CHAPTER VI
October brought Samson Phillips to town for six weeks of special signalling instruction. Quite suddenly, from lethargic standing about in the vicinity of Deb, as he had done since her kiss-in-the-ring days, some unseen goad prodded him into courtship. The old-fashioned word exactly expressed the flavour of his proceedings. Perhaps he was afraid she would sink too deeply into the mire of Bohemianism, as exemplified by La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy, in whose company he had found her on his previous leave. At all events, without quite knowing how it came about, Deb perceived the handsome sapper to be a prominent factor in her daily life. He rang her up on the ’phone regularly every morning, and was alternately facetious or reproachfully tender in claiming her day for the theatre, or a jaunt in the country, or dinner with his people. The play or the restaurant was always selected by him with due care for her innocence and not her preference. He loaded her with gifts that were a compromise between the generosity of an Eastern potentate in the wooing of a rapacious slave-girl, and such restraint as decorum demands before an engagement be a sealed fact: books of poetry, principally Spencer’s “Faerie Queene,” flowers, chocolates, crystallized fruits—gloves ... he was notquitesure about the gloves, and consulted his sister Beatrice, who said she thought a slight touch of unconventionality might be pleasing to Deb;—and war-trophies, which of course were “different.”
The Phillips men always conducted a courtship with their entire family rolling up behind them, wave after wave, and ready with a hearty benison instantly the signal for readiness should be given. A man with honest intentions need make no secret of them, Samson sturdily contended. Not only the Phillips’ mother and grandparents and sisters and three younger brothers with their wives, but also, by virtue of Beatrice’s marriage, the whole Redbury family assisted at the pretty spectacle ofa dark-haired Jewish maiden wooed and won by a son of the same tribe. Deb told Antonia it was like being courted in the Arena at Olympia on a day when thrown open to the general public. Her set also were amused, though less ostentatiously, by the progress of the affair; it was of a species new to them, and Zoe and Cliffe, in particular, were clamorous for details; puzzled that Deb withheld these. For in spite of her exasperation with the Phillipsen masse, she was loyal enough Jewess to protect her own clan from the levity of the Gentile. She confided in Antonia; Antonia knew when to control mere ribaldry; and to consider Samson as a human being, instead of an entertainment.
The whole wooing was not so incongruous to Deb’s temperament as the Studio Gang believed it. They made no account of her fundamental racial instincts responsive to just such a reaction from truancy, nor to the first twenty years of her life, spent in an atmosphere where Samson’s methods would have seemed wholly normal and pleasing. The incongruity only appeared when contrasted with more recent imprints on her development. These were responsible for her first careless acceptance of Samson’s appropriation; she forgot, until too deeply committed for withdrawal, that his actions and her acquiescence were here expressive of more ponderous significance than in the case of Cliffe Kennedy, for instance. She forgot, in fact, at the outset of the event, that the Samsons of this world do not lend themselves to wayside incident.
Apprehension faintly stirred in her only when she saw escape everywhere blocked, by the solemnly joyful expectation of Samson’s mother and grandparents who had so long and patiently waited for the eldest son to make his choice; by the already-one-of-the-family chaff of his younger brothers and their wives (Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah was a recurringly favourite joke with them); by her own folly in having yielded whenever he petitioned for her company; mainly, by Samson’s propensity to propose to her in the form of an arithmetical allegory in which Cliffe Kennedy hazily figured—“Supposing one Man were to have known one Girl for sixteen years, and she had known another Man for three and a half months, while the first Man was away; and the first Man came home again for six weeks, how long ought he to wait before taking the Girl to drink from the Singing Stream?”
The Singing Stream was not a public-house. It was Samson’sway of alluding to pure love. He was obsessed by the notion that if you take a girl to the water, she cannot help but be freshened and purified by mere sight of its freshness and purity.
Bohemia to him meant dancing and carnival and riot in hot studios; it meant glaring lights and stifling air and glittering evening dress. All the nineteenth-century rigmarole: the flash, and gleam of bare limbs; the dark hectic red of spilt wine; exotic music, and the stage, and doubtful witticisms and free love—free love as opposed toreallove. It was his fixed idea that literally to remove Deb from the fetid atmosphere and take her to where a stream babbled and gurgled and splashed over the stones and between green banks, was then and there bound to react upon her system in the way that he so desired.
