Kept Page 14

  “Will you drive me to Sloane Street, please?” she said, and gave him the number of Ransom’s flat.

  “Sloane Street,” he repeated and smiled again, and slowly withdrew his head, slowly and reluctantly, as though loath to be banished from that perfumed air and all that it typified of elegance and refinement and a comely way of life. “We shall want women like that,” he thought, “even after the revolution.”

  It was a long time, fifteen months nearly, since she had called on Ransom, and Giles was obviously surprised to see her. “Well, Giles, and I suppose you’ve forgotten who I am?” she asked.

  Giles bowed stiffly, but amicably. “Oh no, milady, of course not. But it’s a very long time since your ladyship has been here.”

  “It must be nearly a year, Giles,” she answered. “Or more. I can’t remember. Time goes so quickly. Is Major Heritage in?”

  But before Giles could answer, the door of the sitting-room had been flung open. “Why, Manon,” Ransom was saying. “What a surprise and how delightful. I thought that was your voice I heard. Have you come to tea or for a cocktail?”

  “Neither,” she laughed. “I’ve come to talk to you.”

  Over his shoulder through the open door she could see the bright glow of a fire, before which had been drawn a large armchair and a reading-rest.

  “How wise of you,” she said, “to light a fire. Some people think you should only light them between October and March. They’d wear furs in the evening some of them rather than light a fire in July. And it’s as cold to-day as ever it is in February.”

  As Ransom closed the door behind them, she stretched her arms backwards in a gesture of relieved content. Beneath her feet the black pile carpet was warm and silent. The black Chinese screen with its wayward tracery of gilded birds hid but suggested the door to the other room. Half-way up the wall on either side of the fireplace were stretched four rows of many coloured books. The gilt-framed Fragonards above them glowed softly from the mauve-grey walls. On to the high-piled cushioned sofa the glass doors of a Queen Anne bookcase reflected the suffused radiance of the fire.

  “How nice it all is here, Ransom,” and she lifted her hat from her head to throw it on to the chair beside her coat. How different was this room from that other room. “You’re a genius,” she said, “for making yourself comfortable. I was surprised though that you left that other place.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “It was a jolly spot,” he said. “A little too full of ghosts for me though. When one makes a new start of life, it’s as well, I think, to make it in a new place.”

  He lifted from the reading-rest beside the lamp a silver cigarette box, and handed it across to her. “Turkish on the left,” he said. “I remember your tastes, you see.”

  She smiled as she stretched out her slim, unringed hand towards it.

  “You were always very good that way,” she said. “The only man, Ransom, I’ve ever known, I think, whom I could trust to order me a dinner; and one of the very few,” she added as she leant forward, the cigarette between her lips, towards the cupped bowl of his hand, “whom I could trust not to ruin my complexion when he struck a match for me.”

  “I have my points,” said Ransom, and tossing the match away, he lowered himself into the depths of his armchair.

  “And now, Manon,” he said, “you can tell me all your doings.”

  She told him. She had seen this play and that, read this book and that, thought this and that of them. She had been to such houses and seen such people, and during the next week she would be going there and she would be going here.

  “And you, Ransom?”

  “Much as usual. I booked my seat on the blue train for January this afternoon, and I saw Our Betters for the third time yesterday. It wears well. But I’m becoming a film fan, Manon. It’s like most vices. One drifts into it, toys with it, and it gets hold of one. I used to go to the cinema because it was about the one thing one could go to between five and seven, and after going two or three times a week for a couple of years, one hasn’t any use for the theatre, or at least I haven’t. The whole thing seems overacted now and out of focus. I positively shudder at the pitiful devices to which a playwright is driven to get, for example, a letter read out loud. ’ For heaven’s sake,’ I think, ’ flash the thing up on to the screen and have done with it.’”

  “I never go to the pictures,” she said. “They make me feel envious. I don’t like seeing other people do what I can’t do.”

