PART II
CHAPTER I
“It was your pal I wanted really—not you,” Antonia Verity informed Deb, when their friendship was sturdy enough to withstand such frankness, “I didn’t like you.”
“Jenny?—Yes, she was worth fifty of me.”
“And yet you’re not really humble,” the other laughed. “Ring for tea, Deb. I’m tired of seeing you brooding like a sphinx. The pleasure grows monotonous. I suppose you can’t brood while you eat macaroons?”
“Easily; they’re quite dry and manageable.”
“Tea, please, and a poached egg for Miss Marcus,” Antonia commanded of the servant. “I can’t help it if you don’t want it, Deb—you must be cured of that inscrutable habit. I just can’t bear it. How many men have called you Sphinx in your exotic career?”
“All, except one or two. It’s very popular. So is Serpent of the Nile and Cleopatra and little Princess of Egypt. When I am moved to cry ‘Yah, chestnut!’ to these endearments, they offer to strangle me in my own hair.”
“Which usually hangs down in readiness. You’re the only person I’ve met outside fiction whose hair naturally gravitates towards your heels. Even on the night we first met——”
“Yes. The soldier and I had been fooling.... Antonia, you guessed, didn’t you, that time—about Jenny?”
“I saw that she was really ill when I came into your room. And I was puzzled, because I had been quite sure before, that you and she were in some plot to escape from La llorraine. But I doubt if she knew herself, in that semi-hysterical condition, when sham ended and the real began. What did she actually die of?”
“Heart failure. She was weakened by a lot of ’flu, and aspirin, and operations, and nursing other people. I ought to have known the difference. But she was always wildly emotional, and almost as often in pain, and then that evening’sexcitement——” Deb broke off. It was four months now since the night when Cora had lowered her flame in sympathy with the break-up of the Chorus. Four months—and Jenny dead was soverydead.... Her memory did not abide as lingeringly as in the case of a more spiritual or more intellectual personality. A warm quick reality of everyday little touches and eager practical services ... these things die with the flesh. Deb just knew that neither Cora nor the room nor the soldier nor her own family had stood for home-always-on-the-tap on the second floor landing, as Jenny did. And the little group of people surrounding Jenny seemed mechanically to flop away in different directions, after that evening. Dolph took Bobby away to his people. La llorraine and Manon left Montagu Hall in a whirlwind of rage, because Mr Gryce had complained of Madame’s breakfast costume; the Turkish slippers seemed particularly to offend him. Of the Soldier no more had been heard. And even Deb’s room in which it had all happened, was abandoned. “D’you mind if we share a double-room, Deb?” Aunt Stella had asked rather anxiously, about a month later. “Now that Richard is coming back for the Easter holidays and will want a den of his own, I suggested it might be a saving for your father if we don’t scatter quite so much. But he says you must be asked first if you’ll consent to sleep with a soured old maid,” with that tinkling laugh that never sounded quite as mirthful as the spirit it accompanied.
Deb was quite glad of the change. The associations of her old bed were rather poignant. Stella could not bear the smell of Cora, who was henceforth packed away in a boxroom. And Deb began to wonder if all her life would be a succession of disjointed episodes, each with its full complement of cast and scenery, and each when it was over to be slipped as easily as a bead off a string. Daisybanks, in the careless life before the war: what was known as the “Portman Rooms set” of wealthy semi-artistic young Israelites—dances—the river—frequent companionship of Hedvig and Lenchen Rothenburg. That bead slipped. Dorzheim, and its marionette figures: Felix and Marianna Koch, Sigismund who looked like Jesus Christ, Ralph and Huldah van Sittart, Elly Ladenberg from Manchester, clearest of all, perhaps, the upturned face of Lothar von Relling.... They existed now and performed their parts, hidden away behind a thick black curtain ... what matter if it were never raised again. Then the Chorus....
What next?
After a pause, Antonia Verity answered that question. Antonia, following up a whim, came to Montagu Hall to see Jenny. Not finding Jenny, she knocked at the door of Deb’s former bedroom. Deb was just moving—that is to say she was sitting dreamily on an overturned drawer, in the midst of a scrum of her possessions, reading a mid-Victorian novel entitled “Anna Lee, Maiden, Wife and Mother.”
“Come and listen to this,” she bade Antonia without further greeting.
They became intimate over “Anna Lee.”
