Dicky ran into the quite interesting man just as he was leaving Leila, so that he was free to bump against her door and ask to come in for a moment as his head was too full of importance to face an empty room. She was standing at the window swearing at the girl on the balcony opposite.
“She’s been there for hours looking up and down the street and pretending to see to the plants, but I know it’s only to see who comes here : she’s always out through the window when Mervyn’s car draws up, and she always has a duster so that she can flap it as an excuse. Such a plain girl too. You can never see into their room because of the muslin curtains—horrible, aren’t they?—but you can just see it’s choked with furniture. And there’s an awful old woman sometimes comes creaking out with a spy-glass, or perhaps it’s only a watering-pot. It must be dreadful to be old and live with such a lot of furniture and have a spy-glass as your only outlet.”
“I have,” said Dicky firmly, “been drinking with Gordon.”
“Who’s Gordon?”
Women were strangely forgetful and obsessed with the unimportant things of life. He helped himself to one of Leila’s cigarettes and told her for about the seventh time who Gordon was, but she was fiddling about the room arranging the flowers and furniture and she only said “Oh” in an uninspired manner.
Dicky spoke still more impressively.
“He asked if I would care to do a series of articles on a subject he suggested. I said it was a rotten subject and suggested one of my own. He jumped at it.”
But Leila did not even look incredulous.
He longed to tell her that he had just spent thirty pounds on clothes, but she had no delicacy, she was sure to ask how he had got it. What a day it had been! Probably the turning-point of his life. And she knew nothing about it!
“By the way, Celia was with me. We had been to the tailor together. He’s asked us out to dinner.”
“Who? The tailor?”
Dicky threw a glance that should have withered her.
“Gordon. To meet Mary Vane, the editor of——”
But Leila had at last taken the inoculation.
“Asked you and Celia to dinner! That’s funny.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Ronny would.”
“Well, you and he have been dining together quite a lot.”
“Not with editors,” said Leila virtuously.
She thought about it while she moved a vase into three diferent positions and back to its original one. He wondered if she were going to have a party. But she never said so. Could it be she didn’t mean to ask him to it?
She said : “Celia annoys me. She’s trying to break it off. I know, because he gets bothered and says, ’ I don’t want to worry. Why can’t we go on as we are? ’ A a man feels so much safer to enjoy himself when he’s tied to someone else.”
Dicky looked at her with his head on one side like a parrot taking notice. She had uttered a profound philosophy suitable to his future works, but he could not write it down till he got upstairs or she would be exasperated.
“It’s too soon to jolt him up yet,” she continued ;” a man like that doesn’t know what to do with freedom.”
“Well, then, he’ll get tied up with you.”
“No, he’ll get so frightened he’ll shy off it altogether. Do see what you can do with Celia, Dicky.”
“It will be a bit difficult to persuade her to keep on with the engagement entirely in your interests. It might make a play.”
“Much better as a play. Real life is so “—she hesitated, anxiously patting her hair in front of the mirror lest a single loose thread should disturb its close consistency, then subsided elegantly into a chair and said “complicated,” for it was never safe to say things derogatory to life, it might get back on you in revenge, and anyway it only made people think you were bitter, which was a great mistake.
Mab ought to be in by now and helping her to get ready for this evening, for she had only gone to see Harry off on his holiday by an afternoon train. Not that she was worrying about that, of course, but it worried her that Mab should care so much about Harry ; it was not safe to care as much as that about anything, especially a man. It had been dreadful to see her gradually lose all her glorious insolent ease and security ; once she had cried on a day when Harry hadn’t rung up, and Leila had trembled, suddenly aware that there was no fixed and certain point in all the universe.
And she was so engrossed and unobservant now that Leila often felt that Mab did not know she was there, but moved in a dream about an empty flat that they had used to share together. It made her feel unreal as if she were a ghost or were not anything at all, so that she began to suspect that one’s existence depends only on other people, and if they refuse to recognize it, does one then cease to be? She was sitting crouched a little forward in the chair where Blincko had sat that night, and she remembered how Blincko, whom everyone refused to recognize except as a joke, had disappeared from that chair.
She started up and listened quite eagerly for a time to Dicky, who had been talking unheard in an empty room ; for she must join the conspiracy, she must recognize others in order that they might recognize her, or they would all fade away and become nothing and the world full of empty rooms.
Yes, there he was, though she had forgotten him, quite solid and noisy and smoking all her cigarettes and talking about himself of course, about the style he was going to choose.
“Haven’t you got one to start with?”
“Too clear. You see what it means at a glance. You want to have people saying : ’ Awfully amusing but different, you know. Not at all ordinary.’ A. S. M. Hutchinson gives an impression of writhing agony simply by full stops, and those who writhe may be read.”
“But, Dicky, it isn’t natural in you to writhe.”
