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  And musing so, he began to think backwards into the past, to see Marjorie, not in these dresses of the future, but in those other dresses, discarded now, in which he had known her from time to time during their twenty-eight months of friendship, dresses each of which he had come to associate with a particular moment, a particular place, a particular emotion. That crêpe black satin with the long-waisted bodice and short sleeves and rose embroidery which she had been wearing at the Casino on that first afternoon that he had met her. The white georgette with orange beads in which she had met him at Victoria on his return from Africa nineteen months ago; that afternoon when he had read in her eyes with surprised and delighted wonderment the new quality that had come during his absence into their relationship. The pale grey georgette of the dinner frock that had been caught three days later in passive surrender into his arms. For a full half-hour he remained there, then jumped to his feet. “The red and gold brocade,” he said. “Four thousand francs. Right. Ransom Heritage is my name. I’ll just go back to the hotel and get the money. That is the address.”

  “And any message with it, sir?”

  He hesitated. Should he send it anonymously. There was something rather attractive in an unsigned gift. Not to Marjorie though, and not from him. She was not the type of woman to coquette in her imagination with a host of courtiers. She would prefer to know that it had come from him, to know through his sending of it that he had thought of her. To her the gift chiefly meant the giver.

  “Will you please,” he said,” put in a white carnation with it.” She had worn a white carnation in her bodice on the evening when he had for the first time kissed her, and a white carnation had been ever since to them a message and a symbol.

  His hotel was only two minutes’ walk away, and he went straight back there from the shop. He was met on his arrival in the hall by an apologetic porter.

  “I am very sorry, sir,” he said. “I gave you the wrong time for your train. It’s 12.15 not 2.15. If you’re going to catch it, sir, you ought to go at once.”

  “What’s the next?”

  “4.12, sir, and a bad one. Gets you in after midnight.”

  Ransom’s face wrinkled in thought. Four hours’ difference. He had better catch this train. It was rather a rush; but he had nothing to wait for really. The hotel could send round the money quite easily to the dress shop.

  “Right,” he said. “I’d better catch it. And look here, you could do a small thing for me.”

  The porter stretched his arm upsides and sideways in a gesture that appeared to signify his willingness and capacity to arrange or disarrange any circumstance small or great within the visible world.

  “Excellent,” said Ransom. “Then you might some time run round and pay a bill of four thousand francs to a dressmaker. I forget the name, but you can’t miss it—at the near corner of the Rue de Rivoli. They’ll know all about it.”

  “Certainly, sir. Rue de Rivoli, you said, sir?”

  But Ransom had already bounded past him up the stairs. He had to get packed within ten minutes.

  Three hours later, as Ransom lay back in the corner of a first-class carriage watching the Latin countryside slip past him, a hot, exhausted, and perplexed subporter was explaining volubly to his superior that there was no dressmaker’s shop anywhere in the whole length of the Rue de Rivoli that had ever heard of Mr Ransom Heritage.

  “Ten shops I have tried,” he said, “and with the same result. They know nothing of it. What am I to do?”

  The head porter lifted his cap and drew his fingers meditatively through his hair. “Mr Heritage,” he said, “was in a great hurry. He may very easily have confused the streets; very easily. We cannot search all Paris for a dressmaker’s, that is very clear. And if it is not in the Rue de Rivoli we know nothing except that it is a dressmaker’s in Paris. There is only one thing to do. We must send him back the note.”

  The cashier reported, however, that Mr Heritage had left no instructions for the forwarding of letters. “We have only his town address.” “Then the note,” said the hall porter, “must be sent him there. You will please attend to it. I thank you.”

  And the great one returned to his post in the centre of the hall.

  Chapter XIII

  Manon in Debt

  Debt is a habit, the habit of living beyond one’s income. And by increasing one’s income one’s debts are correspondingly increased. When she was spending twelve hundred pounds a year with an income of eight hundred, Manon Granta had imagined that with a yearly income of thirteen hundred pounds her debts would disappear. She was now discovering that with a personal allowance of five thousand pounds the change in her position was one of degree only. Where before she had found herself in difficulties for the sake of twenty pounds, she now found herself in difficulties for the sake of a hundred pounds. And the spending of less money seemed now just as impracticable a proposition as it had eight years earlier. Where she had had four evening dresses in a season she could not now do with less than ten. She could not be seen among the same people three times in the same dress, and she had now trebled her acquaintance. She was in a position certainly to do a great many things that before the War she could not have done. But there were still a number of things that she could not easily afford to do. She had, however, begun doing them. And having once begun doing them she did not see how she could without exciting comment cease to do them. She was consequently less free of the worry of debt than she had been before she married. She had not abandoned the habit of living beyond her income. She had merely altered the conditions during which she exercised the habit. When, therefore, she received from Ransom a number of receipted bills, totalling a gross figure of five hundred and thirty-seven pounds, she gazed at the slips in much the same spirit as in 1916 she had gazed at an eighty-pound account from her dressmaker. “Now where,” she thought, “is the money for this coming from.”

