Celia stood in front of him in the study doorway. He had just closed his eyes sitting by the fire after his return from the club, and when he opened them, there she was with her cloak dropping off her shoulders in the slack way modern girls have. She had behaved extraordinarily this evening, though it took him a slight effort to remember what it was she had said or done. He wondered if that was why she had looked in on him, and feared apologies, reconciliations, embarrassment.
He said, “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you speak?”
She said, “In a minute,” and came over to the fire. Her cloak slipped to the floor as she came, and he suppressed an oath. She stood leaning her elbow on the mantelpiece looking down at the fire, a masculine pose that did not suit her ; Iris could do it, but she was not tall enough. She said :
“Mr. Gordon has offered me a job, Papa, and I want to take it.”
So this was what she had had up her sleeve all this time. She was one of these independent girls who want to earn their living. He might have thought it of Iris, but she hadn’t enough gumption. He said, “What on earth do you or does Mr. Gordon imagine you can do?”
“Read the stories for his magazine and weed out the worst.”
“And why should you wish to read more trash than you already do? You have a comfortable home, a more than adequate dress allowance, you do exactly as you like, not even troubling to tell your parents when you go out or where or with whom.”
“I know.”
“Well, what more do you want?”
“I should like to have some other occupation besides that of being engaged or not being engaged.”
He looked at her, startled. It was not like her to say a thing like that. But what was she like? What was she up to?
“Don’t try to be clever,” he said. She was silent, and he thought of Ronny jostling him in the park and never seeing him. All these young people were engrossed in their own affairs, never bothering about anybody else.
“I want to make money,” said Celia.
So that was it. She was extravagant, she had more money than his mother would have known what to do with, but the little fool had been getting into debt, perhaps into a scrape.
“You had better tell me all about it,” he said in a voice which he tried to make grim but had too strong a touch of satisfaction in it, for here was an opportunity to take a firm hand on the situation, to pay off the scoundrel and tell him what he thought of him, to tell Celia what he thought of her, perhaps even to hear her acknowledge that there was no man like her father.
“You know all about it,” she said.
She found difficulty in speaking and in looking at him. She poked at the fire with a silver shoe, her laconic awkwardness made her seem like a gawky boy, and this was so strange in her as to alarm him, for he could not guess that it was caused by so strange a thing as her effort to speak sincerely to him.
He remembered the atrocious jackanapes who had taken her out that evening ; she was surely not going to tell him that he was the cause of this sudden wish to make money. She could not be such a fool as to dream of marrying him.
Celia’s voice came jerkily, gaspingly, across the fireplace.
“That bowl was worth at least a hundred, wasn’t it? You were going to sell it. It’s not a bit the same thing, of course, but I’m going to make enough money to pay for it. If I saved it out of my dress allowance it would take ten times as long.”
He began to laugh. Not with the short sharp bark he so often gave to show his shrewd knowledge of the world, but feebly, inadvertently, as a sick child cries or an old person coughs. He could not stop at once, though he was annoyed at the way Celia stared at him. Her face was going all twisted.
“That’s funny, that’s damned funny,” he said, his voice recovering a certain military hoarseness.
“Don’t laugh like that, don’t. Were you going to keep the bowl, then, after all? Isn’t there any other like it? Oh, of course there isn’t; and if there were, it wouldn’t be the same. You found it.”
She was twisting her face about so as not to cry. He had seen her cry with fright and temper when he had been angry with her, he had never seen her cry like this ; it affected him with a kind of terror, something seemed to be going from him, torn from him, something that was part of himself. He said, “That sugar basin in the rosewood tea caddy is a decanter with the neck cut off and the edges ground down. That dealer fellow to-day told me. Most of my glass is of the wrong period, just the time when beauty of outline disappeared and perfect technique in cutting took its place. My bowl belonged to still later in the nineteenth century ; the glass was first pressed into shape so that the facets merely required finishing off. It lacks vigour and freshness. Its whole quality is inferior.”
“But it was beautiful,” stammered Celia, who had never thought it was and saw as she spoke that now he thought so no more than she. His glass had never been, as it would have been to his brother, a pretty thing to have in his dining-room ; it was a symbol and a proof of his superior taste and refinement, of his social pride, his knowingness, his love of beauty, his religion. As his father had gone to church twice every Sunday, so Henry had collected Waterford glass.
