Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  She also was plotting. They looked at each other with forced smiles and made bright little remarks, and all the time they were watching each other furtively, wondering how much the other had guessed of their secret thoughts, getting more and more desperate as they waded further into this morass of deceit, planning to turn faint or sick or anything that would prevent their having the food they craved for. To have plenty in her purse and go home starving and to go on starving because she would have to keep up the pretence with the maids at home of having dined, surely Dicky could see how absurd it was.

  But she had never seen him so solemn. As the woman and the elder she would have to get them out of it, and she did it by confiding to him in a childishly impulsive manner how Ronny had failed her and she had wanted to ask him to dinner instead, but he wasn’t on the ’phone and now it was far too late to go back home or anywhere else for that matter, but couldn’t she have him to dinner in his own flat? That would be far more fun, and they would run down the road together to Le Coche to choose it together, for she had seen his windows blazing as she passed in the taxi.

  At this Dicky threw up the game with shouts of laughter, confessing that he had exactly one and ninepence in his pockets until his monthly allowance of eight pounds should arrive the day after to-morrow, and a couple of brutally candid, gibing friends ran down the stairs which they had mounted a few minutes since as polite and nervous strangers.

  But Dicky did not quite forgive her for having seen through him ; she had got the better of him and it was his prerogative to be knowing.

  Now they stood outside Le Coche’s shop and Celia was behaving like a child at a Christmas bazaar. She had never known food could be so exciting and mysterious. Saucissons sounded much more appetizing than sausages and looked like Christmas tree decorations all wrapped up in crimson paper and crinkling green and gold ; she wanted to buy them all and was scarcely to be deterred by Dicky’s warning that some contained garlic and others were all liver.

  And that lovely golden stuff in the great earthenware bowl, she had never seen so much mayonnaise in her life, it made one realize the resources of the universe. And how delicious soup jelly looked in a copper cauldron! And what were those darling fat green things like baby crocodiles? Pickled cucumbers? and in brine, not vinegar? How much nicer than vinegar, and it was pleasant to think that Robinson Crusoe had the same facilities for pickling them, that is if he had the cucumbers.

  And had gherkins also any individual existence apart from the pickle-jars, or were they always born in captivity like the gorillas in the Zoo which otherwise died? And what was sauerkraut exactly? and where did pig’s trotters go to? into the oven or pot-au-feu, and was Saint Ivel canonized for the sake of his cheese? and if so, what about the much more delectable Pommels, those little white-wrapped bundles of the snowy froth of cream piled high on a green striped dish?

  With so much choice they were still debating in eager tones as they entered the shop, pointing in turn to each item of the majestically solid row of cold meats. Roast beef or pressed beef or roast stuffed pork or pickled pork or home-made brawn or tongue or veal loaf or galantine of chicken and ham or ham proper all covered with cloves and breadcrumbs? It perturbed Dicky a little that her tastes seemed spontaneously low ; she was determined to try the pickled pork, declaring that it looked lovely.

  Her raptures were modulated in the shop and did not disturb the massive impassivity of the great Le Coche.

  He was accustomed to ladies in evening cloaks and silver slippers stopping their taxis at the end of Rainbow Road on their way back from a theatre or an early party in order to buy a kipper or half a pound of sausages for breakfast. His little white unwinking eyes had noticed Celia’s face at the window before she entered and now scarcely glanced at her as she made her purchases from among the group of charwomen ; she wore a fur cloak worth two hundred on her back, but she was not likely to be any the better customer for that, she was one of those who were here to-day, gone to-morrow, like the silvery night moths who fluttered round his lighted windows in the late summer dusk.

  She felt herself in the presence of greatness, of a single mind, of one undivided purpose. She and Dicky clasped their paper bags in their arms and ran from the shop like children from school.

  “Brr,” she said, “what a terrible man! Did you notice his wife? Has she always been like that?”

  “She was once pretty.”

  “But she wasn’t brave enough to go on. Did she have a lover and did he find it out?”

  “He would have ignored that. He would have put his blind eye to the telescope like Napoleon.”

  “Like Nelson, Dicky.”

  “I tell you it’s Napoleon ; Nelson didn’t have a wife.”

  “And Napoleon didn’t have a blind eye.”

  “That is true, and in any case it is an odd thing to regard one’s wife’s infidelities through a telescope. But the teaching of history in English schools is most inaccurate.

  “I will tell you instead the true tragedy of Madame Le Coche. Some years ago she was caught in the act of giving the last pickled onion in the bottle to a little boy. In vain she urged that the onion weighed a quarter of an ounce and was one-fifth of an inch in diameter, that the child was suffering acute indigestion as the result of school dinners consisting of soup and milk puddings, and craved for more normal fare. The scene that followed with her husband has cowed her ever since.”

