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  As he had expected, Manon accepted the news with equanimity. It did not seem to her a particularly exciting circumstance. It was unfortunate that he should have quarrelled with his father. But to quarrel with one’s parents was inevitable in the scheme of things. “As inevitable, my dear,” she said, “as measles, and as easy to get over. Your allowance you say was fifteen pounds a quarter. Then I should think you’d better stop paying me any rent till they think better of it.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. He was not going to risk another argument, and besides, there was in fact no other basis on which it would be possible for him to maintain life on the scale that she required of him.

  Chapter XVI

  Young Love Perplexed

  At half-past six on the first Friday in November a message was brought to Mrs Somerset that her son had just rung through to say that he would not be back for dinner.

  “Thank you, Susan,” said Mrs Somerset, and continued her perusal of the French novel that had reached her that afternoon from The Times Book Club. But the print danced before her eyes.

  “How abominably they print these books in France,” she thought. But three minutes earlier the typography had not troubled her. She laid the book down on the small inlaid table at her side, rose to her feet and walked impatiently backwards and forwards up and down the room.

  There had been a good many such messages during the last four months; but they had been growing more frequent recently, alarmingly frequent. This was actually the third time in the last ten days. She had not expected this infatuation, whatever it might be, to last so long—two months at the outside she had given it. But it had lasted five. It was growing serious.

  That evening at dinner she asked her husband whether he had had any reports recently on Eric’s work.

  “It’s curious,” he replied, “that you should ask me that. I was talking to Merton about him only yesterday, and Merton isn’t too satisfied apparently. There’s nothing tangible. But he’s not making the progress he had expected. There’s a leakage somewhere. That was Merton’s phrase as I remember it.”

  Mrs Somerset nodded her head. It was what she had expected. A leakage somewhere. The right phrase for it.

  She waited up that evening for her son’s return. His face would tell her, she knew, everything. It was after twelve when she heard his key turn in the lock. But she did not go out on the stairs to welcome him. She remained seated before the fire, her book between her hands, willing him to come to her. She heard him moving quietly about the hall, heard him climb quietly on tiptoe the first flight of stairs, heard him pause on the landing, then turn and open the drawing-room door.

  She raised her eyes from her book, casually, unconsciously, as though his return was the last thing on earth she had been expecting, as though indeed she had forgotten that he was not at home.

  “Well, Eric,” she said, “and have you enjoyed yourself?”

  He nodded his head. “Quite, thank you, mother. It’s cold out,” and he moved over to the fireplace. She watched him closely. There was a restless nervousness about his movements, a half-suppressed excitement, a light in his eyes that she had never noticed there before.

  “Will you want lunch early, dear, to-morrow?” she asked. “You didn’t tell me where you were playing football.”

  “I’m not playing to-morrow, mother. But I’ll be out to lunch.”

  It was the first Saturday on which she had known him to have missed his football, but she made no comments. She sat back in her chair, waiting for him to speak.

  “An amusing novel that?” he said, at last.

  “Quite. A bit difficult, though. Proust’s got a lot to answer for. But then you don’t read Proust, Eric, do you? You should, I think. He’s an effort, but he’s worth it. There are certain things that Proust can give you, that you can get nowhere else. I doubt if anyone has understood jealousy more completely than he has done. And it is a relief in these hurried days to find a writer who refuses to leave a subject till he’s exhausted it, who doesn’t mind if his work is lopsided in consequence. If he wants to describe a party, he describes it, and he’s prepared to give it as many pages as he thinks it needs. He won’t let himself be sidetracked by any Flaubertian technique. You ought to try him, Eric.”

  He was not listening, and she knew that he was not listening. He was gazing into the fire with such an expression as she had seen on no man’s face for many years. That was how men looked when they have kissed for the first time a long-loved woman. And she waited, feeling that he would in a moment speak to her.

  “Mother,” he said at last, “have many of your friends married women older than themselves?”

  “A good many,” she answered him.

  “And have they been happy?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Who’s to say, Eric. The best people keep their feelings to themselves. It’s only the drabs who unpack their soul with words.”

  “But on the whole,” he insisted, “would you say that they are as happy as the other ones. Is there any real reason why they shouldn’t be as happy as the other ones?”

