The broken puzzle in Lady Slane’s mind shook itself suddenly down into shape. The half-heard notes reassembled themselves into their tune. She stood again on the terrace of the deserted Indian city looking across the brown landscape where puffs of rising dust marked at intervals the road to Agra. She leant her arms upon the warm parapet and slowly twirled her parasol. She twirled it because she was slightly ill at ease. She and the young man beside her were isolated from the rest of the world. The Viceroy was away from them, inspecting the mother-of-pearl mosque, accompanied by a group of officials in white uniforms and sun-helmets; he was pointing with his stick, and saying that the ring-doves ought to be cleared away from under the eaves. The young man beside Lady Slane said softly that it was a pity the ring-doves should be condemned, for if a city were abandoned by man, why should the doves not inherit it? The doves, the monkeys, and the parrots, he went on, as a flight of jade-green parakeets swept past them, quarrelling in the air; look at their green plumage against these damask walls, he added, raising his head, as the flock swirled round again like a handful of emeralds blown across the Poet’s House. There was something unusual, he said, in a city of mosques, palaces, and courts, inhabited solely by birds and animals; he would like to see a tiger going up Akbar’s steps, and a cobra coiling its length neatly in the council chamber. They would be more becoming, he thought, to the red city than men in boots and solar topees. Lady Slane, keeping an ear pricked to observe the movements of the Viceroy and his group, had smiled at his fancies and had said that Mr FitzGeorge was a romantic.
Mr FitzGeorge. The name came back to her now. It was not surprising that, among so many thousands of names, she should have forgotten it. But she remembered it now, as she remembered the look he had given her when she twitted him. It was more than a look; it was a moment that he created, while he held her eyes and filled them with all the implications he dared not, or would not, speak. She had felt as though she stood naked before him.
‘Yes,’ he said, watching her across the fire at Hampstead; ‘you were right: I was a romantic.’
She was startled to hear him thus audibly joining up with her recollections; the moment, then, had possessed equal significance, equal intensity, for him as for her? Its significance had indeed troubled her, and, for a while, made her more uneasy than she would acknowledge. Her loyalty to Henry was impeccable; but after the departure of FitzGeorge, that stray young traveller whose name her consciousness had scarcely registered, she had felt as though someone had exploded a charge of dynamite in her most secret cellar. Someone by a look had discovered the way into a chamber she kept hidden even from herself. He had committed the supreme audacity of looking into her soul.
‘It was queer, wasn’t it?’ he said, still watching her.
‘And after you left us at Agra,’ said Lady Slane conversationally, unwilling to admit that he had shaken her, ‘what did you do?’
‘I went up into Cashmir,’ said Mr FitzGeorge, leaning back in his chair and putting his fingertips together; ‘I went up the river for a fortnight in a houseboat. I had plenty of time to think, and while I gazed over lakes of pink lotus I thought of a young woman in a white dress, so dutiful, so admirably trained, and so wild at heart. I used to flatter myself that for a minute I had come close to her, and then I remembered how after one glance she had turned away and had sauntered off towards her husband. But whether she did it because she was frightened, or because she intended to rebuke me, I could never decide. Perhaps both.’
‘If she was frightened,’ said Lady Slane, surprising both herself and FitzGeorge, ‘it was of herself, not of you.’
‘I didn’t flatter myself it was of me,’ said Mr FitzGeorge; ‘I knew even then that I had no charm for women, especially for lovely, eminent young women like yourself. I didn’t desire it,’ he said, looking at her as defiantly as his rather absurd old-maidish appearance would allow.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Lady Slane, respecting this flicker of a thwarted pride.
‘No,’ said Mr FitzGeorge, relapsing appeased; ‘I didn’t. And yet, you know,’ he added, stung by some recollection to a fresh honesty, ‘although I had never fallen in love with a woman before, and never have since, I fell in love with you at Fatihpur Sikhri. I suppose I really fell in love with you at that ridiculous dinner-party at Calcutta. Otherwise I should not have come to Fatihpur Sikhri. It took me out of my way, and I have never gone out of my way for man, woman, or child. I am the complete egoist, Lady Slane; you had better know it. Nothing but a work of art could tempt me out of my way. In China, where I went after Cashmir, I was so intoxicated by the works of art that I soon forgot you.’
