CHAPTER IV
Deb knelt in front of the squat sturdy oil-stove with “Cora” gold-lettered across its front, and began carefully to trickle a supply of kerosene into the tank. Cora was essential to the evening’s enjoyment of her three votaries; their friendship grouped itself round her personality, and Aunt Stella, whose wit ran fatally in the direction of punning, had even dared to nickname their union the Chorus.
Deb knelt, perplexed, musing, a vestal before the altar....
Cora was six weeks old, and was just losing her first fragrance when Deb bought her.... “Does anyone want an oil-stove cheap?” she demanded, rushing like tragedy upon the assembled company in the lounge of Montagu Hall Hotel. “With saucepan, feeder, gallon-can, and all my illusions, complete for five-and-tenpence?”
“My dear child!” cried Stella, “Cora has been yours for exactly half a day.”
Deb sank down despairingly on the fender-seat. “Five-and-eightpence,” she amended. Then, darkly: “To be bested by a rotten little piece of ironmongery one foot by two——!”
“Does she smell?” Jenny Carew exclaimed impulsively; “oh, then something must be wrong with her.” (They commented afterwards how queer it was that never for an instant had Cora been “it” to any of them; always “her.”) “Do let me take her to pieces for you, and put her together again. Do let me, Miss Marcus. I haven’t had a thrill for ages. And if I fail I’ll buy the fragments for Bobby to play with. Dolph, who did we last lend our screw-driver to?”
Her husband, morose and bearded, was not interested in Cora. “Somebody who hasn’t given it back.”
“All right, Mrs Carew; and you can have the bits for Bobby anyway, when you’ve thrilled long enough.Idon’t want the little brute, whole or in pieces; I would have thrown her out of the window, but just at that moment she threw me out atthe door. She certainly has character, and a perfumed soul, and—and I was so happy, carrying her home in my arms this morning.”
Someone spoke indolently from the deepest armchair at the best corner of the fire. “Miss Marcus, I’ll buy your disillusion for five-and-eightpence.”
“Will you? Will you really? Do youwanther?” Deb looked across at him shyly. The soldier had not been long at Montagu Hall; rarely spoke, except, lately, to Jenny; and generally did not give an impression that he could be stimulated from a state of sunken lethargy for anybody on earth.
“Not for myself. Heaven forbid! But my men are always shouting for more stoves. Doubt if even Cora could throw half a hundred lusty fusiliers out of their recreation room. I’ll have a look at her, if I may.”
He and Jenny and Deb went up to the second floor to inspect Cora.
“There she is already ...” mourned Deb, on the first floor landing.
Presently the three of them were standing with gaze fixed in fascinated silence upon the object for purchase. There was no other illumination in the room; Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of white light and black shadow....
A boarding-house—an oil-stove—the soldier—Jenny Carew—it struck Deb from what a bizarre rag-bag romance drew its patchwork pieces. She stole a look at Burton Ames; he was old; possibly about forty-six; and had an air of being neglected—neglectful: his khaki slouched over his chunky shoulders; his hair, grizzled fawn, was disordered and ragged; the corners of his eyes gathered into wrinkles. Not young, not successful, not handsome, and married ... she had heard him mention a wife somewhere in the West Country.... Preposterous that even for five swift seconds she should have received an impression that the big thing might be hidden here for her—
And then she saw that Jenny’s charming little gamin face was alive, and warm, and flickering as firelight; roguery achase round her lips; tears on her brown, blunt lashes; promise and mutiny and tenderness ... what was the matter with Jenny? Slowly the soldier’s hand came out and closed tightly round her arm, just above the elbow.... Deb, still watching, almost winced at sight of the grip....
And then Ames let go; and flung himself down in the armchairclose at hand; and said, with the content of a man who unexpectedly finds sanctuary: “Let’s stop up here. We don’t want other people. I’m sick of the trail of other people littering the house. I like it up here.”
Yes—but where was the place for Deb, in Deb’s room?