It did not take Deb long to perceive his motive for these day-long jaunts into the country; and mischief urged her to play up; to dabble her fingers among the slippery shallows—it was fortunately a warm October—and to sigh ... once or twice ... and murmur “I wish——” and be wistfully silent again ... and dabble a bit more ... was quite sufficient to make Samson preen himself, owning the stream, her thoughts, the crude blue sky, and the entire healing balm of Nature. He wished her to be convinced of her folly in lingering to gaze at Vanity Fair, when she might have been weaving willow garlands. It was inconceivable that she had done more than gaze with childish long-lashed eyes ... not knowing what she saw....
As though in complete sympathy with the cause of reform, running water seemed to follow him about automatically. Whatever haphazard portion of country they rambled, the persistent brook appeared like an obedient servant on command. Deb began to wish her education were completed; the weather might any day turn chill and dreary. With this in mind, she perched upon a couple of rickety boards which roughly bridged a sparkle of narrow river, and shamelessly determined to put forth her powers to exact forthwith the inevitable proposal, and thus be through with it.
She had not the same compunction in dealing with Samson Phillips that might have wrung her had he been the good-natured, faithful type of fool she had at first imagined him. The man had revealed himself a fanatic, whose gospel was Simple Goodness; but who in preaching it materialized its intangible fragrance as of garnered apples, into a quality of cold iron; forbidding, repellant. High-principled he certainlywas, but intolerantly throned and totally without forgiveness. He would have made martyrs where he could not make converts. He destroyed Simple Goodness, in his harsh advocacy, as he had destroyed the beauty of running water, by letting it serve as object-lesson.
On this berry and bronze morning of October, Deb opposed to him a dancing elfin mood that was far more nimbly in accord with the tags of fluttering colour blown from the trees into the eddies of writhing silver, with the jolly boisterous hedges, all aflame and a-prickle, a blaze of hips and haws webbed in the powdery tangle of old-man’s-beard—Deb was more wickedly and wantonly a part of such a morning as this, kicking her legs to and fro from the plank which spanned the water, than Samson with all his most complacent hopes for her betterment and cure could have deemed possible.
“This is how I like to see you looking,” he said, lying full length on the bank, and smiling lazily across at her. “Come, now, isn’t it better than studios?”
“Supposing a girl should marry a man”—(“and I don’t see why he shouldn’t do some mathematics for a change,” reflected Deb)—“Supposing a girl should marry a man, and the man had different tastes from the girl, about studios and nature, you know, and they had two children——” Samson turned his head away, and nibbled grass—“and both had the same tastes as either one of the parents, ought the other to give up his or her own feelings about things or force them on the children, supposing he or she to be sure his or her ways were the best?”
And she waited solemnly for him to work it out.
He won respect by neither flinching nor compromising. “A man should never allow his children to be brought up away from Nature, whatever they may want themselves.”
“Yes”—straddling the plank so as to face him—“butisn’twhat they want themselves, Nature? And if it isn’t natural for them to want Nature——”
“Then they are unnatural children,” said Samson, stamping with firm boots on his mythical offspring.
Deb’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Fancy had quickened into momentary life a pair of baby creatures like herself, eager for bright, useless toys, perversely breaking them at each fresh disappointment ...herchildren, pressed and wrenched into the pattern their inflexible father judged best for them....
The might-have-been faded, and was replaced by an exultantsense of escape. Thank God, these children—hers and Samson’s—need never live and be sorrowful; thank God, she was still free to scamper away and play.
“Deb——” he pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes; and his words were pumped out with extreme difficulty. “Deb, will you marry me?”
“No—oh, no”—reaction was still too violent to admit of polite temporizing.
A long silence while Samson assimilated her refusal. An interminable silence. Was he wondering what his family would say? They were in such a crucial condition of expectancy that he would have to tell them when he got home—the telling would not be easy.... Deb rebelliously tried to jerk pity aside; it was his own fault. The right sort of man would have been decently uncommunicative till his desire was an accomplished fact; so typically Jewish to drag in the entire household! Or else he should have chosen a maiden more suitable to be the object of his benevolent chivalry. She had not deliberately hoodwinked him into belief that she was this maiden, so unlettered in life as his obstinacy chose to assert. The accordion stretches or shrinks according to the player. She hummed a tag of verse:
“He made a plaster image and he put it on a shelfWith a few assorted virtues that he didn’t want himself.”
“He made a plaster image and he put it on a shelfWith a few assorted virtues that he didn’t want himself.”
“He made a plaster image and he put it on a shelfWith a few assorted virtues that he didn’t want himself.”
“He made a plaster image and he put it on a shelf
With a few assorted virtues that he didn’t want himself.”
