"I never could spare any one anything, could I? Not even myself?"

He resisted the wistful pleading of her eyes, taking a savage pleasure in their tired look. No doubt the preparations for her journey had exhausted her. Her hand was lying limply on the arm of the sofa.

"What does it feel like to wear a wedding-ring?" he asked harshly.

"It feels so strange at first. One keeps catching sight of it and being made to feel different by it. Somehow, it really matters, it really seems to mean something."

"Indeed?" He was ashamed of the cheap cynicism of his tone. It wasn't what he had meant to say.

She waited a few minutes and then she got up and put on her hat, deftly arranging her veil with almost mechanical quickness and skill. Then she pulled on her gloves. How well he knew the swift deliberateness of her movements. Without turning round she left the room. He heard her go into the dining-room.... A few minutes later, he heard her come out again. He heard her open and shut the front door.... He went to the open window. Would she look up? Surely that was the test of whether or not she was still the same—the eternal. In the past, whatever had happened between them, she had never been able to resist that final peep, half to see whether he was there, half to send up a little tiny semi-binding glance of reconciliation. Sometimes, when he had been very angry with her he had watched from behind the curtains. To-day, he was at the open window, waiting to send her the smile which was to obliterate the past half-hour, the past six months. It was not to be so much a smile as a look, a benediction.

She got into her taxi. Through the far window she told the driver where to go. She never glanced behind her, she never glanced up.

He shut the window with a shiver. "The end," he murmured.



X

MISUNDERSTOOD

[To JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES]

Her greatness was an accepted fact. Her fame had not been a dashing offensive but an inevitable advance quietly over-running the world. People who never read knew her name as well as Napoleon's. There was, somehow, something a little irreverent about being her contemporary. To attend the birth of so many masterpieces gave you the feeling of a legendary past invading the present.

A few great critics wrote wonderfully about her, but a vast majority of them, trained only in witty disparagement and acute disintegrating perception, became empty and formal in face of an unaccustomed challenge to admiration and reverence.

It is only the generous who give to the rich, the big who praise the big; the niggardly salve their consciences in doles to the humbly poor, making life into a pilgrimage of greedy patrons in search of grateful victims.

June was radiantly removed from the possible inroads of charity. You couldn't even pretend to have discovered her—unless, of course, you had met her—then you were quite sure that you had. Her friends explained—as friends always do—that it was what she was, not what she did, that mattered, that her letters and her conversation were far more wonderful than her books, that she was her own greatest masterpiece.

It was irritating to be forced out of it like that, but when you had seen her you began doing the same thing.

It was impossible not to want to tell people that her hair was like a crisp heap of rusty October beech leaves, that she always had time for you. And then you began to explain that she was happily married, which led you to the fact that she was happy, which reminded you that you were happy, by which time no one was listening to you. But it didn't seem to matter. People would ask such silly questions about her. "Does she admire Dostoievski?" they would say, and you would answer, "She has the most enchanting brown squirrel——"

George wasn't thinking any of those things. His mind didn't work like that. He was eating a huge breakfast, with the "Times" propped up against his coffee pot. The two and a half columns about her new book annoyed him. He hated a woman to get herself talked about—June, too, of all people. There was nothing new-fangled about June. Why, his mother loved her and she was so pretty and so fond of clothes and babies. There was really no excuse for her sprawling over his paper when she ought to have been moving discreetly through the social column like his other female friends.

There was really no reason for a happy, cared-for woman to write. It wasn't even as if she had to earn her own living. Richard ought to put his foot down, but Richard didn't seem to mind. One might almost have thought that he was proud of his wife's reputation, if one hadn't known him to be such a manly man. After all, a woman's place was in her home—or the Court Circular. She should never stray from birth, deaths and marriages to other parts of the paper. Even the sporting news (though he liked a woman to play a good game of golf or a good game of tennis) was hardly the place for a lady.

George knew that he was working himself up and he hated doing that at breakfast. So he started undoing the elaborate knot of a brown paper parcel to soothe his nerves—George never cut string. And out of it emerged her book—her new book. It was beautifully bound (she knew that he liked a book to look nice) and on the fly leaf was the inscription: "A leather cover, a little paper and my love."

It was as if she had sent him a box or a paper weight or a clock. It wasn't the gift, it was the thought that mattered. She knew that he had never read any of her books, but they were as good a vehicle for her affection as another.

"You are the only person," she had said to him, "to whom my books are really tokens," and she had smiled very radiantly as if he were the only person who had discovered the real secret of her books. George reflected sadly that he was the only person who understood her. Why, it was maddening to think that any one reading those paragraphs in the "Times" might imagine her middle-aged and ugly and spectacled. And how were they to know that her knowledge of cricket averages was probably greater than that of the Selection Committee? Probably, too, they pictured her with short hair, June, with her crinkling crown of autumn beach leaves; and thick ankles, June with her Shepperson legs; and blunt inky fingers, June with her rosy pointing nails and her hands like uncurling fans.

His mind went to other things, her low hard volleys and the lithe, easy grace with which she leapt over the lawn-tennis net. In thinking of her, the irritation her writing caused him decreased. It seemed altogether too irrelevant. June was the sort of woman one did things for. Helpless, he reflected with satisfaction, thinking of her tininess. Why, he could lift her up with one hand. George always mixed up physical phenomena with psychological fact. Small women were in need of protection; pale women were delicate; clever women were masculine—the greatest of all crimes. June might think it funny to be clever, but no one could deny that she was feminine—the sort of woman who appealed to you to do little tiny things for her (things you would have done in any case), as if they were very important and very dramatic and very difficult. George liked the sort of woman who said to him: "Mr. Carruthers, you who know everything——" It was apt, of course, to lead you into a lot of trouble, but that was one of the necessary results of being a man and having a superior intellect. June wasn't like that. She never asked you for legal advice or financial tips. She simply thought it most angelic of you to have fetched her coat and so clever of you to have noticed that it was getting chilly. And when you sent her flowers on her birthday, she would explain to you the flow of delight she had felt and perhaps a tiny little moment of surprise until she realised that of course it wasn't surprising at all, but just exactly what she knew at the bottom of her heart you would do—you, who were such a wonderful friend. Only the flowers were far more beautiful than she could have imagined and how had you been able to find them?

George had a photograph of June on his writing table. People were apt to stop short at it and say: "Is that the great June Rivers, the writer?" And he would brush the question aside—one must be loyal—and say: "She is a friend of mine," rather stiffly, as if they had said that she had run away from her husband or been found drunk.

He looked at it this morning, and suddenly he felt that he must see her—a feeling she frequently inspired. He knew that she hated the telephone, so he sent her a little note.

"Dear June: Thank you for your beautifully-bound book. May I come round this afternoon? I long to see your hair."

He wondered why he had put that: it was a silly sort of thing to say; so he scratched out the "hair" very carefully so that you could see nothing, and substituted "you." Then he wrote "George" and, after a moment's hesitation, added the postscript:

"Of course you saw that Macaulay had taken four wickets for two runs?"

Half an hour later her answer reached him.

"George dear, please come this afternoon. I was so hoping you would. Come whatever time suits you. I shall be happy and patient and impatient waiting for you." ("That doesn't mean anything," he growled to himself. "Pity she can't write more clearly.") "Of course I saw about Macaulay. June."

At five he was on her doorstep, and a very few moments later he was holding both her hands. They seemed somehow to have got lost in his. Her hair was crisper and rustier than ever, swirling about in competitive overlapping ripples. Her eyes, like a shallow Scotch brook, were laughing at him: like transparent toffee they were or burnt sugar or amber. "June," he said, and his voice was funny and thick, "I had forgotten how pretty you were."

"That was just a little plot you were making with yourself to please me," she said.

They sat happily on a sofa and talked about the wonderful way Mr. Fender managed the Surrey bowling; they discussed the iniquities of the Selection Committee; they decided that no woman who played the base line game could ever be quite first class. They considered the relative merits of Cromer and Brighton from the point of view of George's mother; they agreed that being braced was one thing and being overbraced another. Then June told George that he ought to marry, and George said that he was not a marrying man, and June said that men became the worst old maids and that a man's place was in the home and George thought that she had got it wrong by accident.

June was perfectly happy. She loved talking to George—George who adored her without knowing that she had genius, only that she had sympathy—had no idea that she was a great woman, only that she was a charming one. He was looking at her with a worried expression.

"June," he said, "you look tired."

"Oh, but I'm not a bit."

He put her feet up and covered them with a shawl.

"I wish you would stop writing," he said. "What good do books do? Health is the only thing that matters."

"Loving is the only thing that matters," she murmured, "loving and being loved."

