RICHARD FOUND A room outside Blentley for twenty-five shillings a week, which sum covered his meals and baths. It was in a little new bungalow, jerry-built and decorated in shades of beige and biscuit and brown, and furnished with mass-produced furniture and crockery in mean designs. None of the inanimate objects in the house were older than three years and the combined ages of its inhabitants, Richard and his landlady and her two little boys, added up to only sixty-four years, but this did not make for gaiety and a careless youthful atmosphere, as the little boys were very little and unnaturally good and given to catching colds and adding unbearably to the burden already carried by their mother, who was also little, and very meek and timid and good, and only lived for the postman’s daily visit which might bring a letter from Daddy away in the Middle East.
Richard had begun with the intention of having no social intercourse with his landlady, but the kind heart he had inherited from his mother and his own detached yet passionate interest in human beings as social units soon did away with that plan, and he found himself inquiring after the boys’ colds and bringing home friars balsam and camphorated oil in his pockets when their mother could not leave the house, and making comforting remarks when there had been a long gap without letters from the Middle East and she went about looking like a miserable little ghost. Neither she nor her boys ever made demands on Mr. Marten’s time and patience: they were so polite, so patient and good and quiet, they wanted so little to make their dim, peaky faces light up, that they completely won Richard’s head and heart, and slowly he began to return, with feelings of mingled shame and relief, to the first love that had filled his life before he met Vartouhi—the love of ordinary, helpless people all over the world.
Romantic love had seemed to him, before he fell a victim to it himself, a sort of beautiful bane—
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers;
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers,
and he had disliked the thought of it, just as he disliked a romantic attitude towards politics, and leaders, and religion. When he fell romantically in love he had therefore been surprised at himself, and this surprise helped him to keep a part of his mind detached from his own sufferings. Knowing that Vartouhi could never play an orderly part in that “blue-print” which he had drawn up for his life, he had known that he must either try to marry her and thereafter submit to a lifelong enchantment and an unending domination of his higher impulses, or else he must run away. He had seen more than one man bound body and mind to sorceresses; women without scruples or reason, possessing the immeasurably ancient power which may be called Eve. It was a rare type nowadays, and so rare among Englishwomen as to be practically non-existent, and it was his bad luck that he should have encountered a foreigner who was dowered with Eve in excess. He knew that he had been right to run away.
If I had had more physical strength, and had been vital and ambitious, so that I was capable of dragging her along and doing my work too, I might have married her and subdued her, he sometimes thought, but I have only one lung and a vast amount of work to get through in the next fifty years and it’s a bore, subduing people. And his reflections always ended with the bitter thought: she wouldn’t have me, anyway.
But gradually, as the quiet winter days went on with their routine of work and meals and long walks, he began to feel healed. The drabness and etiolation of the little house did not get on his nerves because, in spite of his physical delicacy, his nerves were healthy and his tastes were not those of an ivory-tower dweller. His landlady liked (loved was too strong a word to use of such a dim little person) her triangular teacups and her fumed oak furniture, and to the little boys and the absent soldier-father it meant Home, and Richard was not one to shudder aesthetically over what contented ordinary people. He could escape, if he wanted to, by looking at one of the many hundreds of pictures in his memory: a garden in Spain with azure tiles set in its brown walls and its colonnade, wreathed in budding vines, opening on a pool fringed with white and yellow iris; a swelling brown field in Sussex with a mass of golden young oak trees springing out of it. He could whistle “Tell me, fair ladies,” or murmur the verse about “The shepherds on the lawn” from the “Ode on the Nativity.” Kingdoms of the mind; they could not provide all that the heart desired but they could provide one kind of freedom.
He neither grieved because his landlady had not had his opportunities nor deplored the fact that she liked her anaemic bungalow. Let us get everybody properly fed first, he thought always, impatiently, and then, when the vitality of the peoples rises, so will their taste for rich strong beauty in all the arts, including those of everyday living.
He lived like a peaceful hermit for nearly a month. January had come, with snow and violets, and nearly gone, and he delivered his first lecture at the European Reconstruction Council’s training school. It dealt with the degree of industrialization reached by the States of the Danube Basin up to 1939, and was a success; that is, his fellow lecturers and teachers praised it and the people who were there to learn from it, did learn. He had the supremely satisfying experience of working hard and seeing his finished labours perform the task they were meant to do. He was also well paid for his work and that was very pleasant too. He sent half of his first cheque to the Spanish Republican Internees Comforts Fund and paid his mother back three pounds that he owed her. And he meditated—for he was no anchorite by temperament and disliked a life without feminine society—writing to Alicia Arkwright to suggest that they should lunch in London and go to a film together—“and I shall warn her that it must be inexpensively,” thought Richard.
