by Alec Waugh
Walking into the passage she called out to May Julian:
“You might put me on a bath, please, darling. The Chanel bath salts, and that silver tissue dress. Oh, and don’t wait up for me. I’ll be back late, I expect.”
As though nothing had happened, or as though there were nothing left to happen, unconcernedly Gwen Lawrence walked across the narrow strip of passage between her sitting-room and bedroom.
• • • • • • • •
To analyse your emotions and arrange your thoughts you must have reached some tavern of tranquillity. You cannot describe a railway journey while you are in the train. And Graham Moreton, as he drove his car westwards from Ciber Crescent, was in no condition to define the details-of his emotional turmoil. He was conscious only of noise and tumult.
And, as once earlier, when the pressure on his brain had been too great, he sought relief in the bounding speed of his car along the metalled highroad. He had flung his hat, with his stick and gloves, upon the seat beside him, and the wind blew coldly through his hair, chilling his flushed cheeks.
The pale blue of the sky was deepening to violet as the car swung into the broad Kensington road. The lamps were lit; and the electric sky-signs were flaming their messages on to the converging roads of Hammersmith. At the Broadway the pavements were crowded with men and women returning home at the end of the long day’s labour. For them, thought Graham enviously, there was peace. For the old there were the fireside and the evening paper, and the warm slippers in which one sat nodding after supper. And for the young the languid, desultory strolls beside the river; the noise and light and colour of the dance hall, or the twilit darkness of the cinema. The low whispers and the long farewells.
Over that crowded and ugly thoroughfare, where all day long newsboys and carts and trams and buses had maintained their orchestra of raucous and disordered sounds, for a moment at this hour of the day’s suspension the breath of poetry trembled.
And the wind blew through Graham’s hair and the car leapt forward to the touch of his foot on the accelerator; the road grew emptier and wider, and mile by mile the pressure of the pain upon his forehead lessened.
• • • • • • • •
Unable to read, unable to focus her attention on anything outside her immediate trouble, with fretting, unhappy fingers, Joan Faversham turned page after page of an old novel.
Ever since Christopher had driven her back home after lunch she had fidgeted irritably about the house. Some time that day surely Graham would either ring her up or call. The fact of his having rung up on the previous evening was proof enough that, whatever he might have to say to her, he was resolved to say in person.
One way or another, she would learn the truth to-night. At any rate, she would know enough to be able to decide on her own campaign of action. Did Graham know that he had been seen by her in Paris? On that a lot depended. Had he seen her himself? Or had Mrs. Lawrence told him? That depended, she supposed, on whether Mrs. Lawrence would consider such information to be for or against her interests. Anyhow, either way, in a few moments she would know. But the afternoon had passed. And though she had started each time she had heard the sound of the telephone upon the stairs, there had not come once the tap of the maid’s knuckles on her bedroom door: “You’re wanted on the telephone, Miss Joan.”
The afternoon had passed and the early evening. Mechanically she had taken her bath; mechanically, though with a prescience of approaching drama, she had put on an evening frock slightly more exciting than that which she was in the habit of wearing when she dined with her parents alone. Mechanically she had followed the dinner through its five-course length, mechanically exchanged with her father the conventionalities of domestic conversation. Curiously, from the other end of the table, her mother had sat watching her.
“You look very tired, Joan,” she had remarked. “Oughtn’t you to go to bed soon after dinner?”
But she had shaken her head.
“And wake up at five o’clock in the morning? Oh no, mother, I’m an eight-hour woman.”
And after dinner, with the same old-fashioned novel upon her knee, she had sat waiting, listening.
It was not till after ten that it had come. Not till after ten that a rather flushed and awkward maid had announced that Mr. Graham Moreton had called.
“Oh, Graham, how nice!” Mrs. Faversham had said. “Do ask him to come up, Parkins.”
But Joan had stayed her.
“Please, mother, if you don’t mind, I’d rather see Graham alone this evening. There’ll be a fire in the dining-room.”
And her mother’s grey head was nodded.
Dusty and dishevelled as he had been on that other evening, Graham stood waiting for her before the fireplace in the dining-room. And in his eyes was the same wild, strained, unhappy look.
“Joan,” he cried.
As though nothing had happened, as though they were lovers meeting for the first time after an interval of several weeks, she ran towards him and lifted her face to his. In his kiss was something of that desperate quality that she had recognized on that other evening. And a fresh spasm of injured pride passed through her.
Why should she take what another woman had no use for. or had been unable to keep; why should she heal the wounds that another had inflicted? Angrily the words surged towards her lips, but she fought them back.
“It’s good to have you back again, Jonakin,” he was saying, and his hands were ruffling at the soft wavy hair.
So she had not seen, then, he was thinking. She had not seen him bending before the taxi beside Gwen Lawrence. She had not seen, and they could return untroubled to their former intimacy.
“Joan, dear,” he whispered. “I’ve good news for you. They’ve given me that job in London. I shan’t ever have to go away again.”