"Well," (George thought it so like a woman to go off at a tangent like that), "you've got Richard."

"Richard," she twinkled, "is not like you. He loves my books."

"He ought to know better," George asserted severely, and at that moment in he came.

"George!" Richard was jubilant. "Have you heard the news?"

"What news?" George was thinking of the Carpentier-Lewis fight due that night.

"June has been awarded the Nobel prize."

"How splendid!" George looked a little puzzled. "Is it for life saving?"

"Yes," June put in quickly.

"I'm not at all surprised." George beamed at her. "You always were as plucky as they made 'em and gifted. Do you remember how charmingly you used to sing? 'Not a big voice, but so true,' Mother used to say, and she's a great judge."

"Your mother has always been so sweet to me."

"What a talented woman like you wants to write for beats me."

George had got back to his grievance again, but she lured him on to the subject of irises on which they were both experts, and it was not till just before dinner that he hurried away.

Then suddenly he remembered that he hadn't asked her whose life she had saved. How silly and how selfish! It was so like her not to talk about herself, and then he saw on a patch of posters: "June Rivers awarded the Nobel prize," and though he was very late he stopped to buy an evening paper.



XI

COUNTERPOINT

[To THE MARCHESE GIOVANNI VISCONTI VENOSTA]

Matthew half shut his eyes—as he always did when he particularly wanted to see.

"For the first time in my life," he said, "I regret my myopia. Confronted with this room, imagination pales before sight."

Virginia looked round—at the strawberry ice brocade, at the gilt, at the Bouchers—so painstaking and so painful—at the palms that seemed to conceal manicurists and barbers.

"Look," he continued, "at our hostess. I am sure her ears and her nose take off at night. Her hair is a libel on horsehair and dye."

"Oh,"—Virginia's smile was playing like a light over his face—"think of the days when her eyes were like stars and her ears like shells and her hair was curling all over the place."

"Virginia," his voice was tender, "where you are there are no more palms, wigs turn into hair, rouge into blushes——"

"Matthew," she said, "you are a romantic and I am the only person in the world who knows it."

"You are the only person in the world with whom I am in love."

"For the moment."

"How practical you are!" he teased, "full of forethought and arriere pensees. Isn't the moment the capture of the divine?"

She sighed a little—wise with the wisdom of frustrated dreams, and she thought how happy he was—happy with the happiness of iridescent, ever-changing whimsies.

"Virginia, does that young man love you?"

"Which one?"

"The one in spectacles."

"I don't think so."

"Are you sure?"

"One can never be sure."

"Of course if he doesn't, it proves that I am right in saying that spectacles are fatal. They prevent people from using either their eyes or their imagination. Shall I go up to him and ask him?"

"He would answer: 'I don't understand.'"

"And I would explain: 'Virginia is the only lady in orange,' and he would look at you for a moment or two and, holding out his hand in an ecstasy of gratitude, he would say: 'Thank you. Yes, I love her.'"

"Matthew," she murmured, "what an unsuitable name."

They sat in silence, interfered with only by the necessity of convincing passers-by that they did not want to be interrupted.

"Matthew," she said, "do you see that tall fair man?"

"The blond beast?"

"With a very tall woman."

"With gold hair and eyes like cows in pictures of Christ in a manger?"

"Yes. He loves her."

"How suitable."

"But it isn't. He has a red-haired wife."

"How unsuitable."

"Matthew, do be serious. I like him."

"How complicated."

"I told him I hated his air of perfunctory but restrained passion, and he laughed."

"Any one would have."

"And we made friends."

"You always make friends with everybody."

"You are unsympathetic."

"I am, I confess, a little bewildered by the situation. Do I understand that you are suffering from an unrequited passion for a man who is illegitimately attached to a magnificent cow and legitimately bound to a bewitching squirrel?"

"Matthew, you really are provoking. What I mean is that he is making a fool of himself."

"Why not?"

"Because he might do something irrevocable."

"Lucky man."

She looked at him in desperation—a desperation half exasperation and half enchantment. If only Matthew would sometimes appear serious—there is something so restful about appearances. Instead of which he always remained superlatively unsatisfactory and superlatively irresistible.

"Virginia," he said, "let us leave all this and drive round the park and I will talk to you like a lover in a bad book and I will mean every word I say."

"We can't go yet," she murmured.

"Virginia,"—his voice was urgent—"I will be divinely pompous."

That was so like him. He always tried to safeguard the simplest, most sincere moments of his life by inverted commas. It was a little trick that always irritated her.

"What an artist you are," she remarked acidly.

"Yes, indeed," he assented, smiling her out of her irritation. And then: "I have known you, Virginia, ever since I can remember."

"You told me that the first time we met."

"It is still true."

"How magnificent."

It was her turn now to ward off what she was longing for. To be serious with Matthew was a form of disarmament you always regretted.

"And knowing you as I do, I recognise the crusading light in your eye and I must point out to you that your altruistic excursions have not always ended by tidying up the situation."

"Alas, no."

"Now, why plunge into the eternal triangle? There is really no role for you unless you propose to supplant the cow. What, by the way, is her name?"

"Grace."

"I don't like the statuesque," he said, wrinkling up his eyes. "Look at her ecstatic vacant expression. A dangerous combination."

Virginia wished she had not given him this theme. He would weave it into such marvellous patterns that she would never be able to get it out intact again.

"I must have some more facts," he said. "What is the squirrel called?"

"Estelle."

"And the hero?"

"Edgar."

"More and more suitable. What prophetic parents! How admirably they kept their heads at the font. The squirrel is very vivacious—is it a brave front, a blind eye or a shallow heart?"

"Estelle is a courageous woman and discreet with the unpierceable reticence of spontaneity."

"How delightful. I might try Estelle myself."

"You might."

"If I said 'I love you,' would she laugh or cry?"

"Laugh, I think."

"With a little hidden tear in her voice?"

"I have my doubts about the hidden tear."

"Then she would be no good to me. I like mixed effects."

At this moment Grace and Edgar danced by. They were both radiantly fair and a little colossal in scale. Her eyes were half shut and her mouth was half open.

"Matthew," Virginia was firm, "something must be done. How can he scale the heights of a great passion carrying that hold-all?"

"An empty hold-all isn't so very heavy."

"It is if you can't put it down."

"Virginia," he said, "your missionary zeal appals me. Why invade the situation? What are you going to tell the man? That he has children?"

"No. That he is throwing his life into a cul-de-sac."

"He won't believe you."

"No."

"And it will probably end by his falling in love with you and think what a terrible mess the cow and the squirrel will make."

Edgar came up to them.

"Will you give me the pleasure of a dance?"

"I should love to."

Virginia's apricot had become a strand in the pattern of the ball-room.

A parma violet lady settled on Matthew like a fly.

"I can't think how you have anything left to say to Virginia," she remarked disagreeably. "But I suppose you simply make love to her."

"It is not simple at all."

"Let us go and sit somewhere," Edgar was saying, and they went into another room.

All of our real indiscretions in life come in the form of generalisations. A name is a warning, and we really give ourselves away in abstract philosophisings applied by an intelligent companion to the particular.

"Why should we accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions."

"No."

"Sometimes you have to set out to sea and turn your back on the old familiar coastline."

"In a pleasure boat for an excursion."

"In a sailing ship for distant seas."

"Argosies have a way of turning into penny steamers."

"You ought not to say that—you of all people, who sail the seas in a tub with a sunshade."

"Oh," she said, "I am at the mercy of the winds. But you have a harbour and an anchor and a flag to fly."

"You are thinking that I'm a fool."

"Yes."

"One must sometimes cut one's losses."

"One must sometimes cut one's gains—a much more difficult thing."

"You can't throw away light."

"The world is brighter with your back to the sun."

"Virginia," he said, "I have made up my mind."

"What can I say? I am helpless. I see you going shipwreck on dummy rocks—the water let in by a penknife."

"You are cruel."

"Don't you think I know those frontiers, when paradise seems but a step away, but you know that it is a step you can't retrace?"

"Why should you want to go backwards?"

She looked past him into space.

"Behind us," she murmured, "lie so many things—memories of childhood, dim happy echoes, primroses and hoops and peace shot with laughter. When you have taken your step you daren't look back. Remembering hurts too much. And so you look forward—always forward, knowing that the promised land is behind you."

Grace was dancing round and round, wondering how one stopped. Away from him she felt restless and nervous and will-less and incomplete, like a frustrated animal lost and impotent, with smouldering rage in her heart and sulky fires in her eyes. Why didn't he come to release her, to calm the tearing fever of her blood?