  He had recovered his ascendancy. He crowed, flapping his wings. He would not let her undo the packages which she was longing to explore. He told her to shut her eyes, or, better, go into the next room and at the end of five minutes everything would be ready for her. She went into a tiny room and looked out of the window at the sky and the tops of wet trees. She might have been looking out of an attic in a country house. She would love to sleep in a room like this and have no servants to say, “Very well, miss,” and then go downstairs to say what they really thought; to be free to have dinner, or rather supper, at an hour so disgracefully late that she was really hungry for it, and then to go up the road and choose it herself from all the surrounding food, instead of having to think it out in her head like Mamma in an uninspiring room and before an uncommunicative cook who never gave tongue except to suggest something that she knew perfectly well the Master could not bear.

  Poor Mamma, it was no wonder she thought it a treat to go out to dinner with a lot of old fogies. And she felt so free and light-hearted that she was singing loudly with her head out of the window when Dicky came to fetch her in a mask and a scarlet cloak, because he had not changed.

  “In your absence,” said this Mephistophelean figure as he led her by the finger-tips into the next room, “I clapped my hands, and instantly these curtains of crimson brocade stamped with velvet roses which to your unaccustomed eyes appear merely as red rep, were drawn asunder and a negro page in while velvet pranced out and turned three somersaults which landed him in a respectful attitude at my feet. I spoke one word of more mighty properties than those used by the most famous magicians. This word was ‘ Dinner! ’ It should have been ‘ Supper,’ for it is now certainly 9.30.

  “My servants, however, are too excellent to be literal : the page disappeared, and through those curtains, to the strains of a slow and hungry waltz tune, there entered a row of dwarfs glittering in gold and silver, each bearing one minute but perfect dish, which they placed upon the table and then proceeded round the room, disappearing as they had come, and when all had gone, the music died also in a lingering and starving strain.

  “The room was now silent and empty, until I led into it a silver princess.”

  Enchantment fell on them ; they looked at each other in amazement and delight, for the music he had feigned now stole upon their ears in tinkling, tripping notes like the pattering feet of dwarfs and an air from Mozart danced into the room.

  “It’s the man with the harp,” said Dicky and, pulling off his mask, he ran to the window and leaned out over the balustrade. “I must thr
ow him a penny, and one must wrap it up in paper so that it doesn’t roll away.”

  She emptied the coppers out of her purse, and he produced a much crumpled telegraph form.

  “This scrap of paper,” he said, “has brought me only tragedy and bitterness. Let it carry rewards to another artist.”

  He remembered that if he had opened the telegram in time he would have missed Celia ; he could tell her as the supreme compliment that it had after all brought him his richest reward. But it was not true, for Celia stood only for the present moment and she could come to him some other evening, but the chance he had missed stood for the future, the unknown, the impossible made possible. With Celia before his eyes receiving the homage of his prepared feast and glittering speeches and, most magical gift of all, his unprovided music, he could still regret and would always regret the opportunity he had missed that night.

  An odd fancy came to him to compliment her with the truth instead of the lie. With surprise he considered it a moment before he let it drop, together with four pennies and three halfpennies wrapped in the telegram, as far over the balustrade as he could reach.

  Celia beside him could just see far below a dark, hunched figure and the aspiring shape of a harp ; from the glistening street came the tune to which other couples had danced over a hundred years ago. That ghostly company from the court of Marie Antoinette now trod a minuet in Rainbow Road until dispelled by the crash of Dicky’s package on the pavement. The notes ceased to trip upwards through the air, a husky voice called “Thank you,” and she and Dicky called “Thank you” back.

  Then as the music began again he dropped the curtain.

  He had already forgotten his extraordinary notion. He had other gifts for her than that of an unnecessary and clumsy candour.

  He drew her cloak from her shoulders and her frock flowed out from it like shining water ; he held her finger-tips lightly on his own ; he looked at her and she at him.

  Nothing more substantial was between them than the memory of a kiss, yet it lay heavy as magic on their tongues, their hands, their now evasive eyes.

  It was she who had sought him out yet he held her present only by a thread, at a touch or a look too long she might go from him, silently, he had seen how she would go and not look back.

  He bowed with ceremony, he led her to the fire where the divan had been drawn up before the round corner table laid for two and in the middle a vase of crimson roses.

  On the square centre table were quantities of little dishes or plates or saucers grouped round the tall bottle of white wine that they had bought at the pub round the corner. He opened it with the corkscrew he had borrowed on the way up from the conservatory kitchen of the Girls Below, and poured some out for her in a tall green wine-glass ; he brought her hors d’œuvre of Russian salad and olives and anchovies in a saucer.

  She longed for her pearls—“poor Mamma” was now a nuisance—but she would wear them another time for Dicky, there would surely be another time.

  It was a feast fit for an emperor, and like emperors they reclined on cushions of crimson and purple, and she exclaimed and purred and ate and drank with cries of rapture and hid her disappointment that she had not been allowed to help put it all out in those funny little odd saucers and things, for it was her supper and she had been longing to do it, but Dicky had done it so beautifully and was so pleased it was a shame to grudge it.

  So she smiled at him, hugging her secret sacrifice, and Dicky hugged his secret knowledge of Ronny’s faithlessness, and each in consequence felt a secret slight superiority to the other which enhanced their tenderness and sympathy.