This strange, incivil, and retarded love-making created a medley of feelings in Lady Slane. It offended her loyalty to Henry. It disturbed her old-age peacefulness. It revived the perplexities of her youth. It shocked her slightly, and pleased her more than it shocked. It was the very last thing she had ever expected – she whose days were now made up of retrospect and of only one anticipation. It was as though Mr FitzGeorge had arrived with deliberate and malicious purpose to do violence to her settled mood.
‘But even in China,’ Mr FitzGeorge went on, ‘I still found leisure to think of you and Lord Slane. You seemed to me ill-assorted, as one might say of biscuits, only with biscuits one always assumes that it is the other way round. By saying that you were ill-assorted I don’t mean to imply that you did not do your job admirably. You did. So admirably, that it awoke my suspicions. What would you have done with your life, Lady Slane, had you not married that very delightful and disconcerting charlatan?’
‘Charlatan, Mr FitzGeorge?’
‘Oh no, of course he wasn’t altogether a charlatan,’ said Mr FitzGeorge; ‘on the contrary, he managed to be an undisastrous Prime Minister of England during five (I am told) difficult years. Nearly all years, incidentally, are difficult. Perhaps I misjudge him. But you will admit that he was handicapped. He had more charm than any man I ever knew; and though charm pays up to a certain point, there comes a point beyond which no reasonable man can be expected to go. He went beyond it – far beyond. He was too good to be true. You yourself, Lady Slane, must often have suffered from his charm?’
The question was proffered in such a way that Lady Slane nearly replied to it truthfully and inadvertently. Mr FitzGeorge seemed really interested; and yet, she remembered, she had often watched Henry bending his brows in interest over some human question which could not really interest him at all, withdrawn as he was into a world where human interests shrank to insignificance, and nothing but a cold, sardonic ambition lay at the kernel of his mind, and if so Henry, then why not Mr FitzGeorge? The one was a statesman, the other a connoisseur; she did not want to be examined as though she were a Tang figure which might possibly turn out to be a fake. Observation of Henry had taught her a lesson she would not easily forget. It had been terrible to live with, and to love, a being so charming, so deceptive, and so chill. Henry, she discovered suddenly, had been a very masculine man; masculinity, in spite of his charm and his culture, was the keynote of his character. He was of the world worldly, for all his scorn.
‘I should have been a painter,’ said Lady Slane, answering the question before last.
‘Ah!’ said Mr FitzGeorge with the relief of a man who has at last secured what he wanted. ‘Thank you. That gives me the key. So you were an artist, were you, potentially? But being a woman, that had to go by the board. I see. Now I understand why you sometimes looked so tragic when your face was in repose. I remember looking at you and thinking, That is a woman whose heart is broken.’
‘My dear Mr FitzGeorge!’ cried Lady Slane. ‘You really mustn’t talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of – nothing.’
‘Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I
do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of life, and life becomes existence – a makeshift. Face it, Lady Slane. Your children, your husband, your splendour, were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. They were what you chose to substitute for your real vocation. You were too young, I suppose, to know any better, but when you chose that life you sinned against the light.’
Lady Slane put her hand over her eyes. She was no longer strong enough to bear this shock of denouncement. Mr FitzGeorge, suddenly inspired like a preacher, had overturned her placidity without any pity.
‘Yes,’ she said weakly, ‘I know you are right.’
‘Of course I am right. Old Fitz may be a comic figure, but he retains some sense of values, and I see that you have offended against one of the first canons of my creed. No wonder that I scold.’
‘Don’t scold me any more,’ said Lady Slane, looking up and smiling; ‘I assure you that if I did wrong, I paid for it. But you mustn’t blame my husband.’
‘I don’t. According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told. Being a woman, I daresay that even you took a certain pleasure in the process. And now, are you angry with me?’
‘No,’ said Lady Slane; ‘I think it is rather a relief to have been found out.’
