She stood on a broken doorstep in the rain and knocked four times. She had no umbrella and the rain ran down her neck. The taxi whirred and ticked behind her. The taxi driver had had to mount the steps and strike matches for her to discover which of the row of bells she was not to ring, for the bells themselves had proved a silent mockery. She had considered so busily what she should say to Ronny after the event, that now as she heard the four knocks echo through the tinkling rain she wondered for the first time what she should say to the young man himself. But he would be out ; she had told the taxi to wait in case he should be out ; she prayed hard that he would be out.
Then in the dark, silent house she heard a noise like a rushing torrent, like the crash of masonry, like the galloping advance of a regiment of dragoons.
Somebody was coming downstairs.
The last flight appeared to have been taken in a single leap. The house shook. She expected the door to be torn open as by a hurricane, but instead there was a moment of breathless quiet, so that she wondered if someone were looking through the keyhole at her, and the fancy disconcerted her as so grotesque and childish and unaccountable that she turned and hurried down the steps.
With her hand on the small gate in the railings, she glanced back and saw that behind her the door had been silently opened, revealing nothing but darkness. But now there emerged from it the figure of a young man who advanced slowly on to the broken top step and said in cool and leisurely tones, “Is it anyone for me? I’m Basil Dictripoulyos. It’s too dark to see who you are.”
So much astonished was she at this transformation of a thunderbolt falling from the heavens into a furtive spy and then into a very quiet and collected young man, that she found herself saying without any embarrassment, “I’m Celia Belamy, and I’ve come to return your call. I haven’t a card to press into your hand, but it must count without one. So good night and thanks so much for yours.”
His hand was now also on the gate.
“So were we.”
“But I left a card and you haven’t one. So you must come in. Those are the rules, which I have studied carefully, having much need to.”
His ease made her lose hers. She was unable to prevent him when he slipped through the gate, which he had now taken completely into his control, and kept it firmly shut against her with one hand while he paid the taxi driver with the other. The taxi turned and rolled chuckling and wheezing away through the rain.
He returned through the gate into the midst of her indignant protestations.
“That is not in the rules. That you should pay a visitor’s taxi. It is abominable. I’m not coming in unless you take it back.”
“You are getting wet. Let me remind you that the first call only lasts from ten to fifteen minutes. You will barely have time to explore that unfathomable bag for your purse, but at least it will be easier to spread its contents on my table than to balance them all on your arms.”
He lit a gas-mantle in the passage, explaining that the caretaker thought it a needless extravagance to do this until she put it out. He did not appear to look at her as he did so, and Celia was occupied in considering a row of deal letter-boxes at the foot of the stairs.
“No, they are never used,” he said ; “they are put there to look well, a letter-box for each floor with its own key. Isn’t that exclusive? Seeing them you would surely think that these flats are already self-contained, each with its own front door, as one day perhaps they may be. But the only front doors are to these letter-boxes which are never opened and have never been known to contain a letter.”
This tragedy of frustration and unfulfilment struck her as so poignant that she murmured, “They look like a row of babies’ coffins, but too small even for that.”
“They were born before their time,” he pronounced in hollow tones, and preceded her up the stairs lest, as he explained, she should trip over the holes in the oilcloth, or fall through the broken gap in the banisters, or lose herself behind the Eastern curtain on the first floor, the magic gateway into the marvels of Birmingham.
She climbed endlessly upwards until suddenly the rain pounded again in her ears and she saw before her a square casement window, level with the landing floor. It opened into blackness and the sound of many waters.
“Those are my leads,” explained her guide. “They are on top of the bathroom which is on top of the conservatory kitchen which is on top of the ground-floor kitchen. Other floors can boast of their cookery and cleanliness. I have the stars.”
He flung open the low door of his sitting-room with a gesture that was both arrogant and servile.
Celia went past him into a dim red room that seemed to her very small under its low ceiling, but not at all niggly or crowded. She could see at once where everything was. There were all his books covering one whole wall, and a pool of light from the shaded gas-lamp on to the divan where he had evidently been lying. She sat down on it and began to turn out the contents of her bag in a resumed search for her purse.
“I shan’t talk of anything else till I’ve paid my own taxi fare, so we may as well get it over.”
“By all means.” He laid a firm hand on her purse, an intricate beaded puzzle, and lifted it towards him out of the light into the red shadow. “As you do not know what I paid him, you will have to trust me to repay myself. You see how easily you can be robbed.”
She watched him doubtfully. He seemed to be taking something out of the purse, but she could not be sure. He still held it as he sat beside her. She wished he would ask why she had come ; it would make it easier than if he insisted on treating this as an ordinary visit. Though if he did, she could not think what she should say.
Looking round at her, his face dark against the light, he said, “I did not ask you to dance. When they told the young King of France he should dance with his pretty cousin, he said, ‘ Madam, I do not like little girls.’ That was ungallant and untrue. For he was only frightened of them, as I am. I have not sufficient experience for very young girls.”