—Outburst of romping spirits muted quickly at recollection of the figure lying motionless and with back turned towards her.... He was the only man who had ever spoken the actual words to her: “Will you marry me?” Funny! Years ago, before they quarrelled, she and Con were canoeing in a sort of hazy dreamland when it was taken for granted between them that they would canoe thus into all eternity; and the other men.... What on earth had led Samson to such a mistake in selection? From the outside, of course, she appeared to have most of the requisites: same faith, decent family, right age (a year or two older than perfection, perhaps, but nothing to fuss about!) good looks, good health, good manners—the presence of his mother had always petrified her into gentle orthodoxy ... but surely, surely, he must have sensed behind these layers, something wrong—Well, not exactly wrong, butdifferent. Perhaps he did realize it now, and was relieved ... he hardly looked relieved—furtivelyher eyes peeped towards him, and then quickly away again ... an almost stricken expression to his recumbent lines. Surely she could not be responsible for that? What possible thread of affinity was taut and silken between her and Samson that any act of her could reach him and hurt him? He should have been sensible—Deb kicked petulantly at a low bough near her foot—the suitable kind of girl would have accepted him joyfully; would be nestling her head against his shoulder by now; causing him to feel so strong and brave and protective; and he could have taken her home, and proudly trumpeted his engagement, and the united family could have poured out lavish blessings ... quite wonderful, in its Suitable way, this Suitable dream; she could see that; only it did not fit her, or else she did not fit it ... a dream going begging!
Still silent? Another glimmering look from between her lashes, two black fans, long in the centre, dwindling at either corner. He must bebadlyhurt ... grace touched her to penitence again. After all, he had wanted just her—so there must be a particle of her very self, apart from all misconception, which had tugged him to love and to pain.
Yes—but can’t he look after himself? Need I? need I? No one looked after me when the Soldier.... Need one be nice to grown-up men? Because even when it’s only a boy—even when it’s Lothar von Relling, nobody understands that you’re just “trying to be nice.”... She had been waiting over a year for a little heavenly approbation for that act. Nevertheless, she ought to have said something softening in answer to Samson’s avowal, besides the bald and honest: “Oh no” ... Manners!—Whatdidone say? “Believe me, Sir, I am deeply sensible of the honour you have done me, though all unworthy of it,”—Deb could not suppress a joyous gurgle of laughter—she was free—free—light of heel and of heart. No more arithmetical allegories; nor deriving of solid moral benefit from the sight of running water; nor suffocation under the possessive approval of a good Jewish family; nor quaking in apprehension of the proposal to come. She was free to return to the set of wild young heretics who knew her as she was—or a little worse—in place of these others who thought her so much better, and to whom her real self would have been a mystifying disaster.
Samson stirred at the sound of her laugh. “Come along, we shall miss our train,” he said curtly. The peak of his cap stood between them all the way home. To avoid being alonewith her, he chose a crowded compartment for their journey home, and completed it in a motor omnibus, instead of a taxi-cab according to custom. Deb submitted meekly, feeling as though she were being punished for naughtiness. It was her nature to cling affectionately even to unpleasant conditions, directly they had established any claims of habit; so that it was with a pang of kindliness that from the steps of Montagu Hall she saw Samson salute her and stride away:
“And now I shall never see him again!”
She saw him again three evenings afterwards. His mother wrote, cordially bidding her to dinner. Deb, with every inclination to behave like a coward and refuse, yet felt it incumbent upon her to “face the music.”... She had eaten at the Phillips’ table every day and sometimes twice a day, for a fortnight. But she could not help considering the invitation a mistake in tactics—What more could they want of her, now?
She consulted Richard: “D’you think I need go? It’ll be like a funeral. I feel I ought to bring a wreath.”
“Sure you don’t want him?” asked Richard gravely.
“No—no—no. I should have to go to Synagogue, and dine with the whole family at Mrs Phillips’ every single night—they never seem, any of them, to dine at their own houses. And have a Visitors’ Day. And do good works; not good work, but good works. And never read anything except the Faerie Queene and Rosa Nouchette Carey, and the newspaper leaders. And give up all my pals, because they’re a bad lot. And be accountable to a man for my freaks.’
“Well—that’s just being married, isn’t it?”
“It’s just being married to Samson Phillips—and that’s being married three times thick. I say—I do believe you’re in favour of it.”
Richard said he did not want to force her inclinations. He was perfectly serious about it; these lapses overtook him at times.
She curled her arms round the balustrade post—their conversation took place at the foot of the Montagu Hall main staircase—and put her chin down on her arms and said: “Dear old boy, I warn you that you and father and Aunt Stella would be taken over by the Phillips family-life, and be absorbedlike ink into blotting-paper. I daresay grandfather would manage to stand out....”
“He’s a Major in the Sappers, isn’t he?”