She had no need of married people; took it for granted that the married man cannot lead by splendid sun-beaten ways to finality; that a married woman has ever the advantage over a maid, by won tranquillity of experience. She had no need of these two. Then why did they leave it lying about under her notice ... whatever it was they had found? The atmosphere was neither amorous nor exotic; but Deb had an impression as though the eternal man and woman had just come home; and that at any moment he might commit some little commonplace act—slip off his coat and hand it to Jenny to be mended, to make significant the fact that they were man and woman come home—
—In her room. Petulantly she turned away from sight of Jenny’s face ... could she reach the door and get out before Jenny’s lidded emotions brimmed over into action?—Too late! ... Jenny’s arms were strangling Deb, Jenny’s scorching lips were on Deb’s cheek and neck, Jenny’s half-sobbing half-laughing runs and murmurings of incoherence were thrown upon the unnatural silence ... “You darling—darling—darling! I’ve wanted to hug you like this since the first night you crept into the lounge. You’re such a beautiful little thing ... isn’t she? Isn’t she? Oh, I’m so happy you’re here—do let’s all three be pals—I hate everyone else in this beastly place ... little funny, sorrowful, creamy kid, I like you—I like you——”
And all the while her eyes were on the soldier. And all this boundless slippery exuberance was for the soldier—atthe soldier—it did not matter upon what pretext it vented itself. Warmth and excitement to spare for Deb too ... Deb felt this, or she would have torn herself away from the embrace ... but Jenny was wholly unconscious that she was making love to a man with a girl as the intermediary; she was no self-analyst. But the soldier and Deb, in one look exchanged, established that mental kinship which exists between those who see things alike introspectively and from the outside view; with meaning duplicated and tripled; made grotesque by circumstance or contrast; backwards from the future, andtwisted this way and that by imps of irony; kinship of those who can see with the chill impersonality of gods on Olympus, and also with pointed application to their own tiny scheme of things; restless subtle kinship of those who dream and those who question.
And even as they silently hailed each other, he smiling a little under his fair drawn eyebrows, and she very serious; hailed each other through the froth and tumble of Jenny’s excited talk, the white light which rayed the ceilings and walls of the room, was sucked into soft inky chokiness....
“Little beast has gone out,” commented the soldier, in disrespectful reference to Cora. “Light her again, and let’s sit round and be comfortable.”
Of course Deb did not sell Cora.
Round Cora they hacked a sort of intimate privacy, with privileges for their trio alone. Cora was their excuse, the ostentatious cause of their withdrawal from the rest of the boarding-house: they were going to smoke a cigarette with Cora; they were going to fry potatoes on Cora; Cora was depressed, and needed the instalment of a fresh wick. Perhaps they rather overdid Cora; but the intangible need binding them together needed to solve itself into tangible expression. Cora, whether as an exaggerated joke or a temperamental goddess, was ... convenient. “Are you coming home to Cora to-night?” or “I saw Cora was lit, so I walked in!” Deb was High Priestess of the Oil-can; Jenny, principal engineer and mechanic; and the soldier serenely enjoyed results, as was typical of him.
And then Stella Marcus crystallized their dependence on the Cora legend into a pun. They took up the nickname—“The Chorus meets to-night!”—schoolgirlish methods of allusion ... but Jenny and the soldier had been battered by realities, and welcomed the silliness of their present relapse. And Deb, her soul a responsive barometer, sank alternately to the soldier’s semi-humorous apathy of nothing-worth-while, and leapt again to Jenny’s soaring irresponsibility.
The soldier had been thus labelled by Deb in the spirit of irony, when he told her that he had been twenty-three yearsin the army, and was not, as she had at first imagined, one of that gallant mushroom crop raised by the call of war. He had been in India and South Africa, Aden, Singapore, Malta and Gibraltar. It was difficult to conceive of anyone less of the accepted military type: an individualist of the let-me-alone order; an atheist; a keen but destructive logician; a hopelessly romantic pessimist; he could not understand ready-made standards of conduct, of honour, of conviviality; would not conform to the prevalent disposition to flock together, pray together, stand or fall together. A soldier, even a good soldier, withoutesprit de corps, was a deplorable spectacle; hardly likely to prove an acquisition to the mess. His fellow-officers, after a perplexed interval of acquaintance, were wont to pronounce him a rum beast. To which, very occasionally, was made the resentful addition: “Tries to be funny”—when Burton Ames unleashed his weary but mordant form of humour. He was more popular with his men, who appreciated the eccentric interest he was prone to waste on them singly and as persons, however much he depreciated them collectively.