“How modest you are. And I suppose gallant, since I was twenty-five last birthday.”
His surprise was genuine, for she gave the effect of a precociously “finished” child.
“And I am not quite twenty-one,” he said. “I am therefore nearly five years younger than you.”
Like children they had begun by telling each other their ages and finding them of significant importance.
Her astonishment was as great as his had been. “But you are so dreadfully grown-up,” she cried.
“My nation is many centuries older than yours.”
“What is your nation?”
“One that gave civilization its name and meaning ; that assumed the privilege now usurped by yours of calling all foreigners barbarians.”
“Oh, but we don’t, not all of us.”
He only smiled. She felt baffled. He was hundreds of years older than her. He reaped the benefit of ancient knowledge and experience of life. “The cold old crimes and the days gone by” had left their mark on him and life could teach him nothing but what he chose to make of it.
In his dark, ugly face, its impassive forehead and full curved lips, in the glittering smile that spoke to her without any words, she saw the sad, vicious faces of the little Valois princes, old before they were grown-up, surrounded by perfumes and poisons and priests and dwarfs and bejewelled monkeys ; she saw boy-emperors dizzy on the pinnacle of power, alone at the top of the vast Roman world.
There she was, making up stories as usual right away from the facts. He was only a precocious boy, and quite a nice boy too now he was talking to her, telling her how he had refused to go into his father’s business and had been an actor in the Birmingham Repertory until he came to London to write articles and hoped to get a regular job on a paper, how he was living on eight pounds a month until he could make his own way.
“But you can’t live on that,” she said. “Do you starve yourself?”
“Not with Le Coche at the end of the road. Sixpence goes a long way if you know exactly how to spend it at Le Coche. And I can make it go further. I drink water in a tall green wineglass and hear the cool delicious tink of ice against the champagne bottle in its tub, and when I make an omelette of one egg and balance my tray on that footstool by the fire, I see a small table rise out of the floor bearing oysters and caviare and a lamp whose fantastic shape and colours vie with the one rare orchid in its slender vase. Such are the Aspirations of an Artist.”
“Now you are quite human, I mean nice. For one moment I thought you looked like a Roman Emperor.”
He laughed for pleasure.
“That is because I felt like one and wanted you to know it. Before your taxi came down this street I was the loneliest, the poorest, the most unambitious and insignificant young man in London. I lay on the divan and had no energy even to fetch a book. I knew I should never get on, that nothing would ever happen to me. I longed for drugs to create an illusion that life is interesting. Then I heard a taxi splashing through the rain. There is nothing so mysterious as a taxi in the rain, especially in an empty side-street. Who is in it? A woman visiting her lover? A girl going to her first ball? A man to whom the doctor has given sentence of death? I once pursued a taxi for a considerable distance in blissful ignorance of its occupants, but the driver took me for a tout and bawled ‘ No luggage.’ That is all I shall ever know of his unknown fare, for doubtless she was ‘ fair and fair and twice as fair,’ that she had no luggage. But I took the words as a warning, as an axiom, as a whole philosophy. No luggage. No traditions. No fears. No other people’s ideas, no worn-out property, no relations, no old friends. That is the way to get on.”
“Where to?”
“The top of the world. But why distract me from your taxi? It came down the street—it stopped below. I was at the window by then, craning out over the parapet, all the rain pouring down my neck. Yes, it was at our door. Then it was for one of the Girls Below—for which? And was it the utter swine whose attentions had been falling off lately, or the sweet boy who was just coming on, or the complete stumer who drank all their whisky, or the perfect old darling who was safe to stand the Savoy at least? How varied life must be for a woman! But then came my moment. In the patch of light under the gas-lamp I saw a small white fluttering thing appear out of the taxi window and knew it for a woman’s white kid-gloved hand.”
“It might have been cotton.”
“What unpleasantly morbid fancies young girls have nowadays! I don’t believe you have ever seen a cotton glove, yet this frightful image occurs quite naturally to your untried innocence.”
“These modern girls know everything. And did you know I had come to see you?”
“Of course. I really knew it before the taxi stopped. I knew that in this world where nothing ever happened, someone was coming to make me a prince, an emperor.”
“And are you?”
“You recognized me.”
She was silent, a little scared by that secret-sharing smile that had promoted her thought of him and then read it.
“But I didn’t come for that,” she said.
“I know. I don’t know why you came. Probably because you’ve quarrelled with your young man, for I perceive an ominous excrescence that mars the perfect fit of your glove on the third finger of your left hand. Why don’t you take them off?”
“It’s not worth while. I’m just going.”
“Of course.”
She began slowly to remove them.
“Or with your father. Or both. And the best way to punish them was to go and look up that damned dago they hated so much.”
“How do you know? Has Iris told you already?”
“Iris? Who is she?”