Now he had looked at the proofs and symbols he had thought beautiful for so many years and loathed them ; he had wished to smash them, but that would be sensational, unmanly, unlike himself. But he did not know now what was himself since he had lost his belief in himself, and in a God who had created taste for the benefit of the ruling classes.
He stared helplessly at the fire and said, “Marry him if you like. I don’t know. He mayn’t be much worse than the other one after all. I don’t know.”
Then he made an effort to wake out of his trance and said something about tomfoolery and that perhaps some things didn’t make any odds but other things did or else you didn’t know where you were at all.
“I don’t much,” said Celia, and he said it was all a damned muddle.
It might have been Ronny sitting before her, depressed, disillusioned, and thirty years older. But that was the Ronny she would have lived with ; Leila’s Ronny would be different. She had heard about them from Dicky, it had hurt to find that Leila’s Ronny was so much nicer than the one she had known.
“We never really hit it off,” she said, “never got near each other somehow. I don’t know a bit about Dicky, if I marry him I daresay it might be a dreadful failure, but there would be something there.”
And looking into her father’s eyes she saw something that lay like a dead fish at the bottom of a shallow pool and knew that in his marriage there had never been anything there.
“There’s no accounting for things like that,” said Colonel Belamy and avoided her eyes.
Their intimacy was sudden, strange, and secret. As wireless will open a door in the silence and admit sounds that have been near us but unheard before, so each heard the other’s voice for a few minutes before it was again shut off. For in that rare and unaccustomed air Colonel Belamy breathed with difficulty, felt light-headed and defenceless, unable to plant his feet on solid ground.
He wondered what he was doing talking like this to Celia, who was not a patch on Iris, though she was his daughter and he was of course very fond of her, but why should he talk to her as he had never done to Iris, his special one, and she would certainly have laughed at him if he had? How she would laugh about the glass, and she was quite right : it was much better to laugh than to be morbid and introspective, but there was no need to tell her.
“By the way, Celia,” he said, uneasily careless, “you need not mention what I told you about the dealer’s opinion of my collection. I shall say that I have changed my mind about selling it. That is all. It would only distress your mother.”
She did not at once answer, and then she said, “But, Papa, won’t it be rather a strain? You’ll have to go on pretending you like it always.”
Again she caught a glimpse of something fugitive and helpless in him. He turned away, he said, “Nonsense. You exaggerate so. After all, I should have to have another opinion before I take that dealer’s word for it. They are often mistaken.”
She saw that he was busy collecting his resources and did not impede him further. He had chosen his glass as the standard of his life and must mend his brittle support as best he could.
In a little time he would even make himself believe he had never lost belief in it. He had done this more easily with his marriage, for that had not cut so deeply.
She remembered Dodo’s letter from the trenches years ago. It was odd to have met her brother and her father for just one moment, but perhaps one couldn’t tell how long such a moment lasted.
“In any case,” she thought, “there was Uncle Charles, and that lasted.”
She kissed him, whispering, “I’m sorry I smashed the bowl.”
He said, “There, there, don’t exaggerate. It was a good thing you did it to-day.”
He did not think of asking her why she did it.
She left him, shutting the study door behind her, and was caught up in a bright procession of days and nights that danced by so quickly she could not in looking back distinguish one from the other, as though in leaving the study that night she had stepped straightway into a golden mist that hid her and her father from each other’s sight.
She was always dashing to Gordon’s office or to go out with Dicky to meet a new acquaintance of his in town who might be useful, to go to parties with awfully interesting people he had just met, to dance at a little club he had just joined or to be taken to other people’s clubs, to go to plays with him in the pit and pay special attention to the technique because he was writing a play ; she was always running to the ’phone, jumping out of her bath, scrambling into fresh clothes and leaving others in a frothing pool on the bedroom floor for Gladys to put away, always running after a bus or hailing a taxi, always late, always hurrying, always eagerly expectant of new tales of new successes for Dicky, pausing only to read innumerable stories all just alike of disdainful heroines and proud silent heroes, or to stand on a now mended doorstep in Rainbow Road and knock four times.
“I must find another place,” Dicky said every time he opened the door. And she said sentimentally, “You’ll never find anything so nice.”
