by Alec Waugh
“But you like me?” he would say.
“A whole lot.”
“We enjoy doing the same things.”
“Invariably.”
“We’re at the marrying age.”
“Twenty-three and twenty-eight? It’s what the textbooks say.”
“We’d be very reasonably off.”
“Darling, you’re going to be the most successful lawyer in the whole State of California.”
“It isn’t even,” he persisted, “as though there was anybody else.”
“That is precisely,” she retorted, “my complaint.”
And to Marda Clainton a very adequate cause of complaint it seemed. For six years now she had been doing the kinds of thing that young Californians of her set did do. She had not been exactly wild, but she had not been exactly quiet. There had been moonlight parties and bathing parties and pyjama parties. There had been dancing, there had been gin, there had been petting. Six steady years of it. It was monstrous that Edgar Mountain was all that she should have to show for them.
“If there was anybody else,” she said, “do you imagine that I’d be starting next week for Europe?”
“If you just knew,” he said, “how I’ll be missing you!”
With the intensity that last moments arouse in one he would begin to talk of how much he cared, of how much he would always care; how from the first instant of meeting her he had begun to care. “As one always does,” he said, “when it’s the real thing. One knows at once, intuitively.”
Her cheek rested against her hand, her thoughts concentrated on the packet of railroad and steamship tickets that bulged the black velvet bag that lay beside her, Marda Clainton would gaze with unseeing eyes across the room.
“Dear one, it’s all such madness, this,” the pleading voice at her side insisted. “You’re restless. And because of that restlessness you’re wasting the best years you’ll ever have.”
Had she not been too happy, too excited over her departure, she would have shrugged her shoulders. “Wasting my best years,” she would have retorted. “But don’t I know it, just, and isn’t that the very reason that’s sending me off upon this trip?” She was too happy, too excited, however, to be acrimonious. She let him talk.
“You’re restless,” he repeated, “and discontented. You need someone to look after you, to work for you, to arrange your life. We could have such fun together.”
He outlined the life that they would lead: the house they would have outside the city, their six-cylinder racing Humber, their long week-end trips along the coast, the parties they would give and go to.
Musingly she listened. Yes, they could have a lovely time: the kind of time that the average girl spent nine-tenths of her time in envying. And Edgar himself, handsome, successful, trim, the tall, fair, clear-cut type that people turned round in the streets to look at, was the kind of man that the average girl spent nine-tenths of her time dreaming of. Which was the trouble about Edgar. He was just too eligible. “If only,” thought Marda, “he was not so completely the average man, a little richer, a little handsomer, a little nicer than the average. If only he were different, organically different in some way!”
“We could make such a fine thing of life together,” he was saying. “You say that I’m going to be the most successful lawyer in California. But you can’t think how much more I’d make of life with you than without you. You can’t think what a difference it would make if I had someone like you to work for. With you I’d be the most successful lawyer in all America.”
She laughed at that. It was said so confidently, with so fine a recklessness.
“But, darling, I’m not in love with you,” she said.
“Love’ll come,” he answered.
Which was what had been said by every rejected lover in the world’s long history. Just as every argument that he had used had been the property of every suitor since language started. That talk of the wasting of one’s years; of recognizing the real thing when it came; of a woman’s need to be looked after; of the future that would be theirs to share; of all that a loved woman could inspire; and then that final argument that love in a woman’s case came afterwards. In every novel that she had ever read she had read all that.
“Silly, it’s no use,” she said. “It’s not the slightest use. Let’s talk of something else.”
So he would change the subject, and begin to talk brightly, amusingly, making her laugh in the way that he always could. But there was unhappiness beneath his laughter, an unhappiness that both flattered Marda and saddened her. It was flattering to think that she had the power to make so imposing a person as Edgar Mountain sad. And at the same time it saddened her that he should be sad. He was nice. She was fond of him: fonder than she was of anyone. At the same time she could not believe that there was not more to love than liking. When she had been a child they had talked to her about a magician called Santa Claus who dispensed the richness and happiness of life. And she had believed in that Santa Claus, only to discover later that he was just her father in a red hood and a false wig. It would be too bad if this other magician, this fairy prince that her girlhood had dreamed about, who had the giving of the essential poetry, beauty, intensity of life, should turn out to be nothing more than Edgar Mountain in a new silk hat.
“It just can’t be,” she thought. “There must be more to it than that.”
§
“Yes, there must be more to it than that,” she repeated like a refrain, as a ferry-boat pulled out through the chill spring afternoon towards Oakland Pier; as the long lean train crept hungrily across the Rockies; as the shaken, quivering hotel churned its gale-strewn passage westward of the Hudson River, as the English train rattled past Devonshire through the leafless countries.
“Life’s going to begin now,” she thought, as she sat a few hours later in her bedroom at the Berkeley sorting out her letters of introduction.
