Chapter Four

For the Londoner the first days of his return to London have a curious quality of peace. No one knows that he is back. His telephone bell is silent. The pages of his diary are white. He wakes in the morning to the knowledge that an entire day lies unmortgaged at his feet. He can go where he likes, do what he likes, see whom he likes. He is free, if he wishes, to change his mind: to accede to any sudden whim or chance suggestion. He is not forced, should he make any new acquaintance, to realize regretfully that his first free hour is four days distant. That period lasts for about a week. For the course of that week Gordon stayed with his parents in St John’s Wood. Then the sound of the telephone and the growing blackness of his diary convinced him that it was time to return to his own flat.

The flat, of which three years earlier in the belief that he was going to make a permanent home in London he had taken a seven years’ lease, was on the first floor of a new building half-way down the Royal Hospital Road. It had been called Cheyne Place presumably because such an address would sound better and consequently would command a better rent than a number in Royal Hospital Road. Two months after he had taken it he had decided that the signing of that lease was the most foolish of the several quite foolish things that he had done. He had never been able to work in London. He had always maintained that three months in any place was just three weeks too much. By making himself a leaseholder he had rendered himself liable to English income tax on American royalties that had been already taxed for him in New York. To let a flat was as difficult as to rent one. He saw himself saddled for seven years with a white elephant. It was with the most acute annoyance that he received, for the quarterly discovery that his bank balance was considerably smaller than he had expected, the explanation of the drain of rent. At the same time it was never without a feeling of very genuine pleasure that he came back to it.

His sitting-room was cosy, familiar, and self-contained. Green-curtained and green-chaired, with green-painted bookshelves running the height of the two walls that flanked the fireplace, it had a lived-in feeling. And he enjoyed waking in the morning in his wide, low, deep-sprung bed, lazily opening his eyes into blue and gold brocaded curtains, on to the blue fireplace and shelves, on to the walnut wardrobe, whose long mirror reflected the cream pink curtain that fell on either side of the yellow pillow from the high tester that was suspended above the bed. His flat was a considerable and steady drain upon an inconsiderable and fluctuating income, but it was always a relief to find it there on his return; it was nice after weeks of boats and trains and hotel bedrooms to be among one’s own things again. And it was particularly nice to be welcomed back to them by the broad and beaming smile of Mrs James.

Mrs James was, had been for three years, and it was Gordon’s hope would continue to be for the remainder of her life, his housekeeper. She was the kind of servant that is found only in London and by bachelors. She was plump, little and short of breath. When she was in a bad temper, when the grocer’s boy had been fresh, or Gordon’s guests had disturbed her kitchen, she could assume the martyred look of one who toils under inhuman burdens. When life was going well there would be a roguish twinkle in her eye that reminded you how pretty a girl she must have been. Her own sex she disliked intensely. The worst man was, in her eyes, preferable to the best woman. Gordon’s friends had laughingly told him that it was fear of losing Mrs James that had kept him a bachelor. ‘No woman that you would want to marry could possibly fail to quarrel with Mrs James.’ One of the conditions on which Gordon let his flat was the retention of Mrs James. As long as she was there his possessions and interest were safe. On the occasions when the flat was sublet to a married couple or to a single woman, Mrs James would shake her head sorrowfully on his return.

‘That girl, Mr Carruthers,’ she would begin, ‘well, as I said to James, if it wasn’t for Mr Carruthers, I wouldn’t stay here another minute. The hours that girl kept, and the way she scattered her powder everywhere; never could I get into that room to make the bed; with her always running back and forwards from the bathroom. And then that telephone. Would you believe it, Mr Carruthers? If it went once it went fifteen times an hour? And there I’d be preparing a lunch for her and having to rush in there and answer that there telephone every minute. So careful I had to be too to get the messages right. First thing she’ld ask when she’d come in, “Mrs James, who’s rung me up?” she’ld say. “It’s all wrote down there on the pad,” I’ld say. And straight she’ld go to it, and then in two minutes she’ld be fussing in. “What’s this name, Mrs James?” she’ld say. “I’m sorry, Miss Williams,” I’ld say, “that’s what it sounded like.” Then she’ld frown and stamp her foot. “It’s most annoying,” she’ld say, “most annoying. It’s probably quite important.” And there she’ld have in her hand the sheet of paper with all the other numbers down there on it and I’ld think, what had she got to worry about just one of them, when there were all those others to choose out of. Half a dozen at least there’ld be, and me that doesn’t get one a week. And I’ld say, “Now, now, Miss Williams, you go and ring up one of those other gentlemen.” Then she’ld look angrier still; “Don’t call them gentlemen,” she’ld say; “they’re not.” Oh, Mr Carruthers, you can’t think of the time I had with that Miss Williams. As I said to James. . . .’

With some such tale of woe Mrs James usually welcomed Gordon on his return. He was expecting a recital on this occasion since the flat during the first part of his absence had been let to an American violinist. It would be a story of gin and late hours and ‘double-pillowed morns.’ But no, on the whole, Mrs James had been very satisfied with Hilda Westermann.

‘A very nice, quiet young lady, Mr Carruthers; quietly dressed, nice tailor-made coats and skirts; collars just like yours. And such lovely links. No men ever came here, either. When they rang up she’ld just ring off. “Too busy to be bothered with men,” she’ld say. She’ld always be back early and up early. Went riding in the Park, she told me. Very nice to me she was. A friend of hers came to stay here once; such a nice young lady. I’d begun to make the bed up for her in the little room. But no, they said, they wouldn’t put me to that trouble. They’ld sleep in the big bed, together. Now that was kind of them, Mr Carruthers, wasn’t it?’

‘Very considerate.’

‘And they only had one party. I was afraid Mrs Fitz upstairs would be complaining. They weren’t going to start till twelve. So I said why didn’t they ask her down and they said, yes, they would. And she enjoyed herself so much meeting all those actresses and actors. Very smart people they had here, Mr Carruthers. All the Americans who were acting here, and quite a few English, too. They had James to help. There was quite thirty people. I did them some savoury sandwiches that were better, they said, than anything that could be found in America. But it was so funny. Mr Carruthers, I thought they’ld dance and sing, being actresses; but they didn’t. And James came in laughing himself silly. “You should see them,” he said. “They’re kneeling on the floor and there’s a lot of money about, and they throw dice, in turn, and whoever throws them keeps whispering, “Roll on Seven.” Now, wasn’t that curious, Mr Carruthers? Oh yes, and I know what there was. There was such a nice young lady; black hair she had, and such a lovely voice. She was so excited when she heard that it was your flat. She came into the kitchen to ask me all about you. Met you once, she said. Now, what was her name? Sweetly pretty, she was. Quite girlish-looking, with her hair long and looped up the back, just like my Mary’s; parted down the middle, too, it was. One wouldn’t’ve thought she was an actress. What was her name? I shall forget my own name next. Oh, yes, that’s it, Joan Malcolm.’

At the sound of the name Gordon started. It was three years since he had met Joan Malcolm. It was only once and for a few minutes that he had seen her, but the weeks were few in which he had not at least once thought of her.