Again and again she walked through the library and always he was on the sofa with Virginia—Virginia in her orange haze melting into cushions; and sometimes he was bending right forward, his whole body curved into urgency. And when she passed, he half looked up with the tail end of a smile falling as it were accidentally in her direction.

Estelle laughed and talked, her feet twinkled, her eyes danced. Marriage, she said, was an altogether delightful thing, quite different from what people thought——

Matthew was introduced to her. He explained that love was so important that it could only be discussed lightly. He said that her hair reminded him ... he wished he could think of what, but he had such a bad memory for metaphors. It took him all his time to remember that a harp was like water and Carpentier like a Greek god. It was funny, wasn't it, to have such a weak head. He thought it came from hay fever—he always had hay fever during the third week of May. It came entirely from honeysuckle.

Estelle said that she would like to sit in the library. Grace was in a corner pulling monosyllables out of her mouth like teeth.

Virginia was still in the middle of the sofa, a dissolving mass of orange mist. Edgar was talking away all risk of his suiting the action to the word. Estelle was dimpling.

"Do you remember," she said to Matthew, "that orange is flame-colour?"

"By Jove, yes," he said, "oriflammes and hell fire."

A low murmur came from the sofa.

"Will you introduce me to your husband?" Matthew asked.

They all talked together.

"By the way, Virginia," Matthew said, "the young man does love you."

"Dear me, how very nice."

"It only required me to point it out to him."

"Was he pleased?"

"Delighted. By the way, Mr. Wilmot,"—Matthew turned to Edgar—"do you ever wear spectacles?"



XII

VILLEGIATURA

[To MARCEL PROUST]

What a fool he had been to come. These wooden walls creaking at a touch, and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest footstep. Not that Marie Aimee had light footsteps—far from it. She clattered about with the happy noisiness of a good conscience and perfect health. In her hands the opening of a door became an air-raid and yet what could you do, confronted with her rosy face beaming with a child-like confidence in giving pleasure and satisfaction.

No, it was entirely his own fault. Everything was what he might have expected. The sea was just where he had been told it would be, the air was relentlessly bracing, the cleanliness of the Hotel Bungalow reminded you of a shiny soaped face which had never known powder. It was all, he reflected, quite horrible. The salt-laden wind blowing the sand up from the dunes, the hard bright sunshine, the effect everything gave you of having been painted with the six colours of a child's rather cheap paint-box.

"A different man," she had said he would feel. Well he felt it already—the lassitude of his body feebly revolting against the impending bracing, his eyes watering at the glare. Health and inspiration, Marthe had said, dreamless sleep, an insatiable appetite and perfect peace in which to finish his novel. "Think how quiet it will be," she had said. As if the country were ever quiet, crowded as it was with locos and dogs and sabots. Surely peace meant Paris in August, with every one away, thick carpets and a noiseless valet.

Maurice imagined himself merging into a huge armchair, just able to see a square glass vase of Juliette roses—gilt petals lined with deep pink velvet. Why on earth were there never any flowers in the country? And no one would disturb him—no one. Privacy is only possible in a big town. Every detail of life in the Hotel Bungalow was revealed to him in a series of sights, sounds and smells. And should a fellow lunatic arrive, how was he to avoid him? At every meal there would be little exchanges of the banal, after dinner a game of billiards—even possibly, horror of horrors, potential excursions planned with zest and good fellowship. And all the time he would be saying "No," more and more ungraciously, or, worse still—and far more likely—saying "yes."

And then where would his novel be? Not that it was possible any way to write in a place where the sun was always in your eyes, the wind blew your paper away and creaking boards made sitting in your bedroom out of the question.

Marthe was a fool, given up entirely to hygiene and plans for other people. "You will come back bubbling over with physical fitness, your dear face all tanned," she had said. "Dear" indeed! It was simply a bribe. He was being bribed for his own good. And to think that like a great gaby he had been shoved off to the sea by one term of endearment, and to a place, too, where there was neither shade nor shadows, simply miles and miles of bright monotonous sea, three dusty cornflowers, two bedraggled poppies and the sun all around you.

Tanned, indeed! Why his face would be all blisters and his eyes bloodshot.

The insensitiveness of women!

If Marthe were here she would bathe before breakfast, feed the hens, find the eggs, encourage the cook, pat the dog, listen to the story of Marie Aimee's life, pick the cornflowers, praise the cook, churn the butter, play with the children, climb on to the hay cart, collect shells on the beach, lie in the sun, let the sand trickle through her fingers and explain with perfect sincerity that it was the most delightful place in the world.

But he didn't like paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life. He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a deserted Paris around him.

Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by. That sort of literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of imagination. It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea, she simply wouldn't believe it.

"Think of the sunset reflected in the wet sand," she would say, and if you told her that you didn't want to think about it, that it was no fit subject for an active mind, she would be hurt.

In any case no one had a right to make you do things for your own good. It was a horrible form of self-sacrifice. If Marthe had said, "Please go to St. Jean-les-Flots and pick me a poppy," he would have been delighted, but to stay at the Hotel Bungalow in the interests of his own health was a very different matter.

Marie Aimee was putting a pot with one red geranium in it on his writing table. It was, she explained, still very early in the season but Monsieur must not be discouraged. Later it became very gay with dancing and Japanese lanterns in the garden. The Hotel Bungalow would be quite full, whereas now there was only Monsieur and a lady.

"A lady?"

"But yes, Monsieur."

"A young lady?"

"A lady of a certain age."

Maurice hoped that it would be an uncertain age. Of course every one over twenty would seem old to Marie Aimee. Probably the lady was on that exquisite frontier line, the early thirties, when the bud is already unfurling its petals, angles have softened into curves, and the significant is stirring in everything like a quickening child. Thirty, the age of delicate response, of subtle tasting, divorced equally from the ignorant impetuosity of youth and the desperate clutchings of middle age. How he disliked young girls with their sunburn, their manly strides, their meaningless giggles, their eternal nicknames! And, over their heads, a warning and a trade mark, that sword of Damocles—marriage.

Maurice was feeling a little happier. As he walked into lunch he felt a real twinge of curiosity. Ridiculous it was—why he was getting quite romantic, imagining an exquisite creature on a holiday from her husband. That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow. On the velvet lawn with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.

He walked into the dining room. At the far end with her back to him sat the lady. She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a white hat with a white lace veil. On the chair beside her lay a Holland sunshade lined with green. It was he thought, deplorable, and indicated yellow spectacles. Her feet were very small and gave you the impression of an insecure foundation to her body. Her back was broad. She was certainly over forty. Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age—the desperate age. From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions. For how many women must it not be a ten years' death struggle.

"What a place," Maurice was disgusted; "it is driving me to melodrama."

The lady got up with a certain waddling stateliness (perhaps after all she was fifty). Her clothes fell into perfection—she walked slowly and calmly with appraising steps. The lace veil was over her face. She did not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief. Louis, the waiter, opened the door for her. She sailed out like a gondola on the stage, or Lohengrin's swan. Her movements gave an effect of invisible wheels.

During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles. Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap. Had she, he wondered, ever read any of his books? Perhaps when she found out his name she would come up to him and say: "Are you the Mr. Maurice Van Trean?" And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that she liked "Sur les Rives" best of his books—"she had read them all many times—and especially that marvellous description of Camille's return to her husband."

Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road. It was the most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction in a maximum of unpleasantness. The air was burning and solid. An occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace by the roadside—a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life. He thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he remembered bitterly, that had brought him here. He wished vindictively that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting through the soles of her shoes. He would walk on and on till there were blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging. His teeth were set in the grim satisfaction of revenge.

"This is the country," he would say. "Do you feel the health-giving sea breeze you told me about?"

He stopped suddenly. Walking towards him was the lady. The offensive sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up. She was, he supposed, forty-six—no, forty-four. Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent and long—brown or blue they might have been. Her face was wide and so was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth. Her cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon. There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, "I shall please at my own time." She was not pretty. Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as her limbs.

Maurice took off his hat.

"Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel Bungalow."

"I think so, too," she said drily.

He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of vulgarity.

And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself, fled.

They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimee's footsteps. He explained how anxious he had been about her—how he had longed to see her face—how much her sunshade had depressed him—how her lace veil had been a personal enemy.

She said that she adored the country....

He told her that only in big towns could you find peace or flowers.

She said the Hotel Bungalow had "un caractere assez special...."

He did not listen to her comments—they were mere breathing places. On the subject of the sea he was, he thought, almost witty, with a touch of real indignation.

She said the sea was her passion....

He decided that she was an obstinate woman—entetee. How ridiculous to love the sea—especially for some one who pretended to like the country. The two were practically incompatible. Could she explain her point of view?