In Antonia Verity, Deb recognized with mixed feelings the temperament she had always most coveted, most desired to find in herself. The natural Artemis, Artemis from no simpering prudery nor actual coldness of disposition—but that Artemis who instinctively runs from the pursuer; Artemis in love with her own chastity. Her eyes, changing from hazel to green, deepset in shadow and drooping at the corners, were at perpetual war with the pure scissored curves of her mouth. Deb was aware that Antonia could never deal in fragments where her love-affairs were concerned; and that she rather wondered at those who did. It seemed therefore a foregone conclusion to Deb, whose mind was prone to run on lines of fairy-tale justice, that life must hold for Antonia the eventual big thing; bank in which this guarded stored-up treasure would ultimately find safe deposit. It remained a miracle to her how Antonia managed not to fritter the treasure. She never saw that trifles simply did not happen to the other girl. Men ... knew. They liked her peacefully, but some fundamental quality in her gave them their cue for decent behaviour as a matter of course. As a same matter of course, they embarked on amorous experiment with Deb; could not leave her alone. And this, though Deb longed for Antonia’s secret to attract the better treatment; more than ever admired her ideal of a girl clad in a sort of symbolic moonwhite armour, now that it had become incarnate. Though she had been often to Antonia’s studio, she had never yet succeeded in probing a certain aloofness in her friend....
Jenny—and then Antonia. Jenny whom one touched ... a fervent cosiness of friendship punctuated throughout by touch—it was impossible to conceive of friendship with Antonia thus emphasized. Antonia was good to look at—delicate,clean lines—no mess; her mind clearly braced to all encounter, whether of laughter or argument. But it was unthinkable that one should touch Antonia, nor seek touch from her; Antonia guarded something ... as yet inviolable.
“Who was the man in the room?” Antonia enquired suddenly, at work upon her portrait of Deb.
“Oh—he was—a—a man.”
“Yes, I gathered that with the naked eye.”
“Incredible, Holmes—it passes human understanding.”
“It passes human understanding what that gentleman in shirt sleeves was doing, cooking asparagus in your room.”
“No scandal about asparagus, I hope?”
“They reeked of it—that night.”
Deb moved restlessly. “Don’t be priggish, Antonia.”
“It isn’t priggishness. Oh, do understand that. It’s—decency. Not towards other people, but towards one’s self. I don’t care about conventions.... Yes, I do—they prevent litter and disorder—and they can’t really get deep enough to handicap the emotions. What I meant was that I don’t care about opinion.Ido as I like.”
“Well then ... So do I.”
“No. A man in your bedroom for an hour or two, just to talk to ... and then good-night—that’s not doing as you like. He shouldn’t have been there at all. Taking you and your room for granted. And your lips.”
“He never kissed me,” said Deb in a very low voice.
“I said he took your lips for granted—and the possibility of them. His decision is beside the point. Deb, how I wish you wouldn’t!”
After a pause the other girl said, “I won’t ask ‘what?’ because I suppose I know.... And I agree with you. We ought to save it all up for the one man——”
“No, no, no. That’s merely commercial. To keep one’s market value uncorrupted.... Manon llorraine’s standards. Horrid littleingénue. She reckoned every look thrown to that poor begging man Carew as so much profitless waste of virgin stock.”
“I must say, you took in rather a lot, that one hectic evening at Montagu Hall.”
Antonia rushed on: “Not to save all up for the one man—but... isn’t maidenhood in itself rather a splendid thing? I wish that didn’t sound so affected. This isn’t the Suffrage standard. I don’t hate the other sex—not a bit. I like them. But ... just to be proud, and not slovenly.”
“You think I’m slovenly?”
“I’ve never seen you for more than a minute in male company. But I fancy, if I had, I should have wanted to cry out every minute: ‘don’t—oh don’t!’”
“As bad as that?” lightly Deb had to feign amusement, for her Artemis girl was flicking her well on the raw. She remembered how she had experienced just that desire to cry out “don’t” when Jenny——
So she stood half-way between Antonia and Jenny. But Jenny had been married—and Antonia said “isn’t maidenhood in itself rather a splendid thing?”
A chill white dawn faintly shot with gold ... for Antonia? for herself and Antonia? But surely such divine hesitancy and glamour were for the girl of eighteen, seventeen, sixteen ... wide eyes, intent on vision, tremulous childish lips, “no one shall kiss me until he comes....” And the end of the legend was that he came, and kissed her—just before she was tired of waiting—at twenty, say; or twenty-one. That answered the riddle so easily for young Artemis. But if the legend missed its obvious conclusion?... She was now twenty-four, and Antonia twenty-six ... Antonia’s austere demands were rather a strain on passion unsatisfied in the late twenties—rather a strain on the chill-white-dawn ideal. Antonia at sixteen, tingling from hot indignant scorn at anything which ran counter to her unshaken, unshakeable schoolgirl principles of what was “right”—Antonia at sixteen, not unlike Deb at sixteen; dreaming in a walled garden of lilacs. They had outgrown it——
What now?
