by Rebecca West
It had been good to get out of the car and go into Francis Pitt’s house. That evening he was sitting in the hall waiting for them. Darkness was thick among the curious ugly furniture which had the look of defiant artists’ squalor that tombstones and pews have, as if the clumsy craftsmen who made them knew that the human occasions they catered for befell so inevitably and so innumerably that they need never fear unemployment and could let their blunt fingers make meanness with impunity. She did not have to see them unless she tried, she did not have to ask herself the question of why he chose to live among such ugliness. If she kept her eyes wide, in the way that makes them look most beautiful when one goes into a room, all she need see were the flowers, the excess of flowers that was the trademark of this house, clots of delphinium and peonies, seeming suspended in the darkness, since the vases which supported them and the tables which supported the vases were drowned in the rising night, and his face, his earthy, bedabbled face of grief, all of him that was visible above the black blur of his clothes. It was as if this was a place where one could have the things that mattered, beauty and that other thing, the thing that was behind great plays and acting (real acting, the sort she could not do) without having to pay all one’s attention to the creaking mechanism of intellect that did not even make them, that merely hoisted them up to a position where they could be viewed by the human mind. When she thought that she had a feeling as if she had plucked a cloth from a globe and found it gleaming crystal. She saw the way life should go, and turned sullen eyes on Essington because it was not his way, but slipped from whatever it was she had been thinking, and she was not quite sure what that was, into joy based on the fact that Francis Pitt was not dressed for dinner. That meant that she and Essington would be the only guests. It was true that there was a sleek-headed young man sitting beside him, but he would not be staying, he was taking something down in a little book, he was a secretary from the office in the City which Francis Pitt kept just to collect the current earnings of the fortune he had so miraculously made before he was thirty, which he had so obstinately and with such distinction refrained from increasing since he had returned to England and fallen in love with politics. She was very glad, for it was never so nice when there were other people. For one thing, Francis Pitt, oddly enough, considering that above all things he wanted to be liked, was a very bad host. When there were more than half-a-dozen people meaning seemed to fade out of him; his brows came down so that one could not see his eyes, his mouth pouted round a big cigar so that it became merely thick lips, he sat on at table long after everybody else wanted to get up and there was no conceivable reason why he should linger. It appeared to her part of his unique perfection that he should be a bad host. Obviously it proceeded from his childlikeness. Just as he could not put the ugly furniture out of his house and get in new because he felt that that was a thing for grown-ups to do and he was never quite sure that he had really grown up, so he could not entertain guests because he felt that his father and his mother ought to be doing it instead. It made her want to touch him, to stroke him.
Those were still the days when he used to look at her at the first moments of their meeting, with a hard, grinding look as if he were rubbing some thought they both knew of against her consciousness. Then, as on every other night, as soon as his hand unclasped she would sit down in the chair which he seemed to want her to sit in, and the two men would exchange the duetting remarks about the day’s news which are not intended to be penetrative, which are merely the equivalent of the sniffing and snapping that goes on between dogs at a street corner, a ritual performed to soften strangeness. Francis Pitt would sit with his knees crossed, one foot swinging rhythmically and his heavy-lidded glance sliding nearer and nearer to her face, till they looked into each other’s eyes and his hand would flash up and cover his face. She too would have to cover her face, for always during this time of waiting two things would come into her mind which made her features not know what to do. There had been one night, a week or two after they first got to know each other, when he had brought her home from dinner because Essington had been telephoned for to go to his country place at once, as there was a Liberal Association market day breakfast he had forgotten all about, and goodness knows there were so few Liberals one ought not to discourage them, and it must be so awful for them in the early morning, so he had gone off in her car, and Francis Pitt had taken her back in his a little later. It was the first time they had been alone since that night when he took her to the paved garden and the chestnut alley, and she had felt shy, largely because he seemed to be worried about something. The light from the street-lamps showed his right hand clenched on his crossed knees. But he began to talk about adventures he had had in California when he first went out there as a boy, and that seemed to interest him. When the car stopped and they went up the steps to her house he was right in the middle of a story which he evidently liked telling about how he had gone to a succession of people and said, ‘Now we’ll talk turkey!’ a form of address which was apparently very compelling and ultimately remunerative, so she did not ask him to turn on the switch by the door but stood with her latchkey in her hand. She did not listen to what he was saying, for he was not telling the story at all well, he was being too consciously shrewd and whimsical, he was like a bad actor who has read with his mind’s eye a notice, ‘Mr X gave a performance full of quaint and kindly humour’, and quirks his head and makes crinkles round his eyes and mouth. But after all there was no reason why Francis Pitt should be absolutely perfect. She swayed in a drowse of happiness, noticing wonderful lovely things about the moment. The steps on which they stood were painted with that lovely pattern which London’s pavements wear by night. The purplish vignettes, which surely could have nothing to do with London leaves, must be the shadows of grapes growing in some magic world co-existent with the ordinary framework of earth, the same world whose invisible caverns echoed the barking of his borzois when they ran round his table. She put out her foot and trod the shadowed ghostly grapes into the stone, smiling to think of the unseeable wine that would be pressed from them, smiling to imagine a world full of magic, in which one would probably always be having abrupt alterations to something lovelier. She stared at her front door, which by day was sealing-wax red but was now a neutral tint that looked as if twilight were trying to remember colour, and pretended that the house behind it had suddenly been changed. The staircase would be on the right instead of on the left, and the carpet would be beige instead of black, and the dining room would be at the back instead of at the front, and she would not mind if all the furniture were eighteenth-century instead of Chinese; she had always disliked that style because it was fussy and feminine, but why shouldn’t one be that sometimes? And nothing that had really happened to her in that house would have happened, and it would have been Francis Pitt who lived there, and he would have lived there all the time, and not just rushed backwards and forwards. She thought what it would be like to come in and know that he was in the little library and not go in because he had been there millions of times before and would be millions of times again, so one would not bother, though probably one would. Now he had come to the end of the story about talking turkey and was chuckling reminiscently, so she laughed and said, ‘Oh, how delicious!’ and saw the light shining on his funny fingernails that were so wranglingly bitten and so glassily manicured. He was holding out his hand for her key. She wanted to touch his hand. What she had been doing was silly, she was dreaming about things which could not happen, she wanted to touch his hand at once. So she pretended that she thought he just wanted to say goodbye, and she slipped her fingers into his palm as if she were going to shake hands. At the contact she felt a thrust of emotion so strong that it seemed to have mass and colour and to be outside her, a white arch binding horizons. It was something real, it was something invisible, it was a part of that same magic world of the grapes and the caverns: it was there all the time whether one happened to be feeling it or not, it could only be apprehended directly t
hrough the touch of his flesh, just as one knew of the grapes only by their shadows on the stone and of the caverns only by the harmony between their rounded vaults and the rounded voices of the hounds. She saw a vision of intersecting planes of life: but was immediately distracted from it by her sense, which she knew to be not less important, of the amazing warmth of his hand. Though the night of a cool summer was about them his flesh was glowing as if they stood in sunshine. It seemed as if he were drawing heat from some external and invisible source, a great fire burning perpetually in a clearing deep in a forest, somewhere in that same magic world of the grapes and the caverns and the white arch, a fire higher than the height of a man, higher than the height of the men who danced around it. She saw again the picture which she always used to see when she first knew him, of the lake among the woods where he drove a canoe with food in it across the waters and she waited with the children on the shore. A wave of loyalty and tenderness swept over her, but while she was still in its depths she realised that she had not quite brought off her gesture. His fingers had been contracted to grasp the key, so that if she had honestly thought he wanted to shake hands she would have known she was mistaken as soon as she touched him, and she had to exert a little pressure to get the movement through, a very little, but just enough to make it unnatural. These things had not escaped him. He lifted his shoulders but otherwise stood quite still, as if he had been flicked with a whip he was reluctant to obey; and he gave a deep, nervous chuckle, saying, with an evasive, an almost cunning quality in his voice, ‘Oh … I’m not saying goodbye yet, it was your key I wanted.’ She was ashamed. She did not turn on the switch by the door, but let him fumble for the key-hole in the darkness. It was awful, too, that he did not ask her to turn it on, for she remembered that he himself had found it for Essington a few nights before. And it was awful, too, having to go through the formality of asking him in to have a drink and standing there while he said he had to go back to Hurrell. But it was all nonsense, there was no reason why her face should sting with shame, even though he had seen through it all; a woman does not do a man any harm by being in love with him. She was not going to lay any obligation on him, for obviously nothing could come of it, she was with Essington.