  “And I suppose that that’s the very thing I like about them. I’d like to lasso heifers and be the terror of cattle thieves, and scale perpendicular precipices and rescue forlorn damsels, and be loved to the extremities of self-sacrifice. And when I’m at the film I imagine I am doing all those things. I identify myself with the characters. You can’t think, Manon, how excited I get sometimes. I must take you to a cinema one day, and then you’ll see.”

  “A sort of substitute for life, in fact.”

  “That’s what it amounts to.”

  She shook her head. “Bad, Ransom, bad,” she said. “I’ve no use for substitutes.”

  “No, Manon?” It was said interrogatively, with an ironic but affectionate smile.

  “Not that sort of substitute, anyway,” she said, and they both laughed. They knew each other well enough to be able to talk in shorthand.

  “I don’t think,” she added, “that you can be very happy.”

  “I’m not unhappy,” he replied.

  “Which means?” she asked.

  “Exactly that,” he answered. “By expecting less one comes to be disappointed less.”

  “A grey philosophy.”

  “The only one, I think.” And he waved a hand negligently in the air. “Why pretend after all,” he said, “that things are what they aren’t. It’s a good drug. But I don’t believe in drugs. Do you know what I think our life is like just now? It’s like the third afternoon of a cricket match, when the game’s certain to be drawn, when it doesn’t matter if one makes runs or takes wickets, or holds one’s catches; but one’s got to go on playing till half-past six because a couple of hundred people have paid to see you; when nothing matters, but it’s pleasant rather than unpleasant to wear white flannels in the sunlight. That’s how I see the thing.”

  “But some games, Ransom,” she protested, “are exciting the whole way through.”

  “Very few,” he answered. “I’ve watched cricket for thirty years, and I’ve seen, I suppose, something like three hundred matches, and altogether I’ve seen about six big finishes; but I’ve never seen a game that wasn’t at some point or other, for half-an-hour, or an hour, or a day, genuinely exciting. That’s all that one’s the right to ask of cricket. That it shall be now and again desperately exciting, and for the remainder of the time an agreeable occupation. I don’t think, Manon, it’s an unfair analogy. For, after all, a game of cricket, up to a point, is what one makes it. You can play for a win or you can play for safety. You can do the sporting or the unsporting thing. You can get thrills by running risks, and you can lose matches by running risks. Up to a point you can make it what you like. But there are some things you can’t do. You can’t make a game exciting when you’ve outplayed a weaker side, or when a stronger side has really got you down. You can’t make it exciting when the other people have batted on a plumb wicket and there’s been rain in the night and a sun and wind in the morning, and it’s only a question of how long you can keep up your wicket on a glue pot; You can’t make a game exciting when rain’s played hell with things and you’ve got three-quarters of the day to finish a three days’ match in. No, Manon, it’s not an unfair analogy. And the game that peters out tamely in the end may have been for a day and a half far more exciting than the game with a terrific finish.”

  Manon shook her head.

  “You’ve too many theories, Ransom. You’ve got your life pigeon-holed. I hate theories and I hate pigeonholes. Let’s look at your books, you must have got some new ones.”
And she rose from the sofa and walked in front of the fire over to the bookshelves.

  Ransom Heritage was one of those spasmodic amateurs of letters to whom the appearance of a book is as important as its contents. When in the spring of 1922 he received from the Shakespeare Book Company in Paris a first edition of Ulysses, it was by the ungainly format of the volume that he was in the main disgusted. Books were to him an essential part of the decoration of a room, and he rarely bought a book whose type and binding did not please him. For the most part his library consisted of privately printed and limited editions. And as he preferred, a book to be flavoured slightly with salacity, his taste in the appearance and the contents of a book were found usually to coincide. Jurgen was to be found upon his shelves and the Norman Lindsay edition of Petronius; there was Bosschère’s Apuleius and Arthur Machen’s translation of Casanova; the white vellum-backed edition of George Moore, Avowals, Héloïse and Abélard, The Storyteller’s Holiday; Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves; Pierre Louys’ Bilitis, Burton’s Arabian Nights; there were also the majority of the Nonsuch Press publications, the complete Conrad, the Edinburgh Stevenson, the limited edition of Max Beerbohm. It was the library of a man to whose life literature stood in the same relation that a savoury does to a dinner.