Her heart gave a bound of thankfulness. There was one thing only that those words could mean. He had made an end of whatever might have been between that Mrs. Lawrence and himself. He had made an end, and had come back to her. She said nothing, but she let her cheek rest for an instant against his.
“Then there’s nothing, Joan, is there,” he stammered, “to prevent our getting married at once?”
She drew her head back from his shoulder and looked him searchingly in the eyes. In what mood was he saying that? As an impassioned lover or a tired traveller? Had he come asking peace of her, or adventure: was it in passion or in tiredness that he had come?
Anyhow, did it so much matter as long as he had come? He was hers again now, and that was all that mattered. Hers, to be made to love her in what way she chose. Slowly her arms, her cool, soft arms, went round his neck, to wind themselves like chains about him.
“No,” she repeated slowly: “nothing at all to prevent us marrying at once.”
Unflinchingly she lifted her lips to his.
Epilogue
“Bride or bridegroom?”
In a pale grey Ascot tie, controlled above a fawn-grey double-breasted waistcoat by a pearl pin, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, the elegant figure of Christopher Stirling directed down the centre aisle of St. Mary Abbott’s, Kensington, the friends of Joan Faversham and Graham Moreton.
It was twenty-five past two: in five minutes the bride would have arrived. At the end of the church beside the lectern Graham was pretending to be as little afflicted by self-consciousness as the best man, who was chatting affably at his elbow. The congestion in the doorway was considerable.
“We’d better start taking them round the side aisle, hadn’t we?” one of the ushers whispered in Stirling’s ear.
A tall bearded foreigner was hesitating in the porch.
“Bride or bridegroom?” Stirling asked.
The foreigner looked at him in perplexity.
“Vat?” he said.
“Are you the friend of the bride, sir, or the bridegroom?”
Beneath their bushy eyebrows the black eyes flashed aggressively.
“I am the Comte de Freydros
,” the reply came, “and I have received an invitation to the wedding.”
With a smile Christopher led him to a tolerably good position in the right-hand aisle. A business acquaintance of Graham, he suspected.
The first notes of the voluntary had begun. The choir rose in their places. At the altar rail the priest was standing. The congregation had risen to its feet. All down the aisle there was a turning of heads towards the door.
Slowly, at her father’s side, a film of fluttering whiteness, Joan Faversham moved up the church, a long sheaf of lilies lying along her arm. Behind him as he faced the altar Graham could hear the muffled tread draw closer. There was a rustle of georgette beside him, a stirring of powdered fragrance. They were together now.
As the verger closed the door, the six ushers moved to the pew that had been reserved for them. They could not see a great deal from where they sat, and for the most part they were contented with a casual scrutiny of the congregation. The service was only a prelude, after all. The real show would start when they got back to Mansion Court.
But Christopher, who had been to so many weddings; who had sat so often on hard pews speculating idly on the measure of entertainment that was probably to be derived from the subsequent reception; Christopher, for whom the parade of weddings fashionable and unfashionable had ceased long since to hold any novel flavour, found himself this once following closely the rhythm of the words that were being intoned by the white-robed ministrant.
How solemn, after all, they were—” For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.” What an immense oath in view of life’s limitless concessions and contingencies! One was so familiar with the words that forty-nine times out of fifty one never noticed them. They were part of the nuptial ritual, along with the clothes one wore, and the presents and the invitations. And then would come that fiftieth time, when for one or other, or for both of the two young people standing at the altar there, one felt more than the casual interest of acquaintanceship; when one was able, through one’s caring for them, to appreciate the immensity and solemnity of the obligation that was being laid on them.
For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health. They were big words, and to be used as they were so often used, so recklessly. . . .
• • • • • • • •
There were between three and four hundred guests at the reception. The rooms and stairs and passages were crowded. In the alcove of the drawing-room the efforts of a string quartet were scarcely audible. The noise in the dining-room was deafening. For a moment Christopher hesitated at the doorway. At his elbow a group of young and enlivened persons were discussing their impressions of the ceremony.
“I felt,” one of them was saying, “as though I were witnessing an execution.”
“Whenever I come away from a wedding, I pinch myself all over as one does after a nightmare to make certain one’s still there.”
“Not,” the retort came, “that there’s much more difference between free love and marriage than there is between buying the freehold of a house and taking a ninety-nine years’ lease of it. In either case you have to hang on till someone takes it off your hands.”
By the table before the cake Joan and Graham were standing side by side. She was still carrying across her arm the sheaf of lilies, symbol of innocence, from whose heart had been cut away the golden pollen-crested stalks, at the loss, perhaps, of a little of their fragrance. Ah, well, thought Christopher, one could not have anything both ways. Through the hedge of congratulatory compliments he elbowed his way towards her.
“I must touch glasses with you once,” he said.
She smiled up into his face and in the cornflower-blue eyes was a glow of happiness that had been for a long time absent there.
“You’re very kind to me,” she said. “I’ll always remember it.”
He said nothing, but as he smiled back at her above his glass he felt that it was good-bye that she was saying. A debt was paid. She would have no need now of him.
Then someone else came up.
“So that’s that,” he thought. “And I suppose I’d better go and see the presents.”
