Presently there was a noise on the staircase. He shut up Margaret’s card in the pages of Ruskin, and opened the door. A woman entered, of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable. Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls—ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught—and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead. The face—the face does not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and certainly not so white. Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been. She was descending quicker than most women into the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it.
“What ho!” said Leonard, greeting the apparition with much spirit, and helping it off with its boa.
Jacky, in husky tones, replied: “What ho!”
“Been out?” he asked. The question sounds superfluous, but it cannot have been really, for the lady answered “No,” adding: “Oh, I am so tired.”
“You tired?”
“Eh?”
“I’m tired,” said he, hanging the boa up.
“Oh, Len, I am so tired.”
“I’ve been to that classical concert I told you about,” said Leonard.
“What’s that?”
“I came back as soon as it was over.”
“Anyone been round to our place?” asked Jacky.
“Not that I’ve seen. I met Mr. Cunningham outside, and we passed a few remarks.”
“What, not Mr. Cunningham?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you mean Mr. Cunningham.”
“Yes. Mr. Cunningham.”
“I’ve been out to tea at a lady friend’s.”
Her secret being at last given to the world, and the name of the lady friend being even adumbrated, Jacky made no further experiments in the difficult and tiring art of conversation. She never had been a great talker. Even in her photographic days she had relied upon her smile and her figure to attract, and now that she was—On the shelf,
On the shelf,
Boys, boys, I’m on the shelf,
she was not likely to find her tongue. Occasional bursts of song (of which the above is an example) still issued from her lips, but the spoken word was rare.
She sat down on Leonard’s knee, and began to fondle him. She was now a massive woman of thirty-three, and her weight hurt him, but he could not very well say anything. Then she said: “Is that a book you’re reading?” and he said: “That’s a book,” and drew it from her unreluctant grasp. Margaret’s card fell out of it. It fell face downwards, and he murmured: “Bookmarker.”
“Len—”
“What is it?” he asked, a little wearily, for she only had one topic of conversation when she sat upon his knee.
“You do love me?”
“Jacky, you know that I do. How can you ask such questions!”
“But you do love me, Len, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
A pause. The other remark was still due.
“Len—”
“Well? What is it?”
“Len, you will make it all right?”
“I can’t have you ask me that again,” said the boy, flaring up into a sudden passion. “I’ve promised to marry you when I’m of age, and that’s enough. My word’s my word. I’ve promised to marry you as soon as ever I’m twenty-one, and I can’t keep on being worried. I’ve worries enough. It isn’t likely I’d throw you over, let alone my word, when I’ve spent all this money. Besides, I’m an Englishman, and I never go back on my word. Jacky, do be reasonable. Of course I’ll marry you. Only do stop badgering me.”
“When’s your birthday, Len?”
“I’ve told you again and again, the eleventh of November next. Now get off my knee a bit; someone must get supper, I suppose.”
Jacky went through to the bedroom, and began to see to her hat. This meant blowing at it with short sharp puffs. Leonard tidied up the sitting-room, and began to prepare their evening meal. He put a penny into the slot of the gas-meter, and soon the flat was reeking with metallic fumes. Somehow he could not recover his temper, and all the time he was cooking he continued to complain bitterly.
“It really is too bad when a fellow isn’t trusted. It makes one feel so wild, when I’ve pretended to the people here that you’re my wife—all right, you shall be my wife—and I’ve bought you the ring to wear, and I’ve taken this flat furnished, and it’s far more than I can afford, and yet you aren’t content, and I’ve also not told the truth when I’ve written home.” He lowered his voice. “He’d stop it.” In a tone of horror that was a little luxurious, he repeated: “My brother’d stop it. I’m going against the whole world, Jacky.
“That’s what I am, Jacky. I don’t take any heed of what anyone says. I just go straight forward, I do. That’s always been my way. I’m not one of your weak knock-kneed chaps. If a woman’s in trouble, I don’t leave her in the lurch. That’s not my street. No, thank you.
“I’ll tell you another thing too. I care a good deal about improving myself by means of Literature and Art, and so getting a wider outlook. For instance, when you came in I was reading Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. I don’t say this to boast, but just to show you the kind of man I am. I can tell you, I enjoyed that classical concert this afternoon.”
To all his moods Jacky remained equally indifferent. When supper was ready—and not before—she emerged from the bedroom, saying: “But you do love me, don’t you?”