It began in the confused breathless way that things do in London. There were the first formal invitations; the acquaintanceships that became the friendships that led to other friendships. It was like a kaleidoscope. One would not have thought that one city could have contained in the same class so many types. There were the fashionable friends, who dined her at the Embassy after cocktailing her at the “500.” There were the serious-minded who showed her St. Paul’s and the Tower of London. There were the formal-minded at whose Sunday lunch tables stiff figures in stiff collars and braided coats would discuss with her American relations. There were the light-hearted who took her on windy drives in windy touring cars; and the athletic who took her to Twickenham to watch the Harlequins, to Ranelagh to watch the Tigers, to Lord’s when summer came to see cricket played.
Alone out of all these excursions the cricket bored her. It seemed after baseball the tamest thing beneath the sun. The striker hit the ball, neither far nor high nor often. The fieldsman did not exhort the pitcher nor abuse the striker. The crowd remained silent when a fieldsman failed to pick up the ball and clapped its hands languidly whenever the striker tapped the ball far enough to change his base. She was told that three days were often not long enough to end a game in. She could well believe it. During the two hours she sat there the same strikers remained at their bases the whole time, without as far as she could see attempting anything that approximated to a home run.
It was at Lord’s, nevertheless, that she met Tony Kelvin. He was the only thing in the whole game that interested her. He was little, stout, slightly bald, with short plump legs that carried him at an incredible speed along the boundary. He was the most agile person on the field. The crowd adored him. Every time he chased the ball a murmur rose from it, half applause, half laughter, half affection; a murmur that would swell into a roar when the ball was gathered cleanly, and flung low and fast and straight to the abandoned bases, as he trotted back on his fat little legs, the sweat running down his cheeks and forehead. There would be cries of “Good old Tony!” In appearance he was as unromantic as anyone could
be. He was, Marda decided, the most absurdly, adorably sweet person she had ever met.
“He’s a pet!” she said. “I’d love to know him!”
“That’s easy enough,” her escort answered. “We’ll get hold of him in the interval.”
The moment that the players turned back towards the pavilion, he ran out across the grass to Tony.
“Tony,” he said, “here’s an American that I’ve brought to see cricket for the first time. She wants to meet a real cricketer.”
With the same broad grin across his damp, plump face, Tony Kelvin came over to the Members’ stand.
“So this is your first cricket match?” he said. “How dull do you find it?”
“The only thing that’s amused her,” her friend answered, “has been your fielding.”
The broad grin broadened. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Every side’s got to have its comic to keep the crowd amused when the batting’s slow. It’s thirsty work, though. Let’s go and have some tea.”
As they walked in front of the stand to the Members’ lunch room a number of small boys clustered round Tony for autographs.
“My dear boys,” he said. “If I were to sign all those books, I’d not have two seconds left for tea!”
All the same he took one of the books, scrawled his name in broad bold characters across it, and in the corner sketched a short fat figure chasing under a grinning sun a ball that was depicted as a human object with legs, a mocking smile. All the way to the boundary rope the band of urchins followed him, and as the crowd parted to let him pass, there was a hushing of previous conversation, with a murmur or two of “Good luck, Tony!”
“So this is England,” Marda thought, “and this a national hero!” Nothing less like a national hero could have been conceived by one who was accustomed, in the woman’s section of the Sunday supplements, to the firm cut profiles of boxers, film stars and polo players. “This isn’t going to be the last I see of him,” she said.
What Marda wanted, she went very straight for. By ten o’clock next morning a great number of people had been rung up, half a dozen telegrams had been dispatched, and at twelve o’clock, instead of dressing herself for a lunch party at the Berkeley with a politician whose acquaintance she had been at some pains to make, she watched from the front of the grandstand a short plump person chase a small red ball with ridiculous, with astonishing agility. He was unlike anything she had ever met.
“I was right,” she thought. “This is not going to end here.”
And so when the players began to troop back to the pavilion, she walked resolutely across the grass towards them.
“Mr. Kelvin,” she said, “I’m an American. I pursue celebrities. I’m throwing a party one day next week; I’ll be heartbroken if you don’t come to it.”
“If it’s on Tuesday or Thursday,” he said, “I’ll love to.”
“It’s on Thursday,” she said, “at the Green Park at half-past eight.”
It was at the Green Park, and at twenty-seven and three-quarter minutes after eight, that Tony Kelvin arrived in a suit that had been cut in Savile Row and looked as though it were ready-made. The collar fell back over the stud and the sleeves were creased about the elbow. Between the waistcoat and the trousers there was a gap. Along his forehead there were beads of sweat; across his face was the broadest, happiest of grins. Marda had collected for the party the best-known of the people that she had met in London, but silence fell upon the other guests as Kelvin approached them. There was no question as to who was the principal guest of the evening. Tony Kelvin’s opinion was invited and accepted by a publisher on the tenden novel, by a general on military history, by a politician on Empire Free Trade. The women stopped talking when he spoke; the head waiter treated him with a particular deference. Marda was aware when she danced with him of the whispered recognition from other tables. And all the time with the broad grin on his face, the trickle of perspiration running down his cheeks, his collar growing limper and greyer with every dance, Tony Kelvin laughed and chatted with the calm regal assumption of unquestioned superiority. It had been worth travelling six thousand miles, Marda decided, to meet anything so unlike anything she could have met her side of the Atlantic.