Surely he loved her too. Why did he want her to be with him, to be there in his house, every possible moment she could spare, if he did not love her? Why did he look at her like that, his eyes saying sullenly that at least he could look at her, there was no harm in looking, if he did not love her? What could it be that he longed to say to her and could not, so that whenever they were together silence fell on them that hummed and buzzed and sang in the ears because of the strength of his unspoken words, save that he loved her? There are only four ways a man can feel about a woman, aren’t there? There is hate, and he did not hate her. There is indifference, and he was not indifferent. She had seen the hair on the back of his hands stand up because the sense of her coming across the room was like a wind blowing. That is not liking either. There was nothing left but love that he could be feeling for her. And surely that was the meaning of what happened that other night a little later, when she had gone up without Essington to dine with Francis and Etta, and had found that the fourth, for of course there was a fourth, was that queer Georgy Allardyce, the playwright. They had great fun, for Miss Allardyce was good company. She was not pretty, not at all, for she was one of those red-haired women whose appearance seems to have taken a Puritan offence at the flagrant beauty on her head. Her greyish-white face, with its pale, narrow eyes and thin, bitten lips, might have cried out for protection against the wild force that had her by the hair, as Daphne did when Apollo seized her and was changed into laurel, and been granted it in an ungracious form, for her body seemed to have been turned into wood. It was angular without being slim and had the coarseness of bad carpentry about the joints. It must be dreadful to be like that. But she had a very good shingle, and was beautifully and carefully dressed in a traily Vionnet dress, which surprised Sunflower because she had always heard that Miss Allardyce was dowdy and untidy. She had expressed this surprise afterwards to Francis Pitt, who had given one of his chuckles and said, ‘Yes, Georgy’s taken to dressing very well lately.’ She supposed he was amused to see that even professionally strong-minded women take to pretty clothes as soon as they make a little money. Anyway, it did not matter what Miss Allardyce looked like, she talked so wonderfully. She had a funny husky voice with a crack in it, which made you feel that you were alternately eating crushed honeycomb and drinking something with ice in it, and she said the most unexpected things all the time which doubled you up, they were so amusing. Her talk was rather like Essington’s, only it was more just about people. She nearly made them die telling about a weekend she had spent in a Scottish castle sitting over the fire between two septuagenarian beauties who croaked the most awful scandal about each other because they were both stone-deaf and knew the other couldn’t hear. She would have been quite a good actress, only of course it could not have been done with her looks. It was the greatest pity the evening had to break up quite early because she and Sunflower had to go, as a matter of business, to the party that the actor-manager, Sir Aubrey Balmcourt, was giving on the stage of the Olympic to celebrate the three hundredth night of his play; but, as Miss Allardyce said, it was so good of Sir Aubrey to have spared so many nights from his social duties that he ought to be encouraged. When they came to go something happened that made her like Miss Allardyce a lot. Miss Pitt had asked a question about this party which had been faintly tinged with wistfulness, and Miss Allardyce had pounced on it. ‘Haven’t you ever been to a stage party? And you want to? Then come along with us! We’d love to take you! Go up and put on your cloak!’ She forgot to say anything clever, she forgot to give her lips that slight twist which seemed to process the phrase that was coming between them, to change it from statement into wit. There came into her voice an exultant generosity, as if she were sitting in the sunshine with her lap full of lovely things and tossing them to everyone within reach. It was plain that something good had happened to her, probably she had just placed a new play very well and she wanted everybody to feel as jolly as she did, and she loved being able to do it so easily as just by taking Etta Pitt to a party. That was a nice human emotion for anybody so clever to feel. They all settled down in the automobile, feeling very cosy and happy with each other, Etta quite flushed over her new social adventure, when the queer thing happened. Francis Pitt was standing on the steps looking very impish and vagabondish, not as if he possessed the great house behind him but as if he had only temporarily got into it by a series of comical rogueries. Even his dinner clothes had an air as if he had but recently removed them from a wardrobe while the real owner lay snoring a few yards away. He stood smiling his broad gnomish smile on them, and suddenly, as the starter began to jiggle, he ran down the last three steps and called out, ‘Goodbye … dear …’ and broke into nervous laughter. Ostensibly he had said it to Etta. But it was not for Etta he had meant it … you could tell.