“It’s like a bird’s nest.”
“A turret chamber.”
“A secret bower.”
By which it may be seen that Celia was falling more and more under an enchantment. So was Dicky, but it was of his own wielding. By Celia’s warming to deeper, brighter colours before his eyes, he knew himself a wizard with power to create and call forth life. She was a different person. Those who knew her before all said so, those who met her now were all impressed by her, some fell in love with her and one or two even disliked her. This was the greatest achievement of all for one who had never yet made an enemy. She was beginning to be a person. Even Ronny thought so. He said to Leila, “I don’t think Dicky’s doing Celia any good. There’s something so hard and bright about her now. Flippant. We never really hit it off, but she used to be a sweet little thing.”
Leila, who had her own wisdom, said nothing, for she guessed that Celia must have laughed at him for being sentimental on the stairs or the doorstep. There was no quarrel of course over the entirely amicable rupture of their engagement, but Leila at any rate thought it awkward that they should occasionally run into each other at 39 Rainbow Road. She often took occasion to tell Ronny that Dicky was one of the best, a really faithful old friend, and likely to make his name and his fortune in no time. Then Ronny would say, “Yes, I suppose it’s all right,” and sigh a little, and Leila did not worry too much, for she knew it was nice for him to have something to regret.
“He adores me,” she wrote to Mab, “and that after all is the most important thing. You may think him rather quiet, but that is only his manner ; he is really marvellously brave and was wounded regularly every Thursday at Gallipoli.”
“What on earth does she mean? It’s like the hippopotamus in ’ Alice ’ who was only in the house on Thursdays.”
“Well, the landings at Gallipoli took place on Thursdays. Leila’s letters are a scream. Go on, Mab.”
“Just listen to this. No, I won’t. Oh, Harry, you are a beast. Give it back to me. It’s too bad. Well, I only hope it will come off this time. I’d love her to be as happy as us.”
“As Us!!”
In the fierce light of their incredulous laughter Leila’s happiness withered to the size of a pea.
But from the balcony across the road it appeared huge as a ship in full sail speeding over halcyon seas.
“Oo, what lovely flowers. The young man’s there again at Number 39, Auntie.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s the same one.”
“It’s always the same one. The man with the funny cape never comes now, nor the car. Do you think she quarrelled with them both?”
“That sort never quarrels,” came the condemnatory answer from within.
This gruff comment escaped in fragments from a thick and overcrowded atmosphere together with—” The draught”—” Bad for the ferns “—” Finish dusting “—” Nothing to look at in this street on a Sunday morning.” But the girl with the duster remained on the balcony to watch a radiant princess in scarlet and her lover in white come running down the steps at 39, swinging a luncheon-basket between them, and their laughter soared up to her like a flight of birds through the clear air.
Summer came early to Rainbow Road. The trees at the farther end now stood with a row of stiff green busbys on their heads. The children played cricket in the street all through the long twilights that drifted from rose to primrose to pale green, male First Floors appeared on the balcony in shirt-sleeves, the girl who had done nothing since she left school but go up and down on the step of a bicycle, went up and down more and more slowly to show her skill, waving her free foot with the floating gesture of a ballet-dancer, tinkling the bell in an endless monotonous mechanical serenade, calling to the boys as she passed in the long hooting notes of an owl, wearing ever smarter and smarter clothes, until one day she disappeared, and as nobody knew who she was nobody knew where she had gone.
“But the more good riddances to bad rubbishes the better, that’s what I say,” said Mrs. Page next door as she heaved her way past the area railings, all the majesty of the Armada in her gait, the vast expanse of her red shawl making a torrid zone in the sunlight on the grey street, the beaming grin on her red face dispelling the harshness of her hoarse judgments while at her advance heads came popping up over the area railings like savages over a palisade.
“And that Mrs. McCarthy at 39 there’s another good riddance, with her husband not cold in his grave from being run over at the bottom of the road just as he was leaving the pub, poor old gentleman, and off she goes with another man. Must have been hungry. And took a bottle of my Sarson’s vinegar which I’d lent her for touching up the meat when it had gone off a bit, and off she goes too she does, with the whole bottle and Cyril and all.”