Fitly, he should have been apprenticed to some trade or profession which combined the essentials of a sailor, an explorer, a landed proprietor, a hermit and a carpenter. The career of Robinson Crusoe answered all requisites to perfection....
Out of Deb’s little crowded room, made vivid by her own books and pictures, he created for himself a sort of amateur desert island, away from the gregarious herd in the smoking-room and lounge and drawing-room downstairs. His own room was bare and uncomfortable, as only a soldier’s can be who has many times shifted camp, and without a woman to look after him. And Jenny’s larger room was liable to intrusions from Dolph and Bobby. But in Deb’s room he hung curtains, and fiddled with Cora, and altered furniture, and smoked his pipe, and examined books, and listened to Deb’s wicked imitations of their fellow-boarders, and cooked potatoes by his own home-made method of so many heart-beats to the moment and so many moments to the boil, and confided in Deb and Jenny his love of complete solitude, with ever-deepening tranquillity of mood. Sometimes they all went out together on some impromptu ramble leading to Hampstead Heath or a cinema or a coffee-stall. But usually they were to be found in a careless group round Cora; Burton Ames lumbering inthe only armchair; one figure a-sprawl on the bed; the other flopped on the floor; accommodation of the soldier’s huge inert limbs reducing to nil the already limited space. A clammy February and bleak March urged a desire to huddle, morally and actually. It was scarcely possible for one of them to make a movement without brushing against one of the others.... Sometimes Dolph would meander into the room in funereal quest of his wife; and sometimes Aunt Stella left her rubber of bridge to exchange a few jokes with Major Ames. But for the most part they were tacitly left alone, or unjustly alluded to as a “noisy gang” by Mr Gryce, whose room was below theirs.
Ferdie Marcus was far too glad that Deb was occupied and amused to question the propriety of this bedroom intimacy. If all had gone well, if there had been no war, the poor child would have continued in possession of her own sitting-room in “Daisybanks,” where she had formerly received her friends—“ragged” with her friends was the mysterious term applied—Ferdie had, of course, appropriated it to his own use: “Na, my darling, did you have a good rag this evening?”... He gathered she was having a “rag” now; it was natural to her age; but everything that Deb did, he whittled to fit this assumption of nature—only natural that the child should want to be out—only natural that the child should want to be at home—“Leave them alone, Stella; Jenny Carew is always present; it is only natural that Deb likes the company of young folk. Forty-six, is he? All the better, then; a harmless fogey, almost as old as I am; it livens him up to be with Deb and the pretty little Carew—tells them tales of war ... ho! ho! the new Othello. Only, Stella ... Papa need not know what is going on—wass? He would not understand.”
Harmless? Certainly Burton Ames intended to be harmless. He did not believe himself in love with either Deb or Jenny. He valued them for their companionship, for their interest in himself, for their distinct and unique personalities. They were a stimulating find among the heterogeneous nomads of boarding-houses. He thought he liked them as two charming boys. With his scorn for platitudes and for platitudinous happenings, he underrated the dangers of propinquity. If one were careful ... his careful attitude was his undoing;it goaded Jenny and Deb out of shelter. They knew well enough that from their reliance on—well, on Cora, was sure to arise this equation of danger; they courted it, hunted it, even. Ames was such an insistently masculine factor in that room; a girl’s room. The very rough feel of his sleeve—Jenny knew ... every time she moved.... And she was a restless creature, forever thrilling her wings.
Jenny was just an atom of life-force, twinkling wildly, all the time, in every direction; jostling to be noticed, petted, admired; a gyrating dizzy mote in the sunslant; a savage little brown bundle of sexual impulses. That was primarily Jenny. Funnily opposed to this, some of her instincts and education and ways of speech were those of the typical suburban sparrow: she was suspicious of people who could correctly pronounce foreign languages; scoffed at what she called “highbrow stuff.” What else was Jenny than this? Most of all, perhaps, an insatiable mother; wearing herself out in service to anyone sick or bothered; proud of these calls on her reputation for quick practical efficiency. Cooking, bandaging, scrubbing—she had five brains on each hand. Her notion of spoiling a beloved person was by virtue of touch ... a smother of kisses ... chair and cushions and fire ... healing contact of warm flesh upon flesh ... cosseting ways that were all the realities she knew or cared about. “That sort of rubbish never did anyone a bit of good!” she would interrupt with almost shrewish impatience, when Deb and the soldier were astray in realms ethical or fantastic. Life was four walls and a roof—babies within, and the smell of dinner, and sacrifice, and somebody crying, and body’s pain.... A little fun to be squeezed in at the cracks; fun that was substantial, and never ethereal; fun that was crowds and a pretty dress, a waltz, chocolates, a bottle of wine, a ride in a motor-car....
