“I’d better go and tell some one to pack my things,” he said, but made no movement.
“I’ve told them,” she said in her suddenly absent way. Where on earth did Virginia get to when hereyes looked like that? Those sentinels.... He felt flat.
And then she gave a little laugh, and with it something of her manner returned.
“On the other hand,” she said, “I’d better go and supervise my own packing. It’s a bit complicated, this hot to-day and cold to-morrow....”
And then she left him, walking quickly towards the villa; but she wheeled round from a short distance—and he was suddenly amazed by her smile, a gay smile it was, and it made her face look all golden. She called to him softly:—
“You’ll be ready then, in less than an hour?”
“I’m ready now,” he cried back to that glorious smile. And standing there, he watched her all the way to the house, the tall, the fearless, the mysterious Virginia....
Itwas the lesser and more comfortable drawing-room; in which, before lunch or dinner, was always a cocktail for any one who cared to mix one, or sherry and the like for those with more “old world” tastes. George Tarlyon was being “old world” this morning, sprawling in a large arm-chair with a glass of sherry to hand. George Tarlyon’s white-flannelled legs were stuck straight out, and his blue, slightly frozen blue eyes were mocking the brown tips of his white shoes with an almost serious expression; and George Tarlyon’s crisp fair hair shone with the water of his bath. Handsome, careless, reckless George Tarlyon.... A Viking, thought Ivor, as he came in at the window. And George Tarlyon awoke lazily from his contemplation.
“Hallo!” he said quite genially. “Have you been thinking out another book on courtesans, pacing up and down like that? God, I wish I could think!...”
“Ah!” said Ivor absently, and took a cigarettefrom a box on the table. Tarlyon at once struck a match and held it out to him from his chair.
“Must make striking these awful French matches awkward sometimes,” Tarlyon referred sympathetically to his arm.
“Not so awkward,” Ivor said, “as it makes a good many other things. As you can imagine——”
“I’ve no imagination,” Tarlyon complained frankly. “Have a glass-of-wine instead?” (One referred even to a tankard of ale as “a-glass-of-wine.”)
“Well—perhaps a little later,” Ivor said, leaning against the edge of the table. “I’m not the man I was at daylight drinking.”
Tarlyon suddenly grinned.
“I don’t know what you mean by a little later,” he said, “for I hear you are leaving us before lunch.” And he grinned, just a little, directly up at Ivor. Trying to confuse one, Ivor thought. Well,hewasn’t going to be confused....
“Yes, that’s it,” he told him. “Lunch at Antibes, I suppose.”
Tarlyon lazily stretched out his hand and took another cigarette: he lit it.
“And you’ll dine, I suppose, at Avignon,” he suggested. “Romantic old place, Avignon....” And then he added, first to the brown tips of his shoes, then directly at him: “By the way, Marlay, there aren’t any other women you’d like to take away with you from my house, are there?”
Silence....
“That,” said Ivor at last, “was a damn silly insult.”
“I wasn’t trying to be clever, you know,” Tarlyon pointed out. “We can’t all try....”
“Well,” said Ivor, “if that insult was a sample of your wit, you’d have to try pretty hard.”
“Ah,” said Tarlyon.
“What I mean is,” said Tarlyon, “that you can’t expect to be patted on the back when you are trying to play the fool with a man’s wife....”
Silence....
“That, of course,” said Ivor thoughtfully, “is a sound point of view. In fact it is the only point of view. But it seems to come strangely from you, Lord Tarlyon.”
“My life is my own business, Marlay.”
“Of course.”
Silence....
“Then why the hell,” asked Lord Tarlyon, “are you mixing yourself up in it?”
The slightly frozen blue eyes were looking very steadily, very mockingly, at Ivor. And Ivor suddenly blazed away at them: “I haven’t given a thought to your life, Tarlyon. And I am so little thinking of playing the fool with your wife, as you call it, that you are the last person in the world with whom I would discuss your wife!”
Tarlyon leapt up as though a bullet had ripped his skin——
And then——
“Hallo, Virginia! Ready already!”
And Ivor, whose back was to the door as he half-sat against the edge of the table, screwed his head round....
“I’ve been ready for some time,” Virginia strangely told her husband, not coming into the room. Ivor turned his head away.
“It would be nice of you,” she added, in that way she had of saying things as though she wasn’t there, “to give the man a hand with the luggage across the garden to the car. I seem to have rather a lot of luggage. Would you, please?”
“I can do it,” Ivor said quickly: but a hand fell lightly on his maimed shoulder.
“Don’t you worry, Marlay. I’m the backbone of Pimlico, I am.” And Tarlyon lounged by Ivor without a glance, an immensely unperturbed man. Virginia stood aside and let him pass through the doorway, and, without glancing after him, came swiftly across the room to Ivor, whose back was still to her. In his slack position against the table her eyes were level with his.
“You shouldn’t have asked him to do that,” he said furiously.
“I heard,” she told him.
“Well, you shouldn’t have heard,” Ivor said sharply.
She stared thoughtfully at the white face and the furious black eyes....
“Ivor, don’t be too angry,” she pleaded gently. “It’s so unimportant, that kind of thing!”
She was getting on his nerves, and it was a tremendous effort not to tell her so. She shouldn’t have heard, she shouldn’t have come in. Tarlyon and he might have got the thing more or less right, a bit cleaner anyway. He felt foul, foul. Like a thing from a pest-house. God, how queerly Virginia chose her men!
“Do you know,” she was saying, “I could have reminded him from the doorway—I was just outside, by the stairs—that it wasn’thishouse, and that he was my guest, just like you. But I thought that would be common—wouldn’t it have been, Ivor?”
“Very,” he agreed shortly.
“So I thought I’d punish him by sending him to help with the luggage instead. I had to end it somehow, don’t you see? That was also common, I know, but less common—wasn’t it, Ivor?”
She simplymadehim smile, she was like a schoolgirl. And as he unwillingly smiled, she began to laugh, right into his sombre eyes, a long and low laugh of pleasure. He protested with nerves:—
“Look here, Virginia, if you can’t leave a man in peace to be angry with another man, whatwillyou let him do?”
But she laughed, standing there almost against him, her face close to his: she laughed right into his sombre eyes....
“Oh, Ivor, you are a funny man, I do think!” she cried softly. “Though that isn’t why I’m laughing—in fact, I don’t know why! But maybe I’m laughing because I feel there simply must be something to laugh at in all this—and your very angry face, Ivor! There’s always something to laugh at in everything, dear, and if one can’t quite put a finger on what that something is, one must just pretend. So I’m pretending—and frightfully well, I do think! Don’t you? Answer me, Ivor?...”
And she laughed at him.
“And also answer me this,” she whispered. “When George was beastly to you and about me, and you were beastly to him back, weren’t you awfully glad that you hadn’t made love to me down here? Now weren’t you?... Oh, Ivor, what fun it must be to be a gentleman whose lawlessness is all according to rule, precept, and precedence!”
And she laughed at him.
“You are making a butt of me, Virginia,” he complained edgily.
“Indeed I’m not, dear!” She was contrite. “It was George who tried to do that, and whether he thinks it did or didn’t come off we won’t now have time to find out....”
