him already as an old man.

Is she still faithful to him, he wonders. He knows what are the morals of the green-room--one intrigue after another. “And the people concerned,” he reminds himself, “are always the very last to hear anything.” He makes enquiries furtively about her especial friends. He finds himself listening in his club to the tedious reminiscences of obsolete tragedians. He asks chance acquaintances in the train whether they have ever heard of her. “That’s a wonderful discovery,” he says, “that new star at the Adelphi.” And he waits anxiously, in case the stranger may have some scandal to tell of her. He sees very little of her now. “But you cannot think how one thing comes on the top of another,” she explains. “All these people; its business half of it, and I am so happy. And you want me to be happy, don’t you, darling?” And every day he grows more jealous; every day the strain grows greater. Night after night she is supping and dancing, at other people’s expense; and in this world people don’t give anything for nothing, especially that type of person. There are times when he thinks he would give anything to be certain, to know one way or another. But there are others when he knows that that knowledge is the one thing which he would avoid. He is almost certain that there is something between her and that young barrister he saw her dining with last Sunday at the Berkeley. But he dare not make sure. He dare not be forced to break with her.

For he knows that if he once broke with her he would have to say good-bye to love for ever. He knows that he has not the faith, nor the strength, to begin again. He has lived ten years in the last eighteen months, and ten years bring him very close to the prescribed limits of a life’s endurance. He can no longer say, as he could in the early forties, what is one love affair, is not the world companionably full of freehearted ladies? This is the last time, the very last. He has not the courage to say good-bye to pleasure.

And then one evening the crested wave of jealousy is at its height. There is an all-night sitting at the House, and he is walking from his club to Westminster. It is just after eleven. The theatres are emptying into Piccadilly. The pavements are crowded. Along the streets cars and taxis are hurrying their occupants in search of further entertainment. He follows enviously the momentary view of bright interiors. He regrets the long hours that await him, on a hard bench, listening to dull speeches. He could wish that he were young again, forgetting in the evening’s intoxication the morning’s bills and overdrafts. And suddenly he catches in the corner of a taxi, lit suddenly by the glare of a street lamp, a glimpse of flaxen hair drawn back tight from a forehead, of hair bunching like clustering flowers about the ears, of pale blue cornflower eyes, and of lips so close against a man’s that they have just been kissed, or are about to kiss. A second and the taxi is again in shadow.

Slowly, an old man, he turns and walks back westward to Piccadilly. He could not, after such a sight, endure the superficial oratory, the unreal antagonism of the House. He must be alone on such an evening with his thoughts. Backwards and forwards he paces up and down his long, book-lined study. Was it she, he wonders. It was for only the merest fraction of a second that the glare of the lamp had revealed the dark interior. And there must be so many girls with flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes.

Not like hers, though, not quite like hers: never anywhere had he seen such eyes, such hair. And he had learnt during the last year to know by heart every changing light and shadow of those loved features. Surely he could not make a mistake about her now. But even if it were she, what then? What was a kiss after all? To some girls it meant everything. There were some girls whose lips once yielded would be ready to surrender all. There were others to whom a kiss was no more than the casual brushing of a hand; who kissed out of kindliness, out of affection. And surely she would be one of them, she who was kissed every night before a thousand people, with the limelight on her upturned face, by a man for whom she had on the whole almost a physical dislike. What could kisses mean to her?

And yet how shy she had been when he had first kissed her, nearly two years ago. She had trembled and had sat on the edge of the sofa in that private room, her fingers plucking at her skirt, afraid to look at him. It had passed swiftly enough, that nervousness. But she had not been then the girl to exchange kisses lightly with any man. And if she had become so since, the change had not been of his making.