They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some hot water. It was followed by the tongue—a freckled cylinder of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the bottom—ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day. Jacky ate contentedly enough, occasionally looking at her man with those anxious eyes, to which nothing else in her appearance corresponded, and which yet seemed to mirror her soul. And Leonard managed to convince his stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.
After supper they smoked cigarettes and exchanged a few statements. She observed that her “likeness” had been broken. He found occasion to remark, for the second time, that he had come straight back home after the concert at Queen’s Hall. Presently she sat upon his knee. The inhabitants of Camelia Road tramped to and fro outside the window, just on a level with their heads, and the family in the flat on the ground-floor began to sing: “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord.”
“That tune fairly gives me the hump,” said Leonard.
Jacky followed this, and said that, for her part, she thought it a lovely tune.
“No; I’ll play you something lovely. Get up, dear, for a minute. ”
He went to the piano and jingled out a little Grieg. He played badly and vulgarly, but the performance was not without its effect, for Jacky said she thought she’d be going to bed. As she receded, a new set of interests possessed the boy, and he began to think of what had been said about music by that odd Miss Schlegel—the one that twisted her face about so when she spoke. Then the thoughts grew sad and envious. There was the girl named Helen, who had pinched his umbrella, and the German girl who had smiled at him pleasantly, and Herr someone, and Aunt someone, and the brother—all, all with their hands on the ropes. They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place, to some ample room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a day. Oh, it was no good;
this continual aspiration. Some are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy. To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him.
From the darkness beyond the kitchen a voice called: “Len?”
“You in bed?” he asked, his forehead twitching.
“M’m.”
“All right.”
Presently she called him again.
“I must clean my boots ready for the morning,” he answered.
Presently she called him again.
“I rather want to get this chapter done.”
“What?”
He closed his ears against her.
“What’s that?”
“All right, Jacky, nothing; I’m reading a book.”
“What?”
“What?” he answered, catching her degraded deafness.
Presently she called him again.
Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened by the folly nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of such as Leonard.
Chapter VII
“Oh, Margaret,” cried her aunt next morning, “such a most unfortunate thing has happened. I could not get you alone.”
The most unfortunate thing was not very serious. One of the flats in the ornate block opposite had been taken furnished by the Wilcox family, “coming up, no doubt, in the hope of getting into London society.” That Mrs. Munt should be the first to discover the misfortune was not remarkable, for she was so interested in the flats that she watched their every mutation with unwearying care. In theory she despised them—they took away that old-world look—they cut off the sun—flats house a flashy type of person. But if the truth had been known, she found her visits to Wickham Place twice as amusing since Wickham Mansions had arisen, and would in a couple of days learn more about them than her nieces in a couple of months, or her nephew in a couple of years. She would stroll across and make friends with the porters, and inquire what the rents were, exclaiming for example: “What! a hundred and twenty for a basement? You’ll never get it!” And they would answer: “One can but try, madam.” The passenger lifts, the provision lifts, the arrangement for coals (a great temptation for a dishonest porter), were all familiar matters to her, and perhaps a relief from the politico-economical-æsthetic atmosphere that reigned at the Schlegels‘.
Margaret received the information calmly, and did not agree that it would throw a cloud over poor Helen’s life.
“Oh, but Helen isn’t a girl with no interests,” she explained. “She has plenty of other things and other people to think about. She made a false start with the Wilcoxes, and she’ll be as willing as we are to have nothing more to do with them.”
“For a clever girl, dear, how very oddly you do talk. Helen’ll have to have something more to do with them, now that they’re all opposite. She may meet that Paul in the street. She cannot very well not bow.”
“Of course she must bow. But look here; let’s do the flowers. I was going to say, the will to be interested in him has died, and what else matters? I look on that disastrous episode (over which you were so kind) as the killing of a nerve in Helen. It’s dead, and she’ll never be troubled with it again. The only things that matter are the things that interest one. Bowing, even calling and leaving cards, even a dinner-party—we can do all those things to the Wilcoxes, if they find it agreeable; but the other thing, the one important thing—never again. Don’t you see?”
Mrs. Munt did not see, and indeed Margaret was making a most questionable statement—that any emotion, any interest once vividly aroused, can wholly die.
“I also have the honour to inform you that the Wilcoxes are bored with us. I didn’t tell you at the time—it might have made you angry, and you had enough to worry you—but I wrote a letter to Mrs. W., and apologized for the trouble that Helen had given them. She didn’t answer it.”
“How very rude!”
“I wonder. Or was it sensible?”
“No, Margaret, most rude.”
“In either case, one can class it as reassuring.”