And love was just touch again—for Jenny.
Jenny had no reserves and no discrimination; she could hastily damn a stranger to perdition without any attempt at sane reasoning—and a week later one would find her impenitently ensconced at the other extreme of judgment. She was not actually beautiful: a small, round head, and a small round chin; brown sloe eyes tilted at the outer comers; round the eyes and mouth a crinkling resemblance, mirthful, mournful, to a baby monkey; Bobby, her young son, had inheritedthis. But her eyebrows were delicate umber sickles on the low white forehead. And she could look all things in a second’s space of time....
Jenny had been given sordid tragedy for her lot on earth: poverty of the shoddiest kind; illness that had brought her three times gaspingly close to death. And she had come out well in the test ... better, perhaps, than a schooled philosopher. Loyal to Dolph, competent in the bread-struggle, plucky in the very extremities of pain. To Deb and the soldier she was a sort of Complete Home on tour. He, especially, seemed to rely on her for the daily wants of an ordinary man adrift and ill. For he was already a victim of the war; shell-shock and neurasthenia had left him incompetent for any more strenuous job than his present light ordnance duties. Jenny rejoiced in the very egoism which brought him to her at all times with some slow ponderous helplessness to confide: “Look here—what am I to do?”—She gave prodigally, without thought of barter. And as between her husband and Ames existed that casual masculine friendship which blooms mainly on the borrowing and lending of matches, she was able, under cover of this, to cosset him to her heart’s content; run into his room with soup and custards when he was laid up, ask for his clothes to patch and darn—all the little real things ... advantages of a married woman again.... Deb fretted against her own disabilities. It seemed that Jenny, without cheapening herself in the soldier’s esteem, could softly trail her fingers across his furrowed brows ... murmur: “Darling, how hot your head is!” ... Deb’s modesty bled in scarlet on her cheeks and neck. Jenny, how can you? how can you? ... and oh, if I could only do the same! But she was still dream-crusted with the convention that a man shall avow, and a girl deny or concede; could not force herself to reverse the process, even though Jenny scored—scored all the time.... The soldier’s head lay for an instant drawn back against Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny, magically stilled by the contact, was crooning a song that the sea might have composed to the beloved vessel at last in harbour. Deb, wistful of the other’s frank facility in wooing, redly ashamed lest the soldier should despise it, hating Jenny for giving him cause to despise it, mutinous at her own instinctive adherence to girlhood’s creed, Deb whispered to herself in promise for this empty moment: “When I am married....”
“When I am married”—and marriage is found with love as surely as the picture-coupon in the opened packet of cigarettes, inessential but inevitable. Yet here she had fallen in love where no ultimate together-being was possible; even no passionate response forthcoming. Then was this love at all?—hitherto accepted as a divided flame burning to some splendid fulfilment....
Deb knelt in front of Cora, perplexed, musing; a vestal before the altar. What if she had envisioned the altar of romance as a mountain-peak in the sunset? Here it was a mat before an oil-stove. An altar, nevertheless, where she made painful sacrifice of illusion. For love was complete in itself, without past or future. She might not put eager question, before admitting love: is he young? is he free? does he care? does it hold chance of the final happiness? But she must accept it, barren and bitter and an unshared burden, a journey without ultimate lure of rest. Love was the big thing—the conviction remained. Only she had thought it conditional. And it was absolute.
... Slowly she lit a match, and applied it to the wick. From the mirrors and walls of the many-cornered room, a dozen Debs rendered variation of her dense black hair, her thick storm-grey eyes, and lustreless ivory skin. For Deb’s looks were of that mutable type which inspired every fourth-rate art faddist to paint her Holding a Melon; or in a Blue Jacket; or with head flung back against their favourite bit of Chinese drapery; or absorbed in the contents of a dust-bin (symbolic realism); or as a figure on an Egyptian frieze; or as Mary Magdalene; or as a Wood-nymph pursued by Silenus; or as a coster girl dancing to a barrel organ by naphtha-lights; or merely as “Deborah, an Impression”—till the sight of Deb herself was a repose from these fantastic and distorted relics of pre-war art-phases.
