“The two things are utterly different. A man has to protect a woman’s honour.”
“Because she’s got so little, I suppose.”
Mrs. Belamy said coldly, “I thought you hated women who ran down their own sex?”
“I do. I don’t. I’m standing up for it—the sex, I mean. If we have a young man to our house and get a certain amount of fun out of him, we needn’t all turn round afterwards and snarl at him just because his methods are a little different from ours.”
“Are you teaching your parents the laws of hospitality?”
“Really, Celia, you are making yourself ridiculous. You must have liked the look of this young man very much. Shall we have a rubber, Henry?”
While her parents busied themselves with the cards, Celia looked defiantly at Ronny, who had not said a word during the discussion.
“Well,” she said, “do you think it was because of that?”
“No. Of course I don’t. I know you wouldn’t look at anyone like that. Your mother knows it too, but she was annoyed at the way you spoke of your sister. I wish you didn’t think like that about her, Celia. She’s a jolly good sort.”
“I know she is. It wasn’t Iris I was angry with.”
“You called her a flirt.”
“But she is.”
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t say it.”
“But, Ronny, you know you like her for it.”
“Nonsense. I don’t flirt with Iris.”
He spoke quite angrily. His sense of humour had suddenly deserted him. Celia swallowed hard, and, choking with calm, observed, “Well, you’re the only man I’ve met who doesn’t, then, including Papa. Uncle Charles used to say that if there were nobody else, she’d flirt with a chimney-sweep at close distance range.”
“Then he must have been a nasty old man.”
“Ronny!”
“There you are! You don’t like my running down your everlasting old uncle, but you don’t mind running down your sister, who’s far too frank and natural to bother about the sort of impression she makes and so gets misjudged, even by you. Why can’t everybody be more tolerant?”
“The Whirligig of Life,” boomed Uncle Charles’s voice in her mind. She seemed to be gazing in dismay at a world that spun round her in confusion, all its colours suddenly obscured. Was Ronny understanding and sympathetic? He had been, but he was not now.
He was afraid he had said too much. She was probably jealous, not of him in particular or he would have hugged the flattering thought, but of Iris’s general popularity. He told her rather anxiously how pretty she looked in that frock, and naturally could not understand the expression of dismay that crept into her eyes. He thought she was being perverse and silly and he had to leave her since she did not play bridge.
She was left alone on the hearthrug. The others seemed to have drawn themselves into a solid group silently combating her, conquering her, beating her down. And Ronny didn’t like Uncle Charles and thought her a spiteful cat and Iris a jolly good sort; it was the phrase that all Iris’s young men used about her and in almost the same tenderly admiring tone. Well, why not? She must be sensible. Be sensible, that was all, you fool. There was nothing to feel frightened of.
For staring into the fire with her back to that silent group of adverse or indifferent judges, staring into red-hot caverns and lakes of leaping flame so that her cheeks burned, she felt cold with fear because she must be brave and go on being pretty in vain competition with Iris, because you could never find anyone to think just the same as yourself, because it was best to be wise and reserved and not say all you thought even with those who loved you best, because you were alone really always.
Surely it was unfair—and snobbish—to laugh at a young man because of his name and address. What was wrong with 39 Rainbow Road? She wished she lived in it herself. But of course it was Iris who ought to live in Rainbow Road. It was always Iris. Even her name, which at least Celia had never before envied, now gave her the advantage. And it would be just like Iris, after telling everyone how badly the young man had behaved, to write and tell him to come and see her, perhaps even to go and see him, and he too would think her a jolly good sort. And so she was, for she did what she liked and never minded if she behaved badly.
Celia suddenly sat up, seized the poker, and with quiet ferocity jabbed the coals. She too would behave badly, with a badness so bold, so unwarrantable and capricious that even Iris had never behaved quite as badly.
Ronny had said with complacent certainty that she “couldn’t look at anyone like that.” She hadn’t looked, it was true, but that was an oversight. She would show him that she could. She would say airily to him as they went in to dinner that night, “I ran round and paid a call on Dick Something while you were at bridge,” and then when he exclaimed and looked horrified and told her it was an outrageous thing to do to any young man who had never even danced with her, and to a cad like that— then she would draw herself up and her eyes down and say in a very cool voice, “I like cads.”
“I’m going out,” said Celia, and went to the door.
Ronny looked imploringly at Mrs. Belamy.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “We can finish the rubber without you.”
“Where on earth are you going at this time of night?” Colonel Belamy demanded.
“The time is 5.30,” said Celia. “No, thank you, Ronny. I want to go by myself. I shall be back to dinner.”
Chapter IV
She stood on a broken doorstep in the rain and knocked four times. She had no umbrella and the rain ran down her neck. The taxi whirred and ticked behind her. The taxi driver had had to mount the steps and strike matches for her to discover which of the row of bells she was not to ring, for the bells themselves had proved a silent mockery. She had considered so busily what she should say to Ronny after the event, that now as she heard the four knocks echo through the tinkling rain she wondered for the first time what she should say to the young man himself. But he would be out ; she had told the taxi to wait in case he should be out ; she prayed hard that he would be out.
