Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

The door at the top of the kitchen stairs closed gently and Gladys went down to tell Cook all about it.

  The taxi drove out of The Borehams, away from the dining-room and the hall which had ensnared them like flies caught in a narrow sticky jar, away from Mrs. Belamy’s plaintive protests and Colonel Belamy’s enigmatic anger, away from Gladys and Cook and the policeman’s lonely imaginings and the sequestered squares of South Kensington, up into crowded streets, into a traffic of cars and taxis and buses full of home-returning workers and early pleasure-seekers, into the Town.

  On this day of sudden spring it was as flamboyant as a city in a Russian ballet.

  The sun shone in their eyes, the buses blazed scarlet and green, rhododendrons flamed in the Park where they had appeared as swiftly as the magic gardens of a genie, the buildings rose huge and flushed with gold in majestic vulgarity equal to those of Imperial Rome, on the pavements slim girls like flames trooped past, intent on the one great business of being beautiful, the town revolved and roared and hummed, a gigantic kaleidoscopic top on which they made an infinitesimal speck of colour, even as their city made a transitory speck on the revolving world.

  “God!” cried Dicky, kissing her again as they passed the Ritz. “I’ve never been alive before.”

  The sun shone slantwise into Colonel Belamy’s study. He opened the study door again, took his hat and stick and went out. He glanced at the hall clock where it ticked between the Baxter prints, there was just time to take a short turn before he dressed for dinner. Only just time, although his days were filled full to overflowing with an endless empty leisure which now oppressed him so that he felt crushed by a vast weight of nothing.

  There he was on the shelf, he always had been ; he had never seen any real active service ; he was a man of action and he had never had a good chance to prove it. He had nothing to do but take a taxi and stroll in St. James’s Park.

  It was his son who had had all the luck, a D.S.O. and a distinguished appointment in India, all for a young fool who couldn’t pass into Sandhurst, and with weak nerves too, he had had nightmares ever since that long time without leave in the trenches.

  Still he had got something out of it, something to talk about for the rest of his life if he wanted to, he had got his chance, he had had a run for his money.

  Whenever that phrase came into his mind there came also the memory of a Zulu chieftain in his warpaint running down a gulley between two lines of British fire, brandishing his shield and spear, uttering his long low thunderous war-cry, running at full speed for about a quarter of a mile with shots falling all round him before at last he was hit. They were the only shots Colonel Belamy had ever seen fired on active service. But it was nothing to tell, he could never make it go well with Iris and Dodo when they were children. They said, “Well, was that all?” and “That wasn’t a battle. Weren’t you ever in a real battle?” But occasionally, as now, he was haunted by this image of a man who had lived his idea of life to the fullest for five minutes before he died.

  He ought to go back and dress for dinner. He was always going back to dress for dinner. In sudden reckless revolt he decided he would ring up from the club and say he was dining there to-night. Supported by his collection, he was accustomed to say there was no one there worth speaking to. But this evening he was unsupported and afraid of his own company.

  A mild glow of sunset lingered over the lake, at its farther end the towers and minarets of Whitehall rose like an Eastern palace. He looked at the ducks and remembered that Charles used to throw bread to them to please Iris and Dodo when they were children, though it pleased nobody but Charles himself. He wished now he had old Charles to talk to, he was irritable, unreasonable, and eccentric ; he was always crossing him and contradicting him, but that was something to get his teeth into, to make him feel that he was there, alive. Nobody now either dared or bothered to contradict him.

  Daisy was a good wife, but she had never brought him out, there were things in him she knew nothing of, things like—he was not sure what they were like, but whatever they were like she did not know them, they had never been discovered nor used.

  Children asked him the time. He answered the first, ignored the second, swore at the third, and was annoyed when they scuttled off from him as timid as mice. They were straggling past him all the time, shouting to each other, pulling dead daisy-chains out of their pockets and dropping them on the paths.