Deb as Reverie of a Girl, was so absorbed that she let the match burn down to her fingers before she was recalled to actualities. Quickly she let it drop; and at the same moment Jenny rushed in:
“The Chorus is off for to-night, Deb; isn’t it a shame? Mad’m llorraine is giving a squawking party in her room, and you and I have been specially invited.”
This was catastrophe.
“Oh Jenny—mustwe? Hasn’t she invited the soldier?”
“Out of compliment to us two, yes. But she can’t stick him, really, because he doesn’t jump about opening doors like a foreign monkey-on-a-stick.”
“I wish hewouldopen some doors—to-night. I know exactly what will happen, Jenny: La llorraine will say: ‘Come, now we will be truly cosy!’—and immediately block all forms of ventilation. And then she’ll sing as if she were let loose again in the Paris opera-house, and I shan’t know if it’s my head bursting, or the walls and ceiling, or her voice. Old Gryce will object, and so will grandpapa, but they won’t take any steps, because each one will be afraid of putting a stop to something that is annoying the other more than himself——”
“Darling idiot, why did you ever say you wished you could hear her sing?”
Deb wailed: “I didn’t know that it meant a prima-donna’s powerful mezzo-soprano in a bed-sittingroom already containing two suites of Louis Quinze furniture, and forty-two cases of fur cloaks, and a permanent dog with permanent asthma, and an anthracite stove fire, and a grand piano, and complicated domestic arrangements for producing food at a moment’s notice, and a clothes-line, and litter from their last year’s variety entertainment, and My Child My Solace complete with curls——”
Jenny stopped laughing as the last item was catalogued. “Dolph’s potty about her....”
“About Manon....” Deb nodded gravely. She and everybody else had noticed what was so blatantly happening. She cuddled on the floor beside Jenny’s knees, and leant her cheek against the other’s dangling hand; then she slid her lips along the smooth warm arm the whole way up to the elbow.... One comforted Jenny by Jenny’s own methods.
For the coming of La llorraine and her daughter to the second floor of Montagu Hall Hotel had made a difference to the Chorus. It was not so tight-fitting. A rival cluster of intimacy had been established by the newcomers, Stella Marcus, and Dolph Carew; and Jenny was perforce drawn into it from time to time ... Dolph was insistent that she should be kind to Manon, aged sixteen. And La llorraine, with her overpowering conviviality, had sought to make an undividedbohemian settlement out of the bedroom inhabitants of the second floor; all doors open at all times, and a general pooling of minor difficulties.... “Now Stella, my dee-urr, will you be kind and count methatwashing while Manon play with Bobby Carew and I buy avon-derful cream cheese for the Countess who dejeuners with me in my room to-day. Then need I say, my dee-urr, that I expect you to com’ in and share.” And Stella, who took delight in La llorraine, replied: “Chère Madame, you are as generous with your Countess as with your cheese.”
La llorraine stood for the Continent, as the Continent ached in the memory of those who had loved it before 1914. Not for any one country or another, but for all the gay cities: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, St Petersburg ... irrespective of the distinctions of war. Actually, she was born in some small town on the divisions of Russia and Poland. Her present appellation, which covered stage and private use, could, in its initial eccentricity only be explained by the admiration awakened in her on first encounter with ffoulkes, ffolliott, and ffrench.... “My dee-urr, but what an advertisement! Bah—I know how to catchthatpublic by the ear. They are swine, I tell you ... but this will br-r-ring them in millions. You will see!” So she became La llorraine. And as La llorraine, she stood for every aspect of continental life; garret, and hotel and court; grande dame, and then third-rate mummer; the popular artiste, or the good thrifty woman who can cook succulent dishes for her household. Physically, she was built on a magnificent scale, and always wore plain and expensive black—save for breakfast, when she horrified the boarding-house by appearing in a soiled dressing-gown, red-and-gold Turkish slippers, and a knitted blue woollen shawl over the short dyed yellow hair which formed such a crazy mop to her clear-cut aristocratic face, long and pale, with kind eyes and delicate, sneering mouth. There was no adventure of the demi-monde too lurid for imagination to cast her as heroine; and against that she could whisper mysterious tales of court intrigue, and call Grand-Dukes by their pet names, with an air that betrayed her a careless participant of their intimate revels.