  Most of the books Manon had seen before, but she had not seen them since last she had been to Ransom’s rooms, and drawing a footstool against the shelves, she took book after book to turn the pages and revive her memory of occasional passages. For several minutes she remained bent over Papé’s illustrated Jurgen.

  “How good they are,” she said. “I should doubt if an artist has ever entered more completely into the spirit of the writer. How long is it since you read it, Ransom?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It can’t be more than a couple of months though.”

  “And does it remain as good as ever?”

  “Every bit. I don’t think that looking at life from that particular angle it would be possible to write a better book. The perfect mingling of cynicism and sentiment. A wonderful book,” he went on. “I don’t believe any book’s excited me so much since Poems and Ballads”

  He moved the lamp a little nearer so that she could see to read the better, and leaning forward he looked over her shoulder to see which Chapter she was reading. It was, he saw, the last page of all but one. The page where Jurgen, an old man now, returns to find the Dorothy that he had so loved, a middle-aged and unfaithful woman who is selling her jewels to pay the gambling debts of her young lover. And yet, though so many years have passed, taking away so much that was fine with them, he is still with three-quarters of himself in love with her. They have come both of them to face and to accept a compromise. And they were wise undoubtedly to do so. Still, it is a sad outcome, he reflects, for the boy and girl that he remembers.

  With a snap Manon closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, stretched out her hand and took down another, opened the book casually and turned the pages without seeming to notice what she turned. “She is still thinking,” thought Ransom, “of that passage.” And he wondered whether she was seeing herself in that portrait of the ageing Dorothy. He knew little enough of how things were faring with her now; but there had been stories, and though he knew no facts, it was hardly likely that the Manon whom he remembered would be content to remain unemotionally faithful to a man who had only loved her title. Well, and if it were so and she did see in the portrait of that fading Dorothy a reflection of herself, this at least he knew, she would not lack the courage to face the looking-glass. No one could ever say of Manon Granta that she had taken her pills sugared. Whatever they might say against her, that they could not say. She had pride and dignity and courage and a ruthless honesty with herself. Whatever she might do, she knew why she was doing it.

  “Why do you buy them?” she said. She had moved to the far end of the shelves, and was tapping her finger against a row of long, slim, paper-covered volumes.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Oh yes, that Mattres de l’amour series. I don’t know, Manon. They amuse me rather.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve no use for mental sex,” she said.

  “Nor’ve I,” he answered, “but now and again one wants, or at least I find I want, a sort of mental orgy, in the same way that now and again one wants a physical orgy.”

  “They’re all so dull and gross though, Ransom. It a little surprises me, you know.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But they don’t seem dull if you only read them now and then, and in French I don’t think they’re really gross. In English they are gross because the words that are employed are gross. But in French though probably the words themselves are gross, they’re not gross to us because they have no gross associations for us. There’s a veil of poetry between themselves and us: the poetry of a foreign tongue. They express for us what is in our imagination poetical, but for which in fact the English tongue has not any words. Very likely the English book that is gross to us, to a Frenchman is poetical.”

  “It’s possible,” said Manon, but the subject had ceased to interest her. She had risen from the footstool, had walked over to the reading-rest and picked up the book that Ransom had been reading.

  “Ah, that,” she said. “The book everyone’s speaking of. What’s it like, Ransom? Should I read it? Is it good?”

  She turned the pages over between her fingers. “What’s it about?” she asked.

  He anwered her with a question. “What are all novels about, Manon?”

  “Love?”

  He nodded.

  “And I’m so tired, Ransom, of novels about love,” she complained. “One would think there was nothing else but that in the whole of life. And really how little of our time actually we give to it.”