“You see, Ivor,” she explained, “George made a small mistake. He has always laughed at my men—and so have I, for the matter of that!—and he thought he would have a go at laughing at you. He’s generally found it very effective. But when he found it didn’t come off with you he got angry and gave himself away.... It’s really entirely your fault, Ivor, for not being a laughing matter. You are a damn bad-tempered man, that’s what’s the matter with you, dear. Whereas all men should on certain occasions be laughing matters, or else other men will hate them.”
“So he hates me then, does he?” Ivor rather naïvely asked. “Is that, do you think, because of you or because he just happens to hate me, anyway?”
“Maybe he thinks you’re dangerous,” Virginia told him seriously. “Or maybe it’s because he’s not sure of the kind of man you are. George hates not being sure of people. He also hates not being sure of theincome my trustees allow him as my relation-by-marriage—and a charming income it is, too, I do think! Anyway it won the First Prize at the Islington Income Show....”
You could never tell with Virginia in this mood: one moment she was quite serious, and the next she would say silly things like that.
“And has he any idea,” Ivor began sharply, but he never finished that question for she did the most surprising thing in the world: she drew a cross on his forehead with her finger: and she was not smiling.
“I think he has an idea,” she whispered, “that I may be going away for good....”
“And I have an idea,” she whispered, “that I probably am.”
Theywent. And as they went no one was visible—except dear Hugo in his shirt-sleeves at his bedroom window; and he cheerfully waved to them and they threw farewell gestures to him, for Hugo was really very, very nice—and always so very aloof from everything! His friends might quarrel with each other, but they could never quarrel with Hugo Cypress, the last of thebeaux sabreurs.
The large touring-car, with chauffeur and maid (known as “the Smith,” because her name was Mdlle. Louise Madeleine Dupont) in front, and Ivor and Virginia behind, swiftly approached Antibes, on the road to Cannes. And it passed Antibes.
“I’m damned if we’ll lunch at Antibes!” Ivor suddenly said: but gave no reason to Virginia’s, “Is this man mad?” eyebrow-look.
They did dine, however, seven hours later, within the blond ramparts of Avignon. “Romantic old place, Avignon!”
Nocar, not even such a one as Lady Tarlyon’s, can reach Paris from the south within a day, or even within two days without particular preparation; and besides, it is a chilly kind of nuisance to motor at night over some of the worst roads known to man—especially when one can stay so very comfortably at that ancient hostelry of modern comforts, the Hôtel des Cardinaux, just within the blond ramparts of Avignon, as you enter Avignon through the village of Villeneuve-les-Avignon and across the broad sweep of the Rhone. The Hôtel des Cardinaux, four square and stout sides enclosing what the hasty traveller may remember as a labyrinth of courtyards—in which loiter the queenly ilex-trees and upon which seems to open every window in the place, a multitude of small-paned windows—is also blond, a seared and dirty blond reminiscent of a century when fine ladies did not mind a little dirt so only their lovers were laced and perfumed. In fact, the only thing in Avignon that seems not to be of that dirty and delightful blond is the crucifix on the hill which rises above the centre of that ancient town—that gray symbol of a great idea, which even the vast and glowing Castle of the Popes cannot mortify. Stare one way—if you can find any altitude from which to stare, for this is a stuffy and enclosed town, a town of crooked side-streets and cramped movements, a town of bustlingcommerçants—stare one way, and you will see this crucifix upon its hill; stare another, over the crenellated ramparts that now look so amazingly useless, and you will see the broad sweep of the Rhone over which you blissfully hurried into Avignon; and when you havelooked at the Rhone for a few minutes, you will say that it looks a hard and heartless river, a river of steel. The land of Provence is green and light in spring, but the Rhone beside Avignon is always of steel, and the reflection of the sun upon its smooth waters is but an illusion to placate the romantic stranger. And over it the mistral hurls itself at you as you stand, say, at your open bedroom window at the Hôtel des Cardinaux, so that you cry, “My God, I thought it was warm in Provence!” and you close the window very quickly, and you draw up a chair to the ugly fireplace in which a fire is struggling smokily with the mistral in the chimney. And you say gloomily to yourself that Avignon is not a place in which to be happy in this century: in some past century, maybe Mr. George Moore’s century, but not in this. For, though you are in the land of lovers and troubadours, your thoughts are not of romance: certainly not until you have dined.
Ivor and Virginia dined in a private sitting-room upstairs. Obsequiously was the door opened for them upon a dark and cumbersome room with high walls of faded red damask: and so long deprived of youth and light that, as the light crept in with Ivor and Virginia, the mirrors stirred sleepily with reflections of ancient candelabras and musty golden patches of Empire luxury on the background of red damask. They dined almost in silence: very companionably, but almost in silence.
The day seemed to have tired Virginia, as well it might; and, excusing her silences, she complained, ever so little, of a pain. It baffled Virginia to describe this pain but as a sick little pain, something between a tummy-ache and an ear-ache, and very disturbing in its frequent comings and goings. And she mocked her pain, saying it was a busy little pain—and very mysterious too, or else French and English doctors had been very unintelligent about it. And to deal with it Virginia always carried about with her some clear, white-looking stuff in a little bottle—“it’s got opiumand mint in it,” she said—and she would take a drop or two of this in a thimbleful of water, and it would presently soothe away the sick little pain inside her. And sometimes she would make her friends try a little of the stuff in which there was opium and mint, just to see what it was like, and they generally said it was pretty foul. That is what Ivor sympathetically said to-night, as they sat after dinner in two frightfully uncomfortable arm-chairs in front of the smoky fire. There they sat and talked of nothing in particular, nothing personal. And, quite soon, Virginia said she was tired and wouldn’t mind going to bed; and Ivor said he was also tired, and yawned a splendid yawn to prove it.
They had to walk across the corridor from the sitting-room to their bedrooms, two doors side by side. Virginia let herself into her room; and swiftly she stretched out her hand and took his, and smiled very sweetly at him.
“Good-night, dear,” she said.
Oncein his room Ivor found he was indeed tired. And when he was tired his mutilated shoulder hurt him: it often hurt him devilishly, but he was almost getting used to it. It tired one a good deal more, he thought, to be driven in a car a long distance than to drive one. He would ask Virginia to let him drive to-morrow, he had driven quite a lot with his one arm, and after all there was young David Harley, who drove splendidly with only one arm and a wooden leg. Then he stopped and stared at something, quite intently; and as he stared at it he was very still, scarcely breathing. Of course, he had seen it before, while he was dressing for dinner, but he had only seen it out of the corner of his eyes; he hadn’t touched it, he hadn’t the faintest idea if it was bolted or not.... Then, suddenly, he felt very weary in mind and body; quickly undressed,and went to bed. It was a wide, low, and very comfortable bed, with no antique nonsense about it. His shoulder hurt like hell.