  “None at all, Eric,” she answered, “none at all as far as I can see. I believe George Moore said once that after a woman had been on the stage five minutes you didn’t know what she looked like. She was either a good actress or a bad actress. And I think it’s the same with a wife. After you’ve been married to her two years you don’t know how beautiful she is or how young she is. She’s either a good wife or a bad wife. You won’t see her as other people are seeing her. She may remain beautiful and young and attractive to you long after she has ceased to be young and beautiful and attractive to other men, or while she is young and beautiful and attractive to other men she may be none of these things to you. That is why I don’t think it matters if a woman is older than a man. The capacity to retain is something other than the capacity to attract. The woman may lose her looks; she may, after ten years of marriage, be no longer a woman to attract a man were he to be meeting her for the first time. But that will not matter then, because it is impossible to expect the woman to whom you have been married for ten years to attract you in the same way that a woman will when you meet her for the first time. There is only one static emotion, and that is a dead emotion.”

  Eric listened thoughtfully with his face turned from her. It was in this way always that their greatest intimacies were discussed, as subjects of impersonal conjecture.

  “And should you say,” he continued, “that it ought to make any difference if the woman has money and the man has not?”

  “Do you mean the man having no capital, or the man being incapable of earning money?”

  “The man having no capital.”

  “To that I should say very certainly no. For if a man can earn money he has capital. His brain is his capital. The man who is capable of earning two thousand pounds a year has the life interest at five per cent. in a capital of forty thousand. He need not feel in the least ashamed of asking a girl with a capital of thirty thousand pounds to marry him.”

  And all the time she was speaking she was saying to herself: “This evening my son has learnt that a woman older than himself and with a private income loves him. He is debating whether he should marry her or not. Most mothers would try, I suppose, to influence him one way or the other. But my son has to make his own life as his parents have. He is free to make of his life what he wishes. If he asks us for advice we should give him facts, but not opinions. He may hurt himself, but people have the right to hurt themselves; if they are worth anything they are the better for being hurt. A man must forge his own sword and his own shield; no experience can harm us if we make the right use of it.”

  “All the same,” she thought, “it’s going to bruise me pretty heavily, seeing him get hurt.”

  At one o’clock next day Eric stood waiting for Marjorie outside Romano’s.

  It was one of those surprising November days when the sky is blue and the air is soft, and there is a golden haze over th
e streets that have so long lain colourless. And as Marjorie stepped down from her taxi into the sunlit Strand it appeared to Eric that she was bringing the summer with her. She was wearing a light yellowy-brown coat and skirt with an orange and black handkerchief knotted at her throat, and a small brown felt hat pierced with a platinum arrow drawn down low upon her forehead. From her wrist dangled the little moiré bag with the tortoiseshell clasp that he had given her. And on her lips and in her eyes flickered such an expression of contentment and repose as he had never before seen there.

  “She is happy,” he thought. “I have made her happy!” and a sense of giddying exultation rose in him.

  They did not speak as they walked side by side together up the stairs to the table he had reserved in the alcoved balcony. “Mr Somerset, sir,” said the head waiter. “Yes, this table, sir; the first one.” And he presented with an appropriate flourish the emblazoned menu card.

  But Eric at such a moment could not be worried by anything so prosaic as the ordering of food. “The lunch,” he said; “the top dish of every course,” and leant forward across the table so that he might be able to look the closer into that loved face.

  He could hardly believe that it had come at last, that yesterday those months of longing had been set at rest, that he had held her in his arms, that he had kissed her, that that calm oval face set in its helmet of dark brown hair had been raised to his, that on those lips, so long desired, his lips had rested. He could not believe it, seeing her sitting there. So often before he had sat here looking at her in the days when she had seemed as unattainable as she was lovely. For so long it had seemed impossible that she could respond to him.

  “I can’t believe it, Marjorie,” he said. “I can’t believe that it’s really happened.”

  From the end of the room beneath the clock the music swelled and softened, deadening the murmur of talk from the other tables. Islanded by that ebbing sea of sound, secure in the magic city of their enchantment, Eric and Marjorie smiled into each other’s eyes.