Alicia was having a dreary New Year. The man she had met at the party had been sent out of England on a Government job and she was temporarily without anyone regular to kiss, while even her excellent health had broken down under the daily journey to the factory in a freezing bus full of coughing women, and she had had a heavy cold. She stayed away from the factory for a day or two, sitting up in bed in a snow-white fluffy jacket tied at the throat with red velvet ribbons, her dark hair caught up with a childish bow of the same ribbon on top of her head, and every morning her father, who was fond of her, came in and inquired, while folding his newspaper, did she want anything from Town—though Heaven knew that there wasn’t much to be had even if she did. She usually gave him some small commission, for he was a man who enjoyed spending money on women and his daughter thought this a trait to be encouraged. Then he would go off in the car that he was still allowed to run because he was head of a firm fulfilling very large Government contracts, and Alicia would be left alone, to read and blow her nose and stare out of the window at the garden under melting snow. In a lowered state, with time on her hands, she not unnaturally indulged in gloomy reflections about being twenty-eight next July and having no plans and not much hope for the future, and so on and so forth, and even wrote a depressed letter to her best friend, Crys, another tall cool girl like herself, with a commission in the W.R.N.S. Crys’s consolatory letter arrived by the same post as Richard’s invitation to go to London and see a film, and she was ridiculously pleased to hear from him, and at once wrote to explain why she could not come, ending with an inquiry as to why he always wrote letters, the telephone had been invented about 1890, or thereabouts, she believed.
“I dislike the telephone,” he wrote back on a post card of Milan Cathedral, “and never use it unless I cannot avoid doing so. I am sorry you have a cold and I will write to you again in a fortnight to see if you can come then.” The post card was signed “Yours affectionately, Richard.”
“‘Affectionately’!” exclaimed Alicia, throwing the post card down on the bed, “what a way to sign oneself! Just like Mash.” (Mash was the old governess of her childhood.) She picked the post card up again and after studying it severely, tore it in pieces. “But that’s rather how I feel about him—‘affectionately.’ He’s the sort of odd old thing you do feel affectionate about.”
With which serene piece of self-deception, she picked up Vogue and became absorbed in it.
Meanwhile, what was happening in that forcing-house of the passions, Sunglades?
Everybody was relieved when the holiday ended and they could return to their normal avocations, and the spirits of Miss Fielding were further lightened by the departure of her father for London, with hints that he would probably not return for at least a fortnight, if at all; he would let them know. But her rejoicing was of short duration, for he returned in three days, more depressed than she had ever seen him, and it became alarmingly clear after he had been back a few hours that the cause of his depression was that he missed Betty. He cheered up wonderfully when she came in from the Ministry about seven o’clock, and Miss Fielding’s heart sank to zero when he announced, sparkling and joking his way through dinner, that they must make up their minds to seeing a great deal of him in future—a very great deal.
“Thinking of settling down here again, Father?” said Kenneth, who was also in excellent spirits, and had been so ever since he had visited London earlier in the week. Everybody, indeed, was cheerful except Miss Fielding. Betty was always cheerful, and Vartouhi was all smiles because she had had such a pretty necklace made of gold filigree beads and red jewels from her sister in America. She had met the postman in the lane that morning on her way into St. Alberics, and he had given her the parcel. It was quite a handsome present and must have cost at least ten dollars, perhaps more, in Miss Fielding’s estimation. Vartouhi was a lucky girl! three hats, and a bracelet, and scent! and now this charming necklace whose deep red and gold glowed against her smooth throat. No wonder her long eyes gleamed with delight.
“Ah—yes—well, perhaps, perhaps,” said Mr. Fielding, smiling and twinkling mysteriously and nodding at Betty, whose private reaction was Mercy on us! “It depends; it depends.”
Miss Fielding heard this with feelings close to despair. What! settle down again near St. Alberics, and spend the remainder of his days—and he was sure to live to ninety-odd ; not that, of course, she wanted anything to happen to him—popping in and out of Sunglades borrowing money from Kenneth and upsetting him by his bad example? Reviving scandalous memories in the minds of all the old friends and neighbours; perhaps marrying some highly unsuitable person years and years younger than himself—good heavens! perhaps marrying Betty! He looked at her as if he was going to propose that very evening ; and all Miss Fielding’s possessive instincts rose in fury at the thought. Why should he, who had caused Our Mother so much worry and distress (even Miss Fielding could not pretend that Our Mother had been broken-hearted over his departure), why should he, at the very end of his misspent life, settle down with a shallow frivolous woman like Betty who took no interest in world problems and had led an almost useless existence? Our Mother’s memory would be profaned by such a marriage, and Kenneth encouraged thereby to make a fool of himself in every direction. And what would they live on? Father had been practically penniless when he arrived at Christmas, Kenneth said. It would mean continual loans; perhaps even a settled quarterly allowance; endless complications. And above all there was the indecency, the sheer inappropriateness, of remarriage at seventy-eight. There might even be a paragraph in the Evening Standard about it. Miss Fielding’s face was red with rage as she cut up her corned-beef pudding.