But nobody at No. 39 noticed that they had a new caretaker after all these years, it was quite a long time before Leila even noticed that the back yard had been quiet now for days and days because Cyril no longer played there with his tin trays and war-whoops and repeated shouts of “Bang. Bang. Now I’ve killed a tiger. Bang. Bang. Now I’ve killed a lion.” She never noticed that the primeval forests, the hordes of wild beasts and savages with their tom-toms and the one intrepid explorer, had all vanished out of the back yard.
Dicky had no more need of Mrs. McCarthy and the local colour of basements and back yards nor yet the gay ghosts of parties long ago. The wheel was spinning fast for him, carrying him more and more into the centre of things. He talked extravagantly of moving from Rainbow Road to Half Moon Street, “for I shall go from one celestial curve to another. I catch life bending.”
Every time he met Celia he had fresh toys to show her, displaying them with eager pride but with penetration into their mechanism. All these wonderful new people, they knew such still more wonderful people, they wore such beautiful clothes, they lived such immoral lives in such large houses, wasn’t it wonderful that he should be meeting people like that?
There was a marvellous girl, at least not exactly a girl, who was one of the Bankshires you know, and who shot and hunted and danced and her eyes snapped so that you could see them at the back of her head, and she was so free and brave that she had affairs with everybody and never minded what was said about her, “and there’s a nice side to Damaris. She was telling me about her best friend who is completely promiscuous and she said, ’ I must say I am still a Puritan at heart. I do like there to be a touch of romance in one’s affairs.’”
“What a funny definition of Puritanism!”
“Not quite a strict one, perhaps. Still, it’s a nice line. I asked her if I might use it, but she didn’t seem to like that much. Perhaps she had thought of using it herself. These writers are so selfish. Oh yes, didn’t I tell you she wrote as well as everything else? Does a novel straight off in ten days ; all comes bubbling up out of her. Some Niagara.”
“Is that really true?”
“Of course not. But isn’t it funny the things that people think will impress other people, and the trouble they’ll take to appear something or other?”
She thought that he who could see so clearly through other people would never expose his vanity behind a glass sheet. His frankness was his safeguard. He boasted, he plotted, he was shameless, and for that she loved him far more than for his spontaneously experienced love-making, his impassioned worship of things in her that she did not value.
“I made another howler last night,” he would say, and tell Celia all about it and how cleverly he had retrieved himself when he had seen his companion was laughing at him, “so I said, quite low and as though I were speaking to myself, ’ Yes, you are charming. And you have a sense of humour. That is so rare in women.’”
“Oh, you didn’t!”
“Why, was that a bad line too?”
“Well. A trifle old-fashioned.”
“I see. Superior sex. Patronage. Almost oily, in fact. Never mind, I’ll get there in time.”
But after a moment he added :
“She liked it though. And she seemed average.”
And later again when they had been talking of something else, “It depends what public one caters for. One has got to fit the taste of the public that matters most. You are excellent as a standard, Celia, but not as a test.”
She called out as impulsively as if she had seen him walking into a pond, “Oh, Dicky, you’ll get there all right, but where? Do look out.”
“Don’t worry. I may take in the public, but I’ll never take in myself.”
“There’s Mary Vane,” said Celia, who had had to exchange her mental vision of the successful editor’s black and scarlet brilliance for a sad memory of a handsome, ungainly woman in fussy pink. For Mary Vane had begun by writing and editing magazine stories with her tongue in her cheek, but on finding them successful with a large public, thought there must be more in them than she had realized, and had thus grown to resemble her own public to the point of speaking and thinking and even dressing like it.
Dicky swore to her that he would never wear fussy pink either physically or spiritually, but she thought he wore his new nickname, Piccadilly Dicky, or, for short, Piccy Dicky, in a spirit of some solemnity, as a hitherto frivolous and light-hearted commoner might be sobered into an awed sense of his importance by the sudden acquisition of a weighty title.
He began to talk with an air of virtuous wisdom concerning wines and restaurants to which he had been treated, he took his clothes seriously, not in the reckless spirit in which he and Celia had sallied forth on their lightly considered enterprise. It was now all a much graver matter, and Celia became uncomfortably aware of her duties towards it.
