But what had happened? Anything might have happened. He hadn’t got her letter, and that might have made all the difference. But she had got his, only this morning, written the moment he had left her, and what could have happened since to change that?
He had got his cable from New York ; but why should that make him want to hurt her? It was some stupid mistake, some misunderstanding ; there she was worrying again and inventing a quarrel all about nothing. Why should he want to quarrel after writing like that to her in the midst of all his hurry to rush out to Damaris and her crowd, writing his loving, his passionate repentance at having behaved like a bully and cad to her?
But then he could not have enjoyed feeling that. He must have been glad to get away from it. He had said he hoped he wouldn’t feel such an utter worm for long, and he hadn’t ; he had gone to the Tadpole and it didn’t matter how you behaved with Damaris and her crowd, and he had been a success, especially with Damaris, and she had asked him to dinner to-morrow at her home in Berkeley Square and next day there was the cable from New York and it was all too much for him.
It all came together in bits like a jig-saw puzzle while she talked and pretended to listen and tried to eat and knew underneath that there was no use in piecing it all together and wondering what had happened, since it all came to one and the same answer, that Dicky had found fresh worlds to conquer and wanted no more reminders of a world in which he had met difficulties, disappointment, and humiliation.
All through that dinner, through the talk, through the laughter, extra loud and frequent because they were anxious, she could feel the telegram inside her bag, she could feel the fog rising about her, choking her, a fog in which old familiar cries rose drearily from faces she could not see.
There were so many extra courses, the dinner went on for ever ; but “It can’t last, it can’t last,” she thought, and it could not. The dinner came to an end. They sat in the drawing-room and she told them what had happened and then left them. Her mother came and sat with her and did not know what to say, and all round her the fog thickened, denser and denser, and the cries echoed back to each other.
“How extraordinary!”
“It’s really rather peculiar.”
“How impossible!”
“The poor boy must be potty.”
“That’s what comes of knowing people like that.”
“It just shows.”
“What are we to say to Fanny Marshall?”
“Darling, it’s so fortunate there has never been any engagement.”
“And now I hope you will give up that ridiculous job.”
“And perhaps you will listen more to other people.”
“One can’t go out of one’s own class.”
Only Colonel Belamy was startled into an unfamiliar expression and stigmatized this piece of ferocious vulgarity as “barbarous.”
Barbarous. Which means barbarian. Which means foreigner. The terms of reproach shut Celia in. She would never again, she said to herself, step out of her own class, only she said “step off the chimney-piece,” and “Never step off the chimney-piece,” it remained, ringing in her head like a never-ceasing, clanging peal of cracked bells.
Very deliberately she stepped into her glass case, and now the voices that she could not hear said:
“Celia’s a nice little thing, but——”
“So shallow.”
“So artificial.”
“Mechanical.”
“Tinkly.”
“Almost tinny.”
“You never hear her say anything but what other people say.”
But she did not give up her ridiculous job. She clung to it obstinately, even when it meant staying in town all through August by herself when the house ought to have been shut up, and it meant keeping on a maid and one or two rooms open ; “but girls never think of things like that,” complained Mrs. Belamy, “as long as they can feel noble over doing a job,” and of course what she ought to have done was to go for a nice long voyage with dancing every night on deck, and then she would soon get over that wretched affair, as Fanny Marshall’s niece had done last Christmas when they found out the man was an absolute rotter and without a penny just in time and she felt it dreadfully, poor dear, but they took her straight out to the winter sports and she quite got over it, in fact she got engaged to a very nice man in the third week.
But Celia had no initiative.
No vitality.
She wasn’t much of a sport.
So she stuck to her job and read the magazine stories until she felt sick ; “but what else can I do?” she asked herself, for if she asked anyone else they would start ramming that voyage down her throat again and she didn’t want to flirt on deck in the moonlight, she didn’t want to get engaged again, she didn’t want anything except to be left alone, and there she was secure in her glass case and likely to be left and let alone for ever.
She read in the papers of the success of Dicky’s play in New York. It was a brilliant exposure of. society, it was fantastic, witty, tender, sentimental, and bitingly satirical. It was by a new young writer who called himself Alexander. At the end of September it was put on in London. Celia went to it with a girl in Gordon’s office who did not know that she had known the author, for everyone else would feel self-conscious at going with her.
In a few weeks he became a legendary figure. He soared so high above human ken that chatty paragraphs appeared about him in the evening papers to say how simple and unassuming he was with those who really knew him.
He was fabulously rich.
He had been impossibly poor.
He was incredibly young.
He was a battered man of the world with one beautiful memory.
He had said, “Stupidity always conquers over anything exquisite and rare.”
Then Celia wondered if he had become his own public.
She heard from him once again at the end of November, when she had a cable from New York :
“Left Chinese snuff bottle in Rainbow Road. Please remove or destroy it before things are moved or luck will go. Alexander.”
As before, he could trust her with his fears, his weaknesses, his almost insane superstitions. He could not ask his tenant nor Leila nor anyone else for fear it should get round and people would laugh and, worse, would know that he was afraid, that he did not believe in his luck. Suddenly she was sorry that he should still be afraid and so lonely as to have only her that he could trust with his pitiful request.
She walked to Rainbow Road on a gusty, rainy evening after dinner. It was the last day of November. Then it was very nearly a year since she had first gone there ; it seemed much longer.
She went by the side-streets and she walked slowly, for she did not find as she had thought that it was unbearably painful to walk again up Rainbow Road. Under the trees she did not think first of that night when she and Dicky had clung together before their parting ; she instead remembered the face of a man that she had seen there in a fog.
Up at the other end there were black figures moving in and out of the lighted doorway of Le Coche.
From among the patter of raindrops came the tinkling, tripping notes of a harp picking out a melody from Mozart. Yes, there was the man with the harp again, playing the same tune as he had played to her and Dicky.
And there was the girl coming out on the balcony opposite to listen to him. She was always there waiting—waiting for what?
A slender moon slipped in and out of the clouds ; a soft scurrying wind stroked at her face and blew in her ears. A dead leaf was tossed up to the chimney-tops ; she raised her face to look at it and raindrops fell on her cheek. The trees at the end of the road were swaying and spreading their spidery fingers towards the moon. Beyond them and beyond the low and hurrying clouds, the sky was clear and immeasurably far off. She knew for the first time in her life that she was free, not because her life was empty but because it was full, because it was her own and no one else’s to make or mar, and she knew that she was happy.
She did not wonder at it, nor tell herself that she was happy, for happiness, she discovered, can only happen, it cannot be sought nor held nor invested in any one thing or person, for that would destroy it as inevitably as to grasp the butterfly that has chosen to alight on your shoulder. All that you can do is to be ready to receive it when the moment comes, and the only thing in all the world she now regretted was that when she and Dicky had kissed in the dining-room and seen each other as gods, she had all the time been worried about the broken bowl and her father stamping about in the study next door.
She stood on the doorstep and knocked four times. The door was opened by Chance, who held in his hand the Chinese snuff bottle.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Margaret Irwin
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Knock Four Times Page 29
