Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  “He adores me,” she wrote to Mab, “and that after all is the most important thing. You may think him rather quiet, but that is only his manner ; he is really marvellously brave and was wounded regularly every Thursday at Gallipoli.”

  “What on earth does she mean? It’s like the hippopotamus in ’ Alice ’ who was only in the house on Thursdays.”

  “Well, the landings at Gallipoli took place on Thursdays. Leila’s letters are a scream. Go on, Mab.”

  “Just listen to this. No, I won’t. Oh, Harry, you are a beast. Give it back to me. It’s too bad. Well, I only hope it will come off this time. I’d love her to be as happy as us.”

  “As Us!!”

  In the fierce light of their incredulous laughter Leila’s happiness withered to the size of a pea.

  But from the balcony across the road it appeared huge as a ship in full sail speeding over halcyon seas.

  “Oo, what lovely flowers. The young man’s there again at Number 39, Auntie.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s the same one.”

  “It’s always the same one. The man with the funny cape never comes now, nor the car. Do you think she quarrelled with them both?”

  “That sort never quarrels,” came the condemnatory answer from within.

  This gruff comment escaped in fragments from a thick and overcrowded atmosphere together with—” The draught”—” Bad for the ferns “—” Finish dusting “—” Nothing to look at in this street on a Sunday morning.” But the girl with the duster remained on the balcony to watch a radiant princess in scarlet and her lover in white come running down the steps at 39, swinging a luncheon-basket between them, and their laughter soared up to her like a flight of birds through the clear air.

  Summer came early to Rainbow Road. The trees at the farther end now stood with a row of stiff green busbys on their heads. The children played cricket in the street all through the long twilights that drifted from rose to primrose to pale green, male First Floors appeared on the balcony in shirt-sleeves, the girl who had done nothing since she left school but go up and down on the step of a bicycle, went up and down more and more slowly to show her skill, waving her free foot with the floating gesture of a ballet-dancer, tinkling the bell in an endless monotonous mechanical serenade, calling to the boys as she passed in the long hooting notes of an owl, wearing ever smarter and smarter clothes, until one day she disappeared, and as nobody knew who she was nobody knew where she had gone.

  “But the more good riddances to bad rubbishes the better, that’s what I say,” said Mrs. Page next door as she heaved her way past the area railings, all the majesty of the Armada in her gait, the vast expanse of her red shawl making a torrid zone in the sunlight on the grey street, the beaming grin on her red face dispelling the harshness of her hoarse judgments while at her advance heads came popping up over the area railings like savages over a palisade.

  “And that Mrs. McCarthy at 39 there’s another good riddance, with her husband not cold in his grave from being run over at the bottom of the road just as he was leaving the pub, poor old gentleman, and off she goes with another man. Must have been hungry. And took a bottle of my Sarson’s vinegar which I’d lent her for touching up the meat when it had gone off a bit, and off she goes too she does, with the whole bottle and Cyril and all.”

  But nobody at No. 39 noticed that they had a new caretaker after all these years, it was quite a long time before Leila even noticed that the back yard had been quiet now for days and days because Cyril no longer played there with his tin trays and war-whoops and repeated shouts of “Bang. Bang. Now I’ve killed a tiger. Bang. Bang. Now I’ve killed a lion.” She never noticed that the primeval forests, the hordes of wild beasts and savages with their tom-toms and the one intrepid explorer, had all vanished out of the back yard.

  Dicky had no more need of Mrs. McCarthy and the local colour of basements and back yards nor yet the gay ghosts of parties long ago. The wheel was spinning fast for him, carrying him more and more into the centre of things. He talked extravagantly of moving from Rainbow Road to Half Moon Street, “for I shall go from one celestial curve to another. I catch life bending.”

  Every time he met Celia he had fresh toys to show her, displaying them with eager pride but with penetration into their mechanism. All these wonderful new people, they knew such still more wonderful people, they wore such beautiful clothes, they lived such immoral lives in such large houses, wasn’t it wonderful that he should be meeting people like that?