Some sort of a compromise ... a dream semi-yielded, semi-cherished.... Oh, just chance it! A separate code of rules for every transient episode—or none at all—or trust to the moment’s inspiration—take love haphazard—compromise.... Burton Ames had left her possessed by the very desperation of restlessness. And it was easier now to give lightly, since striving to compete with Jenny, she had once broken bounds. Jenny had died, without getting what she wanted; Jenny had shown how easy, how frighteningly easy, it was to die ...slip away. So cram in something at all costs, lest it should happen to you like that....
“Here you are!” Antonia threw her the sketch on which she had the last half hour been working. It was a startlingly clever study in crayons. Underneath it was scrawled “Girl of the Transition Period.”
Petulantly Deb flicked it away. “‘It’s pretty—but is it art?’” she quoted.
“No. It’s psychology.”
“Résumé of our conversation. And yet my people allow me to do what I please, say what I please, go where I please, with whom I please—they’re awfully broad-minded.”
“That’s just why your career is so precarious, my wee one. You’re up against nothing—except your own extremely hazy sense of self-respect. If your father and your Aunt Stella were saying ‘don’t’ all the time, and locking you in your room, and forbidding men the house, and intercepting letters, and generally behaving as we’ve been taught the Best Parents ought to behave, you’d be kept busy defying them, which is a quite healthy occupation. At the worst, in a mood of superlative defiance, you’d go right over the wall ... well, that’s at least honest. All this laxness and let-her-do-as-she-likes, and ‘I’m sure young men are to be trusted now-a-days’.... But parents are not to be trusted. I don’t know what parents are coming to. My mother—it’s her sorrow that I haven’t yet formed a Bold Free Union for her to countenance and encourage——”
“And you would never consent to do it; have no desire to do it. It’s a sad waste of an indulgent parent, Antonia. Thousands of girls get cursed and kicked out of home for just that boldness and freeness which your mother pines to find in you.”
“The darling!—it’s only theoretical pining. Any vivid details of a Bold and Free Union would shock her beyond words. I suppose the truth is that parents are thinking too much—and not enough. It’s still only surface lenience. They’d howl quite as loudly, and break their hearts quite as vehemently as the old-fashioned parent, if we really transgressed.”
“Father would, of course, which puts it out of the question.”
“You being financially dependent on him?”
“Not only that. I happen to be fond of him.”
Antonia smiled, a sweet slow warmth and kindling of herwonted frostiness. “Is there that much grace in you, woman?”
“Though you didn’t allow for it in the sketch—yes, there is.”
“I won’t exhibit the sketch, I promise you.”
“Antonia, dear——” Mrs Verity stood, with one hand pushing aside the dark blue and green portière of the studio. A neat little figure in a black dress with white collar and cuffs; a precise little spinster, one would say, from a novel of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell. Manners of superlative delicacy; speech in which each separate syllable was clearly articulated; a habit of mind which seized on the most trivial utterance of others, and smoothed it out flat for earnest consideration. Mrs Verity’s personality was such as to make it quite credible that Antonia was found in a gooseberry bush.
“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus. Are you quite well? Yes? Really? I am so pleased. It is delightful to find you here with Antonia. I wonder if I might ask for a cup of tea? Not if it is at all inconvenient, Antonia. I can order it in the dining-room, indeed I can. Do you not think the parks are looking lovely? I wonder if—— But I interrupted you, Miss Marcus.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Deb, who had only begun an affirmative: “Yes, aren’t they?” in reference to the parks.
“Oh, but please, please say what you were going to say. It was unpardonably rude of me to cut you so short.”
“It wasn’t anything worth repeating, Mrs Verity. Do go on with what you were going to say—‘I wonder if——’”
“No, indeed, that can quite well wait till you say what you were going to say.”
“But really—I’ve forgotten it,” cried Deb, by now hysterically incapable of the “Yes, aren’t they?” of her original intention.
“My fault; how could I——”
“Here’s your tea, mother;” Antonia smiled mischievously down on the punctilious little lady’s distress.