Well worth it, she added during the days that followed, as she came to recognize in this absurd, squat, important person the unmistakable signs of imminent submission. In spite of the broad grin, the noisy affability, she knew the meaning of those quick intent glances, those occasional mumbled phrases, those pauses that it would be dangerous to prolong. “He’s fallen,” she thought, “really fallen!” And her heart leapt as it had not leapt since those early uncertain, self-doubting days when she had been unable to believe that a man could really be attracted by her. “He’s fallen,” she thought. And with a quivering excited curiosity she awaited the moment of avowal. It would be something completely new. He was an English hero; English utterly. She had heard that the English were bad lovers, selfish, clumsy, inarticulate. They might be. But in spite of it, or rather because of it, they could be adorable; just as Tony was adorable in spite of his bald head, his damp face, his absurd short legs. Whatever his wooing of her might not be, it would be surely unlike any that she had had made to her before.
When the moment did come, her heart beat faster than she had ever thought it possible for a heart to beat. It came as she had expected it to come, at the most ill-chosen moment; at Lord’s, in the middle of a cricket match, with people in front, behind and to the side of them. “It’s perfect,” she thought, “perfect!” as she saw the familiar light coming into his eyes. “What other man would have dreamt of making love to me in a place like this?” With hands clasped forward in her lap she listened to the voice pitched so low for fear of eavesdropping as to be scarcely audible in the murmur of talk around them.
“Not easy to say this sort of thing,” he said. “But you know what it is I’ve got to say. You must have guessed. From the beginning, I expect. One always knows. That kind of thing—well, it’s at first sight—with the real thing, that is to say.”
As she sat, hands clasped in her lap, Marda had closed her eyes. For a moment she could not think of what it was that this voice at her side reminded her. For a moment she listened baffled. Then she realised. It was like a very old scratched record playing on a gramophone with a defective soundbox. With the outraged incredulity of one who has been monstrously ill-used she listened to the familiar words; the words with which Edgar and how many others had in their time wearied her:
“One knows when it’s the real thing—one must know. Inside oneself one knows. Affinities—that’s the word—affinities.” Miserably he murmured on. If only he really were a gramophone, so that she could take the record off.
“And I was thinking,” he concluded; “you’ve never, I mean, met my people. Suppose they were to invite you for the next week.”
Slowly, gently, but with great firmness Marda shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I should have loved to. But on Friday I’m going across to Paris.”
“For there must be more to it than that,” she thought, as back in her hotel she telephoned the number of telegrams that a moment’s-notice departure involved. “There really must be,” she decided as two days later she prepared to take her place in that Paris that is called Paris; the Paris of discredited English, outcast Russians, holidaying Americans, unscrupulous Frenchwomen; the Paris of Montmartre and Montparnasse, of heavy-eyed returnings by the wan light of morning.
Before she had been there a week she had become an integral part of that shifting unrooted population. She was on Christian name terms with a hundred people; she knew which were right bars for cocktails before the lunch, and which were the right bars for cocktails before dinner; she knew the night clubs that were amusing between twelve and two, and those that only got amusing after three. Of the Paris that the French inhabited she saw extremely little, and that little she found extremely dull.
It was in the French Paris, however,
that she met Roderigo di Porlingy.
He was the first person she noticed when she came into the long, high-windowed Faubourg St. Germain drawing-room in which stiff-backed people were seated in stiff-backed chairs discussing the Naval Conference; noticed him although he was taking no part in the conversation. Tall, grey-haired, dark-skinned, with slim figure and a short curled black moustache, he seemed, seated upright in his chair in his obtrusively unobtrusive way, the chairman of that party. Whenever he interposed a sentence into that eager exchanging of ideas, he gave the impression of having said the final word.
“Who is he?” she whispered.
“A Spaniard; the head of one of their oldest families. He lives permanently in Paris. He’s quarrelled with everyone in power in Madrid.”
“Or rather they’ve quarrelled with him,” thought Marda. He himself would not quarrel with anyone. He was too dignified, too aloof. For the first time she realised there could be a meaning to that phrase “Too proud to fight.” In his calm impassive manner, with its impressive background of receding centuries, was implicit the contemptuous withdrawal of the old world from the new. Nothing that was less than a thousand years old was in his eyes properly established. “I’ve never met anything like this before,” she thought. And went on thinking it till the afternoon that she went to his house to see his collection of Japanese prints. It was a good record, played on a good gramophone, but the words were familiar to her. The years were fleeting, the rich voice whispered; one should not waste one’s life’s best years. One must not run the chance of letting one’s old age regret the pleasures that one’s youth had scorned. The instant was uncapturable. The light butterfly hovered for a moment. The voice was rich and full and wooing. With a sigh Marda shook her blue-black head and, armoured with that self-composure which was more powerful than a suit of mail, rose quietly to her feet.