The sea, she said, was such a wonderful escape....

He was thrilled. A thousand explanations of her presence at the Hotel Bungalow jostled one another in his mind.

Of course he quite understood what she meant about the sea. It had a certain spaciousness and it did, so to speak, quarantine you from life. For instance, in a rowing boat, it was impossible to feel the importance of being a snob.

That was not, she said, exactly what she meant....

Maurice was annoyed. He was accustomed to people who were proud to share his meanings.

Madame would perhaps be able to explain....

It was not, Madame murmured, a question of being able to explain, but of being able to interrupt....

Maurice flushed and relapsed into sulky silence. He watched his companion trotting by his side, taking three little steps to each one of his. He took a childish pleasure in making his strides as wide as possible, upsetting the rhythm of her walk. The brim of her hat hid her eyes. He felt that his uncertainty as to their expression gave the matter an interest that it did not intrinsically possess. Even if she were smiling, what did it matter?

Suddenly she turned to him.

"Has Monsieur anything more to conceal from me?" she asked.

Maurice capitulated. It was a delightful formula. He wished that he had thought of it himself. It was she, he said, who had been hiding things from him. Her eyes, for instance. All this time he had been wondering about the expression of her eyes.

"And yet you deny the potency of the country," she sighed, "the miracle-working country, which compels a young man of twenty-seven to wonder about the expression of an old woman of forty-four."

"Madame," he said, "I am very old. I have ceased to take myself seriously. You are very young, for you can force others to treat you with curiosity and respect."

She reminded him that eight minutes ago he had taken himself seriously. "It was you who made me," he retorted, "you have given me back my youth."

They went on like that for quite a long time—gallant lawn-tennis—long base line rallies with an occasional smash. And then he said that he must be indiscreet—specifically so. Why had she come to St. Jean-les-Flots?

It was, she explained meditatively, an escape (he noticed that it was the second time that she had used that word). The Hotel Bungalow was very clean, the food was good, the air was marvellous....

She pulled herself together.

When you took a holiday, she said, you had to make a careful choice between old acquaintances and new ones. Which was likely to be the more tiring? She herself always went to new places at the wrong time of year. Then it was a case of friendship, or nothing. The people who visited watering places out of season were always either impossible or enchanting. Very often amusingly impossible and temporarily enchanting, but so much the better. There is a certain safety in the transitory.

Is Madame married? Maurice asked abruptly. It was the sort of question that had to be asked brusquely, or not at all.

"Yes—No—Yes. That is to say, I have a husband. He will probably come here for a day or two later. He is tres comme il faut."

"Surely you do not blame him for coming to see you."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is magnificent, but it is not life. One is not always young enough to permit oneself these phantasies. At fifty-six it is silly to waste two days visiting some one you don't want to see. But there, Edmond is like that. Oh! the stability when he says 'my wife.' It is superb. It must be grand, too, when he says 'ma maitresse'; he has the property sense. And how he adores women, woman, all women, any woman. Even sometimes me. And when he doesn't, he keeps the habits. Toujours des petits soins. He never goes out of training, even at home."

"He sounds charming to live with."

"Ah, yes. That is it. He is charming. One cannot bear it. To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one. To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays. It is too much. And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand. Pouf. It is not agreeable."

There was a pause. Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.

But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow. Regretfully they parted.

He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.

She thought how like her husband he was. Her husband twenty-five years ago.

At dinner she still was in black and white. Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious. After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.

"Being sensible is no good at all," she said with sudden passion. "Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot. I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few—very few—it matters—but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous. Sometimes he would try impossible subjects—for fun—but always he could bring some sort of harmony out of everything. Ma foi, it amuses me to watch him now—now that it is difficult, and he is fifty-six and I don't love him—but then, when everything was easy and he was twenty-seven and I cared—then it was—well, it was different."

The way that her voice opened and shut reminded him of a sea anemone.

"It is not the way to talk to a stranger, is it?" she said abruptly, "but I feel as if I had known you for a long time. For twenty-five years, to be exact," she added.

Maurice felt curiously tongue-tied. He longed to tell her about Marthe. For the first time in his life he was finding a confidence difficult to make. He wondered why.

"Bon soir, Monsieur," she said, and she walked up to bed with a characteristic lack of pause or hesitation.

Maurice woke up—was woken up—knowing that he had something to look forward to. Sleepily he wondered what it was while patterns spread over his semi-consciousness—dreamily he saw Marthe in a filmy lace dress over black and he felt himself trying to play on a grand piano, every note of which was a sea anemone. Then he woke up completely, and with a delightful rush he remembered Madame and all of the marvellous things that she had told him and all of the significant things he had not yet said to her.

He walked down to breakfast whistling. In the courtyard he patted the dog and lifted the patron's son on to his shoulder, then he asked the patronne if the cook had a name and whether he might some day come and watch her churn butter. In the dining room he praised the coffee, and admired the geraniums. St. Jean-les-Flots must have a particularly fine soil for geraniums, and what air! Why, he felt a different man already.

Madame Marly—he had discovered her name—did not appear till lunch. They bowed to one another, and each talked a little to the waiter. It was delightful to keep their pleasure at arm's length. Coffee on the terrace brought them together.

"You are right," she said, "the country is an impossible place. It makes one talk."

"I love the country," he said.

"And then the sea. It is always going on without you."

"I have a passion for the sea," he murmured.

"I would like to wring the neck of the cook, chloroform the dog, buy Marie Aimee some lawn tennis shoes, and have a daily box of flowers from Paris."

"They shall be ordered at once."

"I should also like," she was looking out to sea, "to fill the hotel with people."

"You flatter me," he murmured.

"Perhaps," she added, "it would be simpler to go away."

"Simpler but impossible."

"Why impossible?"

"The air is unique. The Hotel Bungalow...."

"Please don't," she begged.

"Besides, for the first time in my life I am becoming discreet."

"Ah, no, my friend, believe me. It was merely that you, too, found it difficult to interrupt."

"I did not want to interrupt."

"There you had an advantage over me. I was longing to bring your remarks about the sea to an untimely end."

Her laugh was the most confidential thing in the world. You felt as if she had given you an unlimited credit of intimacy. He thought that she was looking ten years younger in her creamy crepe de Chine dress, with her big straw hat, which seemed to have conquered, without an effort, the perfection and simplicity of the absolute.

"What is it called?" he asked fingering it.

"Crepe surprise."

He asked her to describe its lines, but she refused.

"Ne parlons pas robes," she said.

They decided to go for a drive.

The cocher explained that he had lost his wife, but that "Lisette etait un tres bon petit cheval."

They laughed—at him, at one another, at the sun, at the sea, at everything. He told her about the convolvuluses, and she said he ought to write a book.

He told her his name.

She puckered her forehead a little, and looked to him for help.

He explained rather stiffly that he had written three novels, a book of short sketches, a book of light verse, and a phantasy on Algeria.

She asked what they were called. He told her.

She asked which was the best.

He said that "Sur les Rives" had the best things in it. Perhaps it was less finished than some of the others, but it was on a bigger scale, the conception was more interesting.

She asked what the conception was.

He told her that it was about a woman who, out of affection for her husband, and deep intrinsical virtue, refuses to become the mistress of the man she passionately adores. He goes away and she gives herself to the first person she meets with a look of him. Her original great struggle has exhausted all her powers of resistance.

Madame Marly was silent.

"It is true," she said, "for big things we have big resistances, and for little things little resistances. And so we live our lives in small weak lapses—not driven by hate or love, but by pique or boredom, lowering our flag to salute a pleasure boat, not a battleship. Pouf," she made a little gesture of disgust that he was beginning to know. "We occupy the places that other people make for us. We curl on their divans, we sprawl in their gutters, we sit proudly on the pedestals they put for us, we occupy their altars, and when we are alone, what happens to us? We dissolve into air."

"Not you," he said. "I feel it. You are so independent, so sure. Where are your hesitations? Your very doubts are challenges to truth."

"Challenges to truth," she said. "It is a nice phrase."

Driving back into the sunset they were silent. He wrapped her cloak round her, and once he kissed her hand, but it didn't feel as if it belonged to her. Her thoughts had taken her right away out of his presence, out of the carriage beyond the sunset. Where had they taken her? He wondered.

* * * * *

That night she came down, dressed in glowing apricot—"fold after fold to the fainting air."

As always, her clothes seemed part of her, without ends or beginnings, flowing from her, a streaming enhancing accompaniment. He asked her if her dress were nymphe emue or feuille morte. He was proud of knowing those two names. She said it was neither. He begged her to tell him, but she refused rather abruptly to discuss it. He said he loved her clothes—that he would like to know....