It was at a cricket match that he had met her. And Mrs James’ description of her as some one who did not look like an actress was as accurate as it would be for the majority of serious modern actresses. In Mrs James’s imagination the word ‘actress’ evoked a picture of guardsmen sitting in the stalls, of champagne suppers, of weekends at the Metropole; of debts and indiscretions; with bailiffs removing the furniture as a final curtain. Such a picture may have been true of the old Gaiety days when an actor was a vagabond and an actress was a trollop. It is certainly not true today in England and in America, where the stage presents as legitimate a career to a woman as does the law, medicine, commerce, politics or education, when an actress is just as likely as any other woman to be leading an orderly, domestic life, whether as a wife or mother, a daughter or a fiancée. On the whole, perhaps, she is more likely, since the successful pursuit of a career does not leave much surplus time or energy for extravagances and eccentricities of behaviour. Certainly, no one could have looked less like the mid-Victorian idea of an actress than Joan Malcolm.

So little, indeed, did one connect her mentally with the stage that Gordon did not at first recognize her. It was, too, in a vaguely theatrical setting, at a cricket match at Wimbledon Park between the Household Brigade and the Thespids, a side nominally composed of actors but to which laymen such as Gordon were periodically elected, that they had met. She had been brought down by one of the members of the company, and after tea she had been sitting in the deck-chair next to his. They had not been introduced, but they had exchanged the few casual sentences that people do at cricket matches. She was a New Englander, from Maine, and her voice, although she had lived recently in New York, had retained a suggestion of a drawl.

‘You know, I’m quite certain I’ve seen you somewhere,’ he had said, at length.

‘You may have done. I’m acting over here, in “Adolescence.” ‘

‘But why, of course.’

It was a night-club, cocktail kind of play built on the ‘Our Betters,’ ‘Spring Cleaning,’ ‘Vortex’ model. Joan Malcolm had been brought over to play the part of an American heroine. The play itself, Gordon thought, was a manufactured, shoddy thing. But of Joan Malcolm’s acting in it he had taken away a vivid and permanent impression. She had played the part of a young American brought face to face in a superficial setting with the facts of faithlessness, disloyalty, evasion. Her presentation was simple, dignified, and moving. It had the quality of truth. It did not depend on obvious tricks of technique. It had youth, and it had character in its presentation of the clash between two civilizations; which was perhaps a parallel of the problem by which she herself was faced: the clash between the restrained New England in which her family had been reared, and the New York in which she had to earn her livelihood. In her final scene, resolutely she avoided histrionics. With her life in apparent ruins at her feet, she stood in the centre of the stage looking very young, very beautiful, very desperately tired, but with the suggestion of an interior strength that would carry her to safety. The other characters, her friends and relatives were busy with suggestions that she should do this, that she should do that; that she should go to this and to the other place. Would not it be wise if she went back to America? ‘I suppose so,’ she said. They made more suggestions. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. They argue again for a minute. ‘I suppose so,’ she replied. In the growing weariness and indifference of those three ‘I suppose so’s’ were laid bare the recoil from that experience, and the strength of character that would aid her to overcome it. It was the most implicit piece of acting that Gordon had seen.

Joan Malcolm smiled when he told her that.

‘It’s curious you should have noticed that,’ she said. ‘That’s not the way the play was written. The author had said “I suppose so,” the first time; then, “You’re very kind.” The last time, “Thank you.” I never even knew I’d altered them till he told me. I’m bad about my lines. I’ve never got them word perfect till the dress rehearsal. I guess that by living the part, I’d just come to realize that that’s what the girl would have said.’

‘It would have sounded wrong his way.’

‘It certainly would that.’

They talked for a little of the stage, of recent plays, of acquaintances they shared. It was easy, friendly, unexacting talk. Then he asked her about the cricket.

‘Does this game seem pretty strange to you?’ he said.

‘It seems very slow.’

‘Slower than six-day bicycle-racing?’

She laughed at that.

‘Maybe it’s a fair parallel.’ She tried to explain to him the spell of six-day racing: that going on day and night; the little tent they live in, and the resting between sprints; then the excitement when one of them tries to make a lap. ‘There’s the danger of it, too,’ she said. ‘And the feeling that it’s working to something: that everything’s going to culminate in the last hour; rather like the ‘Ring’ with thirty years of work rising to that last hour when the Rhine drowns everything. It’s got a timelessness,’ she said.

‘So’s cricket.’

Sitting there in the late afternoon, tired with fielding out three hundred runs with the concentrated tension of his own innings ahead of him; with the shadows lengthening, with the green of the trees misted in the declining sunlight; with the scent of summer rising from the sun-soaked ground; with the sounds and roofs of London seemingly a century of miles away; with the white flannels moving against green grass; with the talk of friendly voices round him, and this new friend at his side; with the exquisite leisured grace of this hard-learnt game deployed before him; surely there was here that sense of timelessness on which alone can repose lastingly any peace of spirit. It was difficult to explain all that cricket could mean, and meant. ‘It’s an escape too,’ he had said. ‘For a certain number of hours you’re islanded and safe. It’s an atmosphere you can relax to.’

‘Ah. So you, too, you’ve felt the need for that.’

She had turned quickly as she spoke, and in her voice there had been a keener note. From beneath the brim of her wide, flowered hat she looked steadily at him. He had not realized before how beautiful her eyes were: wide and long-lashed and dark and luminous. But it was more than that that he had realized. In that sudden ‘Ah, so you too, you’ve felt the need for that,’ there was the admission of a kinship in two lives that had followed similar courses; they were entertainers, both of them, with the strain of having to carry at all times with them the responsibility of a public; with the need overwhelmingly to relax; and the granting so rarely of that need’s fulfilment; especially from people. They talked the same language, he and she. Each knew what the other was about. I’ve made a friend, he thought. But before he could say anything there had come from the field a suddenly roared ‘How’s that?’ There had been the raising of the umpire’s finger, a burst of clapping, a murmur of ‘Well held!’

‘That means I’ve got to go and bat,’ said Gordon. ‘Keep my place. I’ll be back soon.’

He was very resolutely resolved, however, not to be. Ordinarily he probably would have been. A quick-wristed but slow-footed batsman, he was far more at ease against quick than against spin bowling. And from the sunny end a leg-break bowler was flighting the ball high against the sun. As the likelihood of the game resulting in anything but a draw was slight, on most occasions Gordon would have chanced his arm, hitting at the ball’s flight. There would have been a couple of streaky fours, and then in all probability a skier to extra cover. But today with Joan Malcolm watching what was certainly her first and might be her last cricket match, he was determined to make a creditable display. And so when he was facing the sun he bent low over his bat, curtailed the backlift and with his left elbow well up, watched the ball right on to a dead-hung bat; while at the other end, against the fast bowler, with his bat held straight and his left leg flung across the wicket, he swept through from his shoulder down the line of flight. When the ball had crashed its way along the carpet to the fence, he held himself in like a reined steed as the bowler ran up for his next delivery. ‘I won’t try and score off the ball. I won’t, I won’t!’ he repeated to himself, as he went forward to play his shot. It was the most concentrated innings he had played for many seasons. It was late in the day and with his own score in the sixties that his control gave way and a skied shot went soaring to extra cover. As he returned to the burst of clapping in front of the pavilion, he turned his eyes towards the deck-chair in which Joan Malcolm had been sitting. She was not there, however. Nor could he see her in any of the other chairs. He looked quickly at the row of cars for the blue bonnet of a Chrysler. Neither was that there. And the pleasure that his innings had given him evaporated.