“Samson? No, only Captain. Why?”
“Nothing.... I mean the family are known to be tremendously patriotic and all that sort of thing, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so. Rotting apart, Richard, d’you think I need go to-night?”
“Yes, I do.”
So Deb went, a shy, prim creature in flowered silk and fichu; all her troll mood of October dried into apprehension of spending three awful hours in the awful company of an awful family hating her because she had flouted it. More than ever did she quake at the sound of her unnecessarily loud and nervous peal at the bell, and wished that the Phillips would conduct their love affairs in solo, and not in the bulk.
By the end of dinner, she was, metaphorically, rubbing her eyes and wondering if she had dreamt the whole matter of Samson’s proposal and her rejection of it. The cicatrice of her infliction showed not a trace on the smooth firm skin of the Phillips’ complacency. The Phillips’ grandparents still made a fuss of the dear little girl, such a well-mannered little girl, and (in brackets) our Samson’s little girl. Mrs Phillips and Beatrice still included her in all their plans, and consulted her with pleasant humorous allowance for her immaturity. While Herbert and Abe, the two younger brothers—Joseph was at the Front—and their wives Martha and Gwendolen—Florence was not yet allowed to be up more than an hour a day, although little Fanny was a miraculously good baby—continued their chaff as though the situation were at exactly the same stage as last time Deb had dined there. Abe even made reference to the threadbare matter of Delilah and clipped locks....
Only Samson was imperceptibly more silent than usual; but he was never talkative. “Can’t he have told them?” but of course he had told them. They were probably informed beforehand of the exact hour he had meant to propose. Then ... what was the psychology of their present behaviour? Deb was helpless, rebellious, wholly perplexed, and disliking her company more than ever before, because she had imagined she was definitely rid of it; that she would never again sit amongst flashes of white teeth—they were a handsome healthy family and had married handsome healthy girls—and hear the curiouslyrobust conversation about Florence and her baby. When a married pair was in question, they knew no reticence; it was right and seemly that open discussion should take place, even in the presence of a young girl; no harm at all—had not Abe and Florence been enjoined in the Synagogue, within hearing of all, to wax fruitful?... But all jokes concerning love unsanctioned by the Rabbi were strictly prohibited by the Phillips’ men until they were in smoking-room seclusion. This was their code. The code of the Jewish male.
“I—Ididsay ‘no,’ didn’t I? I couldn’t have said ‘yes’ by mistake?” Deb racked her brains—and recognized with horror that her favourite pudding had been provided—a pudding she hated. She had told Mrs Phillips once that it was her favourite, because that lady was distressing herself over an imaginary poorness of fare; and ever since then it was carefully ordered for her, and beamingly heaped on to her plate. To-night the necessity for a second helping was worse than ever, because bewilderment had robbed her of appetite, especially for coals of fire.
Once or twice it seemed to her morbidly excited fancy as though the wedding had taken place already—while she was asleep or hypnotized or under drugs—and already she was a Phillips, doomed to dine at this seat at this table in this room for ever and ever, till she was as old as grandmother Phillips; until she died and all the male Phillips followed her corpse to its cremation, and were reluctant even then to scatter abroad the ashes.... “Yes, Mrs Phillips?” She started from her trance, to find the ladies had risen from their seats, and that she was being markedly beckoned upstairs by a would-be mother-in-law into her bedroom to see the corals purchased for little Fanny.
Deb thought: “It’s coming now....”
It came.
The explanation was simple after all: Samson, it appeared, according to his mother, did not understand girls. He had never taken any notice of them—till Deb. He was that sort of man. So when Deb in her first confusion and surprise had stammered “no” to his offer, he had believed shemeant“no”.... He had come home in a terrible state—dear silly fellow!—till they had all assured him it was all right, and that he had only to press for a different answer, to get it.... “Girls aren’t as downright as men,” Beatrice had assuredhim—“just the plain question, without even taking her hand?—and then you shut up completely? Oh, Samson, you old goose—you don’t deserve her!” To which her brother answered gloomily: “How can I take her hand before she has accepted me?”
“You know, little Deb”—Mrs Phillips wound up her recital, “Samson is so upright——”
Downright ... and upright ... yes, all that, but she did notwanthim. How to make these people aware that it was more than maidenly bashfulness which had prompted her to let drop the stupendous good fortune deposited in the palms of her hands.