  There was a marvellous girl, at least not exactly a girl, who was one of the Bankshires you know, and who shot and hunted and danced and her eyes snapped so that you could see them at the back of her head, and she was so free and brave that she had affairs with everybody and never minded what was said about her, “and there’s a nice side to Damaris. She was telling me about her best friend who is completely promiscuous and she said, ’ I must say I am still a Puritan at heart. I do like there to be a touch of romance in one’s affairs.’”

  “What a funny definition of Puritanism!”

  “Not quite a strict one, perhaps. Still, it’s a nice line. I asked her if I might use it, but she didn’t seem to like that much. Perhaps she had thought of using it herself. These writers are so selfish. Oh yes, didn’t I tell you she wrote as well as everything else? Does a novel straight off in ten days ; all comes bubbling up out of her. Some Niagara.”

  “Is that really true?”

  “Of course not. But isn’t it funny the things that people think will impress other people, and the trouble they’ll take to appear something or other?”

  She thought that he who could see so clearly through other people would never expose his vanity behind a glass sheet. His frankness was his safeguard. He boasted, he plotted, he was shameless, and for that she loved him far more than for his spontaneously experienced love-making, his impassioned worship of things in her that she did not value.

  “I made another howler last night,” he would say, and tell Celia all about it and how cleverly he had retrieved himself when he had seen his companion was laughing at him, “so I said, quite low and as though I were speaking to myself, ’ Yes, you are charming. And you have a sense of humour. That is so rare in women.’”

  “Oh, you didn’t!”

  “Why, was that a bad line too?”

  “Well. A trifle old-fashioned.”

  “I see. Superior sex. Patronage. Almost oily, in fact. Never mind, I’ll get there in time.”

  But after a moment he added :

  “She liked it though. And she seemed average.”

  And later again when they had been talking of something else, “It depends what public one caters for. One has got to fit the taste of the public that matters most. You are excellent as a standard, Celia, but not as a test.”

  She called out as impulsively as if she had seen him walking into a pond, “Oh, Dicky, you’ll get there all right, but where? Do look out.”

  “Don’t worry. I may take in the public, but I’ll never take in myself.”

  “There’s Mary Vane,” said Celia, who had had to exchange her mental vision of the successful editor’s black and scarlet brilliance for a sad memory of a handsome, ungainly woman in fussy pink. For Mary Vane had begun by writing and editing magazine stories with her tongue in her cheek, but on finding them successful with a large public, thought there must be more in them than she had realized, and had thus grown to resemble her own public to the point of speaking and thinking and even dressing like it.

  Dicky swore to her that he would never wear fussy pink either physically or spiritually, but she thought he wore his new nickname, Piccadilly Dicky, or, for short, Piccy Dicky, in a spirit of some solemnity, as a hitherto frivolous and light-hearted commoner might be sobered into an awed sense of his importance by the sudden acquisition of a weighty title.

  He began to talk with an air of virtuous wisdom concerning wines and restaurants to which he had been treated, he took his clothes seriously, not in the
reckless spirit in which he and Celia had sallied forth on their lightly considered enterprise. It was now all a much graver matter, and Celia became uncomfortably aware of her duties towards it.

  It was no use her meeting Lord Thingummy at Ranelagh and finding him so amusing if she couldn’t be sure which Lord Thingummy it was. It was no use her repeating a witticism about a Society lady if she had forgotten her name. She was committed to being smart, and her clothes, which had formerly been a gay adventure, were now a responsibility. To do Dicky credit, they must be not merely pretty and expensive but remarkable, and this aim was so foreign to her ambitions that she made mistakes.

  “There’s too much of Shaftesbury Avenue about that frock,” said Dicky ; “it makes you look like a Kensington girl.”

  She was startled to find him already beholding her from a higher rung of the ladder. How quickly he had moved!

