“That,” I said to myself, “is what you have bought with your five pounds.”
That evening, next day and for several days, I disliked Lucy. I made a story for all who knew him, of Roger’s dinner party, leaving the impression that this was the kind of life Lucy enjoyed and that she was driving Roger into it. But for all that I did not abate my resolve to force my friendship upon her. I can give no plausible account of this inconsistency. I was certainly not, consciously, in love with her. I did not, even, at that time find her conspicuously beautiful. In seeking her friendship I did not look for affection nor, exactly, for esteem. I sought recognition. I wanted to assert the simple fact of my separate and individual existence. I could not by any effort of will regard her as being, like Trixie, “one of Roger’s girls,” and I demanded reciprocation; I would not be regarded as, like Basil, “one of Roger’s friends”; still less, like Mr. Benwell, as someone who had to be asked to dinner every now and then. I had little else to think about at the time, and the thing became an itch with me. I felt about her, I suppose, as old men feel who are impelled by habit to touch every third lamppost on their walks; occasionally something happens to distract them, they see a friend or a street accident and they pass a lamppost by; then all day they fret and fidget until, after tea, they set out shamefacedly to put the matter right. That was how I felt about Lucy; our relationship constituted a tiny disorder in my life that had to be adjusted.
That at least is how, in those earliest days, I explained my obsession to myself, but looking at it now, down the long, mirrored corridor of cumulative emotion, I see no beginning to the perspective. There is in the apprehension of woman’s beauty an exquisite, early intimation of loveliness when, seeing some face, strange or familiar, one gains, suddenly, a further glimpse and foresees, out of a thousand possible futures, how it might be transfigured by love; the vision is often momentary and transient, never to return in waking life, or else precipitately succeeded by the reality, and so forgotten. With Lucy—her grace daily more encumbered by her pregnancy; deprived of sex, as women are, by its own fulfilment—the vision was extended and clarified until, with no perceptible transition, it became the reality. But I cannot say when it first appeared. Perhaps, that evening, when she said, about the Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste, “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that,” but it came without surprise; I had sensed it on its way, as an animal, still in profound darkness and surrounded by all the sounds of night, will lift its head, sniff, and know, inwardly, that dawn is near. Meanwhile, I moved for advantage as in a parlour game.
Julia brought me success. Our meeting, so far from disillusioning her, made her cult of me keener and more direct. It was no fault of mine, I assured Roger, when he came to grumble about it; I had not been in the least agreeable to her; indeed towards the end of the evening I had been openly savage.
“The girl’s a masochist,” he said, adding with deeper gloom, “and Lucy says she’s a virgin.”
“There’s plenty of time for her. The two troubles are often cured simultaneously.”
“That’s all very well, but she’s staying another ten days. She never stops talking about you.”
“Does Lucy mind?”
“Of course she minds. It’s driving us both nuts. Does she write you a lot of letters?”
“Yes.”
“What does she say?”
“I don’t read them. I feel as though they were meant for somebody else. Besides they’re in pencil.”
“I expect she writes them in bed. No one’s ever gone for me like that.”
“Nor for me,” I said. “It’s not really at all disagreeable.”
“I daresay not,” said Roger. “I thought only actors and sex-novelists and clergymen came in for it.”
“No, no, anybody may—scientists, politicians, professional cyclists—anyone whose name gets into the papers. It’s just that young girls are naturally religious.”
“Julia’s eighteen.”
“She’ll get over it soon. She’s been stirred up by suddenly meeting me in the flesh after two or three years’ distant devotion. She’s a nice child.”
“That’s all very well,” said Roger, returning sulkily to his original point. “It isn’t Julia I’m worried about, it’s ourselves, Lucy and me—she’s staying another ten days. Lucy says you’ve got to be nice about it, and come out this evening, the four of us. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
So for a week I went often to Victoria Square, and there was the beginning of a half-secret joke between Lucy and me in Julia’s devotion. While I was there Julia sat smug and gay; she was a child of enchanting prettiness; when I was absent, Roger told me, she moped a good deal and spent much time in her bedroom writing and destroying letters to me. She talked about herself, mostly, and her sister and family. Her father was a major and they lived at Aldershot; they would have to stay there all the year round now that Lucy no longer needed their company in London. She did not like Roger. “He’s not very nice about you,” she said.
“Roger and I are like that,” I explained. “We’re always foul about each other. It’s our fun. Is Lucy nice about me?”
