CHAPTER III
Samson Phillips was first and foremost a man of tenacious disposition. He heard Antonia mention that Deb was to be found that Saturday afternoon with a certain person of the name of llorraine, and that she intended a visit to the same person, on her way home after the picture-show. Therefore, by doggedly attaching himself to Nell and her friend during the picture-show, as he was well able to do after Otto’s admonition to conviviality; by dint of an afternoon’s complete boredom and stiff discomfort; and by steadfast repetition of “Well—where do we go now?” at every projected flight on the part of Antonia and Nell, when circumstances offered a break in the concerted programme, as outside the Redburys front door, or after the complete and lingering tour of the Leicester Galleries: “No, I don’t care much for this kind of picture.” Or after half an hour spent in some neighbouring and drearily respectable tea-rooms; in fact, by simple dint of “hanging on,” Samson presently found himself being welcomed by La llorraine, after the manner of a Royal Mistress of the Robes receiving the Royal Master of the Staghounds.... She was in one of her “legitimate” moods; wit and not coarseness was the passport for innuendo. They had rented a rambling underground flat off Elgin Avenue, where their furniture had at last a chance to spread itself; the vast drawing-room, lit by candelabra night and day, was thick-carpeted and sparsely furnished by a Louis couch and chair, a piano, and a table that held some delicate simpering miniatures. Manon moved about the dim spaces, a solitary unchildlike little princess with wide skirts and golden hair that was brushed high off her forehead and piled into stiff curls.... Obviously, the more disreputable phase of peroxide, clothes-line, and variety entertainment, was for the moment in abeyance.
Samson awkwardly approached Deb and Cliffe Kennedy, who were talking together by the window.
“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus.”
“You? How funny!” Deb began to laugh.
Samsonwasfunny, in juxtaposition with La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy. He was so unplastic.
“Who brought you here? Antonia?”
“I came to see Miss Verity home.”
“But she has only just come.”
He held to his point. She would some time or other be obliged to make a departure, and then his services as an escort would naturally be required. A girl should not traverse the dark streets unaccompanied. A girl should be aware of perils besetting her, though ignorant of their nature.
Samson enquired how Deb proposed to reach home. “This is the worst end of Elgin Avenue,” he hinted darkly, and looked with suspicion at Cliffe Kennedy, who passed his hand across his eyes as though brushing away a hideous memory, and said abruptly: “I’ve never spoken to you of my little sister—have I?”
Deb knew that he was an only child. But she also knew by now his marvellous talent for fitting every subject that came up with local interest of personal experience. What she did not know was exactly how real was the momentary belief which inflated his account of the lovely and cherished little sister—Beth, her name—whom Cliffe had once been requisitioned to fetch from an evening party. There had been a woman—he had not gone. “Someone else will see the Babe home.”... Beth, tired of delay, having refused all other escort—“I’m waiting for my brother, thanks,” with childlike pride—had at last started off by herself....
“It was months before we gave up the search. And it killed my mother—spiritually,” Cliffe amended, recollecting that Deb had frequently lunched with Mrs Kennedy. “Her hair went snow-white during those months——” mournful eyes fixed on Samson’s aghast, attentive face. His gaze wandered to Deb’s, read there a gentle reminder of the dear old lady’s almost unpowdered dark brown coronal; and without the slightest perceptible break in the narrative, sank his voice to the supplementary explanation: “Yes—she dyed it for my sake. I simply couldn’t bear it. My fault—damnable ego-ridden slothful beast!—and the perpetual sight of that piled-up silveriness never let me forget for a moment what she had suffered—what we all suffered ... she guessed it was drivingme to madness—Other women condemned what she did—called it preposterous vanity ... at her age. God! one of the divinest impulses of pure love——”
By now, Cliffe was so swathed about in self-spun illusion of tender maternal sacrifice and a lost little sister, that Samson may have been pardoned for horrified credulity:
“And you never heard anything—no news—no clue——?”