Two evenings later he had gone to see her act. The first time he had gone there his interest in the plot’s development had prevented him from realizing more than the finished fact of Joan Malcolm’s performance. But now, uninterested in the plot, his attention entirely focused upon Joan, and upon his examination of her effects, he was struck by the effortlessness of her acting. Was the unquestioned skill of her performance, he wondered, the outcome of a technique, laboriously mastered, or was it a happy chance that had cast her for the one part in which she could be herself? Was her very unstudiedness the result of study? The control of the hands, that invariably betrays the amateur, was achieved, for instance, with a complete simplicity. In her big scene she let her arms hang motionless at her sides. Was that a studied simplicity or what Lawrence had called ‘the hot blood’s blindfold art?’ She was so young, at the outside, twenty-three. This was her first big part. Her experience both of life and the stage, must necessarily be small. Probably her success, like all success, was the outcome of a happy mixing of the mood and moment. But he could not believe so composed, so exquisite a talent had not a big future set for it.

His impulse to go behind the scenes afterwards was very great. A cautionary impulse had stayed him. He did not believe that between himself and her there could be such a thing as casual friendship. It would have to be real, one way or the other. Why complicate things he had thought. As likely as not she would be busy, her mind full of plans for the supper party she was on her way to. Or even if she weren’t, there was as likely as not to be some man or other in her life. Just because at the moment his life happened to be empty, there was no reason to suppose that hers would be. It was better to let things take their course. He was bound to be seeing her one day soon again.

He never had. Owing to a mismanipulation of theatre dates, ‘Adolescence’ had been suddenly withdrawn. Within a month of his meeting her, Joan Malcolm was on her way back to America. Never since had he and she been within three thousand miles of one another. He had watched her career, however; he had very often thought of her. He was surprisingly touched to find that she should have remembered him.

‘And she really seemed interested, Mrs James?’ he asked.

‘Interested! As I said to James afterwards, Mr Carruthers, I’ve never seen a young woman so interested in a young man that she’s only met once.’

Four years of travelling had considerably depleted Gordon’s wardrobe: even so, the business of unpacking his trunks, moving his cricket and town clothes from his parents’ house and transferring them to his compactum wardrobe was sufficiently arduous and lengthy to make him at each repetition of the performance vow that he had taken his last long trip. It was while he was engaged upon this task that the telephone bell for the first time since his return to the flat began to ring. It was a feminine voice that asked for him.

‘Why, Gwen,’ he cried.

‘So you haven’t forgotten my voice?’

‘Did you expect me to?’

She laughed, a young and happy laugh.

‘I didn’t know. It’s such a long time. You’re not married or anything?’

‘Neither.’

She laughed again.

‘When I saw in the papers that you were back, I wondered. As I have changed my address I knew you wouldn’t be able to find me, so I thought that I’ld ring up.’

‘When am I going to see you?’

‘We might have lunch one day.’

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow’s fine.’

‘Where would you like to lunch?’

‘I’ll be round your way, I might as well look in.’

‘Then we’ll lunch here?’

‘We might as well.’

‘Till tomorrow then,’

She had rung off, as casually and dramatically as she had rung up; as casually and as dramatically as during the last three years she had made her exits and appearances in his life.

He had met her in the course of a lecture that he was giving at King’s College on the modern novel. There were about two hundred students in the hall. Three quarters of them were girls. Whenever Gordon spoke, he made a point, so as to be certain that his voice was carrying, of picking on some one at the very back of the hall, and talking to that one person in the knowledge that if that one person could hear, the rest of the audience would be able to. Before a lecturer has been speaking for many minutes, he has almost invariably established a current of personal contact with one member of his audience.

While the chairman was making his introductory remarks, Gordon glanced along the smudge of faces in the two back rows. He saw no one with whom he felt particularly in tune. He rose to his feet with the feeling that he was speaking into the void. Before, however, he had spoken for two minutes he had become conscious of a bright smile lifted amiably towards him. They were grey and friendly eyes and they smiled roguishly beneath the brim of a low-drawn hat. He could see little of her face; her chin was buried deep into the high collar of a buttoned coat. He had no more than a glimpse of a rather full, wide and smiling mouth. He had the impression of someone gay, jolly, unexacting. It was to her that every sentence or two he turned his eyes, and turned the pitch of his voice.

It was his invariable technique, but this time he found that he was subtly changing it. It was no longer impersonally that he turned his attention to one of the members of the audience, knowing that if that one person was responsive, the rest would be. He found himself this one time turning his attention and his jokes to the grey and friendly eyes in definite curiosity to see what effect they would produce on her. ‘I wonder if she will get that point. I wonder if shell think that funny.’ By her response he could tell in which of the writers he was discussing she was interested. He noticed that she grew listless when he was talking about James Joyce, though she laughed at the extract he read out of ‘Ulysses.’ She brightened when he began to speak of ‘The Forsyte Saga.’ Into her eyes when he mentioned ‘Jurgen’ there came a quick flash of eagerness. ‘So she’s read that,’ he thought.

The first time that Gordon gave a lecture he was taut, a little nervous, and completely concentrated on his audience. He would be uncertain of the length his talk would run; of the parts that would hold the attention of his audience closest; whether the proportions between his serious and flippant passages were spaced properly. He had to adapt himself to suit his audience. But when he had given the same talk once or twice, when he had learnt which portions to shorten, which to lengthen, when lightness was needed and when a return to seriousness, the giving of a lecture was rather like the turning of a gramophone record. It was something done with one’s left hand. There was no taut-ness, no suspense. You knew exactly what was coming; what effect was to be produced. You could think of other things. But on this occasion the very foreknowledge of what was coming gave Gordon a sense of excitement and suspense. He found himself looking forward to the better passages with which he ended the lecture. ‘She’ll like that bit,’ he thought, ‘I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t make her laugh.’ And mixed with that, there was the curiosity of watching the particular point of each reaction. It was like a voyage of discovery: this slow probing of her mind.

It was an evening lecture. Coffee and cakes were being served afterwards. For Gordon, lecturing and the sense of an audience had an intoxicating effect very similar to that of alcohol. He was tired, but elated; ready to enjoy the informal discussions that arose out of his talk. But this time there was only one person that he wished to meet. He looked for her the moment that his first talk with the president of the Society was over. He hoped that some engagement or other had not taken her away. It hadn’t. Across the room the grey and friendly eyes met his. She was prettier than he had expected, with the robust, healthy grace of youth. Her eyes smiled as they met his. As he extricated himself from the group he was attached to, she welcomed him as though he were a familiar friend whom she had seen two days back, and would be seeing again in two days’ time. He dropped quite easily into talk with her.

‘You’ve read no Joyce,’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘How did you know that?’

‘From the way you looked when I began to talk about him.’

‘How did I look?’

‘As though you were ready to be interested, but weren’t going to be till I had made you.’

‘Perhaps that’s how I felt.’ She had an easy, pleasant voice, unstandardized into a fashionable drawl. Her interests were eager, spontaneous, uncalculated. She did not seem to be considering at all the effect that she was making upon him. She was interested only in their exchange of impressions and ideas. They had been talking for several minutes before he mentioned ‘Jurgen.’

‘I suppose I was one of the first people in England that read the book,’ he said. ‘I don’t think any book I’ve ever read has excited me quite so much.’

She agreed. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘That, and “Poems and Ballads”; oh, and this’ll surprise you probably—Stacy Aumonier’s short stories.’