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, ne parlons pas robes."

He wondered at her irritability, but he obeyed.

They went out on to the terrace. The sea was black and angry, all the waves at cross purposes.

"What is your name?"

"Paula."

"What will you say when I tell you that I love you, that I want you?"

"You won't tell me because you will know that I don't want you to."

Her voice was a part of the wind.

"Why don't you want me to?" he was urgent—harsh with desire.

"Because it all happened twenty-five years ago."

He didn't understand.

"Because—because there are some things you can't do twice—like your book, they are the big things that create a strength of resistance. Because they are the beautiful things that belong to our dreams. Because they are of a magic fabric, into which you can weave no facts."

It was dark and he could not see her. The end of his cigarette was a bright spot in the night. The sea and the wind were the counterpoint of her voice.

He felt unreal and remote and small. A tiny strand in the vast design of destiny.

She got up and walked in. He did not move.

* * * * *

"Thank you for the flowers."

The sun was glittering frivolous and cynical.

The box he had ordered from Paris had arrived. First there was a mass of Juliette roses—gilt and velvet—then a staircase of sweet peas, flame-coloured, coral, crimson, magenta, purple, bronze and black.

Both together they drank in the blaze of colour.

Ecstatically he said to her,

"You can't thank me, can you? They are too beautiful."

"Perhaps not," she said, "but it was beauty unleashed by you."

He looked at her with adoring eyes. She gave you phrases which lit torches in your soul.

They walked down the beach together. The sea was light and mutinous.

"How untransparent it is," he said, "lapis lazuli and turquoise and chrysoprase—no emeralds or aquamarines, or sapphires."

"How are we to get in our purple without an amethyst?"

"I don't know."

"That is what comes from not reading the Book of Revelations," she said.

They saw big, dissolving, poisonous jellyfish in the sea, mysteriously without lines—and tidy slabs of jellyfish on the beach. They found a starfish, and wondered who came to dance a sword dance round it. They picked up shells that looked as if they had fallen out of fading sunsets or glimmering dawns—they looked into pools of shutting and opening sea anemones.

They never noticed a sardine box or an old boot.

They were happy.

Over her head was a scarlet paper sunshade. It looked like a huge tropical flower.

"Paula," he said—and his eyes opened to her like a magic trap door.

That night they stayed indoors.

"Tell me the things that life has given you," he said, "the things that have made you so rich."

"If I am rich," she said, "it is from the things that I have given."

"Yes," he said, "but why do you impoverish yourself at my expense?"

"Please," she said, "don't talk about that. There are in all of us exposed places—you can call them pain or romance—Sehnsucht or memory—but they are the sanctuaries of our hearts—they cannot be violated."

"Paula," he said, "you have made too much of life. You have made it into the sort of hope that is always a disillusionment."

"Yes," she murmured very low.

"Why were you so unpractical?" his bantering tone revived her.

"I have done for some one (even for you, perhaps) what I have never done for myself;" she was smiling. "I will tell you a story. There was once a man who loved me. He was born with everything—a marvellous name, great riches, beauty, a magnetic quality that I have never seen equalled. I always reproached him with having added nothing to his inheritance—no glory—no achievement—'I have spent,' he would say, shrugging his shoulders. 'Wasted,' I retorted tartly. 'If you like. I have never admitted my past or my future as barriers—or even frontiers—to my actions. I have lived without forethought or arriere pensee—without the weakness of regrets or the stinginess of precautions,' and then he turned to me—his eyes were half shut and his voice was muffled as if a flood were battering on the door of his dispassionateness, 'I have had everything in life except you,' he said. I smiled at him, a little sadly, a little cynically. 'It is I who have given you the greatest gift,' I said. 'I have given you a regret and an illusion. Vous avez donc tout eu.' That night he killed himself."

"And you, Paula, did you feel a murderess?"

"No, a saviour."

* * * * *

She was dressed in pale lilac—the coolest lilac in the world. It rippled round her like loving caressing waves.

"What is your dress called, Paula?"

"Oasis," she said. "'Indian summer' would have been a better name."

"Tell me about it."

"Why do you always want to know?"

"I am writing a book."

"Tant pis."

She was out of temper.

The flowers arrived.

Old-fashioned pink roses, coral carnations, purple stocks, pink pinks, mauve orchids, moss roses, patterned chintz-like phlox.

"Oh!" she said, and for a moment she shut her eyes.

Then:

"Tell me about her," she said.

"Marthe?"

"Is that her name?"

"She is vibrant."

"But of course. What does she look like?"

"Her hair is like a dirty new coin. You feel that you could polish it into brightness. Her eyes are like tea—yellow camomile tea. Her mouth is big and rather grave. There are electric waves of aliveness running all through her."

"I do not like her."

"No?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"All that irrelevant, interfering vitality. It is dangerous."

"And slumbering, mysterious magnetism, is that not dangerous?"

"That, too."

There was a thunderstorm and the air got cool.

Madame Marly had a headache and dined in her room.

* * * * *

The next day was grey—grey air, a grey sky, a grey countryside, a grey sea—not luminous, lustrous grey, but opaque chiffon drawn across the world.

Paula's flowers had arrived—lemon-coloured hollyhocks, blue and mauve and purple delphiniums, filmy love-in-the-mist, primrose antirrhinums, snowy Madonna lilies with golden middles, huge creamy roses, tiny yellow rosebuds, straggling larkspurs.

She was dressed in a grey whipcord coat and skirt with a grey swathed turban. She looked distant—on the brink of disappearance—not so much as if she were going to travel but as if she were going to vanish.

She regarded the flowers with grave concentration. It was as if she felt for them a stern passionate devotion. She took one of the white roses and stroked it—as if it were a shy mother with her first child. Then she said:

"I want to go for a long walk."

They walked for miles and miles. The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops. It looked quite white. Her eyes were deep and brooding and you couldn't catch them.

"Paula," Maurice said, "how remote you are."

"Am I?" she said. And it made her more remote than ever.

He walked desperately, as if each step were an obstacle painfully overcome. She walked with a swaying unconscious rhythm, as if she did not know what she was doing.

She cut off his perfunctory attempts at conversation with a monosyllable. When they got home they were both tired.

They each decided to have a hot bath and rest before dinner.

She was dressed in very severe perfect black, marvellous lines, waiting to be sculpted.

He told her so.

She pursed her lips.

They sat in front of the fire in the hall.

"Tell me a little more about your husband?" he said.

"What can I tell you? I know him so well. You see, I have loved him and hated him—I have become indifferent to him—and I appreciate him. But I have had nothing from him that a hundred other people have not had—except, perhaps, his name."

"Marly?"

She looked at him in amazement.

"Marly?" she laughed. "Marly is not even my own name. We are all of us so very monogamous when we love, proprietary, exclusive, jealous, whatever you like to call it. Edmond's character was like a pergola. You walked in and out. There were always roses and jasmine, clematis and wisteria, peeps of the garden and patches of the sky—but never a shut door—never one. Oh," there was a breaking passion in her voice—"how I longed for four walls, for a lock and key, for a dungeon, for bars. 'Don't you know,' I would say to him, 'that much trodden territory becomes neutral?' and he would smile and say, 'you are generous.'"

Maurice was looking into the fire.

"Poor little Paula," he said. "But you were his only wife."

"Yes," she said, "a law-given copyright."

"Paula," he said, "will you do something for me?"

"I wonder. There are surely no somethings where we are concerned."

"I want you to describe several dresses to me. Your own perfect divine dresses. I want them for my book."

"So I am to be made use of, am I?"

Her eyes were flashing.

He was not looking at her.

"Yes," he said, "I am going to steal some of your genius."

She had left him. He was not surprised. She never said "Good-night."

The next day she had gone—very early, leaving no address, no letter.

She had, he heard, left his box of flowers at the village infirmary. He knew that that day it was to have been full of verbena, sweet geranium, sweet briar, thyme, myrtle, lavender and single roses....

* * * * *

Marthe had insisted that he should come with her to Lally. He was feeling foolish and fascinated—dressing was evidently a religion with the most solemn rites in the world. The gravity and concentration of every one astounded him—the firm vendeuse refusing to allow her cliente any freedom of choice. The pathetic cliente pining in vain for forbidden fruit—the hopelessly ugly and unrewarding, who alone were permitted to follow their fancies. Patterns were discussed in hushed but intense undertones, faint but all-important modifications were offered by the vendeuse to bridge the gulf between the figures of the mannequins and those of the clients. The brave longing of a squat pigeon to have the model reproduced "textuellement" was resolutely suppressed.