There was no more talk of his going away again. In the middle of January he spent a day in London and came back very pleased with himself and assured Kenneth that his loan was in a fair way to be repaid very shortly with interest, and he brought chocolates for Vartouhi and an enormous bunch of sweet pale violets for Betty and a large cake for Miss Fielding and Miss Burton. The latter was touched, and her heart was won. He’s a dear old man, she thought, as she sat at the piano playing My Love had a Silver Ring in the firelight, and I like having him here. How disagreeable Connie is, always trying to stop people from enjoying life and having an easy time if they want to. Heaven knows there’s enough misery in the world—and what does it matter if he does propose to Betty? I’m sure she won’t have him.
And she went into the next room to take a refreshing peep at Vartouhi’s beautiful bedspread, which was half-finished and by now very beautiful indeed; gorgeously, dazzlingly so. Vartouhi still came up for two or three evenings in the week to work at it. She had been slightly subdued ever since Christmas, and Miss Burton was amused, but rather disturbed, to learn that she found the house duller now that Richard had gone away.
“You’re like ‘Barbara Allan,’” said Miss Burton disapprovingly.
“Who is that, Miss Burton, please?”
“Oh, a girl in an old song. First she let the young man die for love of her and then when he was dead she made a dreadful fuss and ended by dying herself from remorse.”
“What is re-morse, please?”
“Being sorry you’ve been naughty.”
“I am not sorry, Miss Burton, because I have not been naughty to Rich-ard.”
“Well, I think you were, very unkind and naughty, but never mind that now. I thought you’d miss him when once he had gone.”
“Is no one to look at me with love now, Miss Burton.”
The Usurper laughed.
“Is a nice feeling to have a man want marry you, Miss Burton. Though you say ‘no, no,’ is a nice feeling.”
“I quite agree, Vartouhi.”
“I think I will go and see Rich-ard in his new house?” She glanced up innocently at Miss Burton, who looked as severe as she could.
“Now you don’t want to do that, Vartouhi!—digging him up just when he’s probably getting over it.”
“Is a kind thing to do,” said Vartouhi, embroidering busily. “He is lonely, perhaps.”
“Not at all,” said Miss Burton vigorously. “His mother saw him yesterday and she says he seems perfectly comfortable in his lodgings and likes the work very much.”
“He has forget me, all,” said Vartouhi, and giggled.
“A very good thing too.”
“All the same, Miss Burton, perhaps I shall go,” said Vartouhi, and smilingly fingered her necklace.
Miss Burton, who had definite plans of her own for Vartouhi’s future, hoped sincerely that she would not go, but was powerless to stop her if she meant to, except by giving advice. She was most anxious that Vartouhi should not see Richard alone in doubtless comfortless lodgings; the girl’s charm would glow with more than its usual power in such surroundings and was almost certain to revive his passion for her, while she would see him, pale and moved and an exile for her sake, and perhaps her heart would be touched at last. And then what becomes of all my fine schemes? thought Miss Burton. What a wicked little thing she can be!—but only where men are concerned. She is a good, loyal, kind little girl to me and Betty and even to Connie.
Oh dear, I do hope she won’t go.
But on a Saturday morning towards the end of January, a mild wet day when the country seemed as colourless as it could be, Vartouhi walked to Blentley and knocked at the door of the bungalow where Richard lived. One of her three hats, a brown one with a feather, was arranged right on the back of her head like the hat of a lady she had seen in a woman’s paper brought into the house by Betty, and she wore her necklace outside her old tweed coat and had bare legs and heavy shoes. Richard’s landlady opened the door and looked at her with mild interrogation on her small face.
“Is Mr. Marten live here?” asked Vartouhi with her most sparkling smile. (What a small house! and so brown!)
“Yes,” said the woman, staring. She was fascinated by this visitor, who would have looked striking even in conventional clothes and was doubly so in the blend of shabby garments with surprising hats and jewellery that her circumstances and taste compelled her to adopt.
“He is in the house?”
“Oh yes. But he’s just going out. Did you want to see him?”
“Yas, please.”
“I’ll just go and tell him, if you’ll step inside.”
Vartouhi did so, looking with lively scorn at the furniture and walls. Brown, all brown! Is like the inside of a parcel.