“I spend regularly four nights a week in brothels,” Cliffe replied with exquisite simplicity—and Samson checked a stern protest at use of a word which, after all, Deb could not possibly understand.
“But I’m making you melancholy with all this. A chance word reminded me—I’ll see you home to-night, Deb; but I hope you’re not relying on me to pay your bus-fares; you still seem to cling to the outworn tradition that gentlemen, beautiful glossy eligible gentlemen who live in Kensington Palace Gardens, always pay the fare of the young lady they’re walking-out with—or rather riding-out with. I’ve noticed a semi-diffident, semi-expectant look that you always direct towards me when the conductor comes round, and you pull out your modest little purse—and I’m hypnotically compelled to the low rapid pained yet masterful and at the same time unobtrusive utterance: ‘No—please—allow me—I insist.’... And I can’t afford it, Deb. I’ll see you home to-night, but you must pay your own fares.”
Samson favoured the speaker with a look so expressive of the “beautiful glossy eligible gentleman who lived in Kensington Palace Gardens” that Deb’s eyes, encountering Kennedy’s, were an elves’ dance of green and grey merriment.
“I will accompany Miss Marcus home, if she allows me.”
“Are you pledged to see Nell home as well? Antonia and Nell and I all live in different directions, you know.”
“David Redbury is calling for his sister.” Samson stationed himself in an uncomfortable attitude beside the lounging intimate pair, and remained there unbudgingly on guard, declining to be drawn into their conversation; nor yet to be beguiled away by any inducement of refreshment or music.
Meanwhile, La llorraine was making Nell welcome.
“My dee-urr, you arethatfriend I have been wanting always for my Manon ... she grows too old, too staid—She is with me and the Countess and Stella Marcus and Mrs Verity—shehears us talk—it is not always well that she should hear us talk. The Countess has a most tragic business on the carpet, my dee-urr ... wait, I will tell you—or when we have more time, perhaps. But my Manon—you shall see her every day—all day—so she will grow a child again—healthy, romping children, you and she.... You can eat your déjeuner here, and she her dinner with you—ideal!—it shall be planned ... for listen:” She sank her voice to the confidential pitch, holding Nell inexorably captive with one hand, and with the other sweeping wide descriptive circles. “At present she muses too much of marriage and what it brings. She sleeps badly. She put me questions—sochquestions.... Wait, I will tell you my plans....That marriage, when it koms—ah, it will be somesing! superb! you see. But it is essential she shall be fresh and unconscious and blooming.... Those girls, Antonia, Deb, they are no more early-morning, ... They dream not ... they laugh at love. My dee-urr, it vos vonderful you should been brought here for my Manon!
“Now tell me, my dee-urr, are you trobbled inside aboutthatquestion of a hosband? Or your mother?”
“I don’t know ... I mean—I haven’t any....” And then, from the midst of confusion, Nell pushed out a courageous: “I think it’s horrid to talk about husbands and that sort of thing.”
La llorraine was switched off at the main. And Antonia, overhearing, smiled at Nell encouragingly. She and Deb agreed that it took weeks of hard labour to pierce young Nell’s creamy layers of impenetrability. As one put out a tamer’s hand, swiftly her fugitive spirit darted away, in a tremor of shadows and dreams; thoughts that frightened her, so like couchant, half-slumbering beasts they seemed. Sweeter thoughts that slipped from chill grey to silvery sheen—aspen-leaves stirred by a wind from nowhere, and hushed again. It amused Antonia not a little that La llorraine should in public and within the first five minutes of meeting, demand an outburst of articulate confidence on the subject of Nell’s troubled inside onthatquestion of a husband.
Nell and Manon, swept imperiously together by the opera-singer’s enthusiasm, and expected to begin romping without delay, eyed each other in furtive dislike ... till Manon’s demure sang-froid relieved the situation.
“Would you like to see my canary?”
“No,” said Nell, in a passion of pity for the artificial life any bird must lead, in that hectic twilight atmosphere.
