The moment had come for her to speak, but there was nothing for her to say, for the moment had come and gone and been over long ago, and now there was nothing left for either of them to say.
“So that’s over,” she said. “Why didn’t we know it before?”
He said, “What’s over?” and she said :
“Oh, you know,” and he said he did not know, but she knew that he knew, and it was no good speaking, for whenever she thought of doing so, all the wrong things came into her head, that she had thought he needed her or at any rate needed her to stick to him, but now even that didn’t matter and he needed her no more than Dicky and there was no place for her at all.
But of course she could not say any of this and it was ridiculous to feel hurt and unhappy and angry with Ronny ; she ought to be very glad that he did not need her any more, but she only felt hollow and empty, as though she were not there at all.
Some hours earlier that evening Leila had opened the door-window on to the balcony and looked up the street towards the blazing windows of Le Coche, down the street to the mysterious dark forms of the trees. Someone must have been playing a violin down at that end ; every now and then she heard the strains of music drawn out through the dusk. An empty car stood waiting down there, and on the other side of the road in the dark patch between two lamp-posts the small figure of a girl had stood waiting under a green umbrella. It was not Mab. Leila had closed the window and drew the curtain and did not look again. Nobody ever came when you looked for them.
After she and Dicky had finished supper she found herself going to the window again and remembered this, so turned away saying : “What can she be doing?” for the fifteenth time.
“She’s met someone and gone off somewhere, of course,” said Dicky satisfactorily, and refused to listen to Leila’s objections that she would have remembered the party or at least have wanted to come back and change, though he admitted she might have ’phoned, but what was the use of worrying?
“I know ; but somehow I feel upset.”
“That’s the cream. Take some carbonate of soda and listen to the story of my life.”
“Which of them?”
“I never can make up my mind. Do you like the one——”
“Is the gas lit in the hall yet?”
“The one about Eton and Harrow competing for my services in the tennis championship? Or the one——”
“If I put Scorhill by Mervyn she’ll be rude to him, and if I don’t she’ll sulk. She’d better be rude.”
“The one in which I was discovered writing poetry on paper bags in Soho? It’s so difficult to choose a past. Have you decided yet whether your title is The World’s Worst Woman, or Uneasy Virtue?”
“Don’t say that sort of thing to-night to Mervyn Joyce, will you? He’s rather conventional, but he’s quite nice and has a car and his wife goes abroad a great deal.”
“What worries me is that when I wake up to find myself famous I haven’t got a single mother to rush to with grand pianos and necklaces as all the nice young authors do in the evening papers. I think I shall borrow our caretaker for the purpose, it would look so well if I lunched her at the Ritz.”
“Is that a knock? I wish I didn’t shiver so. It can’t be the cream.”
“Perhaps you are feverish and have got the ’flu. There’s a lot of it about. I’ve noticed a nasty hacking sound in your laugh.”
Leila looked at him superstitiously. She shouldn’t have wished to nurse him through influenza. He certainly wouldn’t nurse her, and if she were away now for any time she would probably lose her job. There was an unmistakably double knock on the door. She hadn’t even changed her frock and Mab wasn’t back. When would she come back? Was she never coming back?
She said carelessly, “I don’t think I shall say anything about expecting Mab back.”
Dicky nodded, pretending an interest in the recesses of the empty cream pot. So she was afraid Mab might have gone off with Harry on that holiday. And had she? How amusing life was and dramatic. And how thankful he was not to be a girl, always afraid of something.
He ran down and opened the door to an anæmically fair young man who became agitated at the sight of him and asked if he oughtn’t to have knocked twice, but that he had an idea that the bells——
“Stick to your idea,” said Dicky ; “it’s the best you’re likely to have for a long time.”
And he butlered the astonished young man upstairs to Leila, who received him in her most carefully nonchalant manner.
“So glad you’ve come first, Teddy ; you can help Dicky clear while I change my frock. You two know each other, don’t you? Oh, don’t you? Oh well, Dicky Teddy, Teddy Dicky. There’s another knock. Keep ’em busy, Dicky.”
She plunged into the back room, slamming the doors to after her. Here she was safe for just as long as it took to change her frock.
Whose were those voices coming up the stairs? They sounded jovial, confident, secure, a lot of talk about little things like the coal strike and revolution. How delicious to have your mind free enough to worry about things like that! She was dragging her new crème-de-menthe frock over her head. Yes, that was Mervyn on the stairs saying all the correct things about the miners and what the public wouldn’t stand, and there were Toby’s excitable yaps that had earned him his nickname, and this was the frock she had at last let him give her, “like a fool” she now thought, staring at herself in the glass. He had been so sensitive and highly strung about it, so full of reproach at her implied distrust of his delicacy, but all the same she would have to be extra nice to him this evening because she was wearing it, and it wasn’t worth it, however deep in debt you were, not all the frocks in Shaftesbury Avenue were worth the cost of being nice when you didn’t feel like it. She had forfeited a part of herself ; it was a tiresome, nagging feeling ; she was by so much the less a person, and less free to wonder with an undivided mind as to what could have happened to Mab.
If she had gone with Harry on his holiday, she surely would have told her.