She heard voices, and Richard’s tones sounding surprised, and a moment later his tall form came out into the hall, stooping towards her. He was in his overcoat and was evidently just going out.
“Oh——” he said, stopping short, “it’s you—Vartouhi, I mean. This is—this is a surprise,” he ended, very coldly. “I thought it might be Miss Arkwright. I’m meeting her in town. Er—won’t you come in?”
He stood aside, and she sauntered past him into the room. To her it seemed all brown, like the rest of this stuffy little house, and quiet and chilly, with not much light in it from the small windows. Papers and books were scattered on a table.
Vartouhi turned to smile at him as he followed her into the room. There was silence for a moment.
“Er—have you a message from my mother or Miss Fielding?” he asked courteously, looking down on the odd enchanting little figure from his great height. All his pain revived at the sight of her. He recognized with resignation that he was not so healed as he had hoped.
“Oh no, Rich-ard. I come to see you. I am thinking you are lonely perhaps so I am coming to see you and cheer you up, too also.”
“That’s very kind of you,” he answered with perfect gentleness and no trace of irony; all the same, Vartouhi knew that she was most deeply unwelcome. She smiled impudently and moved her shoulders but just for a moment she could not think of anything to say. She had hoped that he would look at her with that pleading which had so often pleased her vanity at Sunglades, but his eyes were only friendly and calm.
“You do not want marry me any more?” suddenly demanded Vartouhi, sitting down on a chair and gazing up at hint while clutching at her hat, which nearly fell off the back of her head with the abruptness of. the movement.
He shook his head. He simply could not think of words in which to answer her. Had she come to say that she would have him after all? God forbid! and yet——
“You sure, Rich-ard, you do not want marry me any more?” she repeated, looking at him with narrowed eyes.
He found his voice.
“I’ve decided it wouldn’t do, Vartouhi, even if you would have me.”
“I thought you do not want any more, Rich-ard. When I see how you look at me, I thought it.” He could not tell from her tone what she was feeling, but he hoped that she was wounded by his apparent indifference. He said still more calmly:
“Why do you ask? You didn’t—come to tell me you’ve changed your mind, did you?”
“No, no, Rich-ard!” cried Vartouhi, bursting into giggles. “But I like to have a man want marry me, though I say I will not marry him, no. So I come to see if you still want.”
“Typical,” murmured Richard, gazing at her pensively and thinking how a less intelligent young man than himself might have sneered something about “making sure the moth was still on the pin.”
“Please?”
“It’s all right—nothing. Well, I’m still in love with you, even if I don’t want to marry you. Does that make up at all for the disappointment?”
“You still are loving me, Rich-ard?”
He nodded, looking down at her.
“Is a good thing,” said Vartouhi cheerfully, getting up from her chair and rearranging the hat. “You are going to London now?”
“Yes—and I must go or I shall miss the bus.”
“To see Miss Arkwright?”
“Yes.”
“You like her?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Is a horrid girl,” said Vartouhi vehemently. “She has two fur coat. Is bad in war-time.”
He burst out laughing and made his shepherding movement of driving her out of the room. “Go on with you—you’re hopeless. The Barbarian in Our Midst. Miss Arkwright is charming and you’re jealous.”
“I am not—I am not! I do not care you see her at all!”
“Oh, not jealous of me, jealous of the two fur coats.”
“Is a bad wicked thing in war-time,” she said obstinately, going in front of him down the hall.
He shut the front door behind them.
“Is my day off,” explained Vartouhi sunnily, walking beside him down the road, “so I come in the bus with you—so far as St. Alberics.”
“That will be delightful; thank you,” he said with irony.
He had expected to be a little embarrassed in the bus by the attention which Vartouhi’s unusual appearance and queer English would inevitably attract, but he was surprised—and his passion for her was increased—by the sober air she at once assumed, which eclipsed her personality and presented only a faintly smiling courteous mask to her fellow passengers. It was the first time he had ever been with her in a public place and he found the experience interesting as well as painfully delightful. Of course, he thought, watching her as she sat opposite to him gazing politely out of the window, she comes of a race famous for concealing their feelings under their good manners. It’s only because she has got to feel familiar with me by living under the same roof with me for six months that she tells me the truth—how polite she was to me that first day, when she carried my rucksack! If only she had been really like that! courteous, gay, with a heart growing steadily sweeter as it unfolded. But it makes no difference, blast it. Have I only been in love with her for six months? It feels like six years.
“Good-bye, Rich-ard,” said Vartouhi, as they parted at the bus stop in St. Alberics. “I go to eat lunch in the Fedora Café and then I go to the Fedora Pictures to see some Germans and some Italians and some Japanese all blown up. Is a varry good thing. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Richard.