Deb stretched her limbs lazily, without displaying, however, much determination to move. She was rather hoping that Antonia would invite her to stay. But:
“I have to be going out presently, but in an opposite direction, or I’d ask you to wait for me.”
“Are you supping with Gillian? I thought you told me you expected her here; Miss Marcus, do you not agreewith me that Gillian Sherwood is quite a remarkable character?”
An almost imperceptible contraction of Antonia’s brows expressed impatience. “What was the lecture like?” she asked. Deb pondered on the unknown Gillian, hardly hearing Mrs Verity’s painstaking description. This was one of the moments when she was convinced of mystery in the background of Antonia’s life. Why had she never mentioned a Gillian who had a remarkable character, with whom she was on terms of supper? Why did she apparently object so strongly to her mother’s introduction of the name? Why was she on certain occasions so anxious to rid herself of Deb’s company? Why was she so vague and elusive as to the manner in which she had spent the foregoing day, or intended to spend the morrow? Why had she once said casually “Don’t drop in here without letting me know, Deb. Always ’phone. I’m out such a lot, it’s hardly worth your while to chance it....” Antonia herself was always “chancing it” at Montagu Hall.
A second door in the studio led to a small garden. Beyond the panes a tall young man suddenly loomed, and rapped three times, as might a conspirator.
“It’s Cliffe Kennedy,” remarked Mrs Verity, and nodded cheerfully to him. Immediately, as though at some signal, he opened the door, strolled in, and immediately burst forth: “I’ve just told a man that his wife was an abominable female! Yes, an abominable female! and he didn’t know whether to agree with me or not.—Antonia, one doesn’t put tea away when a visitor comes. One brings it out.—I think people ought to know their own minds about that sort of thing, don’t you, Mrs Verity?”
Mrs Verity, as was her wont, gave the matter her weightiest consideration of puckered brow and clasped fingers. “It certainly seems to me of the utmost importance that a man should be aware of his exact state of harmony or disharmony towards the woman in whose company he is compelled to pass at least two-thirds of his normal existence,” she pronounced. “But perhaps he hesitated to express his opinion to you in the fear that it might by some means be carried back to his wife?”
“Not the slightest fear of that—she wasthere, my dear lady, beside him at the very moment when I said ‘Your wife is an abominable female’—did I say abominable or loathsome? I forget!—‘And all your old pals including myself consideryou’ve ruined yourself by marrying her. Throw her off, man, throw her off!’ That was the time for him to agree and get rid of her. Permanently. No woman of spirit could stop with a man aware of the opinion of his pals. But he’s ruined, I tell you. His pluck is broken. He just sniggered and moved away backwards conciliatingly; and She, the hag, the doll, the curly hypocrite, murmured: ‘Come along, Bertie!’—I ask you! ‘Come along, Bertie!’... Antonia, who’s that Florentine page lying over there among the cushions wondering about the handsome young man with hair like the village idiot?”
Deb started at this accurate guess at her reflections, and Cliffe Kennedy grinned at her in excellent fellowship.
Mrs Verity exclaimed: “Forgive me, I have been exceedingly remiss. I should have introduced you before, indeed I should. How could I have neglected to do so?”—though it was hard to say at which point of Mr Kennedy’s speech she could have effected the introduction.
“This is Antonia’s great friend, Deb Marcus. Miss Marcus, Mr Cliffe Kennedy. Cliffe, I will think about the problem of your friend and his wife. I am sure you meant to do good by your intercession. It seems to me a great pity under the circumstances that they should be definitely and not merely experimentally married. And now, since we may not meet again to-day——” She bade good-bye to Deb and Kennedy, patted her daughter’s shoulder, and slipped unobtrusively away.
“Well,” flung out Kennedy to Deb, “was I right about the village idiot?”
She glanced at his golden shock-head, and parried to save herself. “I see no straws spiking in every direction in your hair.”
“And you can’t make village idiots without straw. Good. Nor can you break camels’ backs. Nor tell which way the wind is blowing.”
“Nor eat ice-cream sodas.”
“The straw is a useful animal. Awful dearth of village idiots because Selfridge’s have made a corner in straws for their soda fountain. Species practically extinct. Sole surviving specimen, C. Kennedy, Esq., fireman, pageant-maker and pork-butcher. Pageants and pork while you pause. Preposterous prices! Antonia, you remember my inspirationfor a grand historical pageant of barques up the Thames in commemoration of the death of Ethelred the Unready?”