Then in the dark, silent house she heard a noise like a rushing torrent, like the crash of masonry, like the galloping advance of a regiment of dragoons.
Somebody was coming downstairs.
The last flight appeared to have been taken in a single leap. The house shook. She expected the door to be torn open as by a hurricane, but instead there was a moment of breathless quiet, so that she wondered if someone were looking through the keyhole at her, and the fancy disconcerted her as so grotesque and childish and unaccountable that she turned and hurried down the steps.
With her hand on the small gate in the railings, she glanced back and saw that behind her the door had been silently opened, revealing nothing but darkness. But now there emerged from it the figure of a young man who advanced slowly on to the broken top step and said in cool and leisurely tones, “Is it anyone for me? I’m Basil Dictripoulyos. It’s too dark to see who you are.”
So much astonished was she at this transformation of a thunderbolt falling from the heavens into a furtive spy and then into a very quiet and collected young man, that she found herself saying without any embarrassment, “I’m Celia Belamy, and I’ve come to return your call. I haven’t a card to press into your hand, but it must count without one. So good night and thanks so much for yours.”
His hand was now also on the gate.
“But I am in,” he said.
“So were we.”
“But I left a card and you haven’t one. So you must come in. Those are the rules, which I have studied carefully, having much need to.”
His ease made her lose hers. She was unable to prevent him when he slipped through the gate, which he had now taken completely into his control, and kept it firmly shut against her with one hand while he paid the taxi driver with the other. The taxi turned and rolled chuckling and wheezing away through the rain.
He returned through the gate into the midst of her in
dignant protestations.
“That is not in the rules. That you should pay a visitor’s taxi. It is abominable. I’m not coming in unless you take it back.”
“You are getting wet. Let me remind you that the first call only lasts from ten to fifteen minutes. You will barely have time to explore that unfathomable bag for your purse, but at least it will be easier to spread its contents on my table than to balance them all on your arms.”
He lit a gas-mantle in the passage, explaining that the caretaker thought it a needless extravagance to do this until she put it out. He did not appear to look at her as he did so, and Celia was occupied in considering a row of deal letter-boxes at the foot of the stairs.
“No, they are never used,” he said ; “they are put there to look well, a letter-box for each floor with its own key. Isn’t that exclusive? Seeing them you would surely think that these flats are already self-contained, each with its own front door, as one day perhaps they may be. But the only front doors are to these letter-boxes which are never opened and have never been known to contain a letter.”
This tragedy of frustration and unfulfilment struck her as so poignant that she murmured, “They look like a row of babies’ coffins, but too small even for that.”
“They were born before their time,” he pronounced in hollow tones, and preceded her up the stairs lest, as he explained, she should trip over the holes in the oilcloth, or fall through the broken gap in the banisters, or lose herself behind the Eastern curtain on the first floor, the magic gateway into the marvels of Birmingham.
She climbed endlessly upwards until suddenly the rain pounded again in her ears and she saw before her a square casement window, level with the landing floor. It opened into blackness and the sound of many waters.
“Those are my leads,” explained her guide. “They are on top of the bathroom which is on top of the conservatory kitchen which is on top of the ground-floor kitchen. Other floors can boast of their cookery and cleanliness. I have the stars.”
He flung open the low door of his sitting-room with a gesture that was both arrogant and servile.
Celia went past him into a dim red room that seemed to her very small under its low ceiling, but not at all niggly or crowded. She could see at once where everything was. There were all his books covering one whole wall, and a pool of light from the shaded gas-lamp on to the divan where he had evidently been lying. She sat down on it and began to turn out the contents of her bag in a resumed search for her purse.
“I shan’t talk of anything else till I’ve paid my own taxi fare, so we may as well get it over.”
“By all means.” He laid a firm hand on her purse, an intricate beaded puzzle, and lifted it towards him out of the light into the red shadow. “As you do not know what I paid him, you will have to trust me to repay myself. You see how easily you can be robbed.”
She watched him doubtfully. He seemed to be taking something out of the purse, but she could not be sure. He still held it as he sat beside her. She wished he would ask why she had come ; it would make it easier than if he insisted on treating this as an ordinary visit. Though if he did, she could not think what she should say.
Looking round at her, his face dark against the light, he said, “I did not ask you to dance. When they told the young King of France he should dance with his pretty cousin, he said, ‘ Madam, I do not like little girls.’ That was ungallant and untrue. For he was only frightened of them, as I am. I have not sufficient experience for very young girls.”
“How modest you are. And I suppose gallant, since I was twenty-five last birthday.”
His surprise was genuine, for she gave the effect of a precociously “finished” child.
“And I am not quite twenty-one,” he said. “I am therefore nearly five years younger than you.”
Like children they had begun by telling each other their ages and finding them of significant importance.
Her astonishment was as great as his had been. “But you are so dreadfully grown-up,” she cried.
“My nation is many centuries older than yours.”
“What is your nation?”
“One that gave civilization its name and meaning ; that assumed the privilege now usurped by yours of calling all foreigners barbarians.”
“Oh, but we don’t, not all of us.”