  “From the first moment that I saw you, Marjorie, I loved you. From the first moment.” His hands as he spoke were pressed tightly one upon another, so tightly that Marjorie could see the paling of the flesh about the fingertips. “The moment you came into that dance club I knew that there could be no other woman in the world for me. It was exactly what one reads about in books. My heart stopped. It was like having a miracle happen before one’s face. And then I saw that you were coming to our table, and I realised that it was you that we were waiting for, and I didn’t know what to do or think. ’I’m going to be introduced to her,’ I thought. And I didn’t know where to look. If I once looked at you, I thought, I should never be able to take my eyes off you. I had never seen anyone so beautiful. I had never imagined that anyone could be so beautiful. They say, don’t they, that first impressions are deceptive. But I don’t believe it. One knows the first time; I’m sure one does. And whatever happens, one’ll come back to that first impression. I’ve always found that. If ever I’ve disliked a person at a first glance, however much afterwards I may try and persuade myself that I was wrong, however much I may even imagine I was wrong, I always come back in the end to that first feeling. And it must, mustn’t it, be the same with love, Marjorie? I’ve never felt that before. I shall never feel like that again. I’ll always love you, always, always, always.”

  Her head, as he spoke, was a little tilted back, her long-lashed eyelids closed upon her eyes, and her lips were a little parted, parted as though she were drinking in that flow of words; and into her face came such an expression of calm, of passive ecstasy as parched flowers must know when the rain refreshes them.

  “That first night we danced together, Marjorie,” he was saying, “at Lady Manon’s ball; that evening when I got back I lay with my hand beneath my cheek, the hand that had lain against your shoulder, and it was scented as you were scented, and as I lay there with that scent about me, I felt that my cheek was touching yours. And I wondered if the moment would ever come when that would happen. And I thought that if it did, I shouldn’t care what else in life might happen to me. ‘I’ve had that,’ I should be able to say. “No one can take that away.’”

  He paused breathlessly.

  “And now, Eric,” she asked, “how do you feel now that it has happened?”

  “Just as I knew I should.”

  For a moment she smiled at him, dazzlingly, intoxicatingly, then turned away. “You’re rather a dear,” she said, and through eyes a little misted she looked over the edge of the balcony at the noise and animation of the room below. Ah, to be loved like this, to have this warm mantle cast round one’s loneliness. To feel that someone cared, that someone really needed you. To be able to make that someone happy; to have for giving the thing that more than anything else in life that one desired. With her head still turned away she stretched out her hand to him across the table.

  As a small boy impatiently enough had Eric Somerset stood in the auditorium of a theatre while the stalls were filling and the orchestra arranged their music and tuned their instruments. Every other minute he had demanded to be shown his father’s watch. “When’s it going to start, daddy?” he had complained. And he had always considered himself defrauded when the music and not the play started at the advertised hour. He could never regard the music as part of the entertainment for which his father had paid money at the box office. But never in the days of bare knees and sailor suits had he listened with greater impatience than on this afternoon to the orchestra’s tinkling prelude. His talk grew disjointed in fretful anticipation. If only it would begin; if only the great blaze of the electric skylight would be extinguished, leaving him alone with Marjorie in the peopled darkness, alone so that he might take in his the small hand that rested so temptingly on the dividing barrier of the seat. At last, on a chord of tripping gaiety, the music ceased. There was a burst of clapping, a moment’s pause was filled with a buzz of talk, and then from behind the heavy damask of the curtain came the glow of the footlights. Slowly the lamps in the dress circle dimmed, the house was a void of darkness. Once again was the orchestra agitated into a riot of melody and the curtain rose on a chorus of grenadiers parading in a green glade before a marble fountain.

  But for Eric the action of the plot, the words of the songs, the rhythm of the dances were a confused meaningless torrent of sound and colour. Within his fingers Marjorie’s hand had curled itself. From her body as it leaned towards him emanated the subtle, penetrating scent of Quelques Fleurs. When the curtain fell and the auditorium was again a blaze of light he looked round him pityingly at the vague rows of faces that radiated away from him. Poor creatures! There they sat, their eyes riveted on the stage, chained by the artifice of song and tinsel, the slaves of mummery. Did they realise that within a few feet of them, a real drama had been staged, that in that suffused shadow a real man and a real woman hesitated on the brink of an avowal They might if they chose draw their vicarious excitement from the contemplation of another’s passion. But who that held in his the soft hand of a woman and heard in his ear the low whisper of a loved one’s voice needed the inflamed speeches of a mimic Juliet. What to him were those frenzies and heroics, to him who had found in his own life a deeper, a surer ecstasy.

  It was dark by the time the play was over. But in the gleam of its lighted windows and street lamps and electric sky-signs Shaftesbury Avenue seemed brighter than it had been in the brief glow of its winter sunshine. “It’s very beautiful,” said Marjorie, and she paused in the doorway of the theatre, her hand upon his arm.