Ivorslept, and had a dream. He dreamed of golden hair falling about his face and body, creepers of golden hair entwining him. And then a strange turn happened, strange even in a dream about golden hair, for he was made to see his mind as a column of marble. And a very tall and shapely column it looked, too! standing on nothing, directed nowhither, just an Attic column looking very beautiful with the rare beauty of an indestructible thing. That column was his mind, in the dream. And he looked at it for a long time, he was made to examine it very carefully. “Look, look!” someone seemed to keep on crying in his ear, rather impatiently, Ivor thought. And then at last he saw what he was intended to see—there it was, oh so high up on the column! There it was, a naked creature, a woman, a slight and naked thing, and so dazzling white! She held on there in a marvellous abandon of fulfilment, white arms and legs deliciously entwining the column, golden hair wanton about her shoulders, and lips destroying the marble column with kisses. Ivor stared at it for a long time, a very long time, and as he stared the column seemed to come nearer and nearer to him, until he could hear what the golden woman was whispering as her lips destroyed the column. But although he could distinctly hear what she was whispering, his mind couldn’t form what he heard into words, simply couldn’t; and he miserably racked his brain about it, thinking that it was very important indeed for him to form her whisperings into words. And when at last he opened his eyes to the dark room he could still hear the whispering, but now he could form what the whispering voice was saying; it was saying: “Oh,Ivor! dear Ivor....” And she wasn’t kissing a silly marble column at all, that golden woman, she was kissing his lips, and her hair was falling about his face, tickling just a little. Oh, she wasn’t real, of course! she was only a legend, a legend of a night in Avignon! And, stretching out his hand, he touched her body lying across the bed, and her body under the very thin nightdress was icy cold to his hand.
“You’ll catch a most awful cold,” he murmured to the amazing lips.
“You are so vain, so vain, ...” she whispered.
Naturally, they did not now hurry to Paris: or hurry anywhither, for the matter of that. They had no plans, there was no hurry, the weather was perfect; and the world was far too busy enjoying the lack of killing—the spring of 1919!—to notice or care what two people were doing. Ivor and Virginia had too much to talk about to discuss such banalities as destinations. “We are going towards Paris? Very well then, let’s go towards Paris.” Thus they motored gently towards Paris, staying at places.Nach Parisis the vaguest and most uncertain destiny in history, as all men know; and the route these two adventurers took would have broken the heart of a motoring-map, if they had consulted one. They somehow got to Chartres, among other places. Chartres has about as much relation to Paris from Avignon as Canterbury, and they got to it only by the divine accident of seeing, one evening, the two towers of its magnificent cathedral from the far distance. Ivor and Virginia never forgot the catch in their hearts at the sudden beauty of the great cathedral high against the evening sky. “Oh, it’s somehow like a great horse!” Virginia whispered in the silence of their wonder at that great shape high against the sky: for the cathedral of Chartres is built upon an eminence in the town, and from anywhere on the straight roads that lead out of Chartres to the four corners of the world you will see its lofty genius against the sky.... From Chartres to Paris is but a three hours’ drive at most, but it took them a week: part of which time they spent at a hotel in the forest ofFontainbleau. A lovely and indescribable fortnight, this from Avignon to Paris....
Virginiaalways stayed at the Ritz in Paris: it was just a habit: but the habit was confined to the rue Cambon side of it, saying it was quieter there. Ivor, who also stayed on the rue Cambon side, pointed out that as a matter of fact it was much noisier than the Place Vendôme side, but that as all hotels were beastly, it didn’t very much matter. There are certain gentlemen of mean and truculent appearance, who, in the early hours of every morning, enter the central streets of Paris, and bang large tin cans against the walls on the thin pretence of clearing out the dustbins.
Virginia had found a letter awaiting her at the bureau: and she had looked at the envelope with that vague, far-away look. But when Ivor, dressed for dinner, came into her room to see if she was ready, which of course she was not, she gave him the letter with a mischievous laugh: saying that it was a masterpiece of Tarlyonry, and an instructive essay for any man on the perfect way to treat a vanished wife and a possibly vanishing income. “Which, though, he wouldn’t think very much about,” she conceded, “for no Tarlyon was ever quite penniless.”
“Am I, or am I not, going to like this letter?” Ivor asked her frankly. “Because if not, I would much rather read itafterdinner, if I’ve got to read it at all....”
Virginia was before her mirror, subduing “Swan and Edgar”; and she turned to him in her chair, with her face sideways, holding that small iron toy to Swan. She made a little face at him.
“It’s just an ordinary kind of letter,” she said.
It was addressed from Monte Carlo, and dated five days back. Ivor sat on the edge of the bed and read:—
“Dear Virginia,—I hope you won’t mind the liberty I’ve taken with the villa. I’ve closed it up and scattered the menials, as I gathered that you won’t be returning to this part of the country for some time, and being solitary host of a villa like a wedding-cake isn’t my strongest suit. Hugo and I moved on here, and haven’t enjoyed it as much as if you’d been here too. The ‘dicing’ hasn’t been going so well as it was—poor old Hugo came a crash the other night, and has gone clucking back for to be a toy soldier at Aldershot, saying that ‘dicing’ isn’t what it was in the early seventies and that he’s going to fight the Bolsheviks instead, for the only person who took his money with even a pretence of sympathy was a Grand Duke, who probably needed it himself. I’m leaving for London to-morrow, but as I’m only passing through Paris, where I suppose you are—you might have written to me, I do think!—I shan’t have time to look in on you. I shall stay at Belgrave Square, and look at London for a period, and then go down to Rupert Kare’s. In the meanwhile, should you suddenly feel the call of England in your blood and want to come home, be a dear and send me a wire to White’s, so that I can meet you with a couple of plovers’ eggs on a plate, it being the season for plovers’ eggs and you adoring same. Virginia, don’t tell me that you and I aren’t going to break an egg together at the Mont Agel this year! Remember that you would never have married me if I hadn’t drugged you with plovers’ eggs—and will so drug you again, Virginia, or my name isn’t George St. George, ever your lord but never my own master.”
“Dear Virginia,—I hope you won’t mind the liberty I’ve taken with the villa. I’ve closed it up and scattered the menials, as I gathered that you won’t be returning to this part of the country for some time, and being solitary host of a villa like a wedding-cake isn’t my strongest suit. Hugo and I moved on here, and haven’t enjoyed it as much as if you’d been here too. The ‘dicing’ hasn’t been going so well as it was—poor old Hugo came a crash the other night, and has gone clucking back for to be a toy soldier at Aldershot, saying that ‘dicing’ isn’t what it was in the early seventies and that he’s going to fight the Bolsheviks instead, for the only person who took his money with even a pretence of sympathy was a Grand Duke, who probably needed it himself. I’m leaving for London to-morrow, but as I’m only passing through Paris, where I suppose you are—you might have written to me, I do think!—I shan’t have time to look in on you. I shall stay at Belgrave Square, and look at London for a period, and then go down to Rupert Kare’s. In the meanwhile, should you suddenly feel the call of England in your blood and want to come home, be a dear and send me a wire to White’s, so that I can meet you with a couple of plovers’ eggs on a plate, it being the season for plovers’ eggs and you adoring same. Virginia, don’t tell me that you and I aren’t going to break an egg together at the Mont Agel this year! Remember that you would never have married me if I hadn’t drugged you with plovers’ eggs—and will so drug you again, Virginia, or my name isn’t George St. George, ever your lord but never my own master.”
Ivor folded up the letter, rather slowly and clumsily, with his one hand. Virginia was ready, radiant with the peculiar glitter of a very fair woman in a sleeveless black dress, and looking at him with that mischievous smile of hers. It put him rather on his guard, that smile.
“Odd man!” Ivor said thoughtfully. “Might havebeen written by a Dago, parts of that letter—and yet he’s the most gallant man in England.”