Marthe was discussing her vendeuse's child....

And then suddenly Maurice saw Madame Marly. She was without a hat and scattering her terrified staff with her eye.

She came straight to him, her voice was mocking.

"Maintenant, je peux donner des renseignements a Monsieur."

"I did not know," he blurted, "I had no idea," and then as the ultimate significance of their meeting disentangled itself from the immediate embarrassment,

"Thank God, I have found you."

* * * * *

Mlle. de Marveau married the Comte de Cely.

The Comtesse de Cely wanted an escape and became Madame Lalli.

Madame Lalli wanted an escape and became Madame Marly—for Paula was always Paula.

And then she met Maurice and her youth. Twenty-five years of age and experience and disappointment fell from her. But to keep her great illusion she offered her big resistance....

And then the tiny knife turned in the tiny wound. The unconscious buzzing machine touched the exposed nerve—the silly, absurd, irrelevant name.

The lover in pursuit of the beloved became the novelist examining the dressmaker, seeking for information. When professional meets professional.

This time she capitulated for she ran away.

* * * * *

That night Maurice wrote to her.

"Paula, I love you. I loved you always. I loved you invulnerable, wise, fortified beyond the wiles of men. How much more do I love you now with your one weak spot—so weak, so absurd that it can only be kissed, and laughed at and adored.

"Paula, my own, the twenty-five years have never existed. There is only one immortal moment—and that is to come.

"Beloved, best beloved, only beloved, I want you so badly.

"MAURICE.

"Besides, you have got to describe me several dresses for my new book."



XIII

AULD LANG SYNE

[To HAROLD NICOLSON]

It was delightful to be back in England after two and a half years. Two and a half years of India, of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of heat and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she had felt—starved of little intellectual coteries with their huge intellectual sensations—starved of new books and old pictures and music, of moss roses and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into the selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert, who did not know how to be selfish. Thinking of him made her feel very tender and very small. His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to duty, unconscious and instinctive and uncensorious, combined with a guilty sense that her youth and beauty had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant soil. He was more convinced than any one of the importance of books and music and intellectual interests (he never read and did not know one note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore received a consecration they could never have had by merely being important to him. It was all so very simple—What she admired was beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine—And she belonged to him—Robert. It was a miracle that found him every night on his knees in humble gratitude. She had, he thought, been so wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that she liked Anglo-Indian women. When one by one his staff were incapacitated by love, he never complained. It made them of course useless, but how could they help falling in love with her? It would have been so unnatural if they had not. And when she told him—and to do her justice she knew that she was telling him the truth—that she was not worthy to do up his shoe laces—he would laugh and kiss her hand and send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to deserve his wife.

No wonder he was always urging her to go home—haunted as he was by the feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his iron character, she had finally succumbed—as she so often succumbed to his unselfishness.

How she was loving England! The wet, heavy air—the sky curtained with clouds—the drenched leaves—the saturated flowers—the damp breathing earth—the distant lethargic sun. She could feel a pulse in the sopping soil and her heart beat with it.

Finding her friends too was such an adventure. What struck her most about them was that they seemed so stationary. There they were, just as she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things, saying the same things—fixed points with their lives revolving round them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.

She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims. After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India, because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at home. I'm in England."

And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps, how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things, trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. How badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he had ever been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never had. If she had not been married—it was a silly "if." The most he had said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it had thrilled her at the time—what a blank cheque of possibilities it had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked seriously to her—very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and, instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.

She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he been? She wondered. It was all such very ancient history. And yet he had gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder—men were so odd.

So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an essential part of being fond of St. John—a rule of the game, so to speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects. Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in towns got on his nerves.

"But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very seriously what an intimate gesture it was.

Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with her in her bedroom. St. John didn't like it at all. There was to him something inherently disreputable about the horizontal. If she were too tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one—except him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn't do).

"But my back does ache so easily. After all, if I were really ill you wouldn't mind."

"That is different."

"How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the presence of a young man?" He consoled himself with the thought that she was extremely, exceptionally innocent. She told him that thousands of people were extremely, exceptionally innocent. It was a fact which could never be explained to juries. St. John doubted it. He believed in a vast number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the people he knew were exceptions.

The train drew up at the platform. Ariadne got out. The footman explained to her that his Lordship was so very sorry not to be able to come to the station, but he was attending a cattle show.

"Of course," said Ariadne, and she felt it.

She got into the brougham—it was so characteristic of St. John not to use a motor in the country—which had that delightful, almost forgotten, smell of broughams, and drove through an avenue of oaks up to the fine old Georgian house, dignified and mellow and lived in—a house proud of its cellar and its stables—of its linen and its silver—a house where men were men and women were women—where the master hunted and sat on the Bench, and the mistress embroidered and looked after the household—each having his separate functions and the one joint one of propagating the race.

In the hall, St. John's housekeeper, in a black taffetas apron, welcomed her.

"His Lordship would be most distressed not to have been there when her ladyship arrived, but the cattle show——"

"Of course," said Ariadne, and hinted at a quite special awareness of the importance of Cattle Shows.

Her bedroom was immense—there were lavender bags in all the drawers, and flowers on the dressing table, the fire was lit and there was boiling water in the shiny pale brass can. Her maid, the housekeeper explained, was sleeping in the dressing room. On the table by her bed was a glass box of biscuits, "The Wrong Box," "Omar Khayyam" and Lucas Malet's last novel.

Ariadne was smiling with happiness. Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be? There was a tap at the door.

"Come in."

"It's I." (St. John never said "It's me.")

She threw open the door.

"Do come in," she said, and then, with a little stab of extra pleasure, she wondered if he would be shocked by her flimsy pink dressing gown and her bare feet.

"St. John," she put out both her hands. "I am happy to be here."

He took them and held them quite tight, then he kissed them.

"Little Ariadne," he said.

It was, she supposed, a way of getting over the dressing gown.

"You look younger than ever," he said.

"It's my hair being down," she murmured.

He asked her if she had had a good journey, and whether the housekeeper had seen that she had everything she wanted.

She asked him if the cattle show had been a success.

He said he really must dress for dinner, and so must she.

"Ariadne," he put his hand on her arm, "it's good to have you here."

There was an emotion welling up in his voice that surprised her. He turned his back and left the room rather hurriedly. She realised that he had almost kissed her. Would he have said, "I'm sorry, but you looked such a baby," or, "Forgive me, it was seeing you again after so long," or, "Ariadne, can you forgive me? I lost my head."

She plumped for the baby, and wondered if the visit could conceivably be going to be a slight strain. In old days there had always been a certain tenseness about their relationship, made worse by her attempts to topple over his gentlemanliness. She had felt that if her wish could have been gratified just once, she would have been released from it and never have wanted to repeat the experiment. Also a little of the responsibility would have been his—thus obliterating the irritating daily spectacle of his untarnished blamelessness.

Of course he had never been in love with her. She had always been buoyed up by little things she wouldn't even have noticed in some one she hadn't cared about. If there were acute disquieting moments when the troublante quality of her loveliness tossed him about unmercifully—weren't they moments that any stranger might go through sitting next to her at dinner? No—the truth always had been that he was really fond of her.

"I'm glad now," she smiled to herself, "how lucky that we can't always sculpt our own relationships."

She went down to dinner—in the huge hall full of armchairs and cushions and antlers and comfort St. John stood with his back to the fire smoking a cigarette which he threw into the grate when he saw her (St. John invariably threw away his cigarette when you came into the room and then asked your permission to light a new one. In her mind's eye Ariadne always saw him opening the door for his wife after a violent scene with her).

"My dear," she said, "what a divine house."

"The wing you are sleeping in was built by the fifth Lord....

"The staircase was designed by....

"The mantelpieces in the drawing room....

"After dinner I will show you...."

Dinner was announced.

She tucked her hand under his arm.

"Are you going to take me in to dinner, St. John?"

"Of course," he smiled at her.

The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian silver—beautiful they were—to reasonable proportions.

St. John said there were some very fine pieces of Queen Anne which he would show her.

"There was," she murmured, "nothing like Queen Anne."

The attentiveness of the footman and even of the butler did not seem to her to be entirely confined to their wants.

St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she answered travelling Europeans—correctly, concisely, and without any frills of vocabulary. It was quite possible, she reflected, that St. John wanted to know the answers to his questions. That was the worst of being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that it bored you to tell. Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.

St. John was explaining what a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her, it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to feel that the land belonged to you—to see your own flowers growing, your own calves being born—to feel yourself surrounded by your own people, for whose happiness and welfare you were responsible.

Ariadne said that inheritance was a sacred trust (it was wonderful how easy she found it to talk like St. John).