Duly chastened, she sat quietly on a small pouffe, her head bent, her hands linked in her lap, while Mrs Phillips apologized for Samson’s remissness in not urging his suit to triumphant conclusion that afternoon on the bridge; and betrayed at the same time her stern pride in the rigid sense of honour which had forbidden her son to speak to the girl of his great love for her at the same time as he proposed marriage. “He argued that he didn’t want to influence you, dear. So I promised to put that right for him. He’s so absurdly chivalrous, that big boy of mine. All his brothers have had their little flirtations. Abe was quite a social success, as I daresay you are aware. But Samson, of course, is the eldest of the four;andhis grandmother’s favourite; and that is quite important, as I daresay you know. He always refused to let a girl believe that he meant something serious when he didn’t. And I think, my child, that he was secretly waiting for you to grow up.”
“I’m twenty-five,” whispered Deb inadequately.
“My dear—not really? I thought you were at least three years younger than that. And you have never been in love until now?”
How Cliffe Kennedy would have let his hoyden invention romp at this juncture! But Deb was too aghast at the slow process which was ringing her in, for even the memory of Cliffe—somewhere in the world—to bring comfort.
“I’m not in love with your son,” she cried desperately.
“That does not matter at all.” Mrs Phillips spoke with unyielding decision. “Samson has a very high ideal of wifehood. He naturally will not require you to love him before you are married.”
“Oh!” gasped Deb.... The point of view was disconcerting;but Mrs Phillips’ apparent certainty of the wedding was worse than disconcerting—it was terrifying! “I, Deborah, take thee, Samson——” it sounded like two Bible legends badly mixed up.... She rallied her forces for another thrust at the Phillips’ illusion; it was perfectly awful to know that it was still there; that she had done nothing as yet that counted towards damaging it. “Mrs Phillips—please—I—I did mean to say ‘no.’ I’m not worthy of your Samson, indeed I’m not.”
The imperturbable dark-skinned surface of Mrs Phillips’ face broke into a gleaming smile.
“Now I wonder who’s the best judge of that, you or he?” Then more solemnly: “I assure you, my dear little girl, all that matters is that you should make him happy.”
Deb’s rebellion shot up to hollyhock height as she reflected: “They take it for granted that he’ll make me happy.... Oh, but he would, if I were the Suitable Sort. All the hatefulness of refusing him over again....”
“Do you mind, Deborah, if I make a remark on the way you do your hair? It is, forgive me if I am rude—so very unbecoming. A young girl should always strive to make the best of herself, you know. Beatrice”—as her daughter came in with an enquiring air of is-it-all-right-now—“I was just telling Deborah how we all wish she would change her style of hairdressing.”
Mrs Phillips’ inflexion of the word “all” crushed Deb back again on to the pouffe, whence she had deprecatingly risen. All ... she heard the entire Phillips family owning her, re-modelling her, chanting as in chorus: “How we wish Deb would change her style of hairdressing!”
“Let me try how she looks with it done like mine,” exclaimed Beatrice brightly. “May I, Deb—just for fun? I’m supposed to have a way with hair”—she began to pull out the hairpins. “Oh, what masses—look, mother. I think it’s delightfully quaint the way you tuck it under like a boy, but it seems rather a shame that nobody should guess what a quantity you have, doesn’t it? Hardy says a woman’s crown of glory is her hair.”
“No, Samson said that,” Deb corrected dreamily. She knew that Hardy Redbury spoke rarely, but with a certain caustic originality.
“I believe itwasSamson!” Beatrice and her motherexchanged meaning glances of delight. So Deb recognized the utterances of the beloved!
“There—what do you say to that?” and Beatrice stepped back a pace or two while Mrs Phillips hovered round the victim.... “A little more off the forehead and ears,” she pronounced; “she has such nice little ears; so why not show them?”
Deb, accustomed to the thick tumble of hair to her eyebrows, and its warm cluster round her cheeks, stared aghast at her scalped and naked renaissance in the hand-glass Beatrice held up for her benefit. She might have cried with the famous savage who was asked why he did not feel the stress of the weather upon his person: “Me all face!”
“Doesn’t she look sweet?” Beatrice cried. And Mrs Phillips assented with less of majesty than usual: “It does indeed make a difference.”
“Come down and let Sa——the others see!” Deb was urged to the door and down the stairs, and pushed into the drawing-room, where by now the whole party were assembled.
“How do you like her?”
Truly abashed, head hanging, cheeks a crimson blaze, the girl stood just inside the doorway, while the expected chorus smote her unmuffled hearing:
“Hullo ... Beatrice at her old games.... By Jove, what a change! So shehasgot ears, has she? I often wondered.... Greedy little Delilah! all that hair, and then wanting Samson’s into the bargain!... Turn round—no, slowly.... It does suit you, Deb—you must always wear it like that....”
“Doyouconsider it an improvement, Samson?” enquired Samson’s mother.