“Don’t you see that that is the way of his pride?” she pointed out. “He has a great deal of pride, and common sense too, but they’ve both somehow got motheaten in him. And so he writes in that casual and bantering way, as though nothing in particular had happened——”
“Well, it has,” Ivor said sharply.
“Now don’t be snappy, Ivor,” she begged him mischievously. “You and I know somethingmostparticular has happened, and so does George really, but he wouldn’t give that away, even to himself, not he! He thinks and writes about it in that unimportant way just so as to make it seem unimportant, something not at all serious. You see, he’s always been quite sure of his hold on me, and he can’t get out of that conceited habit all at once. Some Englishmen never think their wives can be unfaithful to them, not because they think so well of their wives but because they think so well of themselves. And so George simply can’t help thinking that I am only playing—we must give him a little time to realise that I’m not playing, Ivor,” she added gently.
“For him to realise that, or for you to realise that?” he asked, and put the light out of her eyes.
“You’ve got no right to say that!” Virginia cried.
He had meant to hurt, on a sudden impulse to lance a grievance that had risen within him; and now was shamed by her sincere anger, and would have pleaded his reason and begged her forgiveness, but she turned her head from him, and her face was set. And he told her unlistening face how he had noticed during the last two weeks, and divine weeks they had been, that she had avoided the subject of what they were going to do, the definite thing which was essential to people who weren’t babies. “Every time I wanted to talk about it,” he told her, “you somehow stopgapped me, and sometimes so cleverly that I forgotwhat I wanted to say in admiring you—but all the time I couldn’t help wondering why you avoided the subject, and feeling you must have some reason for that, a reason so weak that you didn’t dare let it out, for fear I might just laugh at you.” He smiled a little. “It’s been an uncomfortable feeling,” he explained. “Like a cold hot-water bottle.”
But there was no response in her set face. She had sat down with her back to him, on the chair by the toilet-table, and was playing with the lid of a little ivory box. Never before had she looked like this; for the face he saw in the mirror was set in an inexplicable anger, a deep and almost venomous anger which amazed him; and he had a curious feeling that this Virginia’s spine was made of steel, it would bend and bend and bend until one day it snapped up straight and stayed straight, rigid and unyielding. He felt, as it were psychically that there were wastes in this Virginia unexplored by man, wastes where she roamed in utter disregard of human laws, wastes where she could wander untrammelled by human emotions. Give her an inch of excuse, and she would become a snake, to swish away with implacable and unfathomable face. American women were said to get like that when angered, hard. He knew, quite dearly, that she wasn’t now angry at what he had said, but that her whole nature had been given a twist to anger at some hidden aspect of him.
“Well?” he asked softly, from behind her. She had humoured him often, after all....
She turned her head and looked directly at him.
“I’ve got nothing to say,” she said steadily. “You say that I haven’t wanted to discuss what we are going to do. Having discovered that I don’t want to, I’m merely wondering why you are insisting on it—that’s all.”
He laughed a little at that.
“Don’t try to bully me, Virginia, and I’ll not try to bully you,” he warned her. “You see, dear, Ithink we ought to discuss it, whether you want to or not. It’s really rather important—and you can’t just get out of it by looking like an angry queen and saying, ‘I have nothing to say.’ I’m in love withyou, Virginia, and not with love, so I want us to be sane about it. There’s a great deal more pleasure in sanity than people think—for, you know, one doesn’t have to be mad because one is in love....” And then, from behind, he bent down and gently tilted up her chin with his hand and kissed her lips; and, surprisingly, they held to his lips!
“Is that the way sanity takes you?” she asked.
“It was a proposal of marriage,” he said gravely. It was the first time that word had occurred between them; but it had occurred within them for now two weeks. Virginia stared at him seriously, and her hand gently brushed his forehead, a very fond gesture. The curious anger in her had died as suddenly as it had come.
“That’s what I was being angry about,” she explained. “And that’s why I’ve made you avoid the subject these glorious two weeks, these lovers’ weeks. I don’t think I want to marry you, Ivor. In fact, I don’t think any woman has ever wanted to marry you.”
“I’ve only asked one,” he told her darkly. “But I’m afraid you will have to marry me, Virginia. Things seem to point that way. I am not philandering with you, I’d have you know. I have finished with philandering. It doesn’t matter a button to me if we are married or not, and I’ve no one in the world to consider but you—but marriage seems to be indicated, for several weighty reasons which I will explain to you if you’ll cease laughing at me.”
“I was trying to look like a woman yearning for dinner, that’s all.”
“You must yearn,” he said firmly. “We can always dine, but we can’t always talk sense——”
“Not even now,” she interrupted with a great weariness. “As far as I can make out you are trying tomake an honest woman of me. Well, you can’t do it. No one can do it. And I want my dinner, please.”
“Damn dinner! It’s no good being funny about this, Virginia, because I’m frightfully serious. I will not have us slopping about Europe in this hole-and-corner way. You are too fine and I am too old.”
“So this is ‘slopping about,’ is it?” she asked, ever so quietly.
“Don’t, please, drive me into being disloyal to all this——” he was begging her impatiently, when she swiftly interrupted him with a gesture.
“Oh, got you!” she cried, laughing into his astonished eyes. “Don’t you see, you poor Ivor? No possible or prospective husband could have said that—only a lover could have said it, in just that particularly idiotic way! Oh, Ivor, you are too sweet! And that’s why it’s perfectly absurd, all this talk about our marrying. You simply don’t look or think or talk like any possible husband; it’s perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence that you are a lover and always will be. You simply aren’t casual enough to be anything else, Ivor. I assure you, dear. You will never make any woman feel, deep down in her, that you could be anything so casual as her husband. Anyway, you can’t be mine—oh, please don’t insist!” she pathetically begged him. “For I will give way, and then we will look so silly as husband and wife—or rather, feel silly. Oh, my dear, it’s ever such an impossible relation for Ivor and Virginia!...”
But he insisted that they must be reasonable and responsible people, not vague drifters on the scum of life.
“It’s just a matter of orderliness,” he explained earnestly, “our getting married. You are quite right, it is an effort to see myself as your husband and you as my wife—but we needn’t make the effort once we’ve committed the fact. When I said that you were too fine and I was too old to slop about Europe in a hole-and-corner way, I meant that this disorderly kindof life is unworthy of you, and that I’m not young enough any more to enjoy doing no workallthe time. For, you know, one never can do any real work unless there’s some stability in the way of life—one simply must be a responsible person, even a lover must be a responsible person, if he is ever to get any work done. And the idea that a man and a woman of your position can live together and say, ‘the devil take the world’ is bosh, there’s never any conviction about that ‘devil take the world’ remark. I know you don’t care anything about social position, I know you quite sincerely don’t ever want to do social things again—but, Virginia, there’s something displeasing and slack, like two people being in dressing-gowns all day long, in a state about which people can make remarks—and in which you can get mocking letters from Tarlyon! I’m talking sense, Virginia, so don’t argue with me because I want my dinner as much as you do and it’s my turn to be angry next....”
Her silence was serious, her eyes wide with thought. He waited, close beside her, staring at her with a crooked little smile. Then, suddenly, she nodded, just once.