“I remember a few rough suggestions you threw out, of a sort of Lord Mayor’s show,” laughed Antonia, “presenting every sort of special occasion on which the English people were notoriously unready, headed by Ethelred himself, refusing to get up on his wedding-morning because he had overtired himself the night before, taking cinema films of a tortoise——”
“And ending with a symbolic presentment of the proverb ‘Always lock the stable door after the horse has got away; it does no harm and amuses the horse’—tableau of same, with horse smiling happily over the adjoining hedge. Would you believe it, Antonia, that when I approached the Lord Mayor on the subject, and put it to him that this was the undoubted moment for the Educational Value of such a moral lesson upon the psychology of the gritty-nosed board-school child, and would he lend me some of the comic costumes and coachmen he must have lying about from his own piffling show—Antonia, he said: ‘Young man, are you aware that this country is at war?’ and handed me a white feather torn from the hindmost of a flock of geese who happened to be waddling across the hall. I didn’t lose my temper, Antonia. I put it into my buttonhole, and said very calmly, ‘Thank you—that’s the second present I’ve had to-day,’ and turning back the coat lapel on the other side, I showed him my V.C. where the King had pinned it. Then all the geese rose on their hind legs and cheered——”
Deb’s childish peals of laughter broke off his narration. Till the last episode recounted, she had been in bewilderment trying to sift fantasy from fact; with such vivid conviction did the speaker present each succeeding picture: the smiling horse, the mayor bending for the feather, the proud young V.C. ... but that incident at least might quite well be true——
“Areyou a V.C.?”
He gave her rather a queer look from his candid forget-me-not blue eyes. And he put down his cup and walked sharply to the window, and remarked in a very matter-of-fact tone: “No. I’ve been medically rejected for the Army. You see, I’ve only been given another year to live, and I suppose they thought it a pity to reduce the allowance.”
“Never mind, Cliffe,” said Antonia gently—and Deb, the tears choking in her throat, waited for the message of divine womanly consolation that was doubtless on its way—“Awell-meaning man can tell an enormous quantity of lies even in one year. Don’t give up. Look at him well, Deb—he has a wrinkle in his face for every lie his lips have spoken.”
The man turned round to give the entire benefit of his long face, webbed and wrinkled by a thousand evidences of inaccurate statement. Sombrely he looked at Deb:
“Shall I tell you how I was cured of my habit of lying, in spite of Antonia? Yes, cured, by God, and by pretty drastic means....” He bent his chin on to his hands. Deb knew instinctively that on this one occasion, if never again, out of a fever of imaginative falsehood was emerging a simple and rather poignant piece of truth——
“Never mind the details,” he broke out abruptly—“just take it that there was a woman, and she loved me—I never knew how much. She was responsive to my moods as a field of barley to the wind—rustling to shadow and waving back to pure light. A field of barley, I tell you!” he cried fiercely, striking the table with his fist.... “I was miserably depressed over something or other—again a detail—and she tried to laugh it off. That irritated me—she wasn’t taking the tragedy seriously enough.Mytragedy! ‘Ring me up to-morrow, Cliffe, between seven and eight, and let me hear the worst,’ and again that forced silly little laugh. I replied with an inflexion of mocking composure—intensely dramatic: ‘Very well, dear. If I haven’t rung up by five minutes to eight, you’ll know I’ve put a bullet through my head.’ And left it at that.”
He brooded a moment.
“I rang up at two minutes past eight. And it was she who had put a bullet through her head.... Couldn’t endure the prospect of life without me. Oh, no, I hadn’t waited deliberately; I was merely rather rushed, and I’d forgotten the terms of my farewell the evening before. And she had waited ... at the other end ... fifty-five minutes of slow agony....”
“Well, you can understand it cured me of the habit of the effective lie.”
The girls were both silent. The light was fading from the studio. Antonia’s voice spoke with a quiver of laughing accusation: “Cliffe, dear, do I spy another and very recent wrinkle?”
Deb cried in sharp distress, “Oh, Antonia ...” for eitherthe other had trodden with profane feet on sacred ground, or.... She appealed to Cliffe. “Itwastrue?”
“It depends what you mean by true,” he replied with the air of a man slowly descending to earth by parachute. “I think that somewhere or other, and for the reason I have told you, a woman must have sat listening through fifty-five moments for the tinkle of a telephone bell to release her—or how could I know it all so vividly? They say the human imagination is incapable of conceiving outside reality. That the man was not myself?—an accident. Or perhaps it was indeed myself, and I have forgotten it, and in telling you this as a mere tale I’m calling truth itself a lie....”