“Yes.”
She could feel his eyes upon her—eyes of hot proprietorship—and knew all the sensations of the slave-girl exploited in the market-place for critical appraisement. The veiling had been ripped from large tracts of her person, leaving them bare—bare.... Deb, who could be quite happily unembarrassed, even unconscious, when the delicious cream-white slenderness of her limbs was exposed to view, who would not have minded a whit any haphazard spectator of her evening bath, cheek rubbed contentedly against her own satiny damp shoulder, loving the huddled contact, Deb now underwent sheer agonyat the novelty of stark forehead, ears, and nape of the neck. The erection on top of her head felt rickety, top-heavy; all the separate hairs dragged the wrong way, as hair is prone to do when forced out of its groove; the Phillips went on exclaiming, suggesting, twisting her about and around, trying the effects of her hat on the new coiffure.... And it was not so difficult to refuse Samson when, on the way home, he proposed to her for the second time.
“And now I shall never see him again.”
A week later came a formal invitation from Mrs. Phillips bidding Deb to dinner.
Nightmare ... and really nightmare, this. One lops off a head and it promptly grows again; or hits out ever so many times at a malignant beast-face and hits ...pastit. And it pushes itself nearer.... What was the good of refusing Samson, if something in his temperament was blank to refusals? And she could not stay away, with the knowledge that in Sussex Gardens the Phillips’ illusion was still large and benign and unmutilated ... illusion that she and Samson were to be married. A smooth, shiny illusion, like a forehead bared of its tumble of fringe....
Something drastic had to be done to it. She would have to accept the invitation to dinner, and sit at that seat at that table in that room ... and watch the teeth flashing and gleaming ... hear again the joke about Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah ... be approved as one of the family by Mrs. Phillips ... and feel Samson’s eyes of fanatic proprietorship fixed upon her while she gulped down her favourite pudding. She would have to go, because the worse alternative was to remain in ignorance of just how much she was still engaged to Samson. And perhaps after dinner she would find another way of beating in her cry of freedom upon his unreceptiveness. But she was not very hopeful of this.... She was frightened.... The Phillips were altogether too much for her.
However, the nightmare did not precisely repeat itself. There was no flash and gleam of white teeth round the table; but instead long sombre faces; Samson the centre of commiseratingsolicitude. An oppressive atmosphere of reproach directed towards Deb; the second refusal could not be thrown off as lightly as the first. Ultimate results, no doubt, would be the same ... inconceivable that the eldest son of the tribe should not have the maiden of his choice. But meanwhile the maiden was giving trouble ... how dared she? Mrs Phillips had much ado to keep the hatred from her eyes every time she brooded down the table at Deb. What better match could she want than Samson? Samson, with his splendid looks, and his grandmother’s fortune, and his loyal unwavering affection. The affection of a good Jew who would give her a comfortable home.... Obviously the girl was coquetting—testing her power—and making Samson suffer. She deserved to be whipped ... making Samson suffer. And a mother in such a crisis must control her primitive longings to use force upon stubborn opposition—to take Deb and throw her under Samson’s feet—“There—to do what you like with.... And now, sleep again and eat again and smile again ... my son ... my son ....”
Deb understood all this, understood and was passionately sorry for the irritable disappointed heart that craved for Samson’s babies to worship as none of the grandchildren had ever yet been worshipped, and cursed her for her perverseness in refusing birth to this small dark-skinned Samson. She wished she did not understand quite so well. Had she been wholly an outsider, she could have dealt her wound, and jigged away. Or had she been wholly in spirit one of these people, then what romance in the prospect of just such a home and babies! But betwixt and between ... a laughing vagabond soul who could ache in every fibre for the sorrows of a Jewish mother; light flying heels that yet lingered for their owner to look back regretfully on anchorage—a very unsatisfactory blend ... and, oh,whatwas going to happen after the interminable dinner?
After dinner, a series of weighty manœuvres left Deb alone with Samson in the small boudoir.
“What I want to know—what I feel you ought to tell me—iswhywon’t you marry me?” The question lifted itself from his glucose despondency.
Could he be made to see?—“Because—because—oh, Samson, we’re so utterly different.”
“Is that reason one? Look at Abe and Florence—howquiet she is, and he’s such a lively fellow, and yet they couldn’t be happier.”
“But they belong to the same world—their code, their creed—and we don’t. Quiet and lively is only on top. You think things wrong that I think right, and the other way about.”
“There is no such thing as thinking things right or wrong, Deb. Theyareright or wrong.”