“All right,” she said, almost absently. “George will let me divorce him—yes, we can manage that. He’s got a lot of common sense hidden away somewhere....” She got up from her chair with a sudden little shake. “That’s settled then, Ivor. No more talk about it, please—oh, please!” she suddenly pleaded in her breathless little voice. “Let’s have our summer, and then in the autumn we can get down to this business of arrangement and divorce—down from our mountains, Ivor, right down!” Her eyes seemed clouded, he had a queer idea that she was going to cry; but she didn’t, she picked up a tube of lip-salve from the toilet-table and took it to her lips, and then on a sudden thought held it away again.
“Will you kiss me before or after?” she asked.
And he did whatever it was suitable for him to do.
Thecorridors of a hotel at the hour of nine-fifteen at night are consecrated to the activities ofvalets de chambre: it is at that mysterious hour, when the quality are at dinner or the play, that the white-apronedvaletsraid their bedrooms and rudely snatch away their clothes; and, with jackets and trousers screwed deftly under their arms, go searching the most noisome holes of the hotel for boot-brushes and oily rags with which to dust and clean them.
But to-night the last ofmessieurs et mesdameswere late in their descent. And it was as thevaletswere waiting in a little group about a bedroom door, in final gossip before the raid, that there passed them down the corridor two silent dandies: a very fair lady—“Ah, ce type anglais!”—and a very tall, beak-nosed, clean-shaven man with one arm and a white flower brave on the silk lapel of hissmoking. The white-aproned group stared aftermonsieur et milady; they saw the hand of the fair lady suddenly laid upon the sleeve of the tall gentleman, and the way she raised her head to him and spoke words which, they saw, the dark profile was quite helpless to answer.
“Elle l’aime, vous savez,” said thedoyenof thevalets, a wise man.
“Elle s’amuse, mon vieux,” sneered a young Italian with a broken nose; but his heart had been broken too, several times.
Now these were the sudden words of the fair lady, which her companion was quite helpless to answer.
“I want a baby,” she said. “I need a son—frightfully!”
“And I think,” she said, “that there’s somewhere a son of yours who needsme—frightfully!”
“Comedia!” whispered the young Italian with the broken nose, as the lift swallowed up the silence ofmonsieur et milady.
Thepact was made, then: there was to be no talk of “arrangements” until the autumn, it was to be a clear summer of—“unreason,” Virginia teased him. So they had no thought of returning to England that spring or summer, and did not—except for one reckless night in April, to a masque at the Albert Hall. Carnival, lovely carnival! And they were so weirdly and completely disguised—for Virginia was an adept at the art of masque and fancy-dress—that not one of her thousand acquaintances recognised her, or him; and they had much fun to watch the cheerful passages of Lois and many another, including Tarlyon and Hugo Cypress, who had both adopted the same fancy-dress in the form of an Assyrian beard each: with which Tarlyon looked quite magnificent and royal, and Hugo quite too comical. And once, as she passed him, Hugo caught her and insisted on her complaisance for the dance; but as she danced, she didn’t, of course, dare utter a word, lest he should recognise her and “cluck” the news to every one; though even so he might have perceived her had he not been so tipsy—“entirely to amuse the guests, lovely lady,” he earnestly assured her choking silence. And then, in the early morning, swift bathing and changing in Ivor’s flat in Upper Brook Street, and so back to France by the eight o’clock train. “Unreason,” indeed!...
What had they to do with England, those two, and what had England to do with them, during those months? They would outlaw themselves until the autumn....
They were violently happy in each other. They weregreat lovers, Ivor and Virginia. And sometimes it was a consuming love, and then again it would be very gentle: silent now and bubbling then, gay and grave in changing moods, and sometimes it would be passing sombre—and then again the thing would burst upon them. “Like a flash of very white teeth,” Virginia said. But she said many strange things in nearness, for she was very shameless with him, which was strange in her. (Gerald Trevor used to say that it was the business of a good mistress to be shameless, and the business of a good lover to appreciate it. Men can’t afford to be shameless, they get nasty, he said. Prejudice, of course. Dear Gerald!) One day she wondered about her shamelessness with him, saying that she had never been like that before.
“But never, Ivor! Men have wanted me to say things, of course, but one just wasn’t able to, even if one liked them very much. One just couldn’t. But now! Oh, you lovely beast, Ivor!...”
Now when Virginia said she had “never” done a thing before, there was no question of not believing her (the word “never” is really frightfully difficult to believe), for the amazing thing about Virginia was that she never told a lie. She had never been known to so far, anyway. And Ivor accused her of never telling a lie, saying that it was inhuman, and that he felt rather out of it, having told a-many.
“But that’s where I’m beastly,” she pointed out vividly. “I go silent, you see. I just sit still and say nothing. It’s much worse than lying, and much crueller, to be silent—and I’m known, you know, as a very silent woman. Of course I get a bit chatty with you ...” she suddenly giggled at his expression. That was how things generally ended with those two....
Oneday Virginia cried. Looking up from the page of a book, Ivor saw her eyes dimmed with tears.
“Oh!” she cried, at his look.
“Well!” he exclaimed, in utter surprise.
She smiled a little, in sudden confusion. And she spitefully dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I must be growing up,” she said.
“But, darling, not yet to second childhood!”
Oh, how sad she looked! like a fairy in a sad tale about Midsummer Night.
“I’m realising, you see, that I haven’t deserved a bit of this—oh, not a bit of it!” she cried miserably. “Ivor, I’ve deserved it much less than other people might deserve it. I am too lucky, Ivor, and I’m afraid....”
“I’ve been such a beastly person,” she said. “You don’t know....”
Vividly the scene of his first kiss that January night in Nasyngton came back to him. He remembered it against her.
“Don’t, please, Virginia!” he begged her. “I do hate your thinking of all that....”
She stared at him miserably. There were no tears in her eyes now, they were intent beyond his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said plaintively. “Only I see men. Suddenly, sitting here—I see men. You and I are so happy, you think such fine things about me, and you make me fine—but sometimes I see men! Men who wanted to be happy with me, you know. I was so easy, Ivor ... and then I was so cruel.... Some haven’t forgiven me yet. There are a few men in the world this minute who hate me for a beastly woman, and they are right, for they’ve never seen me with you. I’ve been awful vicious, Ivor....”
And he remembered the feeling she had once given him of the “wastes” within her, the lawless wastes where Virginia’s soul wandered in lawlessness, thebleak wastes of angry indifference; and how he had seen her, felt her, dropping thither from his love, and how he had somehow clutched her back, he never knew how—this soft and tender Virginia, pitiful and so full of pity!
“You are thinking lovely things about me!” she cried in distress. “I see by your eyes, Ivor.”
And her arm swept round the wide and dim studio in an impotent gesture.
“Why don’t you see that I don’t deserve all this?” she cried.
Forall these things came to pass in a studio in the Place du Tertre, which is a small square lying flat on top of the Butte above Montmartre, in the white shadow and beneath the white cupolas of the queer church of Sacré Cœur.
This studio lay behind a shabby little house in the Place du Tertre, and was built low and wide and elegant to the caprice of an adventurous artist, one Kay Benson; and with it was a garden of flowers by day and lanterns by night, a little garden replete with the secret of all lovely gardens, for a man and a woman could sit in it: thence to stare down at the mists of the busy city and the thin and lively riband of the Seine, at the whole pageant and the confusion of mighty Paris, from the Mont Valérien to the grim old Lion de Belfort.