“Who wants nature? I want style. I’ll say ’ Damn Nature ’ like Aubrey Beardsley and pull down the blinds and turn on the light. I want a style that is rich and slow-dropping and mellifluous and frequently meaningless. My metaphors should be fantastic, my images grotesque, one particular phrase of no particular importance should recur like the refrain of a ballad, but I bet you that will be the only thing like a ballad about it. None of the wind on the heath brother for me. But it will have flashes of wit and colours like rainbow-tinted glass on the rich mahogany of the sideboard.”
He wrote down this last sentence ; then gnawed his pencil, dissatisfied.
“It is too obvious,” he said ; “anyone would see the colours in iridescent glass. I should have said the colours in a cricket field.”
“There aren’t any, unless you mean the players and they’re in white.”
“Their faces are red.”
“That’s absurdly far-fetched,” said Leila, who had gone on being sympathetic long enough.
“That’s what I mean to be. Far-fetched. The treasures of the Indies, the pearls beneath the ocean, aren’t they far-fetched? I tell you, those who read my stuff will dive for pearls. At least,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “they’ve got to think they’re diving for pearls.”
He proposed to shut himself up for a week and write not one word and read for nine hours a day alternate sections of the Song of Solomon, Swinburne, Wilde, and James Branch Cabell.
This sternly ascetic purpose seemed to affect her oddly, for she said : “There are a lot of selfish old women going about the world in trousers.”
Dicky looked astonished and, gradually, offended. That would not do, pursuing one’s own thoughts as Blincko did. She must adhere to the conspiracy. After all, Dicky might be enormously rich one day, successful, useful, grateful for early kindnesses ; he might say, “In those days when I literally hadn’t a bean those Girls Below often used to stand me Indian corn.”
It would be a good thing to nurse him through influenza or preferably pneumonia, but Dicky was never ill.
“I was thinking of Ronny,” she said ; and now she came to think of it, so she was ; her remark had been far more applicable to Ronny, he had prosed on so about himself the last time they had talked, sitting by her fire as she and Dicky sat now, and dipping twigs in the fire and twirling them so that the red sparks shot off and made Catherine-wheels in the dark.
He had said, “It isn’t my fault, is it, it’s really my tragedy, that I can’t fall in love thoroughly like other people? God knows I wish I could again, but I suppose it’s been taken out of me for good and all.”
Leila had said “Poor old Ronny!” but then she laughed and added : “You think of love as a nice warm bath, don’t you? And there you sit on the edge, waiting for someone to come and push you in,” and then grew anxious, for he had been very nice to her, and she said yes, of course it was all that woman’s fault, for she had heard all about the wife of the junior officer, and that she was very sorry for him, to which he replied stiffly :
“I didn’t say that to ask your pity,” and she, briskly :
“Sorry, I thought you did.”
But there was something very nice about the way he smiled and looked as though he were thinking about her, half amused and half sorry for her, though there was certainly no reason to be sorry and she would be most annoyed if he really were. How dreadful to be called “Poor old Leila!” Her worst enemy could not say worse of her.
Yesterday Mab had spoken of “Poor old Blincko,” and she had shivered and when Mab asked why, she had said the usual, “Oh, someone walked on my grave,” and Mab had laughed that vague, happy, foolish laugh that had come to her lately, a laugh that had nothing to do with what happened or was said round her, but seemed to continue a conversation she was having with someone who was not there.
“What’s up?” asked Dicky. “You’ve got something on your mind besides your hair.”
“Have I? Perhaps it’s your manners. Or—yes—it might be a postcard I got to-day which should have been a letter.”
“Cheer up. He may have been considering the few and vicarious pleasures of the Ground Floors.”
“But then by the same post there also arrived an anonymous pot of Devonshire cream, and so,” concluded Leila vaguely, “there’s good in everything.”
“Devonshire cream???”
“I suppose I’ve got to ask you to supper.”
“You might just as well. Mab’s out, isn’t she, and it won’t keep. It will cheer you up to have me.”
“It hasn’t so far.”
“Dear Leila, you are so impossibly natural. No one could be so natural without years of practice. Who’s coming?” “Who’s told you anyone’s coming?”
“You, of course. You’ve been shoving those chairs round and round the room as though you were playing trains. And you’ve thought of nothing else all the time I’ve been talking. Who is it you don’t want me to meet?”
“Oh, it isn’t that. I wish Mab would come in.”
“We won’t leave any cream for her as a punishment. Let me be a sister to you. I’ll make your party go with a bang.”
“I haven’t asked you to it yet.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I quite understand it was an oversight, but you are getting rather forgetful, Leila.”
That was the worst of making friends with people in the house, especially when they were as insensitive as Dicky. She had wondered whether it wouldn’t be a pity to have him with Toby Clinton. “There are only dull people coming to-night, Dicky.”
“Never mind, I’ll bring out the best in them. And I know what I have got to go with the cream—some maraschino cherries.”
“The remains of your supper with Celia! Not mouldy yet?”
She laughed her high nervous laugh. Celia, in the bus on her way home, shivered because someone walked on her grave.
She had waited a suitable time so as to be in no danger of catching up Dicky, for The Borehams, though occurring at an earlier and more correct position from Piccadilly, were on the same bus route as Rainbow Road. Now she followed, sitting on top, crouched under the green silk umbrella, tossed and jolted to and fro with a queer sensation of physical lightness and emptiness that answered to her thoughts, “for now,” she thought, “I am free.”