“I must go,” said Deb politely. “Good-bye.”
“I’ll see you home, wherever it is.” Cliffe lounged to his feet.
“No, thanks,” coldly.
“But I want to. You’re angry with me. And I must put myself right——”
“By another lie?” A flame of indignation in the grey eyes that accused him of rousing her emotions by false pretences. Deb had been profoundly moved by the climax of the tale.
Cliffe argued good-humouredly: “For goodness’ sake, why all this arbitrary distinction between what I invent and what God invents. Of course I’ll see you home.”
“Deb’s stopping to supper with me,” Antonia struck in. “She’s dying to ask me all about you, and my account will be just as picturesque and much more reliable than yours.”
“But, Antonia, I thought you were supping out—with Gillian somebody?”
“Mother said so. I didn’t. I’m supposed to go to some very dull people and I’ve decided to ’phone them off.”
“What do you think of our Gillian?” Cliffe asked of Deb.
“I don’t know her.”
“Don’t know her—but she’s always here or at Zoe’s.”
“Who’s Zoe?”
Kennedy turned excitedly to Antonia: “I say, they must meet, mustn’t they? I believe she and Gillian would hit it off frightfully well. And Zoe’s a whole music-hall entertainment in herself, though I abominate the Spanish Jew of a shoemaker she’s walking out with now. Let’s phone them to come round here to-night. And Winny too——”
“This isn’t a branch of the Y.W.C.A., Cliffe,” Antonia triedamusedly to check his exuberant overflow of conviviality. But Cliffe ran on.
“No—let me see—Zoe shows off best in her own Palais Royale flat—she needs all the doors and cupboards to be really at her best. I’ll give a tea-party there next Saturday. Blair Stevenson may be up on leave, and has asked me to let him meet that singer woman I told him about, with hair just like mine! You must meet her too, Miss Marcus—you positively must.”
“You mean La llorraine—oh, I know her well.” Deb was glad to have found one name familiar among all these pattering new names.
“Good. You’ll come to the tea-party? Antonia will bring you—it’s in a street rather tricky to find. I’m keen on backing Zoe against La llorraine for sheer verbal energy. Take the field bar none. For this evening we’ll just have Gillian and Winifred and Theo. Shall I ’phone them, Antonia, or will you?”
“You can,” said Antonia. “No—bother! Gillian is away till Tuesday, and Winny without her sends me to sleep. And Theo Pandos is a bounder—Deb wouldn’t care about him.”
“That brings the party down to the present three. At least, I suppose I can stop to supper, Antonia, as you’re not going out after all? You haven’t invited me yet.”
“Of course you can. Don’t you know that a studio girl always keeps a stray tin of sardines in the cupboard?”
“And a black and emerald cushion on the divan. Curse it, what I’ve had to suffer dodging the lure of the generic studio cushion. But yours is hardly the generic studio, Antonia. You actually use it for the quaint and unusual purpose of painting pictures in it. The girl of nowadays rents a studio to picnic in by moonlight, or because it has such a ducksome musician’s gallery to sleep in, or a parquet floor for fox-trotting, or an acoustic. Have you a studio, Miss Marcus? Excuse me not calling you by your Christian name for a few weeks, but the whimsical Bohemian vagabond, a species whom I abhor, always uses Christian names within three minutes of introduction.”
“Or else a charming invented name,” Deb supplemented. “I’ll call you ‘Big-Brother-Man’ and you shall call me ‘All-Alone-Girl.’”
“Or you call me ‘Daddy Longlegs’ and I’ll call you ‘Peg o’ my Heart.’”
“MayI? Oh, may Ireally? Andwillyou? Will youreally?”
“Antonia, I’m rather taken with this new person. Where did you pick her up?”
“In a boarding-house. Go on appreciating her, while I ’phone up my hostess for this evening and tell her I have toothache.” Antonia ran up the two steps to the door which led to the house; and stood an instant poised on the topmost, surveying Deb and Cliffe with a provocative smile: “It makes me so happy to think that the two beings whom I love most on earth may also grow to love each other....”
She vanished. And Cliffe murmured: “And she doesn’t care a snap of the fingers for either of us.”
“No. More than anyone else I’ve met, Antonia is absolutely sufficient unto herself.”
“Yet one can’t leave her alone. She’s always the indifferent centre of a swarm of nibblers. What’s the attraction, I wonder.”
