Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  Gordon, the editor of the New Day, whom he could not count as an acquaintance on his right forefinger—Gordon had asked him to dinner at the Ivy and to meet Mary Vane, who ran the literary side of half the fashionable woman’s papers in London and New York.

  “To-night.”

  The word stared at him from the telegraph form, and then “7.45.”

  He looked at his watch, which had stopped going this morning ; he flung open his door and bawled “Jimmy! What’s the time?” dashing down the stairs and knowing that it was no use, for Leila had said hours ago it was 8.30. But she was inaccurate. Jimmy opened his door and said in a surprised and dignified voice, “It’s just on haulf paust eight.”

  “Then I can’t go, I can’t go. It’s too late. Look here, you two. Are you there, Mrs. Jimmy? May I come in? Look here, look at this telegram. It came for me well over an hour ago. There’d have been just time if I’d dashed off then. And I never opened it. They’ll be at the theatre by now and I don’t know what theatre. I’ve missed it. Dinner at the Ivy and two editors and one a woman, and I had that telegram all the time in my pocket, and I’ve missed everything. Everything in the world.”

  He threw himself into a probably seventeenth century chair, buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

  “Well I never,” said Mrs. Jimmy. “Poor boy! It’s a shame, isn’t it, Fred? But fancy putting a telegram in your pocket without opening it. Whatever can you have been thinking of?”

  “Of foolish, trivial, far off things. Of love. What is love beside ambition? ‘ Only a weak man marries for love.’ How true that is! I beg your pardon, Jimmy ; I wasn’t thinking of you. Only of my wrecked career.”

  “Oh come, buck up, old man,” said Jimmy, who was shocked but rather pleased that Dicky should break down in this lamentable fashion. “They’ll ask you again.”

  “Again! An editor ask you to meet another editor again!”

  He gave a hollow laugh.

  “But why didn’t you open the telegram?” asked Mrs. Jimmy.

  “I thought it was an announcement of an aunt’s death.”

  “Like a circular?” said Jimmy. “Do you always put announcements of aunts’ deaths into the waste-paper basket unopened?”

  “No, I assure you I have never had one before. But I forgot about it, I was doing something else at the time. Besides, I was in the dark.”

  Jimmy looked at him rather curiously. “Was it you brought down that curtain on the first floor? We thought we heard a bit of a crash.”

  “It was,” said Dicky, “but honour forbids me to enter into particulars.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Jimmy, who had always thought Dicky a little queer in the head, but then he was a foreigner. “Anyway, I do call it a shame about your party. I hope you’ll meet this May Something again and have the best of luck.”

  He dragged himself wearily together, looking round on the Jimmys with a slow appreciation of the drama involved. Here were these two befriending him in his hour of need, these whom he had scorned at Leila’s prompting, Leila that infernal purple-headed witch who had twice crossed his path to-night and done him out of a dinner. Old friends were best.

  “You are awfully decent to me,” he said pathetically. “I had to tell someone. Good night.”

  He left them and went up to his lonely room. He had hoped they might have asked him to stay and have some supper, as they had often done in the days before he had dropped them. But they must have had it long ago, and anyway it would have spoilt his exit. Mrs. Jimmy was probably wiping away a silent tear by now.

  He tried to console himself by thinking of his evening suit which had belonged to a cousin. But he thought he could have surmounted that with Gordon and he knew he could have with a woman editor who, he had gathered, knew how to take a compliment.

  But he had learnt his lesson to-night. He would get clothes if he had to steal or murder for them. He did not get out the remains of the brawn ; it would choke him to eat it, thinking of that dinner at the Ivy and of the dinner that Leila was eating with Ronny. He wanted air and it had stopped raining, so he climbed through the landing window out on the leads.

  Here he stood above London and the back-yards of Rainbow Road. Stars were showing again between the clouds. Below him were the naked branches of the big lime tree ; they stretched up towards him like the groping skeleton fingers of a giant, beckoning to him. He thought what peace he should find if he threw himself down into them. No more disappointment. No more humiliations. No more life. What had life been to him that he should treasure it? He wondered if Leila had got to the fish course by now and what they were having. It might even be sole with lots of little mushrooms, “Bonne Femme” he thought it was called. An inadequate description.

  He stepped to the edge of the leads and looked down. The yards and their garden walls below were lost in darkness, so that he looked into nothing but the bare branches of the tree. If a cat sprang out and made him start, he would lose his balance and fall over, down into nothing.

  He might never stand higher than he now stood. He might never get out of Rainbow Road, or if he did, only to return to a stool in his father’s office in Birmingham. He would honestly rather die than that. There lay death under his feet, dark and still and full of nothing. Nothing was a lovely word. It meant peace, and he desired nothing but peace.

  “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—

  He hath awakened from the dream of life.”

  Someone had said that, for him alone. Was his life then nothing but a mad trance, an unprofitable strife? The words came rushing up from his retentive memory. There was a time when he had found it worth while to learn all that verse by heart just for the sound of it. He did not think he would now. It might well be that he would never stand higher than he now stood. His imagination might wither and he himself die from within. There might come a day when he would wake up to find himself not famous, but old and dull and unsuccessful. Or worse, find he had got all he wanted and didn’t want it, that the fairy gold at the foot of the rainbow had turned to dead leaves, to dust and ashes in his hands.