‘That’s a real writer.’

They talked for a moment about Aumonier. Then they returned again to ‘Jurgen.’

‘When I heard that it was going to be illustrated,’ Gordon said, ‘I thought: “Oh, heavens, that’ll spoil it. No one’s going to illustrate it in the temper of the text.” Then, when I saw it, it was like a miracle.’

‘My edition hasn’t got illustrations.’

‘You oughtn’t to miss seeing them.’

‘I suppose I could get them out of any library?’ ‘You could always come and see them in mine.’

‘I’ld like to do that.’

He hesitated. It was half-past nine. It would be too late for him to go to the pictures. There was no party for him to go to. His nerves were too worked upon by his lecture for the quiet concentration of bridge.

‘If you’re not doing anything now, why not come back and have a look at them? My flat’s in Chelsea.’

‘I think that would be nice,’ she said.

As soon as they could manage, they extricated themselves from the hall. As they came into the Strand a group of sailors passed, arm in arm, and singing. One of them knocked into Gordon.

‘Oh, hell!’ he said. The girl at his side looked up quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘Let’s get into a taxi quickly and out of this.’

It was a summer evening: warm and tranquil. The green curtains of Gordon’s sitting-room were stirring faintly behind open windows. The grate was banked high with flowers, the small Omega painted lamp pattered the wall with shadows.

‘It’s nice here,’ said the girl. She pulled off her hat and shook her hair out. It was short, but scarcely shingled. It bunched pleasantly about her ears.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked. ‘I really believe I can almost literally say I can offer anything.’

He had replenished only a week before the cupboard that served him as a cellar. She stood beside him for a moment running her eye along the thick-stacked shelves. Then she tapped her finger against a gold-foiled cork.

‘I think that,’ she said.

He liked her for the unselfconscious way that she had chosen it. Only a very natural or a very sophisticated person could have done it. The wine bubbled pleasantly in the tall-stemmed glasses. He showed her the Papé ‘Jurgen.’ And his Straus’s ‘Petronius.’ And the autographed copy of Squire’s poems with the censor’s stamp on it that had been sent to him when he was a prisoner of war. They chatted easily.

‘Aren’t you feeling hungry after your lecture?’ she said at length.

‘A little.’

‘If you’ve any eggs I’ll make an omelette.’

They ransacked the larder and found a bowl full of eggs, some tomatoes, and a pat of butter.

‘This’ll do,’ she said.

Perched on the table at her side, Gordon reflected how mad Mrs James would be when she arrived next morning. It was a very admirable omelette. She sat on the chair, beside the stove. It was like a picnic. They began to talk of books again. She had never read George Moore, she said. He had, he told her, the white vellum limited edition. He kept it in his bedroom. He would show it to her, he said. She followed him across the passage. The reading lamp flung a soft light on to the yellow pillow-cases, the blue blankets, the cream pink hangings. She took out ‘The Brook Kerith’ and kneeling on the floor began to read. Leaning over to see what she was reading, he rested his hand upon her shoulder. She looked up. Her eyes were bright, her lips a little parted. There was a glow upon her cheeks. Before he had realized that anything was happening, it had happened. Scarcely a moment later, it seemed, cream-white against the rumpled blue and yellow, she was stretching her arms lazily and contentedly above her head. ‘Well, that was nice,’ she said.

Three years later Gordon was to wonder whether he knew anything more about her than he had at that first meeting. Endless facts he learnt; that her father was the sales manager of a firm of furniture manufacturers: there were three of them in the family: that they lived in the same house in Boston Manor: that her brother, fifteen years her senior, had been at school at Ardingley, had had a commission in the Sussex, and was now one of the innumerable ex-officers who found their talents precariously valued at seven pounds a week: that her elder sister was a typist in a stockbroker’s office: she played tennis and was an indefatigable organizer of subscription dances. It was her example that had decided Gwen against the adoption of a career.

‘There’s nothing to it,’ she had said. ‘You keep out of work some girl who really needs a job. It’s only a marking time till one gets married. As soon as I was able to wave an engagement ring in their faces they gave way.’

She was engaged to a rubber planter in the F.M.S. She would marry him some time, she supposed. But it would be four years before he would be coming home on leave. He was in the late twenties, Gordon gathered, and was ‘quite a pet.’ In the meantime, as a result of the formality of an engagement. Gwen was allowed to remain a student at King’s College.

‘I’m doing myself much more good there, than I should tapping a typewriter.’ So she had remained a rather casual member of London University.

Those facts Gordon had obtained. But of herself, of her life, of the background against which she moved, he had learnt extremely little. In his own life she was a casual and dramatic visitant. She was always friendly, affectionate, unconcerned. She came to see him when she felt in the mood. If he rang her up and said, ‘What about having dinner together on Friday?’ She would as likely as not answer, ‘Oh, that’s too far ahead.’ She liked to see people, she explained, when she felt like them. She would ring him up now and again and say, ‘Are you doing anything for lunch today?’ More often than not, he would be. If he were, she would say, ‘Well, that’s too bad. Some other day perhaps you won’t be.’ If he were himself to make a suggestion, proposing the day after or the day following that, she would invariably make some excuse. But should he be disengaged, she would arrive smiling, friendly and affectionate.

Her love-making was happy, fresh and pagan, something to be accepted and enjoyed. He did not fancy she was promiscuous, though he might well have thought her so. One evening they had come back together after a theatre. It was late and cold and wet. There was no taxi on the rank. ‘Why don’t you stay the night here?’ he had asked.

‘It would be nice,’ she had said, ‘but it’s such a bore waking up in the morning where one’s things aren’t.’

He had no idea out of how general an experience that remark had sprung. One afternoon they had gone to a cinema together.

‘You noticed that aide-de-camp to the Emperor?’ she said. ‘He was exactly like the first man I had an affair with. I’ve often wondered,’ she added, ‘whether he ever realized that he was the first.’

He had no idea how much she cared for her fiancé in Malaya. They had not been lovers, he discovered. ‘You should begin a marriage as a marriage,’ she had said. He had no idea what he himself meant to her. He had remarked that to her once. ‘As long as you don’t start wondering that,’ she had said, ‘we’ll get along very happily together.’

Once they had been discussing the slight incident that can start a love-affair. ‘I liked you,’ she had said, ‘from the way you said “Hell! ” when that sailor trod on you.’

He had tried to visualize the background to her life; the large, semi-detached house in Boston Manor; with the daily flurry over the breakfast table; trains to be caught; newspapers to be glanced through; letters to be read; then the rushings to the station: the father to his office with the glass door and his name painted on the glass: the brother to his stool before a ledger: the sister to her typewriter and pad: Gwen to her lectures and her courses. Then in the evening round about half-past six there would be the return. In the summer there would be the hurried changing into flannels, the rushing off to this or the other tennis club. In the winter the huddling round a fire with the radio or the gramophone playing. Usually for at least one of the three there would be a changing into evening clothes and a return to London for a theatre or dance or dinner. Probably one at least would stay at home with the parents; perhaps a friend would drop in after dinner for a talk. There would be the week-ends with the probable visit in winter to a theatre or a local dance. In the afternoon the watching from the touchline of some football field the gallant exploits of a muddied friend. In the summer there would be picnics, punts on the river, tennis. That was the background of her life. But apart from that there were for all three the separate lives that made up their real lives. The lives kept, if not secret from their parents, at least apart from them: the separate lives to which latchkeys and the weekly wage had entitled them. A girl like Gwen would have the formal framework of her life, her home, her occupation, her parents, her relatives. But on that framework would be hung all manner of odd articles. Gordon was one of those articles. There were many others. There were the boys and young men who took her to watch football and dirt-track racing, who took her for drives in two-seaters and on the backs of motor-bicycles. There were the girls with whom she went to remnant sales, and after a lunch of two macaroons, a cup of chocolate and an ice, would go and watch Maurice Chevalier at the Plaza. Her life was full and varied.