Mrs. Munt sighed. She was going back to Swanage on the morrow, just as her nieces were wanting her most. Other regrets crowded upon her: for instance, how magnificently she would have cut Charles if she had met him face to face. She had already seen him, giving an order to the porter—and very common he looked in a tall hat. But unfortunately his back was turned to her, and though she had cut his back, she could not regard this as a telling snub.
“But you will be careful, won’t you?” she exhorted.
“Oh, certainly. Fiendishly careful.”
“And Helen must be careful, too.”
“Careful over what?” cried Helen, at that moment coming into the room with her cousin.
“Nothing,” said Margaret, seized with a momentary awkwardness.
“Careful over what, Aunt Juley?”
Mrs. Munt assumed a cryptic air. “It is only that a certain family, whom we know by name but do not mention, as you said yourself last night after the concert, have taken the flat opposite from the Mathesons—where the plants are in the balcony.”
Helen began some laughing reply, and then disconcerted them all by blushing. Mrs. Munt was so disconcerted that she exclaimed: “What, Helen, you don’t mind them coming, do you?” and deepened the blush to crimson.
“Of course I don’t mind,” said Helen a little crossly. “It is that you and Meg are both so absurdly grave about it, when there’s nothing to be grave about at all.”
“I’m not grave,” protested Margaret, a little cross in her turn.
“Well, you look grave; doesn’t she, Frieda?”
“I don’t feel grave, that’s all I can say; you’re going quite on the wrong tack.”
“No, she does not feel grave,” echoed Mrs. Munt. “I can bear witness to that. She disagrees—”
“Hark!” interrupted Fräulein Mosebach. “I hear Bruno entering the hall.”
For Herr Liesecke was due at Wickham Place to call for the two younger girls. He was not entering the hall—in fact, he did not enter it for quite five minutes. But Frieda detected a delicate situation, and said that she and Helen had much better wait for Bruno down below and leave Margaret and Mrs. Munt to finish arranging the flowers. Helen acquiesced. But, as if to prove that the situation was not delicate really, she stopped in the doorway and said:
“Did you say the Mathesons’ flat, Aunt Juley? How wonderful you are! I never knew that the woman who laced too tightly’s name was Matheson.”
“Come, Helen,” said her cousin.
“Go, Helen,” said her aunt; and continued to Margaret almost in the same breath: “Helen cannot deceive me. She does mind.”
“Oh, hush!” breathed Margaret. “Frieda’ll hear you, and she can be so tiresome.”
“She minds,” persisted Mrs. Munt, moving thoughtfully about the room and pulling the dead chrysanthemums out of the vases. “I knew she’d mind—and I’m sure a girl ought to! Such an experience! Such awful, coarse-grained people! I know more about them than you do, which you forget, and if Charles had taken you that motor drive—well, you’d have reached the house a perfect wreck. Oh, Margaret, you don’t know what you are in for. They’re all bottled up against the drawing-room window. There’s Mrs. Wilcox—I’ve seen her. There’s Paul. There’s Evie, who is a minx. There’s Charles—I saw him to start with. And who would an elderly man with a moustache and a copper-coloured face be?”
“Mr. Wilcox, possibly.”
“I knew it. And there’s Mr. Wilcox.”
“It’s a shame to call his face copper colour,” complained Margaret. “He has a remarkably good complexion for a man of his age.”
Mrs. Munt, triumphant elsewhere, could afford to concede Mr. Wilcox his complexion. She passed on from it to the plan of campaign that her nieces should pursue in the future. Margar
et tried to stop her.
“Helen did not take the news quite as I expected, but the Wilcox nerve is dead in her really, so there’s no need for plans.”
“It’s as well to be prepared.”
“No—it’s as well not to be prepared.”
“Why?”
“Because—”
Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail. “Because I’d sooner risk it,” was her lame conclusion.
“But imagine the evenings,” exclaimed her aunt, pointing to the Mansions with the spout of the watering-can. “Turn the electric light on here or there, and it’s almost the same room. One evening they may forget to draw their blinds down, and you’ll see them; and the next, you yours, and they’ll see you. Impossible to sit out on the balconies. Impossible to water the plants, or even speak. Imagine going out of the front door, and they come out opposite at the same moment. And yet you tell me that plans are unnecessary, and you’d rather risk it.”
“I hope to risk things all my life.”
“Oh, Margaret, most dangerous.”
“But after all,” she continued with a smile, “there’s never any great risk as long as you have money.”
“Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!”
“Money pads the edges of things,” said Miss Schlegel. “God help those who have none.”