Fiercely she adored Manon, whose hair hung in streaked yellow curls over her shoulders, and from whose red, greedy little wolf’s mouth one could envisage the dart of a red pointedlittle tongue. Manon fulfilled all expectations as the foreigningénue: soft, lisping voice, demure eyelids. In a frequent spasm of recollection, La llorraine would dismiss her from the room when the conversation was too adult for due preservation of a maiden’s bloom; but on those occasions that her mother forgot to dismiss her, no doubt Manon picked up much valuable information.... Certainly, whether from innocence or art, she managed Dolph Carew exquisitely, never seeming aware of an infatuation so blatant that it shrieked itself aloud at every moment; yielding not a dewdrop of her freshness to his importunity; and at the same time contriving to keep him attached and useful. “My dee-urr,” La llorraine declaimed to Stella Marcus, “such a clown for my Manon?—not for anything in thatworld. I have ... plans for her!” ... a queer impression stealing on the heels of her remark, that Manon was designed to be mistress of a third-rate illegitimate royalty of a fourth-rate kingdom.... A faded Louis drawing-room in vieux-rose—an oldrouébowing his entrance ... waxed moustache and imperial ... careful buttonhole.... “I have sent for my little daughter!” regally from La llorraine.
Grumbling prophecies were afloat in Montagu Hall, that some catastrophe was bound soon to happen among that second-floor crowd—the Carews, the Marcuses, Burton Ames, and—with vindictive inflexion—those disreputable mummers! It was really getting insupportable; and fancy Mrs Carew taking no steps about her husband’s ridiculous behaviour with that nasty little thing in ringlets, but to be instead forever running after Major Ames, who isn’tmyidea of an officer—not at all well-set-up—and the noise—and in and out of the bedrooms—how Mr Marcus can allow his daughter ... but it isn’t as if they were English, no, nor Dutch either, although they never said they were. Did you know that they dressed up on Christmas Eve, all the lot of them, and had a procession up and down the stairs, and the—girl—wore—tights?——
Thus Deb mimicked with diabolical accuracy, the existing Drawing-room Opinion.
“And very attractive you looked in ’em, darling!”
“Jenny, I believe when our gang was singled out for influenza last month, they looked on it as an awful visitation of justice; a sort of plague of Egypt.”
“Perhaps it was. Everyone in the house escaped it except our landing. Do you remember the day I had bolted five aspirin, and the soldier sauntered in, and looked at me, and thought I was dying, and gasped out: ‘Oh, I w-won’t detain you.’ Ass!—but I think it saved my life, I laughed so. And the night I was so awfully bad that Dolph specially got up out of bed to make a cup of Bovril for Manong?”
“Don’t, Jenny! I ... I hated him, that time.”
“Ah, well, I’ve had some jolly enough razzles with old Dolph; he can’t help it when he gets taken this way.” Into Jenny’s tones had crept that note of possessive defence that one hears from the woman in the police-court, shrewishly denying the black eye given her by her “man.” “Poor old boy! he’s gloomier than ever; but then I married him because he reminded me so of Martin Harvey. Dolph says that Manong makes him feel pure again, which is out of my line as I forfeited my purity in his sight by having married him. It sounds a bit mixed up, and I don’t quite see where I come in—with the washing on Saturday morning, I s’pose. Only I’m hanged if I don’t have my little fling too.”
“Does Dolph mind the soldier?”
“Lately he does; haven’t you noticed? yellow with jealousy; tries to keep both eyes on his wife, and not lift them off Manong; wants to confide his woes in me, and take the high moral stride as well. Can’t be done, my lad! But it was quite a rag during the ’flue, Deb; we were all able to take patterns of each other’s dressing-gowns, weren’t we? La llorraine in ermine and her head tied up in a duster was a treat. She and your aunt can tell some smoke-room stories when they get started—my word! Dolph was shocked—afraid Manong would hear.”
“The soldier was bad that one week.”