‘Of course you realise that I found you out at Fatihpur Sikhri? Not in detail, certainly, but in principle. This conversation is only a sequel to the conversation we didn’t have then.’
Shaken though she was, Lady Slane laughed frankly. She felt immensely grateful to the outrageous Mr FitzGeorge, who, now that he had ceased to scold her, sat looking at her with humour and affection.
‘A conversation interrupted for fifty years,’ she said.
‘And now never to be resumed,’ he said with surprising tact, knowing that she might dread a repeated probing of his lancet into her discovered wound; ‘but there are some things which need to be said – this was one of them. Now we can be friends.’
Having thus arranged their friendship, Mr FitzGeorge took it quite for granted that she should welcome his company. He arrived without warning, installed himself in what rapidly became his own chair, teased Genoux who adored him, carried on extravagant discussions with Mr Bucktrout, imposed his habits on the house, but nevertheless fitted himself neatly in to Lady Slane’s ways of life. He even accompanied her on her slow and shaky walks up to the Heath. Her capes, and his square hat, became familiar objects moving under the wintry trees. They wandered tremulously together, often sitting down on a bench, not admitting to one another that they were tired, but pretending that they desired to admire the view. When they had admired it long enough to feel rested, they agreed to get up and go a little farther. Thus they revived memories of Constable, and even visited Keats’ house, that little white box of strain and tragedy marooned among the dark green laurels. Like ghosts themselves, they murmured of the ghost of Fanny Brawne and of the passion which had wrecked Keats; and all the while, just out of reach, round the corner, lurked the passion for Lady Slane which might have wrecked Mr FitzGeorge, had he not been so wary an egoist (unlike poor Keats), just too wise to let himself float away on a hopeless love for the young Vicereine, just unwise enough to remain remotely faithful for fifty years.
Up on the Heath one day he recalled her to an incident she had forgotten.
‘Do you remember,’ he said – those three opening words having become so familiar to them that now they smiled whenever they used them – ‘that the day after that dinnerparty I came back to luncheon?’
‘Dinner-party?’ said Lady Slane vaguely, for her mind no longer worked very quickly. ‘What dinner-party?’
‘At Calcutta,’ he said gently, for he never grew impatient when she had to be prompted. ‘The Viceroy asked me back to luncheon when I had accepted to meet you at Fatihpur Sikhri. He said we must arrange the details. I arrived rather early, and found you alone. Not quite alone, though. Kay was with you.’
‘Kay?’ said Lady Slane. ‘Oh, but surely Kay wasn’t born then.’
‘He was two months old. You had him in the room with you, in his crib. Don’t you remember? You were rather embarrassed at being found with your baby by a strange young man. But you got over your embarrassment at once – I remember admiring the simplicity of your manners – and asked me to look at him. You held back the curtain of his crib, and for your sake I did give one glance at the horrid little object, but what I really looked at was your hand holding back the curtain. It was as white as the muslin, and stained only with the colour of your rings.’
‘These rings,’ said Lady Slane, touching the bumps under her black gloves.
‘If you say so. I once told Kay I had seen him in his cradle,’ said Mr FitzGeorge, chuckling. ‘I had been saving up that joke against him for years. I startled him, I can tell you. But I gave him no explanation. To this day he doesn’t know. Unless he asked you?’
‘No,’ said Lady Slane, ‘he never asked me. And if he had asked me I shouldn’t have been able to tell him.’
‘No; one forgets, one forgets,’ said Mr FitzGeorge, staring out over the Heath. ‘Yet there are some things one never forgets. I remember your hand on the curtain, and I remember your expression as you looked down on that nasty little new thing which has grown up into Kay. I remember the twisted feeling it gave me, to have stumbled into your intimacy. It didn’t last long. You rang the bell, and a nurse came and removed Kay complete with his furniture.’
‘Are you fond of Kay?’ asked Lady Slane.
‘Fond?’ said Mr FitzGeorge, astonished. ‘Well – I’m used to him. Yes, I suppose you might say I was fond. We understand each other well enough to let each other alone. We’re used to each other – put it like that. At our age, anything else would be a nuisance.’