"Yes," he said, "that is just it—a sacred trust. Why, I hardly ever go up to London now, and when I do, I feel quite homesick till I get here again."

They got up from dinner.

"Shall we go and sit in the library?" he said.

They sat one on either side of the fire. She felt like an ancestress or a family portrait. The rosy haze of her tea-gown looked strange and alien fluttering in the huge leather armchair.

"What a wisp you look," St. John said. She remembered how satisfactory her tininess had always been to him. "I think I could blow you away with a puff of smoke."

"I am a limpet really," she laughed, "think how I have stuck to your life."

"Thank God," he affirmed fervently.

"Are you still a great flirt, St. John?"

He looked at her in amazement.

"You have surely not forgotten the way you played fast and loose with me?"

"Ariadne," he was using the firm voice she knew so well, "you mustn't talk like that."

"But you did. Don't you remember that dinner you gave when we went to the L——'s ball and you never danced with me till seventeen minutes past one?"

"My dear, I was saving you up. The joy after all the duties."

"You never told me so."

"There were a lot of things I never told you."

"I tried so hard to make you."

"It was so hard not to."

"St. John," she said, "the things you didn't tell me, were they true?"

"Yes, they were true."

He had got up and knelt by her chair.

She put her hand on his head.

"St. John," she said. Should she tell him that they were not true? That he was building up a retrospective passion which had never existed? That what he supposed to have been renunciation and self-control and chivalry had in reality been a rather tactfully steered uninflammable affection? Why his voice now was far more broken up and moved than she had ever heard it before. Of course he had not been in love with her. She had never realised it as clearly as to-night. For a moment he put his face in her lap, then he kissed her hands—reverently, in memory of his great sacrifice.

"May I smoke a cigarette?" he asked.

"Please do."

He went back to his chair.

She was, he said, a wonderful friend.

So, she said, was he.

They talked about his family and her family—a little about their mutual friends and a lot about friends of his that she had never seen.

They talked about furniture and gardens.

There were, he said, a lot of subjects on which he wanted her advice.

It was all very domestic, their two armchairs and the fire—the dying fire. He must, she supposed, be imagining that they were married, seeing her at the head of the table, in the family pew. She wondered if he would have let her re-set the family jewels. Perhaps his mind had reached the nursery. He was dreaming of children, his children, her children, their children.

Dear St. John. She looked at him tenderly. She longed to explain what an unsuitable wife she would have made him.

"What are you thinking about?" her voice was very gentle.

"I was thinking of the cattle I bought to-day, and wondering what sort of fencing I should put up at the bottom of the drive. Ariadne, you remember how gregarious I used to be; well, you can't think how perfectly happy I am living here alone."

Smiles were popping out of her face shamelessly. No sooner had she kept one out of her eyes than it reappeared on her lips.

"Dear St. John," she said, "I do love you."

He looked, she thought, a little alarmed.

"Not like that, that is all over."

"Quite over?"

"Quite—are you glad?"

"If it makes you happier," and then, "No, I'm damned if I'm glad."

"Thank you, St. John," she was laughing a little.

He looked puzzled, even rather disappointed.

She had broken the rules and laughed.

"How lucky you didn't say that to me four years ago."

"Don't," he said sharply.

"I'm sorry."

He was lighting her candle.

"To-morrow," he said, "you will choose the colour of the garden gates and advise me about the fencing."

"That will be fun."

She shivered.

"Are you cold?"

"One is always cold after India."

He took her to the door of her bedroom.

"Good-night—God bless you," he said.

She put her two hands on his shoulders and, bending forward, she kissed him lightly. It was a cruel way of showing him that she didn't care any more.

"What a revengeful woman I am, punishing him after all these years," she thought.

But he didn't see it like that.

"I think I deserve her trust," he said to himself, and then his thoughts, let out to graze, returned to the subject of fences.

"Robert," wrote Ariadne, "I am homesick for India."



XIV

TWO TAXI DRIVES

[To PAUL MORAND]

I: SUNSHINE

"Margaret, my dear, how delightful."

"Is it?"

"But of course."

"I always wonder," she murmured, "about accidental and sudden meetings. They are a sort of nervous shock and you always feel that you are looking for something that you've mislaid and that you don't seem able to find again until you've parted."

"How depressing you are. Looking for mislaid intimacy, do you mean?"

"I suppose so."

"When I saw you I simply felt—Margaret, thank God!"

"Matthew, you old humbug."

"And for you who specialise in intimacy and the unexpected, it is simply disgraceful."

"But I don't."

"You used to."

"Yes."

"Are you a reformed character?"

"A reformed experimentalist."

"I don't believe it."

"Matthew, after all I am glad to see you."

"Then let us take a taxi and drive round the Bois."

"Very well."

"You're not reformed at all. If you were, you would say, 'I've got to try on,' or, 'there are so many things I must do before lunch,' or 'I am only in Paris for such a short time.'"

"They're all true."

"Of course—that sort of thing is always true. The point is, is it relevant?"

"Talking of specialists. Do you still specialise in the irrelevant?"

"I have never understood what that word meant when applied to my activities. I have still kept my sense of proportion, if that is what you are driving at?"

"And Virginia?"

"Is still Virginia."

"And you love her?"

"Very often."

"Not all the time?"

"Certainly not. How then should I have my opportunities of discovering that I loved her?"

"Does she like your method?"

"I wonder. Sometimes it gets on her nerves."

"Poor Virginia."

"It is ridiculous to pity Virginia. Every one adores her and she meddles about in people's lives to her heart's content."

"I always pity women who care for charming men."

"Why—because charming men are fickle?"

"No, because they are vulnerable."

"Nonsense."

"Charm is the dragon's blood."

"But the leaf always falls somewhere."

"And the weak spot is vanity—which is no use to one at all."

"By the way, how is Michael, talking of charming men. Or, were we talking about them?"

"I suppose so."

"Margaret, I don't like Michael."

"Why not?"

"He is too complete."

"Do you usually tell women that you don't like their husbands?"

"No, they usually tell it to me."

"Is that what you suggest that I am doing?"

"Margaret, please. You know I didn't mean that. It was just an idiotic jeu de mots."

"Matthew, be careful; if you are serious you will turn my head."

"I would love to turn your head."

"Why is it that you always make me indiscreet?"

"I suppose that I inspire people with the happy illusion that I am not going to take what they say seriously."

"I suppose that is it."

"By the way, what was India like?"

"Do you want to know?"

"Of course not."

"I stayed with Ariadne."

"Is she happy?"

"Radiant."

"Loving pomp?"

"Loving Robert."

"Dear me."

"Robert is the most wonderful man in the world."

"Well, he wanted to marry you; why didn't you marry him?"

"I thought his pedestal such a precarious foothold in life."

"If Ariadne can balance on it for a moment, it must be pretty firm."

"It is a lovely pedestal. You can see for miles from it, and it is as comfortable as an armchair."

"Ariadne always had a rare eye for a cushion."

"Ariadne is a perfect wife."

"Margaret, it is absolutely essential that I should see you once every twenty-four hours for the rest of my life. You will, therefore, not think me too matter-of-fact if I ask you your immediate plans?"

"I am staying here three more days."

"Damn—sixteen hours gone already, I am off to Deauville."

"Then I am going back to London where it will all begin again."

"I shall be there."

"How grand it sounds to be a melodrama."

"Margaret, do you know that I love you a great deal?"

"I know that you are a great flirt."

"Of course. That makes my real love so very exceptional and precious."

"Does Virginia know that?"

"Virginia almost understands everything, but of course she can't afford to admit it, or one would behave too impossibly."

"Matthew, may I tell you something very serious?"

"Yes, if you don't expect me to profit by it."

"I used to understand almost everything, and I went on stretching and stretching till it broke, and now I understand nothing."

"Perhaps you are right," he twinkled at her, "perhaps I had better not marry Virginia."

"Are you trying to make me unhappy?"

"Margaret, dearest, I might even be serious if I thought that it would make you happy."

"Good heavens, it's one, and I am lunching at one."

"Margaret, promise never to mislay our intimacy again."

"I promise."

That evening there was a knock at the door.

"Monsieur a fait dire que c'etait un bouquet pour Madame."

An immense bunch of balloons followed him into the room.

"For Margaret who—in spite of everything, because of everything—understands everything."

"Matthew," she wrote, "how young you make me."

And then she murmured to herself:

"Poor Virginia!"

II: LAMPS

"I love you so." The wheels of the taxi were the counterpoint to his voice.

"What is the good of my turning away when every bit of him bites into my consciousness?" she thought.