  Children shouldn’t be allowed in the parks, though of course he was fond of them in their proper place. There was Iris, his little girl, plucky little devil she was, never afraid of him even when he was angry with them and Dodo would creep away, but not Iris : she would storm the citadel, climb on his knee and pull his moustache, the cheeky little brat. It seemed like yesterday. There was a fine woman for you, she hadn’t a nerve in her body. She was fond of him too, made use of him, bullied him, but they understood each other all right, though it was little enough he saw of her now. That stupid fellow her husband wasn’t up to her, he gave in to her too much, what she needed was a man. Daisy had not needed that, he decided in a flash : but it did not occur to him to wonder what Daisy had needed.

  There were more lovers again, you might think that all the parks were made for was children and lovers. They brushed past him without seeing him, they saw nothing, not even each other. Nobody existed in the park except themselves. Their egoism exasperated Colonel Belamy ; it was a relief, almost a delight, to see a vaguely familiar figure in the distance. Then he saw it was Ronny Haversham. That was awkward so soon after the engagement had been broken off, but he was walking with a girl; that was a good thing, there would be no need to speak to him. That was a good-looking girl with him, though too tall and flat-chested, and she looked ill, like most of these modern girls who stooped and had no stamina and strained their hair back till they looked like something coming out of a pond.

  Leila and Ronny drifted past him, though they passed so close that Ronny’s arm touched his elbow. Colonel Belamy was outraged. He said to himself, “He’s consoled himself soon enough,” but he was angry because he himself as well as Celia had been pushed out of Ronny’s world ; he had been made to feel he was invisible, no, that he did not exist.

  And by that he was reminded of all that he had been covering so resolutely in his mind that afternoon. He had discovered that he had nothing to hold on to, nothing to justify himself in his own mind ; himself, as he had thought himself, was gone.

  Chapter XIX

  Celia stood in front of him in the study doorway. He had just closed his eyes sitting by the fire after his return from the club, and when he opened them, there she was with her cloak dropping off her shoulders in the slack way modern girls have. She had behaved extraordinarily this evening, though it took him a slight effort to remember what it was she had said or done. He wondered if that was why she had looked in on him, and feared apologies, reconciliations, embarrassment.

  He said, “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you speak?”

  She said, “In a minute,” and came over to the fire. Her cloak slipped to the floor as she came, and he suppressed an oath. She stood leaning her elbow on the mantelpiece looking down at the fire, a masculine pose that did not suit her ; Iris could do it, but she was not tall enough. She said :

  “Mr. Gordon has offered me a job, Papa, and I want to take it.”

  So this was what she had had up her sleeve all this time. She was one of these independent girls who want to earn their living. He might have thought it of Iris, but she hadn’t enough gumption. He said, “What on earth do you or does Mr. Gordon imagine you can do?”

  “Read the stories for his magazine and weed out the worst.”

  “And why should you wish to read more trash than you already do? You have a comfortable home, a more than adequate dress allowance, you do exactly as you like, not even troubling to tell your parents when you go out or where or with whom.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, what more do you want?”

&n
bsp; “I should like to have some other occupation besides that of being engaged or not being engaged.”

  He looked at her, startled. It was not like her to say a thing like that. But what was she like? What was she up to?

  “Don’t try to be clever,” he said. She was silent, and he thought of Ronny jostling him in the park and never seeing him. All these young people were engrossed in their own affairs, never bothering about anybody else.

  “I want to make money,” said Celia.

  So that was it. She was extravagant, she had more money than his mother would have known what to do with, but the little fool had been getting into debt, perhaps into a scrape.

  “You had better tell me all about it,” he said in a voice which he tried to make grim but had too strong a touch of satisfaction in it, for here was an opportunity to take a firm hand on the situation, to pay off the scoundrel and tell him what he thought of him, to tell Celia what he thought of her, perhaps even to hear her acknowledge that there was no man like her father.

  “You know all about it,” she said.