She was a subscriber to Harrod’s library and read voraciously. She would read three novels a week, she said; less out of an interest in literature than a desire to be informed about the facts of life. Invariably she was interested to know about writers. She would say, ‘I’ve just been reading a novel by Rebecca West. Do you know her?’ She would listen attentively to his recital of such facts as he possessed about his contemporaries. ‘What a great number of people you seem to have met once,’ she said. Considerable though her interest in writers was, she had no wish to meet them. ‘I’m having a cocktail party,’ he told her once. ‘Do come. There’ll be some amusing people there.’ But she had shaken her head. ‘What should I find to say to them?’ she answered. No one that Gordon had ever met made fewer demands on him. She did not want to be taken out to places; she did not want to meet people. Such few presents as he made her she would have just as soon, he felt, not had. She was perfectly content, it seemed, to picnic light-heartedly in his flat, taking his books down from the shelves, turning the pages, borrowing them occasionally, asking questions, cooking an omelette, pattering about the flat in the Chinese pyjamas that were kept for her in a special section of his compactum wardrobe. ‘The only thing that would really annoy me,’ she said, ‘would be not to find them there.’

For three years now, during Gordon’s brief and periodic stays in London, the weeks had been few when he and Gwen had not had at least one picnic meal together. It was simple, and fresh and pagan, and lighthearted.

‘And this is the thing,’ he had sometimes thought, as he had watched her warming her back before the bedroom fire, or rolling herself up with the blankets into a blue cocoon, or lifting her toes above the water as she bathed, ‘this is the thing about which I, and so many others, have written “Modern Girl” articles in the Sunday papers.’ There was so much talk about it, so much shaking of heads and searching of hearts, and yet here it was. And it was neither very important nor particularly dramatic. There was nothing either way very much at stake. But it would have been impossible for him to have told how much of unalloyed happiness and sweetness Gwen had brought to him.

Their partings and their meetings had been unsentimental and undemonstrative. ‘Well, so long,’ she would say, on the eve of one or other of his trips. ‘Don’t write to me. Letters are a bore and I shouldn’t answer them. Just tell me when you get back.’ But he had never seen her trim figure turn round the corner of Tite Street without a little twinge of the heart lest it should be for the last time he should be so watching her.

By next morning the pressure of a return had begun to set its clasp on Gordon. By the time he had finished dressing at nine o’clock, he had, he knew, four very busy hours ahead of him. There was the fitting of a new suit at his tailor. There was the American consul’s witness to his signature to the lecture contract for the following spring. He wanted to go up to Lord’s to see what matches there were for him to sign against. There would be need of a net too, if he wasn’t going to be unbearably stiff after his first game.

‘I’ll leave you to look after everything, Mrs James,’ he said. ‘Put a bottle of Reisling upon ice.’

‘You can trust me, Mr Carruthers.’

So complete was his trust and confidence in her that it was close upon one o’clock before he fitted his key into the Yale lock.

His confidence had not been misplaced. In the minute, cabin-small dining-room with its Lynd Ward woodcuts set out on its cream white walls a glass salad-bowl was a green nest of colour. The long, slim neck of a hock bottle protruded from its steaming ice bucket. A china jar of caviare was set beside a bowl of strawberries. There were some things in pastry. It made an appetizing display. An electric heater had warmed the room. In the drawing-room a fire was burning brightly. On the yellow table by the window was arranged besides the cocktail shaker a dish of radishes, stuffed celery and olives. He had scarcely looked round the room before the bell rang sharply.

It was eight months since he had said good-bye to Gwen. But she came into the hall as though they had only seen each other yesterday. There was a bright, friendly, unconcerned expression on her face.

‘That’s a nice hat,’ he said.

It was felt, with a kind of three-cornered brim, and something feathered on the left-hand side.

‘I made it myself,’ she said. Then with a quick movement of her wrists, pulled it off, flung it on the chesterfield and shook out her hair. ‘I’m thinking of letting my hair grow long,’ she said.

‘I shouldn’t. If you did, you’ld never be able to toss your head like that.’

‘Maybe I won’t then.’

Walking over to the table she carefully scrutinized the plate of hors d’oeuvres.

‘Stuffed celery,’ she said. ‘I adore stuffed celery.’

As he shook her a cocktail she sat on the edge of a chair, swinging her leg and munching at the celery.

‘Now tell me,’ she said. ‘Was it fun?’

‘So much fun,’ he said, ‘that I’ll be able to write a whole book about it.’

‘There’s so much I want to ask you. Which film star did you like the best?’

‘I didn’t meet any film stars.’

‘But the paragraph in the Meteor said you’d been in California.’

‘Yes, but I wasn’t in Hollywood. I was farther north, at Pebble Beach.’

‘Oh, I see, not really in California. Did you meet any gangsters in New York?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘You just lived quietly, then. Were the skyscrapers really what they say?’

They were incredible, he told her. But he changed the subject. The traveller, when he returns, has very little to tell his friends. He has been among people they do not know, under conditions they can barely guess at. He can tell them little that would be of interest to them. Besides, he is much more interested to hear their news.

‘Tell me about this new house you’ve taken.’

‘Well, it’s like this—’

Her brother had found employment at ten pounds a week, a rise which had decided him to take a flat in London with two other men. The Stock market collapse having had its effect on such a luxury commodity as furniture, and her own stay at home in view of the ring on her left hand’s fourth finger being assumed to be brief, her parents had decided to accept the offer a land agent had made them for their house, and move into a smaller one.

‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘Now we’ll be able to afford a car.’

They were going to get a Ford to start with, she said. They were cheap to run, and you wouldn’t damage their works too much as you were learning to change gears. Gordon listened attentively. After his months in the South Seas and in America this talk of leases and economics, and strict planning of tomorrows, seemed as foreign as the French patois he had listened to in Martinique. He had moved so fast and far during the last five years that he had lost touch with a world in which people knew what they would be doing in five years’ time. In the tropics one year was so like another, one day so like another, that no one planned far ahead. In the New World, where everything was building and destruction, when you took short leases of apartments, when you were planning the sale of your car before you had completed your purchase of it, when the tall skyscrapers of one day were the rubbish heap of the next, no one knew where, or cared where, they would be tomorrow. To move quickly was all they asked. He was out of touch with a world of steady, calculated growth.

‘What have you been reading lately?’ she asked. ‘Did you like the new G. B. Stern?’

‘Debonair’ was very good, he thought.

‘But that’s not her latest. “Petrucchio’s” her latest.’

‘Is it? They can’t have published it over there then, yet.’

Nor had he read the latest Delafield, nor the latest Wells. Books were very often published in England before they were published in New York, he explained to her.

‘And I’d always thought America was ahead of the times in everything. But I’ve just read something that you’ll be certain to have read: “Spider Boy.” Did you meet Carl van Vechten?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘Do tell me what he’s like.’