“Lucy’s an angel,” said Julia, “that’s why we hate Roger so.”
Finally there was the evening of Julia’s last party. Eight of us went to dance at a restaurant. Julia was at first very gay, but her spirits dropped towards the end of the evening. I was living in Ebury Street; it was easy for me to walk home from Victoria Square, so I went back with them and had a last drink. “Lucy’s promised to leave us alone, just for a minute, to say good-bye,” Julia whispered.
When we were alone, she said, “It’s been absolutely wonderful the last two weeks. I didn’t know it was possible to be so happy. I wish you’d give me something as a kind of souvenir.”
“Of course. I’ll send you one of my books, shall I?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not interested in your books any more. At least, of course, I am, terribly, but I mean it’s you I love.”
“Nonsense,” I said.
“Will you kiss me, once, just to say good-bye.”
“Certainly not.”
Then she said suddenly, “You’re in love with Lucy, aren’t you?”
“Good heavens, no. What on earth put that into your head?”
“I can tell. Through loving you so much, I expect. You may not know it, but you are. And it’s no good. She loves that horrid Roger. Oh, dear, they’re coming back. I’ll come and say good-bye to you tomorrow, may I?”
“No.”
“Please. This hasn’t been how I planned it at all.”
Then Roger and Lucy came into the room with a sly look as though they had been discussing what was going on and how long they should give us. So I shook hands with Julia and went home.
She came to my rooms at ten next morning. Mrs. Legge, the landlady, showed her up. She stood in the door, swinging a small parcel. “I’ve got five minutes,” she said, “the taxi’s waiting. I told Lucy I had some last-minute shopping.”
“You know you oughtn’t to do this sort of thing.”
“I’ve been here before. When I knew you were out. I pretended I was your sister and had come to fetch something for you.”
“Mrs. Legge never said anything to me about it.”
“No. I asked her not to. In fact I gave her ten shillings. You see she caught me at it.”
“At what?”
“Well, it sounds rather silly. I was in your bedroom, kissing things—you know, pillows, pajamas, hair brushes. I’d just got to the washstand and was kissing your razor when I looked up and found Mrs. Whatever-she’s-called standing in the door.”
“Good God, I shall never be able to look her in the face again.”
“Oh, she was quite sympathetic. I suppose I must have looked funny, like a goose grazing.” She gave a little, rather hysterical giggle, and added, “Oh, John, I do love you so.”
“Nonsense. I shall turn you out if you talk lik
e that.”
“Well, I do. And I’ve got you a present.” She gave me the square parcel. “Open it.”
“I shan’t accept it,” I said unwrapping a box of cigars.
“But you must. You see, they’d be no good to me, would they? Are they good ones?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at the box. “Very good ones indeed.”
“The best?”
“Quite the best, but . . .”
“That’s what the man in the shop said. Smoke one now.”
“Julia dear, I couldn’t. I’ve only just finished breakfast.”
She saw the point of that. “When will you smoke the first one? After luncheon? I’d like to think of you smoking the first one.”
“Julia, dear, it’s perfectly sweet of you, but I can’t, honestly . . .”
“I know what you’re thinking, that I can’t afford it. Well, that’s all right. You see, Lucy gave me five pounds yesterday to buy a hat. I thought she would—she often does. But I had to wait and be sure. I’d got them ready, hidden yesterday evening. I meant to give you them then. But I never got a proper chance. So here they are.” And then, as I hesitated, with rising voice, “Don’t you see I’d much rather give you cigars than have a new hat? Don’t you see I shall go back to Aldershot absolutely miserable, the whole time in London quite spoilt, if you won’t take them?”
She had clearly been crying that morning and was near tears again.
“Of course I’ll take them,” I said. “I think it’s perfectly sweet of you.”
Her face cleared in sudden, infectious joy.
“There. Now we can say good-bye.”
She stood waiting for me, not petitioning this time, but claiming her right. I put my hands on her shoulders and gave her a single, warm kiss on the lips. She shut her eyes and sighed. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice, and hurried out to her waiting taxi, leaving the box of cigars on my table.
Sweet Julia! I thought; it was a supremely unselfish present; something quite impersonal and unsentimental—no keepsake—something which would be gone, literally in smoke, in less than six weeks; a thing she had not even the fun of choosing for herself; she had gone to the counter and left it to the shopman—“I want a box of the best cigars you keep, please—as many as I can get for five pounds.” She just wanted something which she could be sure would give pleasure.