  The possibility of delaying payment Manon Granta did not consider. The most extreme of her financial quandaries had been unvexed by personal obligations. Her debts had been to dressmakers, milliners, garages—never to private persons. And she had made a point of settling immediately any impersonal debt when she had suspected her creditor of standing in need of money. Ransom had to be paid at once. That was very clear.

  Leaning back in her bed she hunted beneath her pillow for the round wooden button of her electric bell.

  “You will find, Hudson,” she said, “in the top left-hand drawer of my writing-desk, a white canvas packet with a red wax seal. Will you please bring it me?”

  Her pass-book that had arrived last night, and that had been tossed into the drawer unopened, made, as she had expected it to make, an uncomfortable study. Of her last quarter’s allowance only six hundred pounds remained. Which meant that when she had paid Ransom for the furnishing there would remain to her some seventy odd pounds on which to manage the house and herself for the next six weeks. She was not in the least flustered. Such crises had arisen before and would arise again. It remained simply to be decided how with the least trouble to everyone concerned she could raise during the next fortnight between three and four hundred pounds.

  Charles, of course, would give it her. But she did not want to go to Charles. That would mean questions. He might ask to see her pass-book. And a cheque for five hundred pounds would, even as a gambling debt, involve a troublesome amount of explanation. Charles was a last resort. Her bank would scarcely allow her to overdraw her account for so large a sum as five hundred pounds without her husband’s guarantee. And she had enough experience of the world to know that only fools went to moneylenders. There seemed nothing for it but that oldest of old devices, the pawning of one’s jewels. She should be able to raise about five hundred pounds on her pearl necklace. She might after Christmas be able to recover it, and even if she could not, its loss would not particularly touch her. She had never cared for it. It was one of Charles’ earliest gifts, and she had regarded it always as the purchase price of her accepta
nce. She had only worn it occasionally to give Charles pleasure. Now that he noticed these things less it would be sufficient for her to wear occasionally an imitation string.

  The little Jew, of whom she had once been the most regular of clients, welcomed her with his most Oriental bow. “This is a pleasure and an honour,” he murmured, “that your ladyship has not accorded me for several years. Not, I think, since your ladyship’s marriage. It was always the greatest of my pleasures to be of any service to your ladyship.”

  She tossed on to the table at his side a small cardboard box.

  “Four hundred, Mr Lewishon,” she said simply, and watched the long, slim fingers with the exquisitely polished finger nails untie as though it were the simplest of reefs a tightly elaborated knot. “You would have made a fortune on the halls untying knots,” she said. “I could watch you performing that miracle for hours.”

  “Your ladyship is pleased to jest,” he said.

  But indeed she had tied and retied that knot for the pleasure simply of watching those pointed, exquisitely polished nails thread their way through its intricacies.

  He raised the necklace to the light, and a smile traced itself slowly amid the wrinkles of his mouth, a smile of genuine pleasure and delight in the excellence of the thing for the thing’s own sake. He rolled the pearls lovingly about his hands. “They are very lovely,” he said, “very lovely.” “That man,” she thought, “might have been a great collector. He can do more than recognise good stuff. He loves it.”

  The little man had inserted into his right eye the lens of a magnifying glass, and his features as he passed sideways examining each pearl separately were wrinkled beyond anything of which one could have imagined capable the elasticity of the human face. Five minutes he spent over his examination, then he straightened himself, removed the glass from his eye, and turning over the necklace in his hand: “Three hundred and fifty pounds,” he said. “Three hundred and fifty pounds. It is only because your ladyship is an old patron that I am making so generous an offer. To anyone else I should offer three and thirty.”

  “Then you had better,” said Manon, “hand me back my pearls.”

  A sense of grieved and personal disappointment furrowed his cheeks the deeper. “But your ladyship—” and his arms were spread sideways in such a gesticulation of remorse as extended over the anatomy of Iago.

  Manon Granta was a very practical woman. “I do not bargain,” she said. “I offered you the necklace for four hundred pounds. It is not worth my while to take less for it. If you cannot give four hundred pounds, I will waste neither your time nor mine. We are both busy people.”

  The eyes of the little pawnbroker dilated and grew misty, his shoulders sank, his fingers fluttered against one another, and he shook his head from side to side unhappily. Why must people drive such hard bargains with him? He was so anxious to please everyone. He had to make money. He had to live as others had. Why were people so hard to him?” Very well,” he said. “Four hundred pounds if you will agree to retrieve them before November. It will be a loss to me. But for the sake of your ladyship I will do it. For no one else I would. I assure you of that, your ladyship. For no one else I would.”

  The exquisite fingers had taken from a drawer beneath the table a small red ticket. “To be redeemed,” he said, “by November the seventh. Yes?” She nodded. “And the cheque,” he went on; “you would like that now? Four hundred pounds. A very large sum. More than I can afford. Still, for an old patron. There you are, milady. And if in two months you cannot redeem the pearls, I fear, I really fear that I shall have to sell them. It would be a pain to me to be forced to do so, but four hundred is a large sum and I am a poor man.”