After a pause Manon tried again. “The young man who has just entered the drawing-room has beautiful eyes. Do you not think so?”
“He’s my brother David. And he’s only a boy. He’s the youngest of us.”
Her prospective friend shrugged plump shoulders semi-bare in her quaint early Victorian frock. “Too young for me, bien entendu. Doubtless he will be infatuated with Mama. The men of her age who visit her, take no notice of Mama, comme femme, you understand, but try always to play with me. And they pretend it is as a child that they make a pet of me, and I pretend too, and Mama. But we all know it is not so,” she nodded wisely. Certainly, if Nell were to attempt the task of preserving Manon’s early-morning dreaminess, here was an excellent opportunity to start. Instead, she sped across the room to David; pulled imperiously, desperately at his arm. “David, I’m ready to go home with you. Quite ready.”
But David was not to be beguiled. He had found in La llorraine what had been so poignantly missing from his life since the outbreak of war. He had re-found his Continent. She embodied all the thraldom of a tour abroad; all the lost delights he had described to Richard. Her looks, her voice, her setting, her clothes and perfume even; the outflung movements of her long white ringed hands, her bits of richly suggestive reminiscences, with ejaculations given in all languages. Sudden familiarities; her exhaustive and professional acquaintance with foreign music, foreign artists and their very questionable careers; of foreign cities—their opera-houses and their royalties; gossip, garlic-spiced and succulent, or else melodramatic and sonorous—her whole attitude towards life, towards theingénue, towards David himself——
He vowed afterwards to Antonia, in ecstatic gratitude for her share in bringing him hither, that never again while he had the freedom of the flat near Elgin Avenue, would he fret at island limitations. “She’s simply incredible. When she talks, I can smell hot coffee and those jolly bright brown lengths of bread that one plunged for at the buffet, arriving at Boulogne or Dieppe....”
“I’m glad you’re happy, at least. My other two introductionsto the party look simply sodden with misery. I think we must be unselfish, and get them away.”
She indicated Nell and Samson, the former still being entertained by Manon; the other, an obstinate misfit in the company of Deb and Kennedy.
Antonia Verity was Cliffe’s only fixed territory; his spiritual headquarters. He returned to Antonia after all his zig-zagging spurts of enthusiasm. But Deb was his present caprice. He took Deb with him everywhere; displayed her proudly to such fragments of his circle as were handy; told her all the stories of all his loves; telephoned her before and after meals; wrote her long and blasphemously witty letters, or postcards that were the scandal of Montagu Hall; made her free of his home and his books and his mother, teased her and argued with her and shocked her and bullied her and—did not make love to her.
It was an enervating existence—for Deb. There was a peculiarly flattering quality to Cliffe Kennedy’s absorption in her, even in its impermanence. Other queens had reigned ... other queens would reign.
She was not in the least infatuated by Kennedy, in spite of occasional efforts to believe this the cause of the diffused glamour on all her days and nights. His personality was not quite that of a real man ... it was a vivid tricky personality—wantonly elusive—wantonly exacting. He had to be forgiven half a hundred lapses of manners—even of humanity—per instant. He was a veritable lob of mischief-making, untrustworthy, with not even that one point of reliable consistency of being a law unto himself. No one could ever hope to pin him down to any statement or opinion. Yet, with these traits, there was nothing womanish about Cliffe Kennedy. His tastes were masculine; his language forcible; his brain elastic but brilliant. Other men—ordinary men—liked and sought his company, while deploring his fantastic appearance, the leathery spider-webbed face and the two bits of blue inset with the vividly light effect of a chimney-sweeper’s eyes among the soot; his abandonment of yellow hair; his wild sad thin legs that were like that kind of poem which having no end or beginning, straggles on and on in various shapeless forms of incoherence. It was a pity, with those legs, that he should favour so strongly the tweed knickerbocker style of clothing. He would have been better suited by a jester’s motley of red and yellow, or apicturesque costume of fluttering rags and slouch hat and knotted staff. He resembled that sort of concentrated allegory in pedestrian form which a few years ago meandered variously through novel and drama as the Wanderer, the Pilgrim, the Minstrel, the Fiddler, the Vagabond, the Gypsy, the Tramp, the Pedlar, the Just-Outsider, the Never-Coming-Quite-in-er. He was the vanguard of that type with which Deb was presently to become so familiar—the young male of the transition period, who, perhaps in self-defence, rose to match the half-and-half girl; young male who required neither extreme of mistress nor wife, but accepted, in a spiritual sense only, the semi-privileges accorded him—the licence of speech confidential or witty; and temporary rights of appropriation—by an unspoken avowal that he might be trusted in all situations not to transgress limits; but in return it must be clearly understood that he was on his guard against the responsibilities of wedlock:
“Shouldn’t we be miserable together, Deb?” And she wondered what reply etiquette dictated to this ardent declaration of no-marriage in the various forms it was offered her. “Please, I wasn’t even trying ...” occurred to her as the likeliest.