He only smiled. She felt baffled. He was hundreds of years older than her. He reaped the benefit of ancient knowledge and experience of life. “The cold old crimes and the days gone by” had left their mark on him and life could teach him nothing but what he chose to make of it.
In his dark, ugly face, its impassive forehead and full curved lips, in the glittering smile that spoke to her without any words, she saw the sad, vicious faces of the little Valois princes, old before they were grown-up, surrounded by perfumes and poisons and priests and dwarfs and bejewelled monkeys ; she saw boy-emperors dizzy on the pinnacle of power, alone at the top of the vast Roman world.
There she was, making up stories as usual right away from the facts. He was only a precocious boy, and quite a nice boy too now he was talking to her, telling her how he had refused to go into his father’s business and had been an actor in the Birmingham Repertory until he came to London to write articles and hoped to get a regular job on a paper, how he was living on eight pounds a month until he could make his own way.
“But you can’t live on that,” she said. “Do you starve yourself?”
“Not with Le Coche at the end of the road. Sixpence goes a long way if you know exactly how to spend it at Le Coche. And I can make it go further. I drink water in a tall green wineglass and hear the cool delicious tink of ice against the champagne bottle in its tub, and when I make an omelette of one egg and balance my tray on that footstool by the fire, I see a small table rise out of the floor bearing oysters and caviare and a lamp whose fantastic shape and colours vie with the one rare orchid in its slender vase. Such are the Aspirations of an Artist.”
“Now you are quite human, I mean nice. For one moment I thought you looked like a Roman Emperor.”
He laughed for pleasure.
“That is because I felt like one and wanted you to know it. Before your taxi came down this street I was the loneliest, the poorest, the most unambitious and insignificant young man in London. I lay on the divan and had no energy even to fetch a book. I knew I should never get on, that nothing would ever happen to me. I longed for drugs to create an illusion that life is interesting. Then I heard a taxi splashing through the rain. There is nothing so mysterious as a taxi in the rain, especially in an empty side-street. Who is in it? A woman visiting her lover? A girl going to her first ball? A man to whom the doctor has given sentence of death? I once pursued a taxi for a considerable distance in blissful ignorance of its occupants, but the driver took me for a tout and bawled ‘ No luggage.’ That is all I shall ever know of his unknown fare, for doubtless she was ‘ fair and fair and twice as fair,’ that she had no luggage. But I took the words as a warning, as an axiom, as a whole philosophy. No luggage. No traditions. No fears. No other people’s ideas, no worn-out property, no relations, no old friends. That is the way to get on.”
“Where to?”
“The top of the world. But why distract me from your taxi? It came down the street—it stopped below. I was at the window by then, craning out over the parapet, all the rain pouring down my neck. Yes, it was at our door. Then it was for one of the Girls Below—for which? And was it the utter swine whose attentions had been falling off lately, or the sweet boy who was just coming on, or the complete stumer who drank all their whisky, or the perfect old darling who was safe to stand the Savoy at least? How varied life must be for a woman! But then came my moment. In the patch of light under the gas-lamp I saw a small white fluttering thing appear out of the taxi window and knew it for a woman’s white kid-gloved hand.”
“It might have been cotton.”
“What unpleasantly morbid fancies young girls have nowadays! I don’t believe you h
ave ever seen a cotton glove, yet this frightful image occurs quite naturally to your untried innocence.”
“These modern girls know everything. And did you know I had come to see you?”
“Of course. I really knew it before the taxi stopped. I knew that in this world where nothing ever happened, someone was coming to make me a prince, an emperor.”
“And are you?”
“You recognized me.”
She was silent, a little scared by that secret-sharing smile that had promoted her thought of him and then read it.
“But I didn’t come for that,” she said.
“I know. I don’t know why you came. Probably because you’ve quarrelled with your young man, for I perceive an ominous excrescence that mars the perfect fit of your glove on the third finger of your left hand. Why don’t you take them off?”
“It’s not worth while. I’m just going.”
“Of course.”
She began slowly to remove them.
“Or with your father. Or both. And the best way to punish them was to go and look up that damned dago they hated so much.”
“How do you know? Has Iris told you already?”
“Iris? Who is she?”
“My sister. No, she’s not like me, and she hasn’t the same name. She’s Mrs. Destree.” As he still looked blank she added hesitatingly, “You sat out with her on the stairs, you know.”
He threw back his head and shouted with laughter.
“So that’s got round. And I’m the low young man who made strictly dishonourable proposals to the safely married daughter of the house.”
She shrank from his laughter, divining in him a quality of ferocious vulgarity that justified the epithet barbarian.
She rose, looking round for her gloves. They were in his hands and he held them out to her, his face suddenly grave and intent.
“Will you forgive me?” he said simply. “I have made another mistake. I make many, for I am a low young man who can only get on in the world if I push through the crowd. The English ideal is to be Self-contained. But it is of as little use for me to attempt it as for those abortive letter-boxes in the passage downstairs. Consider my profile, my complexion, the shape of my head. And my name. Am I to sit quiet in a corner, to ape a young actor being fratefully nace? I shall continue to make mistakes until either I learn that they are mistakes or else I shall make them the fashion.”
Knock Four Times Page 5