  With a sigh of relief Lady Manon passed out of the small dark room into the bright August sunlight. So that was settled then. And once again the world was a friendly and accommodating place. And she would be able to tell Christopher with a clear mind at lunch of the splendid plan she had arranged for him.

  She had made a practice once every three weeks or so of lunching with him in public. It unweaponed criticism. It would be fatal were questions ever to be asked for her to be driven to confess a secret friendship. She had been seen alone too often and with too many men. “If it was an innocent relation,” Charles would say, “why were you never seen with him in public?” And there would be no answer, no satisfactory one at least. One should never tell a lie more than was strictly necessary. The woman who revealed nothing could hide nothing.

  She always chose for these lunches the restaurant at which she was likeliest to meet the largest number of her friends. Once she had taken Christopher to her club, but fewer of her intimate friends were to be found there than at Claridge’s or the Berkeley or the Tour Eiffel. On this occasion she had told him to meet her at the Berkeley. She had arrived at their last three meetings at periods varying between twenty-five minutes and forty minutes late. “If,” she thought, “the poor boy has any sense he will arrive to-day about half-an-hour late. So I will take the opportunity of arriving early.”

  She reached the Berkeley, therefore, at thirteen minutes exactly after one, to find him in the process of consuming what appeared to be his second cocktail.

  “My dear Christopher,” she exclaimed. “And to drink my cocktail. What a poor return for my punctuality.” He rose stammering apologies, his eyes dilated with a sort of dumb idolatry. “Now, now,” she said affectionately, “you mustn’t look at me like that—not here at any rate. I’ve got such news for you. But tell the waiter that we’ll have the lunch—let’s leave it to him to choose—and that same Chablis that we had last time, and then I’ll be free to tell you.”

  The news was, however, scarcely received with the explosion of gratitude for which she had been prepared.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.” And after a pause, “Oh.”

  “Now look pleased, Christopher,” she said. “I’ve been at considerable trouble to arrange this. I’ve spent a whole morning hard at it. Say thank you, Christopher. Some more of this sweet corn, it’s good?”

  He shook his head. “But I don’t understand, Manon. Surely—weren’t we quite happy as we were?”

  “You, perhaps, Christopher. Myself not quite.”

  “But—” he paused and flushed awkwardly and began to erect a large pile of salt upon the tablecloth. “I thought, Manon—I mean, I thought you liked my room.”

  “Yes, I did; I do, Christopher. As rooms, as a room I mean, it’s delightful, but only as a room, if you follow me,” and she smiled sweetly and persuasively. “As a place, well, surely, my dear, you understand. A person like myself, she does expect something; how am I to put it; you must see surely. I’m not in the habit even of dressing myself, and in a small room like that, no, really, no, Christopher, it is a little difficult for me.”

  “I see,” he said, and stared gloomily at the growing pile of salt. “I see,” he repeated. “But this new flat; it’s going to be awfully expensive; I shall never be able to afford it.”

  “I didn’t know, my dear, that anyone was asking you to.”

  “I couldn’t take it on any other terms.”

  She laid down her knife and fork resolutely. “So we’re going to have all that over again, are we? I thought we’d done with that,” she said.

  “But this is different,” he pleaded. “Manon, can’t you see that it is different?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not different in the least. In these sort of things one must assume a complete equality. If you had money and I hadn’t, I should expect you to buy me the sort of dresses that you would expect a woman who was in your company to wear, and I should expect our meetings to take place in conditions approximating as nearly as possible to those with which I was accustomed. As it happens, however, I have the money and you haven’t. As such meetings cannot take place in my house, I must see that they take place in the sort of place where if you had the money I should expect them to. That is all, Christopher. Now don’t be difficult.”

  H
er voice and her eyes were stern. She was not used to obstacles.

  “But, Manon,” Christopher said wretchedly, “can’t you see what an appalling, what an impossible position it is for me?”

  “Why did you make love to me then?” she said. “What else did you expect to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I don’t know. How was I to tell?”

  “If you want to make an end of it,” she went on, “the way’s open to you. You said you loved me. I believed you.”

  “But I do, Manon, I do.”

  “I believed you loved me,” she continued, “so I’ve tried to make things possible for you to love me. You’re not satisfied. Well, there it is, then. We’d better stop.”

  There was not in the expression of her face the slightest sign either of pity or surrender.

  “You’re hard,” he said. “Won’t you see my point of view?”

  “I can see,” she said, “that you’re standing on a ridiculous platform of masculine vanity, That’s all I can see.”

  “It isn’t that, Manon, it isn’t that.”

  “What else is it then?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t explain. It’s one of those things that one feels are wrong, but one can’t find words for. One just feels it, that’s all.”

  “Very well, then, we’ll consider the matter closed, and say no more about it. How do you think they’ve done these kidneys?—not quite enough butter with them, I think. Or perhaps I’m getting hypercritical. One does, you know, even with food. If one isn’t really hungry the stuff has to be perfect to be eatable.”