“My sister. No, she’s not like me, and she hasn’t the same name. She’s Mrs. Destree.” As he still looked blank she added hesitatingly, “You sat out with her on the stairs, you know.”
He threw back his head and shouted with laughter.
“So that’s got round. And I’m the low young man who made strictly dishonourable proposals to the safely married daughter of the house.”
She shrank from his laughter, divining in him a quality of ferocious vulgarity that justified the epithet barbarian.
She rose, looking round for her gloves. They were in his hands and he held them out to her, his face suddenly grave and intent.
“Will you forgive me?” he said simply. “I have made another mistake. I make many, for I am a low young man who can only get on in the world if I push through the crowd. The English ideal is to be Self-contained. But it is of as little use for me to attempt it as for those abortive letter-boxes in the passage downstairs. Consider my profile, my complexion, the shape of my head. And my name. Am I to sit quiet in a corner, to ape a young actor being fratefully nace? I shall continue to make mistakes until either I learn that they are mistakes or else I shall make them the fashion.”
“You might also consider other people,” said Celia.
“What! Your sister! To you! But you don’t like her,” he cried. “You cannot like her. As a friend, yes, you might do so. But not as a sister, an elder sister.”
She stared bewildered at this stranger who knew so much, who knew more than her, who of course knew nothing at all.
“Nonsense,” she said. “I am jealous of her ; that is why you think I don’t like her, but you are wrong.”
“Jealous—you, of—— Oh, but this is indeed wrong. Sit down again and let us resume the examination. Now, why do you think you are jealous of your sister? She is bigger than you, she makes more noise in the world. Is that it?”
“Of course. It’s all quite obvious.” She was laughing now. “Only I’ll tell you the absurd thing I was jealous of in her just now. Her name.”
“Her name! That is absurd indeed.”
“Yes, but you see I liked the name Rainbow Road. And it ought to be Iris to come to Rainbow Road.”
“But Iris was mistress of the rainbow, therefore this is not her home but the Rainbow itself, which is the pub at the bottom of Rainbow Gardens. No, don’t flinch again. I am not making your sister a barmaid, but merely working out the details of this classical-cum-cockney mythology. For Iris——”
“Iris is a jolly good sort,” said Celia faintly.
“Now what sad echo said that? Tell me, why are you sad? Is it because you wear a valuable emerald on the third finger of your left hand, and was it put there by a young man who prefers whisky to champagne as all sound young men do? Celia, are you in league with a whisky brain?”
“What is a whisky brain?”
“‘ The Navy’s all right.’ ‘ Iris is a jolly good sort.’”
“Give me my gloves.”
“Certainly not. I hold your gloves hostage for as long as you are in my territory. They are the loveliest things in my room, so small and slender and limp and white. I shall put them next my rose on that otherwise bare table, for they only are worthy of the position.”
“No. Give them to me. You make too many mistakes. And the worst is to make up things about other people.”
“Especially if they happen to be correct. I grant that. What a lot you could teach me about my mistakes. Doesn’t it attract you, the education of a low young man? But philanthropy is clean out of fashion. Celia, say you will come again. If you come again I will call you Miss Belamy—no, I will call you Mrs.——” He paused, considering, risking everything on one random shot, then pronounced, “Haversham.” Her face told him he was right, and his triumph filled the silent air as with a crackling explosion of fireworks.
“You are very clever,” she said resentfully.
“That means ‘ you are very impertinent.’ Being so, I can tell you two more things. One. You are not in love with Haversham. Two. I am not in love with you, nor likely to be, for my tastes, as you observe, are bad. Believe me, it is not merely respect for your wishes that confines my adoration to your gloves and prevents my holding your hand. I should be afraid lest I might break it.”
“Do you put me on a pedestal?”
“No, on the mantelpiece. That is your proper place. At any moment you might crystallize into porcelain.”
“No, oh no!”
It was so genuine a cry of distress, almost terror, that he was startled into tenderness. Replacing her on her seat as gently as though she were indeed a china figure, he knelt beside her and begged her to tell him what had made her so much afraid.
She stammered, “My mother collects them. She cares for them more than anything now. It would be horrible to be one, all cold and alone. I expect everyone feels afraid of that sometimes.”
He said, slowly piecing it together, “Your mother turned into one long ago. That was because of Colonel Belamy. And you are afraid you may do so because of Haversham.”
“Yes. No. Oh, what nonsense we are talking!”
“No, what sense! That is our mistake.”
He sprang up. “Celia, you are going, else you will be late for dinner and there will be a row and they will find out where you have been and you will repent on Haversham’s shoulder and never come again. Here are your gloves. My rose has dropped a petal on them. It is the same rose as I wore at the dance ; that is why its eyelids are a little weary. Yes, of course I believe that you will tell them all about it, especially Haversham. That is what you came for, was it not? But are you quite sure that, now you’ve been, you will tell him all about it? Even though our only caress has been a butterfly kiss on your glove from an eyelid of my rose?”