Amongst the tricks of this twentieth-century style of liaison was a totally unembarrassed delight in hoodwinking such of the older generation who still took propinquity at its face value, to the belief that the two concerned were indeed formally engaged; wantonly depositing raw material for scandal, where it would be easiest picked up by the person for whom intended.
Cliffe was enchanted when Deb reported to him grandfather’s indelicate enquiriesrethat young Kennedy’s prospects and declarations; or sentimental Trudchen Redbury’s eagerness to discover when congratulations might be allowed to cast off their decent veilings, and appear on the doorstep in the form of a large basket of flowers, white and pink. He even insisted on propping up all such suspicion by escorting Deb to a formal Sunday afternoon call at the Redburys. “Und nun,” Trudchen babbled to her husband, as Cliffe’s decorous top-hat passed up the street in devoted juxtaposition with Deb’s best white fox furs—“it may at any moment ... how happy the dear Stella will be!”
Ferdie and Stella, true to resolve, put no direct questions to Deb. The child was enjoying herself ... she was alwaysout—that affirmed enjoyment. Stella was as rapacious of Deb’s conquests as though her own sterile girlhood were thus being avenged.... A gleam of triumph shot from her narrow dark eyes in the direction of Hermann Marcus, as Deb indifferently thwarted his industrious research. Here, at all events, the despot had no powers of destruction. Ferdie’s lenience rose from different motives. He prided himself on his lack of insistence that each succeeding episode should result in an eventual son-in-law. Plenty of time—plenty of time. His little Deb was flirting ... only natural! The younger generation governed themselves by new laws; how unlawful these laws Ferdie was happily ignorant. According to him, if “it did not come off,” then either one of the pair was indifferent to the other’s love, or else they were “just good friends, nothing more”—no reason why a man and a girl should not be comrades, in these enlightened days. But that any working arrangement could exist whereby passion was deliberately and even verbally harnessed with comradeship, and held in check, and given rein, and expelled again—no, that certainly never occurred to Ferdie Marcus. His outlook was just half a generation ahead of his own; half a generation behind his daughter’s. Deb, in a sort of wilful despair at her vain search for control and supervision either from the authority she would have been quick enough to defy, or by some innermost spiritual compass she lacked, Deb went where she pleased, in what company she pleased, at what hours she pleased; rubbed her spirit in pioneer literature, pioneer drama and pioneer discussion, till it was mournfully sterile of glamour or amazement; and for some inexplicable reason, played up to all assumptions on the part of the Studio gang, that she was even as they were in experience of sin ... only it was not the fashion to call it sin, except when the term was used humorously. Not one of them, girl or man, would have believed Deb, had she chosen suddenly to discard her pose of sophistication. She had experimented just enough for this—no more. Her passionate little face, poised on its thick column of neck; the heavy lids that were never quite drawn back from her eyes; slow-smiling mouth, the rich blood veiled by skin crinkled and transparent as poppy-petals in the sun-rays; above all, a quality in each supple movement she made, which a dancer once defined as “limb-consciousness”—combined to uphold the lie that vanity in her had started.