Gordon hesitated. Directly and indirectly, a great deal of his amusement in New York had come to him through Fania and Carl van Vechten. Cosmopolitans with links in most of the capitals of Europe, they touched life at innumerable amusing points. And yet to explain that life, even to talk of it, to the English girl who sat on his green arm-chair, sipping her bronx and munching her stuffed celery, who pictured New York in terms of gangsters, of skyscrapers, of lavish entertainments at Long Island, of speakeasies where you might be blinded by wood alcohol at any moment, would be as hard as the attempt he had once made to explain what snow was like to a Tahitian. It was like seeing a stained-glass window from the outside.

On the bottom shelf of his cocktail table was a copy of ‘Peter Arno’s Parade.’ He handed it to her.

‘That’s what the half of New York is. Arno’s drawings and Ogden Nash’s verse.’

She turned the pages. A puzzled look came into her face.

‘I don’t know what a quarter of this is about,’ she said. It was the answer he had expected.

And the very fact that he knew three-quarters of what it was about marked the extent to which he had lost touch with her. He had been away so long that he had become a part of other lives: that other countries had become as real to him as his own. He suddenly had a lost feeling of belonging nowhere as he stood looking down at this so friendly, so pretty, so attractive girl, between himself and whom life seemed to have placed a barrier.

Slowly she turned the last page and then closed the book, laid it down behind her, finished her cocktail with a gulp, then rose to her feet with her eyes smiling.

‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘you haven’t kissed me yet.’

In novels he had read—in his own novels he had told—of how love dies between two people. Other things might come to take its place: respect, affection, comradeship, the sense of things shared and faced, but the impulse that in the face of reason, duty, loyalty, of the practical ordering of life drove two people into each other’s arms: that went, inevitably. So he had read, so he had written. But in his own life he had not found it so. The other things had gone: affection, respect, faith, belief in another’s truthfulness and courage; so that he had wondered whether the woman he had come to know and the woman he remembered were not foreign visitants of one face. They went; but that first need that had drawn him to her, that physical need for the touch and closeness of her: that remained. Whatever else went, that remained. That need went deeper, was rooted in something firmer than superimposed mental attributes. Fastidious, with an almost feminine reluctance to take the final step, Gordon had never known the death of physical attraction between himself and a once desired woman. As his arms went once again round Gwen’s young body, all his old need for her, all his old delight in her, returned.

That evening Gordon was giving a dinner party. It was his first party since his return. Stanley and his wife were coming. His sister and brother-in-law, and Vera Marsden. It was a very informal party. But as Gordon took his last look at the dining-room table to see that everything was in order: the flowers arranged; the glasses set out; the champagne on ice; the port decanted; he could not help comparing the actual formality that accompanied such an evening in London, and the lack of it that would have attended a far more stage-managed evening in New York. In New York, had he been giving a dinner party for six people, he would have invited them to the Chatham at any time after seven. We might as well change, he’ld say. We may want to dance afterwards. He would ring up room service and order a dish of savoury canapés; he would look into the frigidaire to see if there was a store of ginger ale, white rock and orange juice. His bootlegger would have seen to his supply of gin and bourbon. He would not worry about anything more. If one of his guests was a girl, for whom he had invited no particular beau, in all probability he would go and fetch her: that is, if he could rely on her punctuality. He would expect, anyhow, to be back by five minutes to seven to mix his cocktails, a combination probably of grapefruit juice and gin; and to see that the canapés savouries had arrived.

His guests would arrive at any time between seven and half-past. They would not apologize for being late. They would know that there would be no thought of moving towards dinner till after eight. There would be an hour or so of canapés and cocktails before Gordon would suggest that it was time to move out to dinner, and in his suggestion would be implied a discussion of where they should go to dine. In London, where the majority of entertaining takes place in private houses, Gordon himself had, during the last four years, not dined in more than a dozen restaurants. But in New York, where speakeasies rose, flowered, and moved on, everyone would have some suggestion about a swell place that’s just opened on Forty-third Street. They would discuss the various alternatives for several minutes, and then when ultimately they had arrived, when the various formalities of door-tapping, of peerings behind grated windows, of card presentations, had been accomplished, there was the informal atmosphere of everyone having a menu handed to them; of everyone choosing a different dish; of every dish arriving at different times; with a discussion breaking out before the coffee was finished as to where they should go on afterwards.

That was the kind of party that Gordon would have given in New York. In London everything was at the same time much simpler and more elaborate. There would be no question of going anywhere afterwards; not, anyhow, before eleven. His guests would be invited for eight. He did not expect the latest to arrive after a quarter past. At a speakeasy one dined usually off a tomato-juice cocktail and one main dish. In his flat Gordon had arranged a four-course dinner. In a bachelor New York apartment the door was opened, if not by the host, by a coloured maid from Harlem. In Cheyne Place he had arranged that James, who had once worked as a butler with Mrs James, should attend to his guests’ needs. There was nothing impromptu about the evening. The only equivalent for his New York habit of calling for an unattended girl would be Vera Marsden’s habit of instructing James to pay her taxi. It was a habit that had from the first impressed Mrs James considerably. She respected it as an Edwardian survival. ‘You can tell that Miss Marsden is a real lady,’ had been her comment.

Vera was the first of Gordon’s guests to arrive.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve told James to pay the taxi. You don’t mind, do you? I’ve no change.’

She was in the middle twenties, fair-haired, blue-eyed, pretty, expensively and untidily produced. For four years between her and Gordon had existed an affectionate brother and sister camaraderie, which left Gordon at the end of it, in spite of the exchange of many confidences, as much in the dark as he had been in the beginning as to what exactly constituted her life. She was, he supposed, ‘the modern girl’ of the Sunday press; though anything less like Gwen, who was also the modern girl of the Sunday press, it would be hard to picture. Her parents were vaguely county and lived in Warwickshire. She herself had for six years been a periodic member of London’s social Bohemia. She had done most things, been to most places, seen most things. She had been a mannequin at Poiret’s; a paragraphist on the Express. She had written short stories for the Tatler. She had taken a minor part in a Lonsdale comedy. She was in no place nor in any job for any length of time. When she was in funds, which might mean the arrangement of a reversion, a legacy from an aunt, the sale of a short story, or a sequence of dress shows, she would be giving cocktail parties in a furnished flat in Hanover Square. When things were going less well, she would be forlornly inhabiting a dingy women’s club in Grafton Street. For long periods she would disappear altogether. Postcards would arrive from Berlin or Cannes, or Budapest. It was assumed during her periods of hibernation that she was being, in her phrase, ‘cherished’ by relatives or friends. Gordon never understood how she arranged her life; where her money came from; what her ambitions were; what her future was. She had a number of men friends. She was never in one place for any length of time. If she had love affairs, she was discreet about them. She had brains, she had charm, and she was popular. But she made no attempt to exploit her charm and talent. She was as likely to ignore a profitable friendship as encourage a worthless one. She would dress with more care for the ‘Blue Lantern’ than for Ascot.

She arrived in a fluster of words and welcome.