Those were the two things that used to come into her mind to vex her, to soothe her, to leave her in such a state of suspense that she felt faint, as she sat with the two men. They always had to wait a little because poor overworked Etta was late, and the conversation would run dry. She would stir and look down at the floor, feeling that Francis Pitt was in the same state that she was, that he would like to shy and bolt like a frightened horse; and presently he would invent some curiosity that could only be satisfied by leaving the room, he would want to know whether it was going to rain and would go out to look at the barometer in the hall, he would become doubtful whether the butler understood about the port he wanted opened and would stray off in search of him. And Essington would say, ‘The poor little man looks bad tonight. He takes this Hurrell business too seriously.’ Yes, that was what was the matter with Francis Pitt. His best friend was dying, of course he was upset. Things were better when they went into dinner. The tired men began to eat and drink and sa
y more individual things and enjoy them. But there was a little time before the women would be quite sure that what they could say would be well received, so she and Etta would sit silent while the man-talk went on over their heads, hard, metallically glittering, fire-spun, incomprehensible, like the sort of things, the tangle of wire and girders one sees, if one lifts one’s eyes as one passes a great office building when it is being put up. Essington moved among the affairs of the world in his characteristic way, like an artist moving among the easels of his pupils at an art school, rubbing out faulty strokes in their drawings and sketching in the perfect line with a fretful gesture that would be intolerable if it were not that he really was a great artist, that the drawings really were botched, that better than anybody he knew how to correct them; and Francis Pitt trotted after him, using his little paw-fists without fretfulness but with mischief to smear any drawing that was being too beautiful, too highfalutin’, that was not subjecting itself to the censorship of commonsense. Always, every evening, however much below their own form they might be, she recognised in them the quality that great actors have. Only sometimes it occurred to her queer that the end to which they were bending their greatness was the rebuilding of the Liberal Party. Thinking of the running backward and forward of weak people that had been the political spectacle just before the war, as she remembered very vividly because she was just starting with Essington then and was trying hard to understand what he was doing in case he got tired of her because she was stupid, she saw no hope that if they did get the thing going again it would give them any opportunity to be nearly as wonderful as they could be. Instead they ought to … They ought to what? There was nothing else for them to do. It was worthwhile following an art or a science, but one could only do that if one was definitely the sort of person that gets ordered about, a subordinate, a private soldier, and these two were officers. They could not be led by something vague outside themselves, as artists and scientists have to be, they had to lead; and as nobody knew where humanity ought to be helped there was bound to be a lot of futility about the business of leading them. Human beings were like the lovely old wineglasses on the table, that were of crystal, that had the form and substance of falling water held for ever to its momentary beauty within them, that were painted with gold patterns as beautiful as the markings of flower petals, that would not change with time, but that would hold nothing but wine, which is not so nice after all. Babies are born, they grow up into these wonderful things with these bodies that may be ugly but affect one as if they were beautiful and these great brains, and they can cancel out death by giving one children so that the race goes on; but, gorgeous and deathless as they are, life fills them up with an activity that is not good enough, with politics, with wars that end in neither victory nor defeat, with things that, say what you like, don’t really please anybody. What men make is not so good as the making of men. Having a baby and bringing it up has more of the quality that belongs to a good gesture, to the fine performance of a part, than all this niggling. She felt a flush of pride because she was doing what Essington always said all women in general and she in particular never did: thinking about principles; and then with dismay she realised, as she nearly always had to do when she felt proud for that reason, that it wasn’t any use her having done what Essington wanted her to do, since it had led her to conclusions that he would not approve.