  “But I am a Kensington girl.”

  “You soon won’t be,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t be so Piccy, Dicky.”

  But her laughter and his did not prevent that shrinking, that fear of not keeping up, especially now she had to keep up with a triumphal chariot. Must she be in competition all her life? Dicky would say so, would say that it was life. She must be brave and go on being pretty, being smart, being modern, being more so than she had ever been. London was full of girls each trying to feel more successful than the others. They had to be fast in order to keep up.

  The moments when she realized this were no more, than involuntary shivers, just someone walking on her grave, only they did not walk there, they danced a brisk and lively Charleston and said, “We will never lie still, however long we are dead.”

  But for all the rest of the time she was dancing with them, not docilely but deliriously, dancing through the brilliant days and nights, through crowded rooms and theatres and the sultry, petrol-smelling streets, past the elderly ladies knitting in the boarding-house windows whose zest in life was quickened as their disapproval of it was enhanced, for with every summer frocks were brighter, skirts shorter, and the papers more scandalous, thus making them happily aware of the heightened colour and movement of London life. Some years ago the windows would have been closed and the blinds drawn down against the sun, but under their new doctors they had grown more daring they looked out and saw Celia passing, and said, “There goes another.”

  Then suddenly a fog came down on that brilliant summer, it began as a thin golden veil, diffusing the light so that it seemed to come as much from the pavement as from the low and oppressive sky, and people, suddenly dun-coloured, and oddly glimmering cars, moved in a dim radiance where everything and everyone had lost their shadows. It shut out the sun and turned the flowers into pale and opaque discs. Distance vanished, then colours, then shapes ; sounds were muffled and died. The town turned topsy-turvy, losing its values, space narrowed, buildings and buses and people all disappeared.

  “It might be November,” said the passers-by, and stray lights pricked the white darkness like pin points.

  Celia lost her familiar way from Dicky back through the side-streets to her home, but then she had not been thinking ; she had drifted in this strange and sudden winter, or rather this no-season, with an odd sense of relief as though for a moment all the wheels of life stood still and she could afford to wander, drifting, through this no-time and no-land.

  Then she found that she was walking by a high wall and above it, floating trunkless in the fog, were the forms of branches. She walked on through a grove of topless trees. She did not at once realize that she was back at the farther end of Rainbow Road ; when she did it made no difference, she still could not recognize this sinister grove, this no-land, as anything but an enchanted wood where she had wandered once or twice before, she could not think when or where or with whom.

  Perhaps it was in this same road one rainy evening when she had been very unhappy about Dicky and then heard a violin speaking to her, calling her, out over wide spaces, silence, and the sea. Perhaps it was with Uncle Charles on their walk towards the world’s end and over the edge, where they might well have discovered such a wood as this ; perhaps it was in that still and silent, no-coloured country that you wander through in dreams and remember nothing of it next day except that you have been you do not know where ; perhaps it was in another life, another world, yes that certainly, for in this other world all life was different and all values were altered.

  The things that had delighted her, hustled her, troubled her, vanished away, the bustling world of men and women and solid purposeful buses and motor-cars, all striving to get past each other, pushing, hooting, panting, all full of the one great business of getting on, all that world had disappeared and she was drifting from it she did not know where, drifting lightly, inevitably, to some point, some moment where she could say, “So here I am. This is what I have been coming to all this time.”

  “But what will it be?” she wondered, and nobody answered her. It was strange that somewhere in time the moment that would decide it was coming towards her, nearer and nearer, but nobody knew when it would come nor what it would decide.

  Above her in the fog a face looked down on her, the face of a man, bare-headed, motionless, as if painted there flat against the grey air. The eyes looked into hers and did not move away, she thought they had been watching for her. Like clear water or very distant sky they appeared to have no colour.