“Have you ever caressed a crystal or a lump of jade, or an ornament in soapstone, something with a surface perfectly smooth and cool—something hard and cut and clear, without fuss or anything except its own polish and beauty? ... that’s the beauty of Antonia, and her fascination.”
“An exquisite statuette in green bronze, standing high up on the mantelpiece. Psyche with the lamp.”
“Artemis. Psyche is too human—too curious.”
“More in your line—eh?”
Deb shook her head. And on pretext of needing to do her hair afresh for supper, she followed Antonia into the house. She required to snatch some general information from Antonia about this long, thin beaky-nosed Cliffe Kennedy, with the sunny, forget-me-not blue eyes, and outrageously nimble tongue, before she presented him with the confidences for which he was angling. As she emerged from the garden passage into the hall, she heard Antonia speaking in that peculiarly distinct voice one reserves for the telephone: “No, I want Gillian—Oh, isn’t she?—Well, listen, Winny—Say I simply must go out to-night. I muddled the days—I expect her to-morrow night instead....”
Deb walked slowly through the hall and up the stairs. She was puzzled....
Antonia had not seen her. A moment later she came into the bedroom.
“Oh, was Cliffe too much for you?”
“You said you would tell me about him.”
“Certainly,” said Antonia obligingly, sitting on the edge of the bed and clasping her hands round her knees. “He’s a rich subject—Cliffe Kennedy, aged twenty-nine—only son of a perfectly sweet old mother. He’s a completely harmless-uncle type, from the sex point of view; and also the most dangerous and mischievous person that ever walked this earth, because he attracts all confidences and secrets, and then betrays them lavishly as the freakish impulse takes him.”
“But forewarned——”
“Isnotforearmed—with Cliffe. He has a magnetic and fatal lure, that draws and draws you.... You seek comfort each time by an instinctive self-assurance that just this once and only this once Cliffe is to be trusted; and when he is relating one of his best impromptus, your instinct equally assures you that just this once and only this once Cliffe is telling the truth. Yes, you needn’t flush quite so hotly, Deb; which one was it you believed? The episode which cured him of lying? Why, he lies by mechanism. He keeps a sort of stock-pot, into which he throws the bare bones of every dramatic incident which takes his fancy, and fishes it up again meated with personal application. He’s everybody’s best friend and everybody’s worst enemy in succession, and gyrates from one extreme to the other so quickly that you may be unburdening your inmost heart to him under an entirely false impression that you are still on the friendly category. There’s the gong, Deb. Any more questions, before the Court rises?”
“Why isn’t your best boy in khaki?” laughed Deb.
“He has been medically rejected. That bit of information happened to be correct. It’s those dotted fragments of truth which make the whole so perilous. It can’t be altogether discarded.”
“And has he really only a year to live? Oh, Antonia——”
“Bless your tears of sympathy, little girl. Cliffe will probably be a hale old man of eighty. Come along....”
Mrs Verity detained Deb after supper on some pretext, while Cliffe and Antonia returned to the studio. In anynormal mother, this piece of manœuvring could easily be interpreted as a wish to further a favourable “match” for Antonia; and Mrs Verity’s intentions were similar and yet startlingly dissimilar; she was benignly hopeful that a free union with that charming Mr Kennedy would be that step in the wrong direction, which she so earnestly desired for Antonia’s good.
“Antonia is the sweetest of companions, and also deserves my supreme respect as an artist,” she told Deb. “But sometimes, Miss Marcus, and oh, I trust indeed that I may be mistaken, sometimes she strikes me as being just a trifle narrow-minded. She seems too content to accept those illogical conventions which have been fetishes since countless years. It would grieve me inexpressibly if Antonia should miss some of the Fullness of life. Do you not agree with me, Miss Marcus, and pray, if you do not agree, do not hesitate to contradict me—do not hesitate to call me unreasonable, but do you not think”—mittened hands fervently clasped in her lap—“that it is Antonia’s duty to the Age to be a little more abandoned in her conduct?”
If one could judge by Kennedy’s conversation during the rest of the evening, Antonia’s friends at least were certainly not to be complained of in that respect. Cliffe slaughtered their presumable confidences with as little ruth as a butcher slaughters lambs, and then disported himself merrily among the mangled heaps. A certain Theo Pandos, after completely maiming the glorious genius of Gillian Sherwood, was flirting shamefully with “Winifred,” who, it seemed, was found in dire need by Gillian on her doorstep, and taken in and clothed and fed. “And I tell you, Antonia, and this is Gospel truth, that sticky, white-slug girl has done the doorstep trick before.... Blair Stevenson knows a man who swears for a fact he met her at Tom Maryon’s, the dramatist, three years ago, under the very same conditions. He made Blair take his oath never to breathe one word about it, for fear of making mischief.Onedoorstep?—she’s lain on twenty-seven doorsteps.”