It was by devious ways and for various reasons that, on that first of May, Ivor and Virginia climbed from the luxury of the Place Vendôme to the solitude of the Butte, to the studio over against the queer church of Sacré Cœur; for is it not queer that men should have climbed so high and laboured so long to build so ugly a church as Sacré Cœur? which is thus a fitting ambition for the silly revellers of Montmartre to reach by dawn, for it is an ugly church even in the dawn and only distance can make it beautiful.
Theirpact was to outlaw themselves from England and all men, from the March day when they arrived in Paris until October. But one cannot be undisturbed in the heart of Paris: which must, of course, be only a figure of speech, for surely the heart of Paris must lie otherwhere than about the rue de la Paix, else men would not so easily die for it. And, too, it was now the chattering Paris of departing armies and approaching Conference, when Lady Tarlyon could not take a step without being recognised and hailed: and Ivor had to be continually standing aside and trying to look as though himself had met her by chance only a moment before.
So they had left Paris, very shortly after their first arrival, and again by car. The world was before them, but they had not a wide choice of direction. Northwards were still soldiers and ruins, westwards were armaments going to rest, eastwards was never but rather dull—so they went towards the Pyrenees, staying where they happened. They went to Hendaye and to St. Jean de Luz—but not to Biarritz!
“Oh no, not Biarritz! We are not feeling at all smart these days!” Virginia cried in his ear, and jolly nearly bit it; which was a sudden habit of hers that caused words between them, for she seemed to like doing it, but it hurt him. “Who has more right to bite your ear than I?” Virginia cried, and because he remarked that she should have said “me” instead of “I,” she punished him. “Oh, you beast, Ivor! you like it, you know you do! And besides your own grammar in your books is rotten....”
But no god known to man can be so absurdly and unreservedly kind to two people; and so there travelled in the car with Ivor and Virginia, the chauffeur and the maid (the amiable “Smith”), an invisible but impish little traveller—none other than that “sick little pain”! It plagued Virginia increasingly, that sick little pain inside her; and soon its mark was laid softly upon her face, always clear-white as a white camellia; but lately it was as though the deity of her father’s button-hole was becoming the deity of Virginia’s complexion, for a gardenia was not more wan nor peculiar-white than the disturbing pallor of her face. Her lips Virginia coloured, but never a touch ofrougetouched her cheek, for she said that many Carnal generations had established her complexion, and who was she to risk breaking the entail of so precious a property? And Ivor agreed with her, saying that she was quite right to have the courage of her own complexion....
Now one day it came to pass that the stuff in the little white bottle, in which there was opium and mint, lost all its soothing properties; and the bravery of Virginia—it was only a very little pain, after all!—was of no avail against the solicitude of Ivor, so that Paris saw them again on an afternoon in April.
“I know of a doctor Lois had once,” Virginia said. But when she came out of that doctor’s consulting room, Ivor saw that she was impatient.
“The man’s a fool,” Virginia said; and when they were well outside, she said: “He has the indigestion theory on the brain. He shook his head over me—such a nasty little man, Ivor! And he said that it might be due to too many cocktails and irregular habits—me! And so I didn’t even trouble to tell him that I hadn’t touched anything but Vichy for years, andnot much of that....Nowwhat are we going to do, Ivor?”
“We are going to find a better doctor,” Ivor said; and found a famous one the very next day. “This sick little pain,” Ivor said, “has had a long enough run....”
Le docteur David was a very tall and bearded old gentleman who lived in a very small and stuffyapartementin the rue Ponthieu, a narrow street off the Champs Elysées: a famous specialist and a kind and genial man of the world, with a perfect command of many languages and without a trace of that aggressive optimism which makes so many Gallic doctors quite unbearable to their victims. Virginia liked him, saying that he was a most superior man and that the word indigestion had not dominated their conversation, but that Dr. David had suggested that X-ray photographs would be interesting. She was not very communicative about it, Ivor thought.
They went again to the rue Ponthieu after the X-ray photographs had been taken. And the first sight Ivor had of le docteur David was when, pacing up and down the stuffy and overfurnished waiting-room in his restlessness, a wide double-door opened and there appeared the back of Virginia and the heavily bearded face of the specialist. Virginia was saying:—
“Then it will be all right until October? Oh, please say ‘yes,’ doctor!”
“Yes,” smiled the tall, old gentleman. They came into the room, and Ivor fully saw him as a very courtly, very bearded, and very wise-looking man of the world. Virginia introduced them, and said quickly to Ivor:—
“It’s a long story. Dr. David says I must be operated on, but that I can wait until October....”
“So long as you keep quiet,” said Dr. David.
“Oh yes, I will keep quiet!” Virginia breathed softly.
“But when I say quiet, madame, I mean very, very quiet,” Dr. David insisted gravely; and his eyessmiled gravely down on her, so that she should understand him well.
“And you say,” Virginia went quickly on, “that it will be quite all right for me to be cut into little bits in London? For I was once in a Frenchmaison de santéfor a few days, and though the nurses were very kind they were dreadfully inefficient, and looked as though they were or might be nuns. It was most depressing....”
The old man chuckled in his beard. Unlike most Frenchmen, he stood on his own and not on France’s dignity.
“But yes, London is easily managed! I have often worked with Ian Black—but you know him, probably? Who in London does not know Ian Black?”
“Yes, I know him,” Ivor said, and Dr. David smiled across at him. Ivor had often met the surgeon, Ian Black, at Rodney West’s house....
“You must come to see me once a week for a while,” the specialist told Virginia, “to let me know how you are. Thus we will cure you.”
“I will come twice a week,” Virginia cried gaily, liking the old gentleman more every moment.
“Well, then, once as a patient and once as a friend,” Dr. David smiled gallantly. “But remember, Lady Tarlyon,” he added gravely, “you must keep very quiet. I warn you that it will be much, much more comfortable for you....”
As Virginia passed out he detained Ivor for a moment. He looked thoughtfully at Ivor.
“If you are a great friend of Lady Tarlyon’s,” said le docteur David, “you will persuade her to keep quiet for the next few months. You will help her to keep quiet, perhaps? These things are very difficult, I know....” And Ivor silently agreed that these things were very difficult indeed.
“You see,” Virginia began, as the car swallowed up the Champs Elysées towards the Ritz, “when I first went to see him, he patted me about here and there, and then he asked me the questions which even the nicest doctors must ask women. He didn’t seem any more satisfied with my answers than I am with the facts—for I do get so unnecessarily weak, sometimes, Ivor! And then he asked if I had ever had a motor accident or a fall from a horse, and I remembered a fall I had had in the second year of the war, over a ditch. Not a really bad fall, you know, but just bad enough to shake me up and keep me in bed for a day or two. And then, after the X-rays had been taken, he said I was a bit wrenched about inside—it’s all very technical, dear—and that he could fix it good and proper with an operation. Not a very serious operation, he said, but not so very minor either. So that’s why I must keep quiet until October—oh yes, I insisted on October, so that we can have our summer out!—for he’s afraid of ever so little a hæmorrhage or something. It would be very bad for me, he said, Ivor,” she added, in a funny little way.
“We must leave the Ritz at once,” Ivor firmly capped a silence.
“Please!” she agreed. “But where shall we go to, Ivor? I couldn’t bear one of those dazzling flats in the Avenue Victor Hugo or round about the Parc Monceau, even if we could find one; and the Latin Quarter is now an annexe of New York—wherecanwe go, Ivor?”