  She found difficulty in speaking and in looking at him. She poked at the fire with a silver shoe, her laconic awkwardness made her seem like a gawky boy, and this was so strange in her as to alarm him, for he could not guess that it was caused by so strange a thing as her effort to speak sincerely to him.

  He remembered the atrocious jackanapes who had taken her out that evening ; she was surely not going to tell him that he was the cause of this sudden wish to make money. She could not be such a fool as to dream of marrying him.

  Celia’s voice came jerkily, gaspingly, across the fireplace.

  “That bowl was worth at least a hundred, wasn’t it? You were going to sell it. It’s not a bit the same thing, of course, but I’m going to make enough money to pay for it. If I saved it out of my dress allowance it would take ten times as long.”

  He began to laugh. Not with the short sharp bark he so often gave to show his shrewd knowledge of the world, but feebly, inadvertently, as a sick child cries or an old person coughs. He could not stop at once, though he was annoyed at the way Celia stared at him. Her face was going all twisted.

  “That’s funny, that’s damned funny,” he said, his voice recovering a certain military hoarseness.

  “Don’t laugh like that, don’t. Were you going to keep the bowl, then, after all? Isn’t there any other like it? Oh, of course there isn’t; and if there were, it wouldn’t be the same. You found it.”

  She was twisting her face about so as not to cry. He had seen her cry with fright and temper when he had been angry with her, he had never seen her cry like this ; it affected him with a kind of terror, something seemed to be going from him, torn from him, something that was part of himself. He said, “That sugar basin in the rosewood tea caddy is a decanter with the neck cut off and the edges ground down. That dealer fellow to-day told me. Most of my glass is of the wrong period, just the time when beauty of outline disappeared and perfect technique in cutting took its place. My bowl belonged to still later in the nineteenth century ; the glass was first pressed into shape so that the facets merely required finishing off. It lacks vigour and freshness. Its whole quality is inferior.”

  “But it was beautiful,” stammered Celia, who had never thought it was and saw as she spoke that now he thought so no more than she. His glass had never been, as it would have been to his brother, a pretty thing to have in his dining-room ; it was a symbol and a proof of his superior taste and refinement, of his social pride, his knowingness, his love of beauty, his religion. As his father had gone to church twice every Sunday, so Henry had collected Waterford glass.

  Now he had looked at the proofs and symbols he had thought beautiful for so many years and loathed them ; he had wished to smash them, but that would be sensational, unmanly, unlike himself. But he did not know now what was himself since he had lost his belief in himself, and in a God who had created taste for the benefit of the ruling classes.

  He stared helplessly at the fire and said, “Marry him if you like. I don’t know. He mayn’t be much worse than the other one after all. I don’t know.”

  Then he made an effort to wake out of his trance and said something about tomfoolery and that perhaps some things didn’t make any odds but other things did or else you didn’t know where you were at all.

  “I don’t much,” said Celia, and he said it was all a damned muddle.

  It might have been Ronny sitting before her, depressed, disillusioned, and thirty years older. But that was the Ronny she would have lived with ; Leila’s Ronny would be different. She had heard about them from Dicky, it had hurt to find that Leila’s Ronny was so much nicer than the one she had known.

  “We never really hit it off,” she said, “never got near each other somehow. I don’t know a bit about Dicky, if I marry him I daresay it might be a dreadful failure, but there would be something there.”

  And looking into her father’s eyes she saw something that lay like a dead fish at the bottom of a shallow pool and knew that in his marriage there had never been anything there.

  “There’s no accounting for things like that,” said Colonel Belamy and avoided her eyes.

  Their intimacy was sudden, strange, and secret. As wireless will open a door in the silence and admit sounds that have been near us but unheard before, so each heard the other’s voice for a few minutes before it was again shut off. For in that rare and unaccustomed air Colonel Belamy breathed with difficulty, felt light-headed and defenceless, unable to plant his feet on solid ground.