  Eric made no answer. Between them and the recurrent spectacle of a London street the radiant light of an illusion hung its magic veil of transfiguration. These newsboys who were rushing past him were not the same boys that had shrieked “Football results paper” on all those other Saturdays. These were not the same cabs and buses that on ordinary days plied their unromantic passage from Piccadilly to St Giles Circus. This was not the Shaftesbury Avenue he had kn
own since boyhood. It was the dream street of a dream city, or rather it was one of the streets in the new city that his love was building; all streets, all places, and all people would be different now.

  “Cab, sir?” a small boy darted up to him. “Cab, sir; get you a cab, sir? Right, sir. Yes, sir, at once, sir.”

  “Oh Eric,” Marjorie objected, “it’s quite fine, we’ve tons of time. We could easily take a bus.”

  “I can’t kiss you in a bus,” he answered.

  Two minutes later she was in his arms, the soft palm of her hand was pressed against his cheek. Her mouth was a cool fountain that slaked his thirst, a fountain that was changed miraculously on the moment of its slaking into a flaming rose.

  “Oh, Marjorie, Marjorie,” he whispered, “I love you so! All the afternoon how I’ve been longing to be like this with you.”

  It was half-past five by the time they reached Marjorie’s flat.

  “We don’t want to go out till about eight to dinner, do we?” Marjorie said. “We’ll just sit about till then.”

  In the grate a large fire was slowly sinking into a dull steady glow that filled the room with colour, that lighted the chairs and pictures, that made of the deep cushioned chesterfield a dark pool of inviting comfort.

  “How lovely, Marjorie, how heavenly I Let’s sit in the firelight till dinner-time.”

  “Heavenly, Eric,” she laughed, “but very hot. I should be roasted in this coat and skirt. I must go and change it.”

  “Oh,” he pouted, “and you look so nice in that,” he added.

  “Perhaps you’ll think I look even nicer in the other thing. Sit here and be good and wait for me. I shan’t be long,” and she gave him a quick kiss behind the ear, pushed him into the room, closed the door behind her, and tripped across the narrow strip of passage to her bedroom.

  Now that it had come at last, she was only surprised it had not come sooner. From the moment she had come to realise how much Eric cared for her, she had known that, were he to make love to her, she would not resist him. Without love she could not exist. She was only happy when she was being loved. To a man who really loved her she could not find it in her heart to deny herself; if that way she could make him happy. Had one the right to deny happiness? Besides, it was only in giving that she could fulfil her nature. How proud she had been on her wedding day in the knowledge that she had something to give that could make happy the man she loved. How proud, too, that it had been her privilege to give him through her pain that happiness. How proud she had been seeing his eyes widen and grow dim with ecstasy. She could not understand how a woman who loved a man could withhold herself. Why else had she given herself to Everard? Why else but because he had loved her and had wanted her, because he had made her happy through his love for her, and it would have been churlish, ungenerous, it would have shown a littleness of nature in her to have refused him a happiness that was hers to make for him? Always she had been like that—always, except in Ransom’s case. To him she had given herself selfishly: given herself because she had wanted to keep him, and there had seemed no other way of keeping him. Physically she had never wanted men, not acutely that is to say. She could have done without. She wanted to be loved, to be cared for, to have kind things said to her. She would have been content with kisses if men had been. Men seemed to place so much importance on the actual fact of physical possession. She never had. What novelists described as “the last favour “had seemed to her always a very incidental moment. It was a caress, one way of many of expressing love. The woman, Balzac had said, who gives her mouth gives everything. But had he meant what so many people thought he meant. That the woman who gave her mouth was ready to give everything; for he had not written that. He had written that when she gave her mouth, she did in fact give everything. La femme qui donne sa bouche, donne tout, gave everything because there was no more to give. It was the supreme caress, to which all other caresses were incidental, or in which rather all other caresses were included. She had never given, never would give kisses lightly. In her whole life she had only kissed four men. Her husband, Everard, Ransom, and now Eric. Her husband was dead, and Ransom lost to her, and Everard no longer mattered. He had been in the background of her life so long that she had come to take him for granted along with such other inconveniences of her life as charwomen who broke plates, and laundries that tore underclothes. He was a lay figure now, a part of the chorus. It was only Eric that mattered now.