The car swung round the vast Place de la Concorde....
“I’m thinking,” said Ivor.
Hethought and acted to such good advantage that—with the help of wires to Turner to hunt up old addresses—within twenty-four hours he had routed up Kay Benson in his studio on the Butte. Ivor had known Kay Benson in the feverish months of new acquaintance succeeding on his meeting with Otto and Fitz in 1910: had lent him money—which Kay had repaid—and had never entirely lost touch with him. Now Ivor liked the studio at sight, dirty and unkempt as it was; for Kay Benson, having built and decorated it in a suddenly rich period before the war, had since fallen from that high estate, and was become again the impoverished and earnest Kay of old. His absence during the war had not improved the general ensemble of the place—but still, thought Ivor, a few days, a few stuffs, a little furniture, and Virginia would put it splendidly right. And the garden over Paris was a marvellous accident, a miracle to happen to a lover....
Kay Benson was eager—the poorer he was the more eager he was about everything, poor Kay!—to go to Tripoli: “and leave this bloody Europe for good and all,” he said furiously. So the matter of letting the studio to Ivor, from that very day if Ivor liked, was easily arranged.
But when Virginia saw it in the candle-light of that same night—Kay was adventuring, earnestly of course, and had given Ivor the key—she cried out that she simply must have it for her own: it was so divine with its wide yet dim roominess, its little stairs up to a little gallery at the end, and its little rooms leading from the little gallery.
“Smith can take care of us and cook for us here,” Virginia cried, quickly planning. “And there’s a sweet little room for her. And a bigger little room for Ivor. And the biggest room of all for Virginia, whowill sleep on a bed in the corner of the studio, which bed will be a lovely divan by day....”
“But will he sell the lease?” she asked anxiously, and Ivor said Kay Benson would sell anything.
“ButIwill buy it,” Ivor said. “Ifound it, andI’m going to buy it. Yah!”
“You might let me, I do think!” Virginia made plaint.
Ivor softened, magnificently:
“Well, we will both buy it—between us!”
“Oh, Ivor, our eyrie! Over Paris, out of ken—our eyrie, Ivor!” And Virginia’s eyes were brighter than a room of a thousand candles....
Thus it was, then, that Ivor and Virginia came to be in a studio on the Butte, on the first day of May, 1919; and intended to stay there, until the business of life should take them to London in October.
Butthe “sick little pain” was not to be tamed into regularity so easily as all that, and it cared nothing for pacts. Virginia’s body was rebellious of Virginia’s heart. And London saw them long before October; it saw them approaching from the sky in a wide-winged, colourless thing which many men had died to make so convenient for Ivor and Virginia.
Maybe Virginia had not been quiet enough. Although she very seldom left the studio and its little garden over Paris, maybe she had not been quiet enough. Le docteur David, on every one of her weekly visits, reminded her—and sometimes Ivor, when he accompanied her—of his urgent command. But, as Dr. David himself had said, these things are very difficult. And Ivor and Virginia were in love.
Everything seemed to be going very well until a certain morning in July. Ivor was leisurely dressing—with one arm one dresses either very leisurely or very frantically—in his little room off the gallery, when the Smith came in. She would often come in thus, of a morning or evening, to help him with his tie or suchlike; for though Ivor was now very expert in managing his clothes, he was not averse from a little help from the amiable Smith. But she looked concerned this morning.
“Miladyis not well to-day,” she said.
“Why, what’s the matter, Smith?”
“Miladyis too pale,” Smith said mysteriously.
And indeed, when in a few minutes he came down into the studio, Virginia was “too pale.” She lay propped up in the bed—that which was “a lovelydivan by day”—and her face was whiter than the pillows behind her head.
“This bed is not going to be a divan to-day,” she turned her head to him to say, as he came down the little stairway. And she smiled at his concern through the loose mass of her hair, for she was brushing it. Whenever Virginia felt tired and lazy in bed she would brush her hair for a long time, with a very special and hard brush; and as she brushed it she would incline her head a little this and that way, peering at you the while through the golden mesh, which shone gloriously with the brushing.
“But, Virginia!” he cried, beside her bed: “are you very ill?”
“Not awfully,” said Virginia.
As he stood, his hand gently held aside the spilled golden hair that almost hid her face.
“But you’ve got no right to look as white as this, my dear! You’ve given Smith an awful fright.”
“Oh, Smith!” she smiled up at him. “She ought to know better, I do think—that ever-anxious little Smith!”
“It’s really quite all right,” she assured him. “I’m apt to get like this now and then—more or less. I’ll just lie about in bed to-day, and to-morrow I’ll be as well as anything. Especially if you’ll read me out that new Shaw play Smith brought up from Brentano’s yesterday. But don’t read the preface, please, for he always gets so angry in his prefaces, and I couldn’t bear any one to be angry with me to-day.”
Ivor sat down on the edge of the bed. He took her hand, and looked very miserable.
“I feel a beast,” he said.
Virginia rapped his knuckles sharply with her brush. Virginia was angry.
“Don’t be silly, Ivor! What on earth has it to do with you?” And she opened her eyes very wide at him, and raised her eyebrows with the “Is this man mad?” look.
Then Smith came in with breakfast, which they had from a little table beside the bed. Virginia always took a large glass of milk at breakfast: to make her strong and fat, she said.
It was half-past nine by Ivor’s watch. He rose. “I will now dash down to Paris,” he told her sternly, “to have a little speech with Dr. David. And then Dr. David will dash up here to have a little speech with you.”
Virginia made a quick noise, but Ivor would have none of that.
“You might go in the afternoon!” she pleaded.
“Nowyouare being silly,” he only said to that; and put on his hat, a soft gray thing which he was quite unable to wear straight.
“Well,go, then!” Virginia cried with feverish venom. She had asked him to read her a Shaw play, and he was going to fetch a doctor! “Oh, the fool!” Virginia wildly thought, in the impatient surge of her weakness.
Ivorpaced about the garden while the doctor was within the studio: and he had no eyes for the glory of the July morning over Paris, they worried the ground and distance with dark absence.
At last Dr. David came out, and Ivor walked with him to his car: through a small green door, up a narrow passage between two dingy houses, and through a wide door on to the pavement of the Place.
“The operation must be next week,” Dr. David told him, as they walked.
“Oh!” said Ivor; then turned frankly to the old man. “Tell me, doctor, is this operation really serious or not?”
“Well, it is not negligible,” the old man answered. “But it isn’t really serious—particularly in the hands of Ian Black. It will be painful for her, you understand—I am afraid Lady Tarlyon will consider thatpart of it extremely serious. But I should say as little as possible to her about the pain, if I were you. I daresay you know all there is to know about pain....”
“I am writing to Ian Black to-day,” he went on, “to make arrangements for next Thursday. So you will please cross next Tuesday, a week from to-day, for she must be well rested.”
Dr. David made a sudden gesture with his hand.
“It is a small nuisance,” he said, “that Lady Tarlyon must have it done in London, for the jolting in trains and on the boat will do her no good, you understand. Particularly as everything is so crowded now. Even an aeroplane would be better, if she had ever been up in one.”