It was no use her meeting Lord Thingummy at Ranelagh and finding him so amusing if she couldn’t be sure which Lord Thingummy it was. It was no use her repeating a witticism about a Society lady if she had forgotten her name. She was committed to being smart, and her clothes, which had formerly been a gay adventure, were now a responsibility. To do Dicky credit, they must be not merely pretty and expensive but remarkable, and this aim was so foreign to her ambitions that she made mistakes.
“There’s too much of Shaftesbury Avenue about that frock,” said Dicky ; “it makes you look like a Kensington girl.”
She was startled to find him already beholding her from a higher rung of the ladder. How quickly he had moved!
“But I am a Kensington girl.”
“You soon won’t be,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be so Piccy, Dicky.”
But her laughter and his did not prevent that shrinking, that fear of not keeping up, especially now she had to keep up with a triumphal chariot. Must she be in competition all her life? Dicky would say so, would say that it was life. She must be brave and go on being pretty, being smart, being modern, being more so than she had ever been. London was full of girls each trying to feel more successful than the others. They had to be fast in order to keep up.
The moments when she realized this were no more, than involuntary shivers, just someone walking on her grave, only they did not walk there, they danced a brisk and lively Charleston and said, “We will never lie still, however long we are dead.”
But for all the rest of the time she was dancing with them, not docilely but deliriously, dancing through the brilliant days and nights, through crowded rooms and theatres and the sultry, petrol-smelling streets, past the elderly ladies knitting in the boarding-house windows whose zest in life was quickened as their disapproval of it was enhanced, for with every summer frocks were brighter, skirts shorter, and the papers more scandalous, thus making them happily aware of the heightened colour and movement of London life. Some years ago the windows would have been closed and the blinds drawn down against the sun, but under their new doctors they had grown more daring they looked out and saw Celia passing, and said, “There goes another.”
Then suddenly a fog came down on that brilliant summer, it began as a thin golden veil, diffusing the light so that it seemed to come as much from the pavement as from the low and oppressive sky, and people, suddenly dun-coloured, and oddly glimmering cars, moved in a dim radiance where everything and everyone had lost their shadows. It shut out the sun and turned the flowers into pale and opaque discs. Distance vanished, then colours, then shapes ; sounds were muffled and died. The town turned topsy-turvy, losing its values, space narrowed, buildings and buses and people all disappeared.
“It might be November,” said the passers-by, and stray lights pricked the white darkness like pin points.
Celia lost her familiar way from Dicky back through the side-streets to her home, but then she had not been thinking ; she had drifted in this strange and sudden winter, or rather this no-season, with an odd sense of relief as though for a moment all the wheels of life stood still and she could afford to wander, drifting, through this no-time and no-land.
Then she found that she was walking by a high wall and above it, floating trunkless in the fog, were the forms of branches. She walked on through a grove of topless trees. She did not at once realize that she was back at the farther end of Rainbow Road ; when she did it made no difference, she still could not recognize this sinister grove, this no-land, as anything but an enchanted wood where she had wandered once or twice before, she could not think when or where or with whom.
Perhaps it was in this same road one rainy evening when she had been very unhappy about Dicky and then heard a violin speaking to her, calling her, out over wide spaces, silence, and the sea. Perhaps it was with Uncle Charles on their walk towards the world’s end and over the edge, where they might well have discovered such a wood as this ; perhaps it was in that still and silent, no-coloured country that you wander through in dreams and remember nothing of it next day except that you have been you do not know where ; perhaps it was in another life, another world, yes that certainly, for in this other world all life was different and all values were altered.
The things that had delighted her, hustled her, troubled her, vanished away, the 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, all that world had disappeared and she was drifting from it she did not know where, 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. It was strange that somewhere in time the moment that would decide it was coming towards her, nearer and nearer, but nobody knew when it would come nor what it would decide.
Above her in the fog a face looked down on her, the face of a man, bare-headed, motionless, as if painted there flat against the grey air. The eyes looked into hers and did not move away, she thought they had been watching for her. Like clear water or very distant sky they appeared to have no colour.
She remembered those eyes and they remembered her. She did not remember where they had met ; she thought in that same country where she had been wandering for the instant before this meeting. Words that she never remembered to have read came floating up in her mind and answered her :
“A dream, a dream! Else in this other world
We should know one another “
She turned and moved away from that unknown and remembered face, away from that enchanted grove, past one twisted turning and then another and another, 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, “So here you are again!”
And Celia——