The heavy alabaster clock on the mantelpiece strikes one. She should be back by now. They have agreed so often that if an actress is to be fresh for her work next day, she cannot dance away her energy, night after night, till morning. They have talked so often of the wisdom of cutting one’s supper parties short. “A couple of hours, darling, that’s all one needs.” And there is a matinée next day. Surely she will be home by now. He walks across to his desk and lifts the receiver of the telephone. “Hammerton 5769,” he calls. The operator repeats the number. He sits there, the receiver against his ear, waiting, waiting for the sound of the quick, breathless voice that will put all his anxieties to sleep. But it does not come. Perhaps she is asleep. It was selfish of him to ring her up. She was tired and has returned straight to the flat after the theatre. The vision in the taxi was the trick of a disordered fancy. He will have woken her up. She will be angry with him. He will send her some flowers in the morning and she will forgive him. But no answer comes. And after a long delay a sleepy, masculine voice informs him that he can “get no answer, sir.” But he is sure he has the right number? “Yes, sir, Hammerton 5769.”

He restores the receiver to its place. She is not there. She is a light sleeper; she would have been sure to wake. Comes to him the memory of an evening fourteen months ago, the evening of his big speech in the House on Ireland. He had returned, eager and elated, and he had felt that he must tell her of his triumph. A sleepy voice had answered him, a voice that had instantly lost its sleepiness when it had realised who was speaking. “Oh, you, darling,” she had said. “Yes, what is it?”

And she had listened intently to his account of the night’s debate.

“But I’m a selfish pig,” he had said, “waking you up like this.”

And in his whole life he had never known anything more intense than the thrill with which he had heard her quick, breathless answer.

“But, my darling, you know, surely, I want you to, always, always. It’s the next best thing to seeing you.”

Those were the days when she had been never too busy, too late, too pre-occupied to talk to him, or see him. He had often come to the flat after a long, night’s sitting, and she had rekindled the fire for him, and had sat before it leaning back against his knees. That had passed, of course, inevitably, in the nature of things. But something surely should have come to take its place. Surely they should have built for themselves some abiding mansion. Had they squandered their capital? Was there nothing left for them?

Backwards and forwards he paces up and down his study. She is not home yet, and he knows that till she is home, sleep is impossible for him. He would lie tossing in bed at the mercy of his fevered fancy. He must know one way or another. It is a quarter of an hour since he rang up. She is back by now perhaps. Again he raises the receiver. Again he calls her number. Again there is the long delay. Again the sleepy, “Sorry, I can get no answer, sir.”

This time he does not rise from the chair. He takes the watch from his pocket and leans it in front of him against the pedestal of the telephone. “Every ten minutes,” he says, “I will ring her up. I will know the exact minute at which she returns. I will see that she does not lie to me. I shall know whether she is telling me the truth or not.”

And every ten minutes from half past one to two, and from two to three, he raises the receiver and calls in the same steady voice, “Hammerton 5769.” And every time there is the same delay and then the same answer. He does not move from the chair. The fire has become a dull glow among charred ashes; the room is cold. But he sits there, his eyes fixed on the second hand of his watch as it eats into the minutes.

Then suddenly a new fear comes to him. She has been home all the time. She has brought her lover with her and refuses to be disturbed. He can see them in the warm dusk of her room, the small table lamp casting through its silk covering a pale rose radiance upon the white linen of the lace-fringed pillows, heightening the beauty of her face, as she turns it to meet his kisses. There is the ring of the telephone in the other room.

“Your silly old man,” he says, and they laugh together. And he places his hands over her ears that she shall not hear it, and his lips wander over her face and neck. The bell stops ringing, and once more his hands are about her and his mouth is against her ear whispering: “Now I can tell you again how much I love you.”

He sees it with the hard clarity of jealousy and foiled desire. He rises quickly, pushing his chair sideways as he does so, and strides backwards and forwards across the room. There is the sound of an opening door upon the landing, the patter of slippered feet upon the staircase, the rap of a knuckle in the passage. “Come in,” he says. And his wife is standing in the doorway.

Old and shrivelled and pathetic she looks, with her sparse hair falling over the black and gold of her long silk dressing-gown. And yet she is younger than he is; he remembers they are both old stuff, and there rises in him the suffocating need for sympathy, for maternal kindliness, for someone to whom he can say in his loneliness: “I’m tired; I’m an old man: be good to me.”

“But, my dear,” she says, “I thought you would be at the House all night.”

“I know, I know,” he says, on his guard instantly against surrender. “It wasn’t very interesting, and I thought--well, I just came back and I’ve been reading for a few minutes before going up.”