“What can it matter—my life is my own affair!” thus Deb, who hoped hers was a wayward soul, and knew it was merely slipshod....
Whatcanit matter?—why, nothing had mattered much since she had kissed Burton Ames ... and he had been called away to the telephone. She had broken bounds then ... entered on forbidden country. Of what avail afterwards to turn and crawl tamely back through the gap, resume an existence where girls did not cheapen themselves?
If he had made it worth while ... he had not made it worth while, or worth anything. One had heard of girls who, disappointed in love, had flung themselves headlong “to the bad.” Deb did not do that. She merely meandered bad-wards; her steps, like those of a very intricate dance, advancing and retreating with sideway darts and curvetings and inexplicable rushes for cover and sudden boldnesses ... all the haphazard effect, to an onlooker, of a dance without the accompanying inspiration of music. But the onlooker could not have guessed that Deb had seen Jenny die with all the eagerness of her being unfulfilled, baulked....
“I never knew it was so easy to die—while one still wanted things as much. One must take—take—and take quickly!”
She was wont to tell Cliffe of her adventures and escapes on Debatable Ground. He listened with proprietary zest, and many oaths of secrecy. And then betrayed her to Antonia or Zoe or Timothy—whomever the object of his next momentary death-or-nothing spasm of intimacy. Deb, following after, cleared up the litter of her character, agreed with Antonia or Zoe or Timothy that Cliffe was simply impossible and deserved to be forthwith discarded ... and then went off with him for the week-end to his country cottage near Wycombe.
No—that was how Kennedy himself would have described the incident. As a matter of fact she went with him for the Saturday, as she had often done before, and they were to return in time for supper at Zoe’s flat, where Deb had arranged to stay for what was left of the night, because it was easier just to roll over on to the sofa in the sitting-room, than to worry about busses or trains to South Kensington. She was shedding the fundamental home-instinct that the black hours must necessarily be spent in one’s bedroom with all accompanying accessories of property. Really, once the sacred custom wasbroken, one could tumble to sleep anywhere; at an inn, or on a divan with two or three other girls, or—in hot weather—out of doors.... Yes, she had grown lax over the geography of her nights. It was easy enough to ’phone Aunt Stella and say: “I’m staying with so-and-so till to-morrow.” “Very well, child—have a good time.” Stella supposed that so-and-so had a spare bedroom, and could lend Deb a nightgown. Gradually Deb trained them not to worry even if she omitted to ’phone her whereabouts; a ’phone was not always handy—“You’ll know I’m all right.”
And all this—for nothing at all. The girl’s behaviour, submitted to the essential interrogation, was as orthodox as her circumstances might be the reverse. That night at Seaview for instance—the sea was entirely a matter of fiction, but Cliffe insisted that such a name must shed a disguise of Philistine respectability over any dwelling. It was not even the dramatically inevitable outcome of a swiftly discovered passion setting them aflame and beyond all reason and remembrance; or else to be explained by a set of automatic coincidences, such as misunderstanding with the rest of the party, or a faulty time-table or a fog. Certainly it was raining rather drearily; and Cliffe declared that the prospect of Zoe and her surrounding aura of Soho waiters and impresarios and macaroni-merchants rendered him faint with boredom ... and they were having rather a jolly talk about something-or-other ... and there was plenty of cold-stuff supper in the larder.... And Deb was in a sort of fancy dress—she had discarded her wet and muddy tweed skirt for a pair of white knickers of Cliffe’s, which, with her own loose red-bordered white serge sailor smock, gave her the look of a trim and dashing principal boy in pantomime. She disliked the bother of resuming her skirt again.
“Oh, well, let’s stop on here,” said Cliffe impatiently. “Why do I pay a high rent if not to be able to talk quietly with a pal now and then, without interruption?”
“Five-and-six a week, isn’t it?” Deb indolently let lapse the question of their imminent return.
“Six-and-six. And cheap at that.”