• • • • • • • •
“Rather be a wife than a stenographer.” How typical, how symptomatic that remark had been of the Georgian attitude to love.
Love in these days. How remote it was from the old and simple need by which primitive men and women were surprised into the responsibilities of parenthood. How remote too from the gilded conception of mediaeval chivalry. “Rather be a wife than a stenographer.” It was the putting to one’s own use of a force from which one stood apart, as the engineers put to their own use the thundering torrents of Niagara. In a scientific age natural forces were not allowed to waste themselves. Love in these days.
For Sybyl it was a profession.
“I want to be happy
But I can’t be happy
Till I’ve made you happy too.”
Crooningly from the alcove at his back, the yearning strains quivered through the heated air. That fond, that childish belief in happiness; with half the world looking for love, as the gate to that enchanted playground: and the other half exploiting their search of it. To Sybyl Marchant love was a profession, preferable because less arduous to commerce. To Mildred Atkinson it was a ladder by which she could lift herself from the conditions of her upbringing. Humphrey was no more than the first rung. He had seen her only that morning lunching with John Heresy. For Madge Gillett it provided a steady and grubby income. About the shoulders of Gwen Lawrence it had cast the weight of sables. And was it not the inspiration of that kindly vanity that brought sitters to his studio? Directly or indirectly, it purchased for all of them a means of livelihood. The less one believed in it, the more profitable it became. It was only for those who had faith in love, like that lovely creature at Madge Gillett’s who could not simulate emotion because love-making was a real thing to her, that love would yield no sustenance.
“I want to be happy
But I can’t be happy
Till I’ve made you happy too.”
The drawing-room was emptier now, and one or two couples were attempting not too successfully to dance. In the hall below the crowd was gathering. In a few moments Joan and Graham would be running through the shower of rose leaves towards the car. There would be cheers and laughter, and the waving of hands; a crush of wheels, and the long car swinging into Prince’s Gate. And Joan and Graham in its cushioned twilight at last alone together.
Ah, well; but that at least was real.
• • • • • • • •
The party broke up slowly after the departure of the bride and bridegroom. There remained still much admirable champagne; and folk had reached that mood of detached hilarity when time and engagements in other parts of London seem of very secondary importance.
It was not, in fact, till after half-past five that Christopher found himself shaking the limp hand of an exhausted hostess. There had been some talk of going on for bridge and cocktails at the “In and Out,” And Humphrey had succeeded in persuading the youngest of the ushers to escort him to a Turkish bath; but Christopher had declined the offer of additional hilarity. He was not, for one thing, in the mood for it, and he had half promised Gwen Lawrence an account of the proceedings. She had been sent, but had not unnaturally refused, an invitation.
“You can come and tell me,” she had said, “all about it afterwards.”
The warmth had gone out of the amber October sunlight as he drove his car eastwards through the park. The few people that were still out of doors were either walking quickly or had fur collars drawn tightly round their necks.
But loveliness had lingered in a final moment of suspended decadence over the brown and golden spaces that a faint mist was covering. Soon would winter come, with early frosts and the rain-splashed places. But for the moment London wore the russet mantle of its autumn beauty. And as Christopher drove slowly northwards towards Ba
yswater, a sense of exhilaration that he had not known for many days enveloped him. He seemed to be seeing through new eyes the London that had become stale for him through familiarity. He saw it with the freshness that he had felt twenty years earlier, when he had come to it as a student, to paint his early pictures. As freshly, but differently; for he was a different person. And as his eyes travelled over the thronged pavements of Oxford Street, he wondered with a thrilled quickening of his pulse whether he were not on the brink of a rediscovery of himself. .......
• • • • • • • •
17 Ciber Crescent was, he was surprised to find, in such a condition of chaos as he had seen it on the day of Gwen’s precipitate return from Paris. The curtains had been taken from the windows; the pictures stacked upon the chesterfield; and in the passage stood a couple of large white-wood packing cases.
“Good heavens! Gwen,” he said, “what does all this mean?”
“I’m going away,” she said.
“Away, why?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Why does anyone go away? For a change, I suppose. But about the wedding: tell me about that.”
He handed her the four-page sheet of the service. “There wasn’t a sermon,” he told her, “just an address for the two of them.” He described the reception; the best man’s speech; the ample proportions of the Favershams’ hospitality; and certain curiously out-moded garments that he had observed upon the figures of the unfashionable.
“Altogether a very convivial party.”
“And was Joan looking pretty?”
“Very.”
Shrewdly, but friendlily, she looked at him.
“You were in love with her, I suppose,” she said. Said it with the intonation, not of a question but of a statement.
He did not prevaricate or flush.
“Perhaps,” he answered.
“Ah, but of course you were, you wouldn’t have bothered about me and Graham if you hadn’t been. You’ve watched enough young men making mistakes without trying to prevent them. It’s their look out, you’ve said. As it is, of course. But Graham was different, because Joan’s happiness was in his hands. You weren’t going to let Joan be made unhappy without a fight. That’s the only reason you bothered about Graham and myself.”