‘Gordon darling; how lovely to have you back! And how thin they’ve made you. I’m thin, too, don’t you think? I’ve been down to that place near Tring where they feed you on nothing but orange juice. I was so afraid it would bring me out in spots. It did Tony Merchan. He explained that it was working the poison out. I said that in that case I’ld prefer to keep it in. I do look well, don’t I? Now I’m going to the Cap to get myself burnt a lovely brown. Who’s coming this evening? Your sister? Oh, I am so glad. I adore Julia. The Stanleys, too? I sent Mr Stanley a short story of mine the other day. He told me he thought I could sell it more easily myself. Which I did. To the Tatler. For twenty guineas. Wasn’t that silly of Mr Stanley? If he’d sent it there himself, he could have given me a lunch with the commission.’

She was still talking when the Stanleys arrived. Stanley, very composed and elegant in an evening suit that gave you the impression that though it had been ordered that season, its owner was in the habit of wearing it every other night; and his wife, light-haired, grey-eyed, in a grey-black frock.

The monologue was still in progress when Gordon’s sister and his brother-in-law arrived. It was the first time he had seen his sister since his return.

‘Dear Gordon,’ she said, ‘I’m so happy. Now I do hope we’re going to be able to persuade you to make a really long stay over here this time.’

There was a maternal note in her voice. Although she was by eighteen months Gordon’s junior, she always gave him the impression of being his senior. She always seemed to be in the position, which she was, in fact, so anxious to fill, of being able to arrange his life for him. Indeed, in spite of her prettiness, her slimness, the lightness of her movements, she looked older than Gordon did. Although her life was a constant rushing from one flat to another, from one country to another, she had a settled feeling: as though in her marriage she was self-fulfilled: as though she had ceased to be potential: as though that were the achievement she had been born for.

Her husband was some eight years older. Where most people nowadays suffer from an inferiority complex, he possessed—it could not be said that he suffered from—a superiority complex. Where so many aristocrats feel constrained to apologize for titles and possessions they have not personally acquired, Lord Haystack accepted unconditionally the inherent prerogatives of the feudal system. It did not occur to him that any commoner or owner of a recently acquired title would question his superiority to them. In consequence, he enjoyed a complete absence of self-consciousness. He treated all men as his equals, because he did not recognize the various degrees of inferiority that classified his inferiors. He met them on the same terms of equality with which a master will accept his valet. He accepted everyone for what they were intrinsically worth. As a result, his judgments of men were sound. He was urbane, generous, open-hearted. His relations with Gordon were affectionate. He respected Gordon’s talent and enjoyed his society. He would have been horrified if a sister of his had betrayed an inclination to marry Gordon, for while a man may marry beneath him, a woman can’t. But luckily, both his sisters being married, there was no likelihood of such an eventuality. Tall, athletic, with a long cavalry moustache, and a tendency to adenoids that made his conversation slightly inaudible, he was a man who was invariably liked instinctively and lastingly.

The five people who stood chatting away the quart d’heure which cocktails had long since robbed of its embarrassment, were, in fact, the five of whom in London Gordon was the fondest. Grace Stanley was almost as old a friend of Gordon’s as her husband. Gordon had indeed been at the dinner party eleven years back at which she and Stanley had met each other. It had been at W. L. George’s, on a night of fog. The telephone had been out of order. They had gone searching for a taxi together through inhospitable streets. It was such a party as Gordon, during his months of travel had pictured himself as giving. On liners, on tropic beaches, on the long continental train as it rattled its way across Salt Lake, he had often thought of the first dinner party he would have on his return to London, with those five people as his guests if he could so arrange it. But now, with the party actually a fact, with himself sitting at the head of his narrow table; with Grace Stanley on his right hand and Vera Marsden on his left; with the amber wine bubbling in the long-stemmed glasses and the grey-black cones of caviare piled beside the soft warm squares of toast upon their plates; with Vera Marsden chattering and laughing, her sentences tumbling over one another; with Stanley’s wit, that had the dry, cool, clear, rich quality of Rhine wine, punctuating her; with Haystack periodically interposing his slow, nasally-mumbled comments; with an atmosphere of friendliness and affection round him, he had a feeling of being out of tune; the same feeling he had that afternoon with Gwen; the same feeling that he had had very often in New York when incidents and personalities that he was ignorant of were being discussed. It was not that he had minded his inability to take part in the conversations; he preferred listening to talking, and would often think when the talk was general: ‘Heavens, I’ve not said anything for five minutes. I’m being a bad guest. I’m not pulling my weight here.’ One of the reasons, indeed, that he preferred his own parties to other people’s was that there was no need for him to talk unless the conversation was flagging or one of his guests was silent. But in New York the fact that he had not known the people and events under discussion had produced the same kind of strain that conversation in French imposed. He had to listen with an extra measure of attention to follow the thread of talk, and should he once lose the thread the effort to recapture it was considerable. To his surprise he was experiencing the same sensation in London, in his own flat, in the company of his five closest friends. He was out of the talk. It was not that he did not know the people that were being discussed. He did. Practically every time. But the events that were being discussed in relation to them were strange. He felt himself the whole time wanting to say: ‘Now, what’s that about?’ ‘I don’t follow that.’ ‘What are you referring to exactly?’ Questions that he did not put since they would have broken the current of the talk. ‘I’ve lost touch,’ he thought. ‘I’ve been away too long.’

He felt lost, here among his oldest, closest friends. But even as he thought it, there was Grace Stanley turning to him.

‘You’ve told us nothing about yourself, Gordon,’ she was saying. ‘Have you been having hundreds of adventures?’

For a moment he wondered whether Stanley had mentioned the cablegram signed ‘Faith.’ Then knew that it was foolish of him to have wondered. Stanley was an inscrutable depository of secrets.

‘It’s less important than what he’s going to do now,’ said Julia. ‘You are going to stay over here a nice long time now, aren’t you?’

‘Till February, anyhow,’ said Gordon.

He was going into the country quietly for a little to get a novel started.

‘What kind of novel?’ Julia asked.

‘A Modern Girl novel.’ Then there would be the cricket. A few club matches round London, then an M.C.C. tour in the West. After that he would get busy on his book again.

‘I’ll probably do what I used to do,’ he said. ‘Spend the week-ends in London and go down quietly to Shenley and work during the middle four days of the week.’

By December his novel should be finished. In February his lecture tour in America would start.

‘And that,’ said Haystack, ‘sounds a pretty pleasant programme.’

Which it was, of course, and Gordon knew it to be. Writing imposes a greater nervous strain than most kinds of work. The profession of writing is uncertain. The temptations it offers are numerous. But the rewards of it are many. Apart altogether from the actual feeling of completion, of self-fulfilment that writing brought, there was no profession which allowed such freedom. He would consider himself during the next six months to be extremely hard at work. Yet three days of every week would be devoted to amusement, and four clear weeks of cricket would be found room for there. It was a pleasant life, a pleasant programme. But to Gordon, fretted by the feeling of being home, yet not where he belonged, the word ‘pleasant’ seemed the least satisfactory label for a life. It was well enough, of course, to play cricket and give dinner parties; to travel and form such rapid impressions of countries as a reviewer did of the books he skimmed through; to write novels describing how the modern girl felt when a man asked her to have dinner at his flat alone, and to have girls saying to him afterwards: ‘I can’t think how you know so exactly what a woman feels.’ It was well enough. But there should be more, surely, to life than that. There was something, surely, that he had had a glimpse of once, as he had stood on a balcony, looking over a green garden to a brown river and wooded banks with the sound of church bells in his ears. He had had a glimpse of something that was more than pleasantness. He had glimpsed it and mislaid it somewhere.