Accidents never happened to people one knew.
Luckily her stockings were the pair that Teddy had brought her from Paris, poor boy. It was very sweet the way he went on proposing, though with his income he must know that he was taking no chances.
And Mervyn’s piece of jade went very well with the frock. Of course he shouldn’t—but you couldn’t really call jade jewels. The ravishing reflection that confronted her was built up by the combined admiration of a limited company ; but instead of this cheering her as she had intended, she had the unpleasant fancy that if it were withdrawn, her clothes would fall off her back and she herself crumble to pieces. There was a story she had read as a child of a courtier called Feathertop who was really only a pole with a turnip head whom somebody had dressed up in a hat and coat and feathers, and then put a pipe in his mouth, and as long as this was alight, everyone thought he was alive, and admired and bowed down to him ; but one day he looked in the glass and saw that he was not a real person at all, and this so much astonished him that the pipe dropped out of his mouth and he collapsed and the people who came to pick him up said, “Why, he was nothing but a turnip and a pole after all!”
Dicky must be right, and she was feverish, for she was shivering again, and funny things that you had quite forgotten came floating up in your mind when you were feverish.
What a din they were making in the next room, more and more people giving tongue until it sounded as though a pack of hounds were shut up in there. She was at bay ; she must turn and face them. She dared not think what excuses Dicky might be making for the absence of their hostess. She flung open the folding doors and advanced with the improbable languor of a mannequin while Dicky played a triumphal march on a comb and paper.
“Darlings all, isn’t this too awful? Dicky had so much to tell me about all his pasts that I had no time to change my frock. Yes, isn’t it really rather sweet?” Here she caught Toby’s eye and just had time to smile in a special manner.
“No, don’t ask me about Mab. It’s that new play. Rotten of her, but she never can resist a first night. And she’s certain to go on to supper afterwards. Yes, Teddy, I will. One moment. Where’s a corkscrew?”
She felt herself whirring with mechanical vivacity. Faces hung all around her in the dimly lit room.
Someone had brought a young man with white tennis shoes and an earnest expression, but perhaps he would do for Scorhill; she liked to collect clever young men, and a man who wore white tennis-shoes at an evening party must be very clever.
“My stockings,” Teddy was saying with a coy grin under cover of the corkscrew hunt.
“Yes. Teddy, aren’t they sweet? I feel so immoral wearing them, though somehow the extremities don’t count so much do they? Gloves now are practically pure.”
It was unkind to have added all that. He had looked so pleased at the word “immoral.” Now Mervyn was waiting to tell her how the jade brought out her eyes, how it expressed her personality, was herself.
“More than myself,” she said with a high laugh. “If it weren’t for the jade you’d see I’d got a turnip head.”
“Ha ha! very good,” said Mervyn vaguely and wondered if Leila really drank. Her eyes looked rather queer to-night.
Dicky thought what a fool she was to worry about Mab of all people, Mab, who was as safe to come out on top as Leila was to make a mess of things. But perhaps it was really influenza ; in that case she was carrying it through rather well, and in applause he whispered :
“You are like an exotic lily in that frock. Why have I never fallen in love with you?”
“Because you are already in love with yourself.”
“How profound you are! You must indeed be ill.”
It was going quite well. Everybody was talking at the tops of their voices ; her chief, Lady Scorhill, was saying ruder things than she had yet thought of, and those near were giving rounds of laughter like applause in a theatre. But it was all going without her ; she could not manage it ; she stood outside and watched and listened, helpless to direct it.
There came a pause ; somebody stopped talking and then another ; for one terrifying instant silence pressed in on all the chattering crowd like a wave from the outer sea that enclosed their gay company. She was speechless as in a nightmare. In another moment it would engulf them altogether.
Dicky came to the rescue by bursting into a Russian dance in someone’s fur cloak. They all dressed up, there was much more noise ; the wave had been pushed back, they were safe for the moment ; the crowded, lamp-lit room spun on through space, through darkness and silence.
And somewhere in space there was Mab, but she did not know where. All these people talking to her and they did not know or care, they all had something else to worry about, she did not know what.
All except Dicky. She had never seen him so full of diabolic confidence and gaiety. She heard Scorhill tell him he must meet a friend of hers, Damaris, “she’s one of the Bankshires, you know. But what’s the matter with your clothes?”
“Poverty—a disease from which I recovered at 3.15 this afternoon and was fitted for two suits at Boole’s at 4.30.”
“You extraordinary boy. I suppose things happen like that with you?”
His nod implied that they happened every day.
“What an absurd little liar he is,” thought Leila. And yet some new secret source of power really seemed to be buoying him up. He put her in the shade. She was nowhere.
She went down to the kitchen to make some coffee and down came Toby after her, very lean and lanky and like Don Quixote in his pointed beard, and there he was asking her again about coming with him to Algiers, as if she could possibly give her mind to the subject while she was measuring out the spoonfuls.
“What would my father have said?” she asked with absent-minded sentiment, for this apostrophe had gone very well the last time she had made it, but that had been with old Chalmers and would not work with Toby, unless he made it himself.