From “Winifred,” Cliffe went on to “Zoe” and “Blair,” and was equally startling in his revelations. There was nothing of vindictive or paltry gossip in Cliffe’s stupendous onslaughts upon the truth. He committed mortality on lines that waxed from merely generous to colossal, breath-taking. He flung about reputations and caught them, as deftly as a juggler hisplates; or dropped them with magnificent disregard of the smash. Treachery was here conducted on as opulent a scale of grandeur as falsehood. Coincidence was blown out to a lusty, full-bellied creature triumphant over those meagre, lean-throated sisters of accuracy and consistency. No human being could have survived one day of life under such a stress of superlative achievement, such haphazard of occurrence, such complicated interplay of motives, actions, and reactions.
Antonia did not interrupt Mr Cliffe Kennedy’s entertainment. It was a very fine one-man performance, and lasted until eleven o’clock. Then he relapsed into moody depression, and said he would go mad unless he could be solitary ... but would kindly see Deb home first, if she promised not to talk.
And he hovered a moment on tip-toe, taller even than nature had made him, looking down at Antonia with a wry smile; where she lay dreamily back in her chair, with hands clasped behind the beautiful, delicate shape of her head. Then he bent, and took that head between his long, thin, brown fingers, as though she were a holy saint, and reverently touched her forehead with his lips, and put her from him, and swung out of the studio.
Deb understood that it was a kiss of renunciation. And that his passion for Antonia was very real and very hopeless....
Did Antonia know of it?
Antonia telephoned early the next morning to make amused enquiry how much of her inmost soul Deb had been lured to commit to Kennedy’s precarious keeping during the homeward walk.
Deb faltered an evasive reply, ashamed to confess that she had inexplicably delivered up to this persuasive highwayman of secrets the complete comedy and tragedy of the Chorus.
“Did he say anything about me?” Antonia questioned her further.
Again Deb faltered an evasive reply ... whilst in her ears rang a guilty echo of Cliffe’s peroration to the bizarre history of Charlotte Verity’s bold infatuation for a now defunct Arctic explorer who was Cliffe’s own father (“twenty-nine years ago. And all this time neither she nor I have dared to tell Antonia that she’s my own half-sister and a child of love.”...)
“No, nothing, Antonia.”
“What did he talk about, then? Well—whom did he talk about?”
“His m-mother.”
“Deb, I can positively hear you squirming. Own up. Why are you shielding him?”
“I’m not,” protested Deb unhappily.
Antonia let her off. “What are you doing to-day?”
“I think I’ll go to Hampstead and ask myself to tea with the Rothenburgs—the Redburys, I mean. Nell was the kiddy I introduced to you last week; you liked her, didn’t you?”
“Yes—I’ve just rung her up to invite her to the show of etchings at the Leicester Galleries.”
“Never mind. I can see her another time.”
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Not a bit. Any message for La llorraine? I’ll pay them a visit this afternoon, instead of the Redburys.”
“Will you? Then I shall probably come on there after the show—if you don’t object.”
“Why should I object? I’m very happy in your company.”
“I accept your act of homage,” serenely.
“’Tisn’t anything of the sort,” Deb repudiated the suggestion with extreme indignation.
“Very well, dear. Ask your Aunt Stella if she’ll lunch with me to-morrow.”
“Me too?”
“The perfect hostess never mixes her generations.”
“That’s an excuse not to give me lunch.”
“You may come to supper the day after, if you bring your brother, as you once promised.”
“And my grandfather?”
“The old Hun? Certainly. I prefer him to the oh-so-English Mr Otto Redbury, anyway.”
“Does the oh-so-English Herr Otto Rothenburg go and sit in the bathroom and sulk when you are there? because it honours you too highly if he appears, and you might get conceited about it.”
“On the contrary, he entertains me with his most irreproachable Jingo sentiments—rather loudly, in case a policeman is posted outside the door.”
“An old lady has been posted outside this door for a goodtwenty minutes, waiting to wash her hands. Shall I let her in?”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“The ’phone and the wash-basin live together at Montague Hall. Good-bye, Antonia—do you like me?”
“Moderately. Good-bye, child.”