Now that she had suddenly lost all hope or belief of Dicky’s love for her, she was free to break with Ronny. She was free of both of them, free both of happiness and anxiety, free therefore of life and death, and so she felt too light and empty to count at all in this bustling world of men and women and solid purposeful buses and motor-cars, all striving to get past each other, pushing, hooting, panting, all full of the one great business of getting on, a world through which she was blown on a chance breeze drifting she did not know where, but drifting lightly, inevitably, to some point, some moment where she could say, “So here I am. This is what I have been coming to all this time.”
“But what will it be?” she wondered, and nobody answered her. Ronny had not answered. Dicky could not. Her parents clung piteously to their possessions and belief in the deterioration of manners. Iris was too busy having a good time to notice life.
Only Uncle Charles might have known something of it, for he seemed to know what he was living for, though he had said nothing about it. But Uncle Charles was dead, and so she drifted on alone down Piccadilly and the Brompton Road, on down the Palace Road, and never noticed that she had passed The Borehams, until suddenly she saw in front of her, gleaming through the dusk, the pale classic columns of the bank at the end of Rainbow Road.
She got off the bus and went down Rainbow Road, and the lamp-lighter came behind her with long, hurrying strides : he must be late ; it was getting very dark, and the rain had nearly stopped. He went past her with his long pole, first one lamppost and then another opened suddenly into yellow light, and she was reminded of the tall evening primroses that grew as wild as weeds all over the Manor garden where they used to stay as children before Granny died ; they looked like dead stumps all day, and then in the dusk they opened before your eyes into great yellow cups and her mother used to love to decorate the dinner table with them, floating them in green saucers on the old-fashioned white and silver table centre, pushing away the orchids that the gardener had brought her from the conservatory, and Granny said : “It is a great pity Daisy didn’t marry a poor man,” but Celia never knew why.
She met an enormously fat old woman in a red shawl who came rocking and wheezing towards her out of the dusk like a derelict ship in a high sea.
Then she noticed that music was stealing out of the dusk towards her, long threads of music that seemed to come from far away.
She went past Number 39 and glanced up at the top floor windows and saw that they were dark. There were lights in the long windows of the Girls Below.
She went on past them down to the farther end of the road where a large car stood at the side of the road, empty, waiting. In front of it, sharply outlining its dark symmetry, lay a shaft of light from a window on the ground floor, and riding on the light came the long drawn out notes of a violin, the music she had heard before and thought far away.
As she came up to it she saw that the window was open, the curtains only half drawn, and she could see one side of a room full of books. The leaves of plants in the window box showed black against the bright light in the room.
A man and a woman stood on the doorstep, listening ; the light of a lamp-post fell on their faces and they stood so still that she did not see them till the light caught the man’s white silk scarf and the woman’s bare grey hair.
She went on to the very end of the road, to the trees that stood there in a row, stiff and straight and silent, for they were clipped so rigorously that even in a gale they could hardly rustle. Each trunk was encased in an armour of wire netting ; they stood at attention waiting for the word of command, and the word had come, for every sooty twig had sprouted into tight buds and in a very short time now the word would come for these to thrust forward in sharp green points and then spreading leaves.
She stood there a moment, listening to the music that had followed her and was wandering away among the trees, and then she came back very slowly on the opposite side of the road and stopped opposite the open window and looked into that square of yellow light set in the darkness as if through a telescope at a scene on another planet.
She saw a picture on the wall of a snow scene with the dark shapes of huntsmen and dogs going over a hillside, and said to herself, “I knew it would be like that.”
The street was silent, empty. She remembered waiting with Uncle Charles for the sun to rise on a sea-strand lonely as Robin son Crusoe’s, walking with him towards the world’s end and over the edge.
Now she could see the man who was playing, for he was walking about the room as he played with long, slow steps like a great cat. Sometimes he was behind the curtains, but sometimes he came out to the side of the room which she could see ; but she did not see his face, for always his back was to the window.
Then he stopped playing and the two who were waiting on the doorstep stirred, and the woman gave a soft murmuring sound like a laughing sigh and the man called out through the open window : “Here we are, Chance.”
Now he would be coming to the door, opening it, and the light of the street-lamp would fall full on his face and she would see what he looked like for one moment before he let them in and shut the door.
She waited, and then suddenly she turned and hurried away, back to the row of trees again, away from those two that were waiting, and behind her she heard a door open and the sound of voices talking and laughing and then she heard the door shut again.
She went on, past one twisted turning and then another and another, away from Rainbow Road to where the houses grew wider and nobler, separating themselves disdainfully from each other.
And up a flight of spotless steps and into a hall where an ancient French clock ticked leisurely between a couple of Baxter prints, and up a flight of softly carpeted grey stairs and into a long, cold, spacious, and discreetly furnished drawing-room where there sat an elegant and still pretty woman who said, “Where have you been again?”
And Celia——