In consideration of her sentimentality he dropped to a tenderer note.
“You need a holiday, my poor darling. I won’t worry you, if you don’t want me to make love to you yet, I won’t.”
“You must think me a fool,” she said, again absent-minded and forgetting her pose of orphan innocence.
But having forgone his sense of humour on her account, he was not disposed to keep it on his own. He complained of her lack of trust in him and embraced her fiercely.
“God ordained you to be my mistress,” he said, pressing her back over the sink so that the soap dish slipped down all over the new frock. This struck her as the most bitter calamity of all. Here she was landing herself in all this worry by accepting the frock, and already it was spoilt.
“Let me go, Toby. Oh, you brute, don’t you see what you’ve done? Just look at my frock.”
“’ My frock,’ yes, my frock—that’s all that matters. Men don’t count to you except as so many chocolates, flowers, dinners and dances and”—he tried to remember he was a gentleman, and failed—” and frocks” he hurled at her, and rushed down the stairs.
He had gone, and she would have to go back into that room alone, and everybody would know there had been a quarrel, and her frock was spoilt. She was oppressed by a sense of failure, as a conjuror must be who is spinning a quantity of plates all together and sees one go down.
No, he was not quite down ; he was coming back, coming up the stairs. She ran out into the lobby to meet him with, “Oh, Toby——”
“My cat and hoat,” he said with dignity, and collected them from the top of the coal-box.
He must be really in love to be as forgetful and mixed up as that. Dear Toby, how sweet of him! Perhaps after all—— “Oh, Toby,” she said again, and,” I can’t bear to have a row with you after you’ve been so decent to me, but everything has gone wrong this evening. I don’t know how it was——”
His coat was a cape which he flung round him. He was impossibly picturesque ; of course she could never go with him.
“It’s that little rat of a dago,” he was saying tragically. “I know he’s been worrying you.”
Dicky again! As if he were of any importance!
“Dicky? “she longed to say loftily.” Who is Dicky?”
But she had to be literal with Toby, and became shrill.
“I tell you he’s nothing to me, nothing, nor I to him. We are just very good friends.”
“And that means nothing. Quite so. You just like to keep him and me—my God, him and ME!—and all the rest of us spinning round you.”
But it all sounded like” Yap, yap! “A fit of giggling seized her, she hid her face in her hands and her shoulders shook. He was touched at the sight of her emotion and continued more gently :
“Well, you can only keep everybody if you love nobody. Are you going to be alone all your life?”
That was true, dreadfully true, even though it came from Toby.
“There’s Mab,” she faltered, wiping her eyes ; but where was Mab?
“Mab’s going to marry. What about you then?”
“Well, let’s wait till she does.” She was catching at another straw. “I can’t run the risk of any scandal before then. His family are nasty enough about it as it is.”
“Then when Mab’s married——?”
“When Mab’s married——”
When would Mab be married? Would she ever be married? Was she alive? Toby took her in his arms. His cape fell off; he really looked almost as manly as Mervyn. It did not strike her as odd to kiss him and tell him nothing of her fears. The kiss was given by a turnip head.
They took up the coffee. She thought Scorhill smiled at Mervyn as they came in ; she knew Scorhill had been saying things about her to Mervyn, he had been quite different just lately. So had she. There was another plate or two running down, it was no use bothering to keep them up once they began to do that.
Now they were going, all going away, and she would be alone to wonder why Mab had not come b
ack. She seemed to have been waiting for that moment all the evening, all her life. But beyond it there would surely one day be another when everything would suddenly come all right and her debts be paid and the landlord cease from troubling and a wholly detached man would make love to her quite nicely and quietly because he wanted to look after her.
She heard her voice saying, “Marry, my dear boy? Me? Not unless I can find a rich old man with one foot in the grave and the other on a piece of orange-peel.” She heard her laugh like a cry, the room seemed darker, she was confronted by a sudden horror, perhaps the moment she had been waiting for all her life was only death.
But as the words “only death” came into her mind, the horror vanished, a sense of brooding quiet hushed her spirit, the crowded, chattering room swung far away, and round her there was only space, only darkness and silence.
Only for a moment.
“So that’s over!” said Dicky, and began again on his comb and paper, chanting his Te Deum. “A good evening, a productive evening. Two women wrote down my name—at least I had to write it down for them. But aren’t you glad when they all go? Out into the Night they all go, and let ’em, damn ’em. The band’s rather good to-night. May I have the pleasure?”
“No, Dicky, don’t. You’ll knock something over. It’s so late. Think of the Ground Floors. No, I can’t do the splits, not in this dress anyway. It’s Mab you’re thinking of.”
Round and round they went, in and out of the table and few chairs and the bright coloured cushions on the floor. Leila felt too ill to improvise steps ; she let herself be used as a pivot round whom Dicky leaped and pattered and finally danced on his heels, while she shrieked with laughter and sang the words to his tune and clapped to keep time and shrieked in earnest when the door opened on a gaunt figure with horned head wrapped in a dust coloured shroud.
“What is it? What is it?” she screamed, clutching Dicky’s arm so that it bore the marks for days after.
Knock Four Times Page 19