  Could any triumph equal that which he had missed to-night? Could any dinners taste as delicious as those that to-night he had not eaten? Could any successful amour bring him the same rapture as the thought of Celia, who had not returned his solitary kiss and who was engaged to someone else? If he died to-night he would keep all these things. But if he lived, they might die.

  He saw himself hurling through space, not as a disappointed young man but as Lucifer, son of the morning, guarding his treasure of youth and hope and belief. And out of the darkness below him the mighty words rose up in waves and sang his dirge.

  “He has outsoared the shadow of our night ;

  Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

  And that unrest which men miscall delight,

  Can touch him not and torture not again ;

  From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

  He is secure ; and now can never mourn

  A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ;

  Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

  With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.”

  Shelley was right. Life wasn’t good enough. The world’s slow stain would leave him cold and grey and dead before his time. Better to leap to death in a lover’s embrace as Heliogabalus had planned, than suffer that tedious ignominy.

  But into his rapturous desire for death there stole a thought that gave him more consolation than Shelley’s poetry.

  “I have to-night,” he said to himself, “refused two invitations to dinner, owing to a previous engagement.”

  He did not consider too closely the nature of the engagement, which was that of Celia to Commander Haversham.

  He stepped back from the edge of the leads. Through the open window behind him there fell on his ear the sound of four low and well-regulated knocks.

  Chapter IX

  When Mrs. Belamy had whispered
to Celia to wake up, and while Mrs. Belamy continued to talk to the other girl about night clubs in a manner that was a skilful combination of the amused and broad-minded elder and the dashing contemporary, she found herself thinking of Nanny at home, who used to tell them stories while they were having their supper of milk and biscuits and she was darning stockings in the night nursery. That was the cosy hour that she used to like best in the day, even now she could feel homesick for it and for Nanny’s gruff, comfortable voice and white cap which would drop lower and lower over the stockings as she said, “And so she went on, and on, and on, until she met, until she met——”

  “Wake up, Nanny!” they shouted, and her head would start up again and say something quite ridiculous in a very clear voice and a great hurry, like “Until she met a pair of stockings” or “a tray of milk and biscuits” or “a grocer’s boy,” none of which could have been any good to a princess.

  The other girl got up to go, and Mrs. Belamy went on thinking of dear old Nanny and her arthritis and the last time she came up to town and asked if Miss Celia wasn’t getting a husband now, and that was five years ago, Mrs. Belamy remembered with a stab of anguish. But the sight of Ronny reassured her. Dear Ronny, he was so dependable.

  She suddenly remembered why she must have been thinking of old Nanny. It was her birthday to-morrow and she had done up a parcel for her some days ago so as to be in plenty of time, but had not sent it off because Nanny was always so childishly pleased to get it on the day itself, and if she had not told Celia to wake up she would not have remembered it in time, for the post-office would have been shut in half an hour. She would not dare send any of the maids with it so soon before dinner, for Mrs. Belamy had so little courage with her maids that it was surprising she dared keep such dangerous animals in the house at all.

  But there was Ronny, he was always so nice and helpful, and thank heaven that new girl was at last going. She asked him as he was opening the door for Leila if he would be such a perfect angel as to take a parcel to the post-office before it shut, she would not have dreamt of bothering him only it was for their old nurse, she would be so disappointed if she did not get it on her birthday, and she did not like to ask the maids who were rather upset this evening.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” said Ronny, who was always so sympathetic. “What are they upset about this evening?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular,” said Mrs. Belamy ; and Celia explained that they were always upset, which, as Ronny remarked, must be very uncomfortable for them.

  He and Leila left the house together, and Celia then asked her mother if she had asked Ronny to stay to dinner with her that evening when she would be alone as her parents were going out to bridge. Mrs. Belamy said she had not spoken of it again. “But why didn’t you remind him yourself?”

  “I didn’t like to when he was talking so hard to that girl.”

  “Dear Ronny, he is always so polite.”

  Celia was silent. Her mother then said that of course Ronny knew he was expected to dinner, because he had left without saying good night.

  “He might only think he was coming back for just a few minutes.”

  “What if he does? You can tell him when he comes. You are so funny, Celia. I hope you are not going to make too much fuss over Ronny. That would be a great mistake.”

  “Would it?”

  Mrs. Belamy waved her hands in despair. “One would think you were twelve years old. Good Heavens! Look at the time! I shall have to dress in twenty minutes. Celia, be a darling and lend me your pearls. You won’t want them just for Ronny, and it was I who asked Grandmamma to leave them to you when she was so annoyed with Iris for resetting the tiara.”

  She ran upstairs in a pleased flutter, for she was going to eat a dinner that she hadn’t had to order herself, and to wear Celia’s pearls and a new dress which made her look quite ridiculously young. It did not trouble her that there would only be old fogies at the bridge party to admire her, for her vanity had reached a stage that was practically self-contained, requiring slight endorsement from outside.