“Wasn’t he? And wouldn’t let me do much for him either, worse luck. I almost wondered if I should have wired for his wife, off my own bat. But he’d have been so furious.”
“Why? doesn’t he like her?”
“Child—don’t you know? he’s crazy about her....”
“Oh....”
“Didn’tyou know? Why else do you suppose he’s so precious backward withus? Hang it, Deb, we’re not exactly unattractive. The chances he’s had.... Another man would have worn my throat away with his lips at it, beforenow!” Jenny clenched her hands passionately. “Deb, haven’t you noticed that he’s never kissed either of us?”
“Yes. I had noticed.”
“He told me the whole story, mooching about the streets in a fog one night. He had fooled about with some chit, not caring for her a tuppenny curse—as he might have fooled with us. Someone told his wife; and she just gave him notice to quit—‘I’ll send for you when I can bear the sight of you again!’ ... that was four years ago. God! she must be made of ice. With a war on, too. Can’t she guess that the man wants looking after; and that if her fingers don’t sew his buttons on, someone else will volunteer for the job. Not that I’ve had much from him, except thanks, for trying to buck him up and brush him up ... a more dejected-looking object I’ve never seen than when he first slouched in here. Thanks? oh yes, he thanked me then, in the fog, for having listened to his drivellings; as if I could have helped myself, with his hand grabbing my elbow; I was bored stiff. That was before you came in with us, kid.”
“I’ll drop out again.... You’re married, Jenny, and so is he, and you can fit each other with what’s left over. But I want something whole——”
“Yes; you’ve got everything to give. But you and I might just as well go on being pals, darling,—he doesn’t care a rap for either of us. And he’d be terrified of me without you, Deb; or of you without me. I’ve never struck such a Cautious Willy. When he’s left alone with one of us he goes to fetch his pipe—till the other comes back. I tell you, it works up all the devil in me....”
“And in me....”
“Deb, he’s arealman, or I shouldn’t care like this. He’s been perfectly sweet to me once or twice. Perfectly ... dear. He can be, when he likes. Have you ever felt the muscles of his arm? ever bent it back? like iron. Deb—I’m sure he’s sworn some gimcrack oath to himself, not to ever let it reach a kiss—with us, I mean.”
“Because of her.”
“Why shouldn’t we set ourselves to break it down? After all, she must be a beast. And she should have kept him while she had him. It’s our innings. Deb, I bet you a gallon of oil for Cora that one or the other of us gets a kiss from him to-night. I’m mad to-night—mad—game for anything!...There! I forgot that blooming party next door. Mad’m’s got a pal in to play her accompaniments; she won’t let us off; not just for a Chorus meeting.”
A conspirator’s rap at the door; the soldier thrust his head stealthily round the corner; ascertained with relief that both members of the Chorus were present; and entered, pulling from his pocket a smoked haddock by its tail.
“I’ve brought a present for Cora; two presents,” from the other pocket he extracted a tin of asparagus. “Shall we revel up here to-night, as a thanksgiving? I don’t know for what; but I’m in the mood.” His brick-coloured face was impassive; his voice slow and toneless; his entire personality redolent of beef decently roasted and eaten at the proper time at a proper table. Anyone more obviously opposed to riotous revels, or to moods of any kind, it would be hard to imagine.
“H’m ... I believe we shall have to divide the haddock before we cook it,” Jenny speculated with a dubious eye on Cora’s limitations, while Deb ruefully explained their evening’s engagement.
“Damn,” said the soldier gently. “Am I invited? I won’t go. I have to sit at attention when I hear music, or else I don’t look as if I were listening. And that’s so tiring. Look here, I can’t endure an evening without you two; honestly I can’t. Why not pretend to be ill, one of you?” Hastily he amended: “Both of you.”
“Ican; I’ve been feeling frightfully rotten on and off lately, since the ’flue. My heart’s gone funny from too many operations, or too many aspirin, or something. We could go in next door for about ten minutes, and then I’ll pretend I’m taken suddenly bad, and slip out in a I-hope-nobody-will-notice-or-make-a-fuss manner; and Deb will naturally follow me out, looking—what’s the word, you high-brows? sol—? sol—? something to do with lawyers.”
“Looking solicitous. Right then; I’ll skulk about on the landing till I hear you. Say I’m out for the evening. That’s settled. We can always throw Jenny on the bed, and me under it, if anybody knocks to enquire. You’d better put the haddock in your wash-basin for the present, Deb.”