The road stretched ahead of them like cire satin with a piping of lights. She had changed her position a little, restless under the constraint of his eyes. A lamp lit her up for him, her face white and drawn, her eyelids pulled over her eyes like a heavy curtain.

"One feels that one could skate down the street," she murmured, "it looks like stuff worn thin with time and use—the shabby shiny surface of the night."

On and on they went.

"We can't get anywhere," he said.

A lamp lit up her face.

It looked so weary and impotent as if she had abdicated the uneven struggle with circumstances.

On they raced, down the slippery ribbon of road.

There was a bump and she fell towards him. He stretched out his arm and held her firm and secure. He wanted her to feel that it was a rampart and not an insidious outpost of passion quick to take advantage.

"Let me kiss you once, for God's sake," his voice was harsh.

She turned her face towards him. The passing lamp showed her resigned, pitying, tender.

"Don't look like that," he said—sharp with the things he had wanted.

"I'm sorry," her voice was velvety and comforting.

Yet another lamp, there was a faint smile on her lips—breathed as it were from him. He huddled into his corner, hurt by her compassion.

"I hate to see the moon," she said, "cynical and prying—an eavesdropper of a moon."

Again a light gave him a fleeting vision of her—photographed on to his soul.

Her deep dark eyes, heavy with distress, the corners of her mouth repudiating the misery of the moment. She put her hand on his arm.

"Don't," she said, "there is in life such an incoherent mass of interwoven strands. And perhaps something comes and tears them all to bits."

Her voice was chanting—as if she were singing him a lullaby—then it became light again.

"Wait till the next lamp," she said. "And you will see in my eyes the old laughter that you used to love."

They turned down a side street and there were no more lights.

Abruptly the taxi stopped.

She got out. Her pale gold coat was a continuation of the moon.

She turned her brooding eyes away from him.

"Thank you for taking me home," she said; her voice had broken. She looked back—a smile turned on to her lips.

He heard her latch key. The door opened and shut.



XV

A TOUCH OF SPRING

[To W.Y. TURNER]

The sun was streaming through the curtains silhouetting a strange bloated pattern on the chintz, breaking through an opening and cutting a deep yellow slit in the carpet. She lay in bed subconsciously awake, subconsciously asleep, her thoughts drifting into dreams, her limbs merging into one another. "This is happiness," she murmured to herself, and feeling consciousness invade her, she clutched at the perfect moment, and it was gone.

Smiling at her defeat she stretched herself luxuriously like a cat and poked her toes out into a cool expanse of sheet.

"It is nice," she thought, "to have the whole bed to myself."

She curled herself up and lay for a few moments watching the sun catching little patches of air and turning them into rainbow dust. Then she rang. Her maid let in such a flood of light that she was forced to shade her eyes. An unabashed cuckoo broke into the chorus of birds, glorying in being a solo part and despising them for mixing and intertwining their notes.

She got out of bed and her bare feet sank into the warm furry rug; without putting on her slippers she walked across the room, stepping like a child into the puddles of sunshine on the carpet. Leaning out of the window the air pierced through her transparent nightgown—a tingling quality underlying a faint veil of warmth. Everywhere mist and dew lay on the countryside like the bloom on a grape. The gardener's boy walking across the lawn had left his footprints stamped in emerald on the grass.

Smiling intimately to herself she got into her bath, wondering vaguely at the miracle of water, enjoying impersonally the cool whiteness of her body, doing tricks of perspective with her arms and legs.

She dressed slowly with indolent rhythmical movements, indifferently aware of her effortless inevitable perfection.

Even more slowly she walked down the staircase out through the open window on to the grey terrace. Somehow she felt that she was violating the morning, forcing the human on to the divine. Sipping the day she walked towards the almonds with their pink blush of blossom bursting through the brown; turning round her head she saw the double cherry, its branches nearly breaking under their load of snow. And at the roots of every tree uninvited primroses and violets were crowding out the earth.

She followed the winding terraces towards the gleaming river, past fluttering daffodils and wandering narcissi, over riotous anemones and bright sturdy scyllae, shaking showers of diamonds off the grasses as she went.

The river lay like a long satin streamer, a curling ribbon dropped on the meadows. And everywhere, hidden and vibrating, was an urgency of life: buds bursting into blossom, birds bursting into flight.

Gradually the veil was lifting from the morning, the sun was rubbing the bloom off it as a child rubs sleep from his eyes.

She retraced her steps, putting down her feet with the delicate fastidiousness of a cat in order not to tread on a flower. "I'm alone with you," she said shyly and ecstatically to the day. Never before had she had the Spring to herself. Always there had been the children (now on a visit) dragging plans and occupations, games, picnics, and bicycles across the pure joy of living, or her husband like a violin very close to her ear tearing her nerves to shreds with poignant urgent beauty.

Looking dispassionately at her life, it seemed to her a slum of human relationships, airless, over-crowded, a dusty arena where psychological acrobats perform by artificial light. And always that dragging of the general down to the particular, that circumscribing of everything by the personal, every rose a token, the moon something to kiss by, flowers prostituted into bouquets. She thought how happy she was this morning, feeling a little tiny speck of the miracle of life instead of trying to catch it like a wasp under the wine glass of some human desire.

This not being a wife, or a mother, or a friend, or a beloved, or even herself, but a tiny part of the universal, this surely was happiness. To be at one with the morning, to belong to this frontierless world of nature, to be coaxed into flower by the sun, to be a strand in some unknown design, how much better than the weary steering of your life between the Scylla of your ardent futile longings and the Charybdis of some senseless malignant providence.

She took her lunch into the wood. The bluebells were still in bud and hadn't yet swept everything before them in a headlong rush of waves that never broke. She sat in an open space on a patch of velvety moss, surrounded by tree trunks and waving windflowers and peeping primroses and violets, all diffident forerunners of Spring, shyly enjoying the sun before being submerged in that all-conquering flood of blue.

She caressed the ground with her hand and watched little gusts of wind play hide and seek with the sun. "I don't believe I've ever been alone before," she thought, and she stretched out her arms into the air, initiating them into freedom.

Gradually the sun began to sink, throwing a riotous tangle of crimson and gold streamers to salute the earth. "They are hauling down the flag of my perfect day," she thought with a stab of poignant sorrow.

The sky became the colour of a primrose stalk and as transparent as green glass. Before touching the horizon it dissolved into violet powder. The colour was being blotted out of everything; one after another the flowers went out like lights; only the white cherry seemed phosphorescent in the gathering darkness. A thick white mist was relentlessly invading everything, climbing higher and higher, enveloping her in its cold, wet clutches.

Bewildered and miserable, she struggled forward through the extinguished beauty of the world. A thin white sickle of a moon painted on the sky looked cynically down at her. Stumbling, shivering, she hurried blindly along.

The big stone hall was flickering in the blaze of an immense fire, peopled with strange, unreal, clustering shadows. In front of it stood a man in a fur coat. He turned towards her with outstretched arms.

"My darling, what have you been doing out without a coat? Look at your hair all white with mist and your sopping dress. I can't trust you to look after yourself for one day, can I?"

She looked at him as if he were a ghost. A look of blankness and horror.

He gathered her up and carried her to her bedroom. Putting her in a chair beside the fire he knelt down and pulled off her shoes and stockings.

She felt as if something were breaking inside her. Cold unrelieving tears were running down her face.

He was kissing her hands and her feet, murmuring little caresses, enveloping her in the glow of his love. And still she couldn't feel any warmer.

Putting his arms tight round her he held her close to him, her cold wet face nestling in his neck.

"I shall never leave you alone again," he whispered passionately, but to his horror he felt her stiffen and fall to the ground with a thud.

At that moment her old maid came in. "Poor wee thing," she said, "don't you be worrying and fretting yourself. It's just a touch of the Spring."



XVI

FIDO AND PONTO

Fido was a Dalmatian—of the race described by some as blotting paper and by others as plum pudding dogs. Every line of his body had been formed by hundreds of years of tradition. You can find his ancestors in tapestries and petit point in Italian primitives and Flemish family groups, nestling in voluminous satin petticoats, or running at the heels of skating children—moving in sedate indifference beside the cortege of a pope, or barking in gay derision at the tidy Dutch snow. Not "a dog" or "the dog" but "dog" unspecified and absolute. True, till 1700 it was largely a matter of silhouette, the lissom outline was there, but with a certain variety of colouring. Then the 18th century stepped in and made spots de rigueur—Dalmatians invaded new territory. They conquered the kingdom of china and occupied a commanding position in coaching prints. An unaccompanied post chaise, deplorable in life, because unknown in art, and the expression "carriage dog" came into use for the first time.