But the moment he has said it he realises that she does not believe him. She has heard the crash of his chair beside the telephone: that is what has awakened her; and she has heard him striding up and down the room, and there is no book lying open on the table; there is no chair drawn before the fire, and in the grate only a few dull coals; no whisky on the small table; no cigar smoke; no feature of the usual setting for an evening’s reading, and, after thirty years of marriage, a wife knows her husband’s habits.

“My dear,” she begins. But he will not let her finish. At all events he must protect himself against discovery and against this fatal weakness in himself that would fling him before her on his knees and on her pity. “It’s quite all right,” he says; “I shall be going up in a minute. I just want to settle my mind a bit first. I can’t sleep if I’m at all excited. And you’ll be catching cold, dear, here. You mustn’t stay, really, in that dressing-gown.”

They look each other in the face. She knows that he is lying, and he knows she knows. But she has a dignity that will not descend to the vulgarity of cross-examination. “Very well,” she says, and again turns, leaving him to the sting of his jealousy.

And it is not till nearly four that he hears, at last, the quick, breathless voice; hears its answering “Hullo!” in the casual tone of one who is happy and tired, and cannot be bothered at this late hour.

“What, you!” it says, “at this time. Where have you been gadding round?”

He keeps his dignity; he would not betray to her the secret of his long night’s vigil. The tone of his voice as he replies to her is equally casual, equally pre-occupied. “A long sitting at the House,” he says. “I’ve only just got back. I thought I’d ring up and say good-night.”

“And I’ve only just got in, too.”

“Really!”

“Yes; dancing at Jack’s, a studio affair, a jolly party. Everyone there, Sybil and Ernest, and Marjorie Cooper and Arthur Winston. Oh, and do you know I believe that Forster ménage is coming to an end. She was dancing with another man the whole evening; rather funny, isn’t it, after all we’ve said?”

He agrees that it is funny, and listens for a few moments to the eager flow of talk. “Well, I expect you’re tired,” he says at last. “You’ve got a matinée to-morrow. I mustn’t keep you up. _A bientot._” And he hears the click of the receiver at the other end.

And next day they lunch together, and the wretched business begins again at the beginning. He daren’t bring things to a head; he daren’t part with her. He daren’t make sure, and it was with a strong man’s love he won her.

How does it end? If I were to attempt the conventional magazine short story I should have to contrive, I suppose, a dramatic climax. But things rarely happen like that, really. There is a working up to a point and a falling away from it. As spring passes into summer, so as one enthusiasm wanes another comes to take its place. We are never rid of our desires; we change them, that is all.

The life of all mortals in kissing should pass, Lip to lip while we’re young, then the lip to the glass.

And of last love, as of second love and first love; it passes calmly enough probably in the end. There will be an American tour, perhaps. And when she returns they will meet as friends. There will be no abrupt severing, “_coupé net en plein ardeur_.” There will be a pause, and during it he will decide that the time has come for him to grow old decently. But anyway the end is unimportant. The emotional climax is reached on that night of jealousy, in the weakness of a strong man, in his desperate clinging to a waning ecstasy, his cowardice, his determination to know the truth, his pitiful desire to be deceived; and in the rallying of his dignity at the last moment, his refusal to be “gaga,” to play “Père Goriot.”

And it is because the climax of such a relationship comes then, that I have preferred to write of it in the form of an essay, rather than of a story; a short story must close on a dramatic curtain. And if a situation does not offer a dramatic curtain, it is wrong to make a story of it: it would be either a bad story because it would have no climax, or it would be an untrue story with the high light flung on a climax that was manufactured and incidental, instead of the significant, the universal moment, the hour of jealousy and self-contempt, the hour when a strong man sits before a telephone watching the second hand eat away the minutes.

It could be done, though, in a novel; it would make an admirable opening chapter to the story of a woman’s life: it would have to be told probably through the woman’s eyes; its early _motif_ would be the arrogance of youth as it strides contemptuously over age. There would be the middle years of turmoil and success, and then the story would turn back upon itself. The woman would fall in love with a younger man and would find herself, in her turn, being used as a stepping-stone for youth. And as she stands watching youth ride past her, she would know all that her early lover had known and suffered.