  Celia told the maid that Ronny was coming to dinner and went up to dress.

  The new jar of bath-salts was scented with hyacinth, so that she dreamed in the bath of walks in bluebell woods with Dicky—no, of course she meant Ronny ; Dicky would be as out of place in the country as a poodle on the moors. It was an unkind comparison ; she was determined to remember it.

  She hurried down to open the door with a bright “Have you been here for ages?” to stare at an empty room, to realize slowly and reassuringly that he must have taken Leila all the way home and would be here in a second. Dear old Ronny, he was so gallant. She rang and put off the dinner for a quarter of an hour, and then discovered what the parlourmaid had been too well bred to mention, that she was already quarter of an hour late herself.

  She sat by the drawing-room fire and pretended to read.

  Dinner would be ruined by now, the meat a mere rag and the chestnut curry all dried up, and he must have meant to come back at any rate to say good night, but Leila had pressed him to do something or other with her first and poor old Ronny was always so weak.

  She was glad Mamma had left without knowing of his defection, for she would be sure to imply that Iris would somehow have managed better. The parlourmaid would be up in a moment to ask if she would wait any longer for Commander Haversham ; she despised herself for minding this. Gladys would no doubt prove a true friend if she flung herself on her stiffly aproned bosom and complained, “My young man has let me down.” And wouldn’t Mamma be wild if she knew of it!

  “I will be brave,” said Celia.

  So brave was she that when the time was up and Gladys did not appear she decided to ring for her after she had played just one tune on the piano to give herself time. She chose a Beethoven sonata which she had not looked at since school, and some of the passages required re-playing several times. Then she rang, and facing that buttressed figure whose face appeared to have been starched along with her lace and linen, she said, “I’ve had a message on the ’phone, Gladys. There’s been a muddle and I am going out to dinner instead now. Just fetch me my cloak, will you, while I ring up for a taxi?”

  Even now she need not have given Dicky’s address to the taxi driver ; she could have gone out and got dinner somewhere. But to do this alone, in evening dress, required more courage of Celia than to drive to the house of a comparatively strange young man and ask him to take her out to dinner. So it came about that she stood once more on the broken doorstep and gave four well-regulated knocks.

  And Dicky, opening the door, heard the buzzing of a taxi, and saw first against its black shape a pale, shining head whose threads of wind-blown hair floated like gossamer in the darkness, and then two sparkling feet, and then the dark furred outline of a small figure and in its midst a glimpse of shimmering stuff.

  To Celia’s instant terror, she felt that he had at first expected, perhaps wished, to see someone else. But his cry of pleasure as he pulled her into the now dimly lit passage dispersed that.

  “Who did you think I was,” she asked—“the Prince of Wales or Gladys Cooper?”

  “Two editors of both sexes who had found it worth while to throw their stall tickets into the gutter and drive out to South Kensington in search of me.”

  “No wonder I was a poor substitute.”

  “You are blasphemous.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Very.”

  The truthful answer was surprised out of him.

  “So am I,” said Celia; “will you take me out to dinner?”

  His tortured smile made her blood run cold.

  “Dicky, what’s the matter—aren’t you well?”

  “Perfectly well, thank you.”

  In his heart he was saying, “God, this is inartistic. You shouldn’t go on.”

  He asked her to come up and have a cocktail first. Could he borrow from the Jimmys? But he had done that before and the last time had not been ver
y successful. It was shortly before he had dropped them, and he saw no reason to expect any better results now, for, in spite of their sympathy this evening, they could not be said to have received his overtures with rapture.

  He might tell her that he had had his pockets picked, and she would ask him why he hadn’t gone to the bank. Or that he had lent his last farthing to a friend in need, and the same question would apply to that.

  And she went on saying things like, “What extraordinary luck that you shouldn’t have had dinner yet either. I suppose you forget all about meals when you’re working ; you ought to live in a place where the landlady would bring them up regularly and sweep your papers severely out of the way. Still, it is luck.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” said Dicky brightly. “Awful luck.”

  He rummaged in the cupboard that he had varnished with such pride, and after due time gave an exclamation of annoyance.

  “I lent the bottles to the Girls Below last night and they’ve never returned them. How like them! And they’re out, and the room’s locked up.”

  Celia had an odd sensation as once when she had seen an elaborate piece of stage scenery by daylight in the open street.

  There was something wrong somewhere.

  It had been rather funny of Dicky to mention cocktails, as he had never offered her one before. Now she was certain he never had them. Then why offer them just in order to get tied up and flustered? for he certainly was flustered for a moment downstairs. Or was it because of something else? Was it——?

  The full horror of the truth swept on her.

  Dicky had not enough money to take her out to dinner, was perhaps quite unaccustomed to taking himself out. She had asked glibly if he starved, but never realized its significance. She had more than enough for both in her purse, but she had been brought up to believe that a man must always pay for the girl and regarded any other arrangement as an insult. And Dicky was touchy ; she could see it by the way he had insisted on paying for her taxi that day, and by the lies he had made up about the non-existent cocktails, which can only have been a pretext to gain time while he plotted further lies.