Fondness, indeed, seemed a remote thing even to Lady Slane. She was fond of Mr FitzGeorge, she supposed, and of Genoux, and of Mr Bucktrout, and in a less degree of Mr Gosheron, but it was a fondness out of which all the trouble and the agitation had departed. Even as the vitality had departed out of her old body. All emotion now was a twilight thing. She could say no more than that it was pleasant to stroll and sit on the Heath with Mr FitzGeorge while he evoked memories of a day whose light, even through those veils, flared up too strongly for her faded eyes.
Even so, Mr FitzGeorge had not told Lady Slane the whole of the truth. He had not reminded her that when he came that day and found her alone with Kay in his cradle in a corner of the room, he had also found her kneeling on the floor surrounded by a mass of flowers. To his idea, fresh from England, the season was winter; yet, cut from an Indian garden, roses, larkspurs, and sweet-peas lay sorted into heaps around her. Transparent glasses filled with water made points of light as they stood about all over the carpet. She had looked up at him, the unexpected visitor, catching her at an employment improbable in a Vicereine. Secretaries or gardeners should have fulfilled this function with which she preferred to deal herself. Her fingers dripping, she had looked up, pushing the hair out of her eyes. But she had pushed something else out of her eyes with the same gesture; she had pushed her whole private life out of them, and had replaced it by the perfunctory courtesy with which she rose, and, giving him her hand, wiping it first on a duster, said, ‘Oh, Mr FitzGeorge,’ – she had known his name then, temporarily – ‘do forgive me, I had no idea it was so late.’
Down in St James’s Street, Mr FitzGeorge’s frequent absences were noticed. Kay Holland himself observed that Fitz was now less readily available for dinner than formerly, though the explanation lay beyond the wildest range of his suspicion. Far from coming near to the truth, he was full of an undeserved solicitude for his old friend, wondering whether perhaps fatigue or even ill-health compelled him to betake himself early to bed; but on so ceremonious a basis had their relationship always been placed that Kay could venture on no inquiries. He was acquainted
with Mr FitzGeorge’s rooms and could form some idea of how the old gentleman lived; could, in fact, imagine him shuffling about in a dressing-gown and slippers among the disorder of his incomparable works of art, dissolving a soup-tablet for his supper over the gas-ring, economising the electric light so that one bulb alone illuminated the small Jaeger-clad figure and touched the gilding on the stacked-up frames – or did he resort to a candle-end stuck into a bottle? Kay was sure that Mr FitzGeorge did not allow himself enough to eat, nor could it be very healthy to live among so much dust in the low, overcrowded rooms where a daily charwoman was permitted only the minimum of service. How Fitz himself contrived to emerge presentably spruce and well-groomed from this sordid confusion was a mystery to Kay, who spent a great deal of his time in keeping his own surroundings as shiningly clean as possible. No spinster, in fact, could be more house-proud than Kay Holland supervising his annual spring-cleaning; washing, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, the more fragile of his treasures with his own hands in a basin of water. But old Fitz! Kay supposed that those two rooms had never been turned out since Fitz had moved into them, untold years ago; a magpie’s nest under the eaves of Bernard Street, filled with the accumulation carried in, piece by piece; dumped on a chair or on the floor when the chairs gave out, stuffed into a drawer, crowded into a cupboard that would no longer shut; never touched, never dusted, except when Mr FitzGeorge consenting to reveal his masterpieces to a visitor would blow the grimy coating away and hold picture, bronze, or carving up to the light.
And now Fitz was seldom to be seen. When he did walk into the Club, he seemed the same as usual and Kay’s misgivings dwindled; if anything, he seemed a little more lively than before, abusing Kay with greater gusto, a twinkle in his eye as though he were enjoying a secret joke. Which indeed he was. Kay sat there, warmed and happy. No one had ever made fun of him as FitzGeorge made fun. But although Kay longed to revert to that conversation about having been seen in his cradle, shyness and habit forbade.
All Passion Spent Page 13