“I suppose the baby-farm next door reduces the price. They do seem to make more noise than ordinary home-babies.”
Cliffe grinned. “The landlord tried to argue that out as aspecial convenience ... ‘So handy just to drop it over the wall!’”
“When you first mentioned your country cottage to me, Cliffe, I pictured it with a thatched roof and an orchard and roses round the door.”
“‘Make me love mother more’” he hummed. “Curious psychological effect some vegetation seems to have! But what a hopelessly conventional imagination is yours, Deborah. Is it likely I’d be found dead in one of those old-fashioned traps for sentiment and earwigs? Seaview is a futurist conception of what a country cottage ought to be, in its stark, splendid ugliness.”
Seaview was a yellow-brick workman’s house, standing in a row with five others of the same build ... bare of ornamentation, and with the straight road to High Wycombe directly outside the door.
Deb balanced one bare tan leg across the knee of the other, clasped her slim ankle caressingly, and dangled a caked and clammy stocking near the fire, which, with the reckless squandering of much paraffin, Cliffe had at last wheedled to a ruddy pyramid.
“I wish you hadn’t tramped me through all the sploshiest fields, Cliffe.”
“‘Where there are cows there is dung!’—simple Russian proverb,” he replied sententiously. “I’m compiling a book of them. Besides, you shouldn’t have forgotten your umbrella.”
“I’ve never had an umbrella.... Think of it—never a little umbrella of my own—and sometimes my arms are empty—oh, so empty.... I have to watch other women dandling their umbrellas ... and wonder why such happiness should have been denied just to me. Sometimes, at night, I dream that I have, after all, one dear little golden-headed umbrella ... and then I wake up to find it all a dream—all a dream——perhaps I shall never have an umbrella now ...” Mournfully she wriggled her toes down into the foot of her stocking.
He watched her from his sprawling posture on the horsehair sofa, and smiled....
“Highly improper conversations.... Wonder if Samson Phillips would approve of it? Does he still write you those compromising letters about running brooks and Ella Wheeler Wilcox?”
“Every Friday. EllaWheelerWilcox sounds like an oath, the way you say it.”
He swung himself upright, striking the pillow-sausage with his fist. “Itisan oath. Yes, I might have been a good man if some confiding aunt hadn’t roused my worst passions by a gift of those eleven white, innocent-looking vellum volumes.... ‘And they were wed on a horsehair bed, and the dying day was their priest.’ Deb, would Samson Phillips consider the dying day an adequate priest for you and me?”
“I’ll ask him if you like. I’m a privileged person with Samson; he used to kiss-in-the-ring with me at children’s parties—a very serious young man unbending to play with the little ones—and acquired a taste for me that way.”
Cliffe hummed:
“Now that you’re married we wish you joyFirst a girl and then a boy—Seven years after comes son and daughter—Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”
“Now that you’re married we wish you joyFirst a girl and then a boy—Seven years after comes son and daughter—Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”
“Now that you’re married we wish you joyFirst a girl and then a boy—Seven years after comes son and daughter—Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”
“Now that you’re married we wish you joy
First a girl and then a boy—
Seven years after comes son and daughter—
Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”
He repeated the last line softly ... and a funny little smile pranced at the corners of his mouth. “Is the game old-fashioned, Deb, for present company? Here you are, hopelessly compromised—entirely at my mercy——”
She shook her head. “Much too old-fashioned!” but was nevertheless not quite sure how far the jocund spirit held sway.... There was an element of primitive commonplace in man which baffled all her utmost powers of histrionics—and she knew it; expecting its most unexpected appearances. When the invariable happened, she had hitherto been able to cope with it in all its forms so triumphantly as to surprise even herself—using alternatively the weapons of pure wonderment, appeal to good comradeship, elfin irony, pathos of reminiscence.... So far, she had had better luck than she deserved. But each averted peril left her a little wearier of wayside incident, a little more restless for the good thing which brought rest.