  She remembered those eyes and they remembered her. She did not remember where they had met ; she thought in that same country where she had been wandering for the instant before this meeting. Words that she never remembered to have read came floating up in her mind and answered her :

  “A dream, a dream! Else in this other world

  We should know one another “

  She turned and moved away from that unknown and remembered face, away from that enchanted grove, past one twisted turning and then another and another, to where the houses grew wider and nobler, separating themselves disdainfully from each other.

  And up a flight of spotless steps and into a hall where an ancient French clock ticked leisurely between a couple of Baxter prints, and up a flight of softly carpeted grey stairs and into a long, cold, spacious, and discreetly furnished drawing-room, where there sat an elegant and still pretty woman who said, “So here you are again!”

  And Celia——

  Chapter XX

  For, yes, of course she was still Celia.

  She went across the room to the row of china figures on the chimney-piece and looked over them at the mirror and saw in it her own face and saw it was just the same. She turned and looked at that elegant and still pretty woman and knew that she was her mother who had never been happy as she was now happy.

  She knelt down beside her and put her elbows on her mother’s knees as she had used to do when she was a child, and said in a constrained, choking voice that she herself did not recognize, “Mother, I do love you.”

  She heard Mrs. Belamy’s voice saying, “Why ever do you call me that?” and she looked up at her face and saw that it was full of terrified apprehension of some disaster, since this could be the only reason for her daughter’s display of affection. She hastened to reassure her by calling her Mamma and telling her she did not know why she had been silly.

  “Unless it’s because I’m so happy.”

  “And all just because of that dreadful young man.”

  “I don’t believe it is all just because of Dicky. But I don’t know why it is, and anyway isn’t it nice to be happy, whatever the reason?”

  Mrs. Belamy did not seem quite sure. She remarked on this horrible fog, that it was just like November, and Celia said absent-mindedly, “Yes, isn’t it lovely?”

  Then Mrs. Belamy laughed and said, “Darling, you are in love! You came in all in a dream too,” and she leaned over the back of her chair and patted her cheek and told her to run along now and dress or she would be late for dinner and at dinner she would be given a piece of news that would make
her even happier but it wasn’t fair to tell her beforehand as Papa would like to think it was really his news, “but I’ll just tell you now that I did all the heavy work.”

  “Darling, how sweet of you.”

  That was the correct formula uttered in a suitably crisp light tone. Mrs. Belamy found nothing in it to alarm her.

  Celia went up still” all in a dream.” She said to herself, “Was it his dream or mine? “and laughed and stared so long in the glass that she was late for dinner.

  At dinner she was told that though of course it was impossible to recognize anything so preposterous as an engagement between her and Dicky, yet her parents had agreed that as they could not prevent her going about with him, it would be better on the whole to have him to the house and she could ask him to dinner on the following Thursday.

  That woke her, the dining-room came back, she saw all the glass and silver and her father’s face, red and solid. And Dicky was waiting for her ; of course it was he who was waiting.

  She said, “Oh Papa! “and was told not to exaggerate.

  But when she told Dicky, he did it for her ; he flung his arms round her in the middle of Hyde Park, and shouted,“We’ve got there at last! We’ve arrived!! We’ve conquered!!! From the moment that Colonel Belamy admits me to the house he admits the possibility of our engagement. That moment, Celia, at a quarter to eight on Thursday, will be the moment of my life.”

  “But, Dicky——”

  “Oh, I know all that. But you wait and see what they’ll say when I get this option offered me on my play.”

  “Darling, they won’t say anything. They have no idea what an option is.”

  “They will have when I’ve done with them,” said Dicky grimly.

  It was then Wednesday evening. They could do little else but foretell their sensations at a quarter to eight to-morrow. Celia would wear her new flowered georgette for the first time, it had cost more than any dress she had ever bought ; and Dicky, in his faultless dinner-jacket, would yet insist on challenging the memory of his first appearance at The Borehams in his cousin’s ancient dress-suit by wearing once again a red rose in his buttonhole.