It was as he was thinking that, that the telephone bell began to ring in the next room. A moment later James was bending at his side.

‘It’s the American Transatlantic Service, sir. They want to know if you’ll accept a call from New York at half-past ten.’

‘From New York? Whoever from?’

‘Mrs Roger Sweden.’

‘Mrs Roger Sweden!’ he echoed the name, startled. Then nodded his head quickly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Tell them that it’ll be all right, James.’

At the other end of the table a discussion of the cricket championship had started. He scarcely heard it. That Faith should have rung him up! In heaven’s name, what could have happened to make her do that? What could be wrong? Had her husband been making difficulties. What was there for him to make difficulties about? That cable? It was eight days old. Letters? He hadn’t written to her. She had insisted upon that.

‘Letters are unlucky things. They get misread. They are written in one mood and read in another. One searches for meanings that were never there. Besides, I can’t write. You should know that.’

She wrote left-handed: drawing the pen towards her, with the paper pointed west to east. When she went into banks and turned the cheque round, the cashier would never believe she was going to sign in the right place.

‘I can’t write letters, and you shan’t,’ she had said. ‘This isn’t going to be one-sided. We’ll just cable each other now and then. Then we can begin where we left off.’

There were no letters to be discovered. What was it then that could be wrong? Was she ill? Was she in trouble? In what trouble could she be? ‘In forty minutes,’ he thought, ‘I shall hear her voice.’ He wondered what time it would be there. Four hours earlier. Five o’clock about. She would be at tea somewhere, or at a cocktail party. She would glance at her watch, thinking: ‘I must leave in a minute or two for that call.’ Or maybe she was in the country, at Hyde Park, sitting on the porch, looking out over the green and gold of the garden, with all that wealth of beauty spread before her, and in her heart despair over some grief that she wished to share with him. Interminably the evening took its course. The women rose to leave the men alone to their cigars and brandy. Quarter of an hour later there was a re-grouping round the fireplace. It looked very cosy, with one lamp lit on the yellow table, with the fire-light flickering on to the leather and cloth bindings of the two high sets of shelves; and the women in their soft loose dresses. It was such an evening as he had upon his travels often dreamed of. But he was far less there actually than he had been when he had been many miles away. Though he sat at Grace Stanley’s side, talking of books and friends, his thoughts were beside a slow-voiced woman who was waiting three thousand miles away to talk to him.

At ten James brought in a tray of drinks. Gin and whisky, ginger-beer and ice and soda-water. In America, where gin cost three dollars and whisky eight dollars a quart, gin—although it was more likely to be pure—was considered a sordid drink, and the girl who was fed gin was inclined to think a man a tight-wad. In London, where gin was as expensive as whisky, women when they did drink anything after dinner, as often as not, preferred it. Julia and Grace asked for gin and ginger-beer. Vera drank ginger-beer alone.

In twenty-five minutes he would know. Never had the passing of any period of time appeared so endless. But it was in less than that time that the bell began to ring. It was the warning signal. Was he ready for the call to come? Yes, he was ready. Would he wait by the telephone then? There was a minute’s delay. He sat on his chair, staring at the steel instrument that in a moment would have been transmuted marvellously into a living presence. And there, three thousand miles away, was a woman waiting as he was waiting. The bell rang again. Eagerly he caught up the receiver. But it was a man’s voice that answered him. Atmospheric conditions were unfavourable, it was explained. In a moment or two he would be rung up again.

It might be three minutes. It might be thirteen. But Gordon could not, in that atmosphere of suspense, go back into the other room; play the host, enter into impersonal conversation. He remained seated in the chair beside the telephone.

On the table beside it was placed a small pile of letters. It was the evening’s post. He picked it up, sorting out the envelopes. Two of them bore an American post mark. They were typewritten. One from Columbus and another from Atlanta, Georgia. They were requests for autographs. There was a note from his bank saying that his account appeared to be overdrawn. There was a statement from Stanley, showing that some seventy-odd pounds would be paid into his bank next day. There was a card for an exhibition of pictures at the Leicester Galleries. There was a card from Lord’s, stating that he had been chosen for the Wessex Tour; and that the first match was in the first week in August.

Looking at the card it seemed as though it had been someone in another existence who had been so anxious to be selected for that tour. With the same detachment that he had talked in the drawing-room a few moments back, he pictured the happiness of those carefree cricket days when you woke to sunshine and the sound of birds. When you came down in flannels to your breakfast to be greeted there by the half-dozen or so other members of the side who were staying at the same hotel; to loiter afterwards over the morning papers; then at about half-past ten or so to motor out through country that contained the heart of England, to grounds that symbolized all that was best in England, to the game that of all others was an expression of England’s spirit. There would be leisure there, and friendliness, and honest effort. And at the end of the day there would be tired limbs and quiet, casual talk, and a long early-taken sleep. He saw it clearly, as one sees on the screen the life of another person. At his side the telephone bell rang again. Was he there? it asked. The call was just coming through. Would he hold the line? There was silence, then a queer buzzing. Then a masculine voice saying, ‘Now then, now you’re through.’ A pause. Then the masculine voice again. ‘You’ve started. Talk to one another.’ Then, as he himself said ‘Hullo!’ he heard the slow, drawled voice, faint but clear, coming through to him:

‘Gordon is that you?’

‘Yes, it’s me. What happened?’

‘Nothing, Gordon. Why?’

‘But your ringing up—’

‘I just wanted to hear your voice. It’s been so long and you’re so far. Say something, Gordon.’

He had so much to say that he could not think of anything to say.

‘It’s been raining all the afternoon,’ he said.

‘It hasn’t here. I’m in the country. I’ve just motored down. I suppose you’ve finished dinner?’

‘Two hours ago.’

‘Isn’t that funny? I’m just going to have mine. I’m feeling so hungry. Don’t you wish you did?’

‘I had such nice champagne with mine.’

‘And I shall be drinking water.’

‘I’ll feel so sorry for you.’

‘But we’ll be drinking lots of beautiful champagne together at Cap Ferrat. When are you going down there?’

‘I’m not certain yet.’

‘But you must hurry. We’ll get in on the first week in August, and you’ll have to find out all the amusing places for me.’

‘I’ll see you come sailing past Nice into the bay.’

‘I’ll be wearing a green scarf so that you’ll recognize me.’

‘I wish it were tomorrow.’

She laughed: across the Atlantic he could hear the gold in it.

‘Will it be very hot there, do you think?’

‘Very.’

‘I’ll get lots of light frocks, then. Have you missed me much?’

‘Terribly!’

‘Will you be glad to see me, very glad?’

‘Don’t you think I shall?’

‘Oh, Gordon! Now I must go and eat.’

‘And I must look after my guests.’

‘I just had to hear your absurd voice first. Good night.’

There was a click, a buzz, iron was iron once again.

She had rung up over three thousand miles to hear his voice! A moment ago she had been in this room talking to him. Now she was in a room that looked out over a green garden. She had taken him with her though. An hour earlier he had the feeling of belonging nowhere. He knew better now. Wherever she was, he belonged.

He stared at the instrument that had been her voice. Then at the black and white card in his hand. ‘V. Bridport—August 2nd,’ he read, ‘11.30.’

But on August 2nd he would be at Villefranche watching from Mont Boron the white prow of the Conte Grande swinging round into the bay.