The love of a mature woman for a boy is a theme that has been used often enough, especially in French fiction, but never quite in this way, perhaps, never as a key to unlock the heart of a man’s last love. But then it is a woman’s theme perhaps rather than a man’s; and we must remember always that, with the exception of some dozen books, the masterpieces of prose literature, and indeed of all literature and all art, are the work of a masculine intelligence. It may be that the contemporary women novelists are better than the contemporary men novelists. It may be that to the nineteen-eighties the great writers of the post-war period will be May Sinclair and Clemence Dane, and Rebecca West and Sheila Kaye-Smith. It may be, I do not know. I should myself doubt whether there is to-day a single woman writer, with the possible exception of Edith Wharton, who can begin to stand comparison with Thomas Hardy and George Moore, with Cavell, with Conrad, with Max Beerbohm, with Galsworthy, and with de la Mare. But one hesitates to dogmatise on living writers. This, at least, is sure. For many hundreds of years there have been pictures painted, and poetry written, and stories told. There have been a few writers of genius, and many painters, and poets, and musicians of great talent. There have been one or two minor poetesses, and there have been Jane Austen, and George Eliot, and George Sand. Women have inspired books, but men have written them, written them, perhaps, I sometimes think, chiefly with the object of giving pleasure to woman, of making themselves attractive to her. The monkey and the West Indian savage woes its mate with dancing, and ornament, and display. The mediæval baron instituted tournaments and exhibitions of strength and courage. Art is the fine raiment in which the civilised man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps, because women have need of no such artifice that their contributions to the museum of the world’s art have been so casual and so imponderable.

I believe that some such apologia has been made before, and I am half-inclined to feel that it was George Moore who made it. Certainly he has said somewhere that the most precious service that art has done to life is its exalting of an instinct into a revelation, its gorgeous apparelling of love. And whether or no he stressed the fact that it was a masculine achievement, it is a point certainly not to be disregarded by the critic of prose literature. For this is what it comes to, that the themes of the world’s great stories are masculine. And it is only youth that can write honestly and convincingly of age.

We are under the spell always of what is distant from us. From the bondage of marriage we survey the raptures of free love. And from the deceit, the evasions, the premeditation of an intrigue we turn our eyes towards the decent pasturage of matrimony. Riot is as real to the virtuous, as virtue to the riotous. It is experience that attracts innocence. And if a young man would write of last love, he has, in the love for him of a mature woman, the situation ready to his hand. There is no need for him to search further; it is thus that the story of youth and middle age is told to him. If he would write of a man’s old age, would go beyond maturity, he would select some Père Goriot, some aspect of wronged senility, some Fouan or King Lear. And by the time that he has come himself to middle age, by the time that he has reached that borderland, the theme of age is, because he is no longer remote from it, unattractive. The ageing novelist returns to youth, and first love, and the raptures of spring. In “The Man of Property” Galsworthy told the story of mature, devastating passion; he was then at that point of balance of which Shakespeare wrote. But mature love, and the love of middle age for youth had, when he came to complete the Saga, ceased to appeal to him. The love of Jolyon for Irene is never actual to us; but of first love, of Val and Holly, of Jon and Fleur; of the hesitations, the blindness, the enrapturement of dawning love, he writes as few save Turgenev have ever written.

Youth means nothing to us when we are young. It is gold that we spend freely. We push past it towards the future. To-day is as indifferent to us as yesterday. We set out to write a book and we do not find out till we have finished it what we meant to say. We have lost interest in our book long before we have corrected the final proof. We are at work already on some new thing. We hardly pause to read the reviews of the book that we handed to our publisher with such excitement six months earlier. What does it matter what they say about that book. We have got beyond it. It is a part of our dead self. We are living in to-morrow. People come up and say: “We like your last book,” or “We don’t think that your heroine would have fallen in love with that sort of man,” or, “Do you think that he would really have behaved quite like that?” And we smile and we say, “Perhaps.” But we are thinking of the new story that is shaping itself in our brain, the new story for which we have already prepared a series of brand-new note-books. I am always surprised when I find a writer of under forty genuinely depressed by his reviews. Surely he must know, I think, that all this is only his apprenticeship, that he is learning how to write, and that a generous public is financing his education. He has not begun yet.