“Oh, but she has—several times, I think!” Ivor cried; and smiled to remember the press photographs of Virginia Tracy “going up, gone up, come down and out” in 1913. “And I should think we could easily manage an aeroplane for next week.” The idea took hold of him. “Oh, yes, why not?”
“In that case you had better ‘manage’ it with your friends in England,” said Dr. David, “for the service here is not yet organised, and they might make difficulties. The Embassy might help, of course....”
“We won’t ask them,” Ivor said quickly. “We can manage one from England, I’m sure. Lady Tarlyon has aerial connections.” He laughed gaily. “Oh, splendid, doctor! She will be awfully pleased about that.”
They were now on the dingy pavement of the Place du Tertre, and Dr. David had his hand on the door of his limousine; but with the other he suddenly touched Ivor’s shoulder, a charmingly intimate gesture.
“Let me know,” he said, “what you have arranged. I shall be pleased to hear that Lady Tarlyon is going to have a little pleasure before the pain. For only thus is life bearable—whether the pleasure comes before or after the pain. But it generally comes before, I understand....” Charming old man, who contrived such courtesy out of commonplace!
Merrimentand gravity were but the width of an eyelash apart in Virginia: which was well proved that same night, after dinner, as she lay in bed and smoked a cigarette. It was understood that Virginia smoked but four cigarettes a day now—which, of course, it was remarked by Ivor, always made the fifth so much more enjoyable. He was sitting now in an arm-chair near her, and hanging from his hand over the arm was the book of Shaw plays, from which he had been reading to her.
“I suppose you know,” Virginia breathed suddenly into her smoke, “that I’m not to have my baby after all.”
“I don’t mean,” she explained, “that this operation affects that. It might and it mightn’t—oh, the beastly mess that women’s bodies are, and the lovely way that Swinburne wrote of them! Has a doctor ever written a great poem, I wonder, Ivor? I can’t imagine it.... Dr. David told me when I first went to see him that I’m not built the way of a child-bearing woman, and that if I ever had one it would be the kind of miracle that happens on the last page of a book. And you can’t imagine how sweetly the old man turned it into a compliment, the way he said: ‘You are the childless woman of the ages, madame.’ Oh, compliments are divine when they are quite meaningless, which may be why women like those men who are always thinking of something else. It’s almost worth while being ill to have met Dr. David....” She took a deep breath of her cigarette, then crushed it into the ash-tray by her pillow.
“Come near,” she begged him, “and I will tell you something ever so interesting.”
He sat at the side of the bed, and took her hand and played with it.
“You have made me tell you many stories,” he reminded her. “And now you tell me one....”
“Ah, but your stories have sharp endings—the way your life will end, maybe! You tell cruel stories, Ivor. I sometimes think you have a very cruel mind. And that leads me to think, I don’t know why, that you will die with a hard collar on, Ivor! But the story I’m going to tell has no ending at all—the point of my story, dear, is that it has no ending! Unless you say that a ‘dead-end’ is a proper ending....”
“I’m not going to say anything,” he said. “I am here to listen.”
“Yes, listen,” she begged him. “Years ago, when first you met me, I was running amok. Lois was, too, and so we ran amok together; and made quite a pretty little tradition of it, you remember? And every one seemed awfully pleased about it: the more we ran amok the more most people admired us and photographed us and said of us the kind of beastly things that make a woman certain she’s beautiful—except just a few severely romantic people like you, dear, who brushed us aside for the shoddy people we were. People said we were newer than any new generation had ever been before, which was quite true of some of us, but the rest of us were all the dear old generations wrapped up together and gone rotten. For, you see, Lois and I were ladies gone rotten—that’s exactly what we were, Ivor, rotten ladies. The only time Lois has ever lost her temper was when a man once called her a rotten lady. Hewasa nice man.... And so running amok was great fun for us, and great fun for our men too—though I do think that if the finest of them hadn’t died they would have sickened of us pretty soon; and perhaps they wouldn’t have been so eager for ‘fun’ if they hadn’t vaguely known that they weren’t long for this world—which must sound nonsense, I suppose. But perhaps they werefey, Ivor! But the few stern people who cursed us were on the wrong tack, for they said we were young fools trying to be mighty clever and thinking ourselves no end of fine people; whereas the one thing we wereall very clear about in our minds was thatwewere nothing at all in England, thatwedidn’t matter one way or the other, thatwedidn’t represent anything in particular and had been somehow left behind in a valley or pushed on ahead into a kind of bog. Quite a nice bog it was, we thought, but still it was a bog, and we were stranded in it. Yes, it was just as though people had got together and said to us: ‘Look here, you dashing young people, push on ahead and see what it’s like out there’—and ‘out there’ we had found a bog with purple and yellow funguses all over it, and slimy pools of queer colours, and it looked so strange and lovely that we stepped right into it; and then people pointed to us, saying: ‘Just look how depraved they are! They are covered with verdigris, but they call it wet-white!’ But we weren’t all that, you know, we were just silly and rather cruel. And all that time I didn’t like what I was doing a bit. I liked it so little that I used to write letters to Kerrison about how fatuous life was, and death was, and love was, and I was, and of course he was. He understood things, you know, even though you couldn’t bear him. But somehow I went on, there seemed nothing else to do—and something shoddy and inevitable seemed to be pushing one on from behind, always and always. Rather like those poor wretches in Tchekov’s plays, you remember, who go on and on doing things in a kind of frantic boredom and despair, and talk cleverly about meaningless things.... Lois was different, she was always more decided than me; and she did a thing because she liked it and as long as she liked it, and she stopped when she was bored with it. In her heart Lois was always ambitious, she wanted to use the ‘Lady Lois’ legend as well as she could; she wanted to be ‘the famous beauty who is representative of the best artistic and intellectual qualities of the British patrician’—though there was never anything patrician about Lois except her lovely face, for her soul is an innkeeper’s soul; like those of all patricians whosucceed in life, I think, for the real patrician tradition seems to be carried on in people’s hearts by those who fail, like Coriolanus—which, maybe, is at the root of snobbery, something fine at the root of something silly, a kind of spiritual respect for fine people who fail.... And so she married nice little Johnny, and now she lets Cabinet ministers and artists make love to her or get drunk and disorderly in her house so that she can influence their Work, and when she dies she will be as famous and as respected as Lady Ripon, but not nearly so nice inside.... But I went on. Or other people went on and left me behind. I don’t know. I did as I liked, and that’s a lonely business, for doing as one likes means always to be leaving one thing and going to another, it means that there are tags and ends of things and people sticking out all over one’s past life. I slopped about with such a determined face, Ivor! And all the time I felt I was going to a ‘dead-end,’ that there was a ‘dead-end’ at the end of my life. I couldn’t think round that ‘dead-end,’ my mind went to acul-de-sacwhen I thought about it. And I was right, you know, for a woman of thirty-one was making for her ‘dead-end’—her ‘dead-end’ was in sight, it just was, as her horse cleared the hedge into that dark little lane by Lady Hall—and, behold! you were there, Ivor! Do you remember how gay I was at seeing you! Oh, I knew, you see, that something marvellous had happened! I knew that my ‘dead-end’ was beaten as it came—you were there, Ivor! And then I was a little sad, you remember, wondering whether you were still the same defensive and antagonistic person you had been years ago, and hoping you weren’t; for you were the man who had got in the way of my ‘dead-end,’ and I wanted you....”