“Well—there you are!” eagerly. Perhaps by patient wriggling she could twist her way out of this earth-tunnel, instead of by one volcanic eruption. “I’d be frightened to believe that. It’s too simple....”
“Well, what do you believe right which I believe wrong?” She could not tabulate. And remained silent.
“There, you see!” conclusively.
“If you married me,” he persisted, “I’d give you every single thing you wanted”—with a mental reservation that his promise naturally did not include the things that were unfit for her.
She twisted in another direction. “You don’t like my friends.”
“No. They’re notreal, Deb. And you won’t like them either when you learn that they’re not real. Nothing unwholesome can be real. I don’t care how clever they are—I’ve no respect for cleverness or art——”
“Not the ‘Faerie Queene’?” innocently.
“That’s wholesome. It has a sound moral. But your Bohemians ... they’re not good. Not good or kind. That’s all that matters—goodness and kindness.”
“They are,” obstreperously. “Bohemians are notoriously kinder-hearted and more generous than Philistines.”
The man smiled. “Yes, call me a Philistine. I’m proud of it. But you don’t understand, Deb. How much time does an artist give her husband or her children or her home?”
“His temperament needs variety, I suppose.”
Samson closed his mouth firmly; he was not going to discuss temperament with Deb, who mercifully did not know what she was talking about.
“I wouldn’t let you be dull, little girl, if that’s what you’re afraid of. We could travel.”
“Together or separately?”
He laughed at the joke. “And you wouldn’t want to see so much of yourfriends... we’re a very united family, you know, and Beatrice and Flo and Esther are always together.”
A very united family—God, yes!
“So we’ve disposed of obstacle number one”; Samson’s spirits were rising rapidly. (But how have we disposed of it? thought Deb.) “Come now, what’s obstacle number two?”
“It’s because you’re such a united family”—she struggled hard to find expressive words—“that you owe it to them to put the right sort of girl in the spare place. Don’t you see, oh, don’t you see, Samson, that I should spoil the cantata.”
“But they like you tremendously, little girl; mother and Beatrice are awfully fond of you. And when you get to know Flo and Martha and Gwen——”
“It’s no good. I should make you wretched. Oh—whydo you want ... just me?”
“You are the embodiment of the qualities I most admire in a woman.”
And he believed it, too. And was unaware that it was some elusive pixie element about the girl—a subtle swing of movement, a freshness thrilling in her voice, some fleeting curving trick of her lip and eyelids, a scornful daintiness which were magic to his manhood, and which would haunt him and escape him, trip up his senses and beckon him on again ... that it was this which, subconsciously, kept him persistent for just Deb, and no other girl. But he was sincere enough, talking rubbish about embodiment of qualities. This was her pixiness, translated into Samsonese.
Deb sighed. “One would suppose you wanted to be tormented for all the rest of your life.”
“In what special ways are you so determined to torment me?” he teased her.
“Everything can’t be drawn up in lists.... I should get restless moods, and want to do all sorts of things that you’d think funny or mad or imprudent—or unnecessary, and I should want to do them there and then and at once ... without thinking them over. And I shall hate being asked questions, and turn sulky over answering them. And I’d go away without you, and forget to write. And ask for a latch-key. And invite people to see me whom you aren’t sure are the right sort, and discuss topics that you’re quite surearethe wrong sort. And shock your mother by not taking enough interest in little Fanny. And get furiously excited over a bookor a picture or a bit of verse or a face or—or ... the way a studio is arranged, or the first summer day in March, before anyone expected it ... the first day that one can fling one’s self down on to warm green grass and lie there ... and lie there dreaming....”
The byway of argument was fatal. She had forgotten that Samson had a corner in Nature.
At once he rushed into enthusiastic confirmation; ignoring the former part of her speech except for a soothing remark to the effect that she’d be bound to settle down—as soon as she had a household of her own.
“I’d rather die than settle down,” breathed Deb—to the defiant youth in her. Samson did not hear.
“You’re quite good enough for me, little girl,” thinking she had been sufficiently chaffed, and the moment had come to strike a more serious note. “Quite good enough. Run yourself down as much as you please, nothing you can say will make any difference!”
No, nothing she could say would make any difference, or rid him of the supposition that she was merely deprecating—a prey to modesty....
“I’m different—not worse nor better. We can’t either of us be too good or too bad for each other if we’re different.”
“Very well, then, you’re right, we’re different. Don’t let’s say another word about it——” He smothered her uprising vehemence with a genial pretence of humouring her. “I give in. I’m entirely wrong. Have it your own way. We’re as different as you please. And now, shall I call mother and the others, and tell her it’s all right, and that we’ve made it up?”