  There followed teacups of soup which Dicky was heating on the gas-ring, and thin sandwiches of paté-de-foie-gras, and plates of spiced meats adorned with dabs of mayonnaise, and preserved cherries sitting in Devonshire cream on biscuits, and coffee which Dicky made very well even though it was in a jug.

  And all the time they ate and drank as ancient royalty were wont to dine, imprisoned behind a barrier.

  He told her of his plans and of his unwritten books, of his struggles and disappointments in the effort to get on and get known, but he did not tell of his mischances that evening, for they would have shown him in an inferior position. He trusted that Ronny for his own sake would not reveal how he had seen him wallowing in the bedspread with Leila ; yes, he was glad he had thought it better not to betray Ronny.

  But he told Celia that sometimes he was overcome by his sense of the world’s vastness and his own littleness, that he feared to die when he had achieved nothing, or, worse, to find that all that he had achieved was worthless, to live when the world had killed his spirit and cold hopes swarmed like worms within his living clay.

  “Oh, but, Dicky, what a wonderful idea! You must write it, indeed you must.”

  “I expect it’s been done before. In fact I believe Shelley or someone wrote something rather like it.”

  “What does it matter?”

  He thought it over and decided it didn’t. It was quite unnecessary to have dragged in Shelley or someone.

  “It shows,” he said, “a bourgeois spirit to acknowledge one’s debts.”

  She just refrained from clapping.

  “Wilde,” he continued, “robbed like an aristocrat. His plagiarisms were so many favours bestowed.”

  “I see Shelley thanking you in Heaven.”

  “And with good reason, for all your laughter, for he is dead these hundred years and I am alive, and if I carry on anything that he may happen to have thought of first, I carry on his life.”

  “Yes, I like that.”

  He was trembling. He was thinking, “If I don’t kiss her now, I may never get another chance.” Last time it had come at the inevitable moment, but now it was not the inevitable moment, not yet.

  He said lightly, “I should have invented you, Celia, if God hadn’t happened to think of it first. I should have done it in a ballet, the ballet of a Sleeping Beauty who vanishes at the kiss that wakes her.”

  He looked at her, but she was cool and smooth as cream, she gave a little tinkling laugh and said :

  “Unfortunately God did think of it first. And He turned me out among a gross of Kensington girls, all of us talking the same slang, running to the same shops, breaking our hearts over the same sort of young man.”

  “What sort of young man?” he asked quickly.

  “He answers to the descriptions, a perfect pet, an utter lamb, and rather an angel.”

  “They are singularly undescriptive.”

  “That is their advantage.”

  “It is wonderful how you have survived.”

  “I am very tough. I have lived through a kindergarten where the mistresses were all so bright you would think they were polished every day. I have spent several years in a boarding-school where, as there were only nice girls, we wore white frocks every evening and had lessons that could not qualify us for any profession. I went to a finishing school in France, and that did nearly finish me. I returned from it an almost perfect automaton, guaranteed to flirt, to scream, to laugh, to talk chiffons or scandal or be the sympathetic listener at any required moment.”

  “Celia! I have never heard you talk like this before.”

  “Conversation must be catching. I have never heard anyone talk like you before.”

  “But have you thought like it?”

  “Yes, of course, at odd times. But if you ever finish a full sentence, or forget to put in, ‘ I mean to say ’ or ‘ perfectly sweet,’ or something like that, people think there’s something wrong and ask why you didn’t go to college or if you read a great deal.”

  If she had been watching she might have seen something of the same expression in him, for he was amazed and a trifle disconcerted to discover such articulate criticism beneath her air of childish sophistication. It was more a part of her training than herself. He must look out not to give himself away before her.

  But she was not watching him, though she was looking at him anxiously,
for she had discussed with him the characteristics that most repelled her in herself, those that she shared with the gross of Kensington girls and dared not try to shed lest in so doing she should find herself alone.

  She said slowly, fumblingly, in a manner very different from the crisp bitterness she had shown before, “It doesn’t matter much who we are or what we are like, does it, Dicky? We each of us have to be someone. So what does it matter what sort of loathly characteristics we are born with, if only we can make something out of what we have?”

  She did not tell him that it had been envy of him, of his freedom, his hopes and plans, his buoyant and vigorous nature, that had made her speak as she had never done before. But he may have guessed, for he felt a tenderness and indeed a pity such as he had never yet experienced.

  “You shall not stay in your glass case,” he cried, flinging his arms round her ; “you shall come out into the world with me and say what you like and nobody will call you clever, because I shall be so much more clever that I shall drown it, but nothing I shall say will be half as true as what you have just said, but how am I going to go on being clever if you go on making me say the truth?”

  He forgot the kiss he had been waiting for all the evening, he held her with clumsy, boyish kindness, patting at her hair and face, he wanted only to comfort and reassure her, until suddenly he was aware that the spell was broken and that they were in each other’s arms.

  “Dicky, you beast, have you pinched our corkscrew?” Leila’s voice came streeling about their ears.

  There she was in the open door, at which, as she afterwards declared, she had knocked at least three times. Behind her stood Ronny with a bottle under his arm and a slightly startled expression which slowly crystallized into one of carved imperturbability.