And chiefly because she thought I had been kind to her cousin, Lucy took me into her friendship.
Roger’s engraving showed a pavilion, still rigidly orthodox in plan, but, in elevation decked with ornament conceived in a wild ignorance of oriental forms; there were balconies and balustrades of geometric patterns; the cornice swerved upwards at the corners in the lines of a pagoda; the roof was crowned with an onion cupola which might have been Russian, bells hung from the capitals of barley-sugar columns; the windows were freely derived from the Alhambra; there was a minaret. To complete the atmosphere the engraver had added a little group of Turkish military performing the bastinado upon a curiously complacent malefactor, an Arabian camel and a mandarin carrying a bird in a cage.
“My word, what a gem,” they said. “Is it really all there?”
“The minaret’s down and it’s all rather overgrown.”
“What a chance. John must get it.”
“It will be fun to furnish. I know just the chairs for it.”
This was the first time I had been to Victoria Square since Julia left.
And Lucy said, “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”
II
Lucy was a girl of few friends; she had, in fact, at the time I was admitted to their number, only two; a man named Peter Baverstock, in the Malay States, whom I never saw, and a Miss Muriel Meikeljohn whom I saw all too often. Peter Baverstock had wanted to marry Lucy since she was seven and proposed to her whenever he came home on leave, every eighteen months, until she married Roger, when he sent her a very elaborate wedding present, an immense thing in carved wood, ivory and gilt which caused much speculation with regard to its purpose; later he wrote and explained; I forget the explanation. I think it was the gift which, by local usage, men of high birth gave to their granddaughters when they were delivered of male twins; it was, anyway, connected with twins and grandparents, of great rarity, and a token of high esteem in the parts he came from. Lucy wrote long letters to Baverstock every fortnight. I often watched her at work on those letters, sitting square to her table, head bowed, hand travelling evenly across the page, as, I remembered reading in some books of memoirs, Sir Walter Scott’s had been seen at a lighted window, writing the Waverley novels. It was a tradition of her upbringing that letters for the East must always be written on very thin, lined paper. “I’m just telling Peter about your house,” she would say.
“How can that possibly interest him?”
“Oh, he’s interested in everything. He’s so far away.”
It seemed an odd reason.
Miss Meikeljohn was a pale, possessive girl, who had been a fellow boarder with Lucy in the house of a distressed gentlewoman in Vienna where they had both been sent to learn singing. They had shared a passion for a leading tenor, and had once got into his dressing room at the Opera House by wearing mackintoshes and pretending to be reporters sent to interview him. Lucy still kept a photograph of this tenor, in costume, on her dressing table, but she had shed her musical aspirations with the rest of her Pont Street life. Miss Meikeljohn still sang, once a week to a tutor. It was after these lessons that she came to luncheon with Lucy, and the afternoon was hers by prescriptive right for shopping, or for a cinema, or for what she liked best, a “good talk.” These Tuesdays were “Muriel’s days,” and no one might interfere with them.
“They are the only times she comes into London. Her parents are separated and terribly poor,” Lucy said, as though in complete explanation.
When they went to the cinema or play together they went in the cheap seats because Miss Meikeljohn insisted on paying her share. Lucy thought this evidence of Miss Meikeljohn’s integrity of character; she often came back from their common entertainments with a headache from having had to sit so close to the screen.
The friendship was odd in many ways, notably because Miss Meikeljohn luxuriated in heart-to-heart confidences—in what my father’s generation coarsely called “taking down her back hair”—an exhibition that was abhorrent to Lucy, who in friendship had all the modesty of the naked savage.
I must accept the modesty of the naked savage on trust, on the authority of numerous travel books. The savages I have met on my travels have all been formidably overdressed. But if there existed nowhere else on the globe that lithe, chaste and unstudied nudity of which I have so often read, it was there, dazzlingly, in the mind of Lucy. There were no reservations in her friendship, and it was an experience for which I was little qualified, to be admitted, as it were, through a door in the wall to wander at will over that rich estate. The idea of an occasional opening to the public in aid of the cottage hospital, of extra gardeners working a week beforehand to tidy the walks, of an upper housemaid to act as guide, of red cord looped across the arms of the chairs, of special objects of value to be noted, of “that door leads to the family’s private apartments. They are never shown,” of vigilance at the hothouse for fear of a nectarine being pocketed, of “now you have seen everything: please make way for the next party,” and of the open palm—of all, in fact, which constituted Miss Meikeljohn’s, and most people’s, habit of intimacy, was inconceivable to Lucy.