“No, please don’t,” she whispered. Her vitality was worn-out from the struggle.
He turned back from the door, disappointed. “Deb—is there another man?”
“No,” again. If only there had been someone, that she could have rung out a triumphant yes.
Phillips was relieved; but knitted his brows anew over the problem of her obduracy. Then he asked her if she would marry him (a) “If I win the V.C. at the Front?” (b) “If I knew more about pictures?” (c) “If I were more lively?”
She shook her head at each tabulated item. But how queer, how pitifully queer that he should dream he could be perseveringlyrefitted for her love as for a suit of clothes which required slight alteration.
“I’ve never cared for anyone but you, Deb. Never. Other fellows might say that and not mean it—but it’s true in my case. You can ask Beatrice, or mother. Or Abe—he always used to chaff me for not letting myself be plagued with girls. So you needn’t be jealous—you’re my first love, and I’m thirty-one.”
Calf-love, then.... No wonder he blundered at every move. But he ought to have got that phase over long ago. Calf-love, moon-love ... pretty enough from a lad of twenty-one; but from thirty-one you expect a man’s defter handling. “You needn’t be jealous.” Should she tell him her fervent wish that some suave brilliant woman had indeed shaped him for present enlightenment? Deb had no ambition to be instructress.... But he would not believe her ... impregnated as he was with his theory of female psychology.
“All girls say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’; all girls like to pretend they’re not worthy; all girls are jealous of the other woman in a fellow’s past; all girls——” Deb was too tired to combat the ‘all-girls’ convention.
She stood up: “I want to go home, Samson.” And he stood directly facing her.... A presentiment seized her that he was going to crush her in his arms. Perhaps, if he did—but no.
“I shall always be waiting for you when you want me, little girl. I don’t change, you know. Hope and wait—that’s going to be my motto!” He straightened his shoulders and pulled down his tunic and smiled at her.
Her hands flew up as though to push away a suffocating pressure. A past that held her only, the encompassing present—and now he claimed the future as well.... “It’s so heavy,” murmured Deb. He must not be allowed to wait for her—hemust not. Could no word, no act of hers shrivel the Phillips’ illusion? Besides ... there were moods which might assail her, driven, persecuted moods that cried for anchorage; soft drowsy Oriental moods, when for sheer languor one might yield—neither of these moods ought to be open to the peril of a Samson waiting and hoping.
“It’s no good, Samson,” with ebbing conviction. And she hated his persistence—until she saw his eyes, dogged with misery, eager with the want of her.
“Then may I—I wonder if you would grant me a last favour? The victim at the block, you know,” stumbling over a laugh.
She knew what was coming....
“I wonder—if you will let me kiss you—just once?”
And because she had hurt him, and could make no other amends, and because she was ashamed it was such a trifle in importance to her; and because Deb could never bear to be avaricious of her chastity, she said: “Yes, if you like.”
He was very deliberate and careful about it, with continual sideway glances at her, as though in fear permission would be retracted. The kiss itself ... well, it was quite obvious that Samson had been speaking truth when he asserted that Deb was his first love. She clenched her hands tightly and endured ... it was soon over! But a curious change had come over Samson. Metaphorically, he began to strut.
“Ah! I feel I’ve advanced a step—now.”
Deb turned upon him in a blinding scatter of rage.
“Because I’ve allowed you to kiss me? Do you imagine, in your fatuous smug conceit, that it makes a difference, except to make me quite, quite sure—surer even than I was before—that you’re the wrong man? You and your strictly honourable intentions, countenanced by the whole family! Why, do you suppose the man I loved would have had to ask formal permission for that kiss?—and that I would measure him out just one at arm’s length as a dole? I, who know what kisses can be.... Oh, yes, I’m sick of pretending to be the Una of your private Faerie Queene. It’s men like you, with minds like yours, who make girls mean and haggling and nigglesome. What makes you imagine that if I hold out a piece of my face towards you ... just because ... because ...” a sob of sheer anger gulping up between the words ... “because you asked, and I wanted to be decent, and didn’t care much one way or another, what makes you dare to feel that you’ve ‘advanced a step’? You haven’t!—not a quarter of one!”
“Very well—I haven’t—we’llsayI haven’t—I give in—you’re quite right—I haven’t advanced—are you satisfied now?” Again that futile pretence of placating her. But: “Kisses ...” she whispered, dreamily, unheeding him, “kisses ... like a shower of stars on my lips. Stars that burn....”
Unconvinced of his error, he stated pompously: “I treated you with the respect which is due to a good girl, Deb.”
Her smile subtly mocked him. “Ah, but you see, I have—not—been—good.”