  He wondered what he was doing talking like this to Celia, who was not a patch on Iris, though she was his daughter and he was of course very fond of her, but why should he talk to her as he had never done to Iris, his special one, and she would certainly have laughed at him if he had? How she would laugh about the glass, and she was quite right : it was much better to laugh than to be morbid and introspective, but there was no need to tell her.

  “By the way, Celia,” he said, uneasily careless, “you need not mention what I told you about the dealer’s opinion of my collection. I shall say that I have changed my mind about selling it. That is all. It would only distress your mother.”

  She did not at once answer, and then she said, “But, Papa, won’t it be rather a strain? You’ll have to go on pretending you like it always.”

  Again she caught a glimpse of something fugitive and helpless in him. He turned away, he said, “Nonsense. You exaggerate so. After all, I should have to have another opinion before I take that dealer’s word for it. They are often mistaken.”

  She saw that he was busy collecting his resources and did not impede him further. He had chosen his glass as the standard of his life and must mend his brittle support as best he could.

  In a little time he would even make himself believe he had never lost belief in it. He had done this more easily with his marriage, for that had not cut so deeply.

  She remembered Dodo’s letter from the trenches years ago. It was odd to have met her brother and her father for just one moment, but perhaps one couldn’t tell how long such a moment lasted.

  “In any case,” she thought, “there was Uncle Charles, and that lasted.”

  She kissed him, whispering, “I’m sorry I smashed the bowl.”

  He said, “There, there, don’t exaggerate. It was a good thing you did it to-day.”

  He did not think of asking her why she did it.

  She left him, shutting the study door behind her, and was caught up in a bright procession of days and nights that danced by so quickly she could not in looking back distinguish one from the other, as though in leaving the study that night she had stepped straightway into a golden mist that hid her and her father from each other’s sight.

  She was always dashing to Gordon’s office or to go out with Dicky to meet a new acquaintance of his in town who might be useful, to go to parties with awfully interesting people he had just met, to dance at a little club he had just joi
ned or to be taken to other people’s clubs, to go to plays with him in the pit and pay special attention to the technique because he was writing a play ; she was always running to the ’phone, jumping out of her bath, scrambling into fresh clothes and leaving others in a frothing pool on the bedroom floor for Gladys to put away, always running after a bus or hailing a taxi, always late, always hurrying, always eagerly expectant of new tales of new successes for Dicky, pausing only to read innumerable stories all just alike of disdainful heroines and proud silent heroes, or to stand on a now mended doorstep in Rainbow Road and knock four times.

  “I must find another place,” Dicky said every time he opened the door. And she said sentimentally, “You’ll never find anything so nice.”

  “It’s like a bird’s nest.”

  “A turret chamber.”

  “A secret bower.”

  By which it may be seen that Celia was falling more and more under an enchantment. So was Dicky, but it was of his own wielding. By Celia’s warming to deeper, brighter colours before his eyes, he knew himself a wizard with power to create and call forth life. She was a different person. Those who knew her before all said so, those who met her now were all impressed by her, some fell in love with her and one or two even disliked her. This was the greatest achievement of all for one who had never yet made an enemy. She was beginning to be a person. Even Ronny thought so. He said to Leila, “I don’t think Dicky’s doing Celia any good. There’s something so hard and bright about her now. Flippant. We never really hit it off, but she used to be a sweet little thing.”

  Leila, who had her own wisdom, said nothing, for she guessed that Celia must have laughed at him for being sentimental on the stairs or the doorstep. There was no quarrel of course over the entirely amicable rupture of their engagement, but Leila at any rate thought it awkward that they should occasionally run into each other at 39 Rainbow Road. She often took occasion to tell Ronny that Dicky was one of the best, a really faithful old friend, and likely to make his name and his fortune in no time. Then Ronny would say, “Yes, I suppose it’s all right,” and sigh a little, and Leila did not worry too much, for she knew it was nice for him to have something to regret.