When I began to realize the spaces and treasures of which I had been made free, I was like a slum child alternately afraid to touch or impudently curious. Or, rather, I felt too old. Years earlier when Lucy was in her cradle, I had known this kind of friendship. There was a boy at my private school with whom I enjoyed a week of unrestrained confidence; one afternoon sitting with him in a kind of nest, itself a secret, which we had devised for ourselves from a gym mat and piled benches in a corner of the
place where we played on wet afternoons, I revealed my greatest secret, that my father was an artist and not, as I had given it out, an officer in the Navy; by tea time the story was all over the school, that Plant’s pater had long hair and did not wash. (Revenge came sooner than I could have hoped, for this was the summer term, 1914, and my betrayer had an aunt married to an Austrian nobleman; he had boasted at length of staying in their castle; when school reassembled in September I was at the head of the mob which hounded him in tears to the matron’s room with cries of “German spy.”) It was the first and, to my mind, most dramatic of the normal betrayals of adolescence. With the years I had grown cautious. There was little love and no trust at all between any of my friends. Moreover, we were bored; each knew the other so well that it was only by making our relationship into a kind of competitive parlour game that we kept it alive at all. We had all from time to time cut out divergent trails and camped in new ground, but we always, as it were, returned to the same base for supplies, and swapped yarns of our exploration. That was what I meant by friendship at the age of thirty-three, and Lucy, finding herself without preparation for them among people like myself, had been disconcerted. That was the origin of what, at first, I took for priggishness in her. Her lack of shyness cut her off from us. She could not cope with the attack and defence, deception and exposure, which was our habitual intercourse. Anything less than absolute intimacy embarrassed her, so she fell back upon her good upbringing, that armoury of schoolroom virtues and graces with which she had been equipped, and lived, as best she could, independently, rather as, it is said, Chinese gentlemen of the old school can pursue interminable, courteous, traditionally prescribed conversations with their minds abstracted in realms of distant beauty.
But it was not enough. She was lonely. In particular she was cut off by her pregnancy from Roger. For a term of months she was unsexed, the roots of her love for Roger wintering, out of sight in the ground, without leaf. So she looked for a friend and, because she thought I had been kind to Julia, and because, in a way, I had responded to her in her schoolroom mood, she chose me. I had not misinterpreted her change of manner. She had made up her mind that I was to be a friend and, as her intimation of this had been in talking of my house, that became for many weeks a main bond between us. I began, almost at once, to spend the greater part of the day in her company, and as my preoccupation at the time was in finding a house that quest became the structure of our friendship. Together we went over the sheaves of house-agents’ notices and several times we went on long expeditions together to look at houses in the country. Once on our quest she took me to stay the night with relatives of hers. We talked of everything except the single topic of politics. On that we were agreed; I, because it was old stuff to me; I had been over it all, time and again, since the age of seventeen; she because, I think, she felt her political opinions to be a part of her marriage with Roger. I have known countless communists and not one of them was moved by anything remotely resembling compassion. The attraction of communism for Lucy was double. It was a part of the break she had made with Aldershot and Pont Street, and it relieved her of the responsibility she felt for her own private fortune. Money, her money, was of great importance to her. If she had lived among the rich it would have been different; she would then have thought it normal to be assured, for life, of the possessions for which others toiled; she would, indeed, have thought herself rather meagrely provided. But she had been brought up among people poorer than herself to regard herself as somebody quite singular. When the age came of her going to dances, her aunt had impressed on her the danger she ran of fortune-hunters and, indeed, nearly all the young men with whom she consorted, and their mothers, regarded £58,000 as a notable prize. “Sometimes by the way that girl talks,” Basil had said, “you’d think she was the Woolworth heiress.” It was quite true. She did think herself extremely rich and responsible. One of the advantages to her of marrying Roger was the belief that her money was being put to good use in rescuing a literary genius from wage-slavery. She was much more afraid of misusing her money than of losing it. Thus when she was convinced that all private fortunes like her own were very shortly to be abolished and all undeserved prominence levelled, she was delighted. Moreover, her conversion had coincided with her falling in love. She and Roger had been to meetings together, and together read epitomes of Marxist philosophy. Her faith, like a Christian’s, was essential to her marriage, so, knowing that I was hostile, she sequestered it from me by making it a joke between us. That defence, at least, she had already picked up from watching Roger and his friends.