  “That’s like the woman who complained that the number of nudes in the Paris salon bore no relation to the number of moments a day a woman would spend naked. I suppose our most intense moments are those when we are in love, and the intense moments are the only ones worth writing of.”

  She smiled and moved over to the fire, and leaning with one elbow on the mantelpiece turned to look at Ransom.

  “Which means, Ransom, that you’ve fallen in love again.”

  “As romantic as ever, Manon. Oh no,” he laughed, “and I don’t suppose I ever shall. It’s too uncomfortable. A love affair’s all right. That’s a distraction, one form of many. But love, that’s different. It absorbs every other interest, deadens every other faculty. You can enjoy, feel, understand nothing except that one thing. Oh no, Manon, one’s happier out of love.”

  The leaping firelight was sinking now to a steady glow, a rich radiance that lit up the shadowed distances and burnished the gold pattern of the folded curtains, but that left almost in darkness the features and expression of Ransom’s face. It was easier so to say to him what she had to say. Her voice as she spoke seemed to fall into the dark secrecy of some confessional. “Ransom,” she said, “there’s something I want you to do for me; something a little delicate.

  “I want you,” she went on, “to take in your name a three-roomed flat. I don’t mind where. Preferably not in the centre of the world. I want it to be a nice flat, and I want you to furnish it, as you would furnish it if it were going to be your own. You can get some pictures, the sort of pictures that you think I’d like. And some books, the sort of books that you think I’d like. And I want you to arrange for some woman, not a woman who lives in the neighbourhood, to come there every morning to cook a breakfast and clean the flat. Give her what wage she wants. I want you to pay all the bills yourself, and if you’ll send me the receipts I’ll settle everything. Don’t buy old furniture that’s worth a fortune, but get the best otherwise. You will do that for me, Ransom, and at once? You’re a good pal, Ransom. Thank you. You may now ring me up a taxi.”

  “And that,” thought Ransom, as he watched five minutes later the back of the cab diminish down the length of Sloane Street, “is going to keep me very pleasantly employe
d for the two days that I have left here before my holiday.”

  Chapter XII

  Ransom in Paris

  A Couple of days before Marjorie’s birthday, in a pearl grey suit and light felt hat, Ransom Heritage strolled alone down the Rue de Rivoli, wondering of what sort of thing Marjorie stood most in need. He had broken his journey in Paris specially so as to choose her something, and now he could think of nothing to buy for her. She did not care for jewellery, she had at least half a dozen bags, and he wanted it to be something that would surprise her, surprise and please her, would show that he had given real thought and real attention to the gift.

  A taxi with raised signal came slowly towards him beside the pavement. He waved a hand at it. “Just drive along where shops are,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to stop.” And leaning back in his taxi he searched on either side through a succession of shops for the idea that eluded him.

  He found it in the end at the south extremity of the Avenue de l’Opéra in the sign modiste hung unassumingly over a small door on the left of a plainly curtained window.

  “An evening frock,” he said; “the very thing, and this’11 probably be a damned good place to get it. Good places don’t need to advertise. The best restaurants don’t, the best tailors don’t. It’s only the second-raters that have to draw attention to themselves.”

  “I want,” he said to the lady who came to meet him, “an evening frock, something quite simple. May I see some models.” And moving across the room he sank back into an easy chair.

  For a moment the manageress looked at him doubtfully, inquiringly, seemed about to say something, then decided not to, and walked through into the room behind. “May, Delphine, if you please, some evening frocks.”

  For half an hour he lay back watching a parade of moiré and satin and georgette, brocade and crêpe de chine and marocain; his eyes half closed so that he was able to lose in a dream of Marjorie the personalities of the various mannequins. He did not see the slim, willowy, light-haired or brown-haired girls who turned swaying across the room in front of him. He saw only Marjorie. Marjorie in green, in blue, in pale rose chiffon, in black charmeuse. Marjorie in soft lines of clinging velvet, Marjorie in the abrupt statement of a rich brocade; and as each new dress was displayed to him he seemed to hear her saying: “Am I prettier in this, Ransom, or in this or this.”