“And please, where am I to wash?”
Ames thought it over. He bestowed on every question, great or small, exactly the same amount of stolid phlegm. “In Jenny’s room.”
“Not available. Dolph and Manong are spooning in there.”
“Alone?”
“Oh, you bet Mad’m or Miss Marcus or Bobby is with them. Our precious flapper mayn’t go a second unchaperoned. It’s hard luck on Dolph.”
“Dear Jenny, your point of view as Dolph’s wife is rather a novel one.”
“Excuse me, but is Jenny here?” A very aggrieved Carew stood on the threshold, glaring at his wife through an enmuffling tangle of beard and eyebrow. He was incredibly like the popular notion of a bushranger. Actually he had been traveller for a wholesale tobacco firm in the City. And was now out of work.
“Jenny, you might think of a fellow sometimes, I must say. Bobby keeps on running out of the room, and I’ve always got to haul him back. And you know quite well what Mad’m is like about Manong. Why don’t you sit with us and do some sewing till Bobby’s bed-time? You’re so selfish.”
Another ferocious glare—and Dolph was gone.
“Charming fellow, isn’t he?” remarked Jenny lightly. She shrugged her shoulders, and followed him out.
The soldier looked at Deb expressively: “Bit thick, isn’t it?”
“I hate Dolph Carew!”
“He doesn’t count. But she—she’s the pluckiest little soul in England. One can’t interfere, that’s the worst of it.”
“Why can’t one? Because one might compromise oneself?”
He smiled a little at her passionate scorn, accepting the implication calmly. “Yes. Partly that.”
“Mostly that.”
“You admire rash impulse, and headlong defiance, and all those virtues that make a muddle in the world, don’t you?”—From teasing Deb, he awoke to awful realization that he was alone with her. “I say—I must be off!”
“Yes, hurry!—a whole half-minute.” Daringly she challenged his unspoken thought.
“Ridiculous child. Remember to put the haddock in the basin.” He just touched her shoulder ... all his warmer marks of affection were reserved for the times when the Chorus was present in full membership ... and went out.
Deb crossed straight to the long mirror, and made the discovery that she had not been looking beautiful enough to saywhat she had said. She began to dress for the evening with a sort of revengeful deliberation. The deliberation was necessary to ensure good result. No wise woman can fly, with spirit aflame, into her clothes, and then hope to prove seductive. The dash was in her spirit, nevertheless. She was angry with the big thing for not proving the mellow, englamoured sanctuary she had every right to expect. This evolution of a dream into fact was futile; worse than that—destructive—to herself. A stupid, lop-sided business! Deb was not glad of love now it had come. Only a troublesome but intelligent honesty kept her from repudiating it altogether as the big thing; returning to her former state of silver-misty anticipation.... “One can pretend, I suppose?”—pretend that the soldier was a mere wayside incident. Only she knew too much about wayside incidents, to commit that error.
—Well then, since she was so sure, were not the issues worth a forced initiative on her part? Could she compete with Jenny’s boldness—if she chose? For with Deb, as with Jenny, the soldier’s steady, profiting self-control had become a nightmare which had to be exchanged at all costs, even for his scorn, even for self-destruction, even for evil....
Her temper resolved itself into action. There was mischief in her selection of the pure ivory taffeta dress, the golden shoes, and cobwebby gold stockings that the supple fancy could continue on limbs straight and slender inside the blown white cup of her skirts. Deb could wear white and pearl and dove-tints without fear of looking miss-ish; by contrast with her deep colours, they enhanced her vivid grace more than the traditional purple or flame. Sufficient of purple in her sombre twilight eyes; flame enough in her lips. Her hair she turned inwards, concealing its masses so skilfully, that, sleek on top and bulging rhythmically into a smooth pear-shape round the cheeks and the nape of the neck, it gave her somewhat the appearance of the knave of clubs as pictured in a pack of cards.
Then she went back to the mirror, and scrutinized her looks long and earnestly, and—like all heroines in every crisis of each love-affair—reflected how queer it was that just these curves and colours should have been the haphazard outward accessories to—her soul? ... no, souls were mawkish things!—to her essential Deb-ness.