And now—Cliffe. Or was it merely her fancy that his eyes threatened? Even Cliffe, whose apparent happy sexlessness had been a subject of such absorbing debate between herself and Antonia and Zoe. Cliffe—even Cliffe—God’s understudy, who brought lovers together for his whimsy and parted them for caprice; and whom no girl of them had caught in lover mood himself—Even Cliffe—but he was a stranger to her now,as they all were, the friendliest, when this thing touched to life some fundamental antagonism.
“Behind the times, am I? Well, try the new way, then. Advanced theory, and all that.... We don’t love each other, but let us experiment in life’s stuff. We may ... please each other without loving. Why not? The Youth of to-day refuses to squander itself in unsubstantial dreamings. Here am I—here are you—brilliant young intellectuals. Eugenics—and all that! Likewise, we are quite crudely frank about our respective pasts; and render it fully clear that we have no intention of making claims on sentiment or responsibility beyond the present hour. And I am cynically epigrammatic about marriage, and you are fairly amusing about chastity. And then, let me see—yes—then we become serious and rather subtle; introspective psychology—passion and its effect on the individual temperament.—God! deliver me from this modern fashion of erotic promiscuity masquerading as Repertory Ethics! Give me instead the old-fashioned blackguard and the out-of-date village maiden—and they’ll play me a decenter scene than ever achieved by all this twentieth-century tangle-talk. Deb—I know a man and a girl who consented to humour the State and get married for no better reason than because they had saved up the price of a divorce, to put in the bank—a sort of emergency exit. And they asked me to admire their hideous sanity. ‘We’ll take each other for better,’ the man sniggered—‘but why insist that two human beings should take each other for worse?’ smug fool—as though his beastly Marriage on a Reasonable Basis were worth while, anticipating dreariness and weariness and satiety. To go in for it gallantly, with hope and a ray of idealism—that’s marriage on a reasonable basis. But this fellow asked me toadmirehim....”
“Now, I wonder what you said to him to dispel that illusion?” Deb was quite serene and comfortable again now that Cliffe was making speeches. He could be reckoned to go on for hours, his out-thrust chin propped on his clenched fists. She suspected he might be equally wrathful and eloquent had he chosen to hold forth in defence instead of in condemnation of his subject. But still....
“People think, because there’s a war on, it ought to reduce the human psychology to a state of beautiful rustic Big Simplicity.... ‘We have no time for minute dissections of idea in these times when——’ Idiots! Windbags! As if waritself—now—were a beautiful rustic simple Big thing. Everything’s complex to a verge of lunacy—it’s the tendency of evolution—war and peace and character and morality—The war hasn’t made a halfpenny-worth of difference—only a khaki embrace gives a fictitious impression of bluff manliness.... Complexity is raging everywhere beneath the surface layer of uniform, just the same—just the same. We’re all victims to it—you, Deb, and I, Deb. And the immediate tormenting question of me and you ... we don’t love each other, do we? You who know too much and have done too little?—do we?”
He rose to his gaunt height, and pressed his large hands on her shoulders, and stood looking down upon her ... she wriggled a trifle uneasily. There was monotony in this procession of negative wooings, and she would have welcomed a change. It might perhaps have been possible to care for Cliffe—if he had not damped her ardour by presupposing the contrary. If he had made love to her ... love, like the threshold of a dim yet familiar garden fresh with the night-breath of drenched petals——
And instead they were ruling her round with geometrical lines and angles—theories! She raised her dragging white eyelids and looked up at him with an intimate appeal for the garden ... the garden back again....
His face grew suddenly stern.
“Go up to bed, child—I’m going for a walk on the Common——”
But he did not remove his hands—till, swooping, he kissed her gently on the forehead. And strode abruptly out of the front door into the dark dripping road.
An uncanny familiarity about his action ... a detached feeling of having once been the spectator—then Deb remembered. She had seen Cliffe treat Antonia in exactly the same way. It was his celebrated Kiss of Renunciation, as performed before all the Crowned Heads of Europe....