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  “Any of them. The ones I know, at least.”

  “Ransom Heritage?”

  “Oh no,” she said quickly. “No, no, not Ransom; don’t go to him. Simon Merivale, he knows, he’ll tell you. You can ask him if you want to know. You’ll get the facts from him. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Just the facts. Not how it happened, nor why it happened, but just what happened. You think the facts explain everything. Most people do. And they mean nothing, nothing, nothing. With me, especially, they mean nothing, they explain nothing. And you’ll judge me by the facts. Of course you will. Everyone does judge by the facts. And they mean so little, so little, if people only knew. Simon Merivale will tell you. You go to him, he knows, he’ll tell you. And then when he’s told you, come back to me or not, just as you think fit. Don’t stand there, though, looking at me like that. Go.”

  “Aren’t we going to dine together?”

  The corners of her mouth were raised in half pitying, half ironical amusement. “Is it likely?” she said. “In your present mood you would be such entertaining company.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Marjorie.”

  She lifted herself from the floor, for one moment looked at him, then laughed.

  “Not sarcastic, Eric,” she said. “Why, what else is there left for me to be?”

  Chapter XVII

  In a Turkish Bath

  “If only I were a Masochist,” reflected Simon Merivale, I as he came down the steps of his dentist’s house, “I should have had a thoroughly enjoyable three-quarters of an hour. As it is I have been supremely wretched. It’s curious, but the more of a philosopher one becomes, the more incapable of enduring pain one grows. I must now endeavour to award myself some compensating entertainment. The old war-horse must be amused.”

  For a moment he toyed with the idea of a surprise call on Manon Granta. He had not seen her since the evening of her dance. He had in fact only seen her on two other occasions: at the Wolves, and the morning when he brought back her cloak to her. Three times in all. But though nothing had been said, a good deal in those three times had passed between them. It would be rather jolly to go on and see her. Jolly, but wiser, perhaps, not. Why complicate one’s life? It was curious how one’s attitude to women altered as one grew older. At twenty you thought of little else. Nearly every time you met an attractive woman you asked yourself whether she would be likely to yield to you. After thirty you reversed the process. You didn’t ask whether she would yield to you, you asked whether you would like her to.

  It was the ambition of every young man to have a mistress. But women as a whole were not interested in quite young men. And by the time one had come to be attractive to them, one no longer wanted them; or rather it was not that one no longer wanted them, but one had got them into some sort of focus with one’s other tastes. There were a great many things that one enjoyed, which a limited income and a limited amount of leisure allowed one only occasionally to enjoy. The indulgence of one taste precluded the indulgence of another. He would himself like to possess a racing stable, a motor car, a town and country house. He would like to hunt, and play polo and play cricket, and do winter sports. But he could not do all these things. He had neither the money nor the time. He had to make a choice. He had to deny himself some things in order that he might enjoy others. He never raced because he preferred hunting. If he took his leave in January for winter sports he would be unable to go on a couple of very pleasant cricket tours in August. And he preferred cricket to ski-ing. It was rather the same with women. If one went in for women, one hadn’t the time or the money for much else. And he didn’t want to give up theatres and first editions, and dinner parties at the Rag. On the whole, he felt his life was better without the complications of a love affair. It was all very well for men like Ransom Heritage who had nothing to do with their time except to pass it. He had his job, and he had his friends, and one way and another a good many interests.

  What was happening, though, by the way to Heritage? There had been trouble with Mrs Fairfield he had gathered. He did not know who had told him. It was curious the way those things got round. He had heard it somewhere.

  Those things always did get out, discreet though Ransom was. He had hardly ever spoken about Mrs Fairfield. He had told him, both because he was his oldest friend and also because it was the best way of stopping scandal.

  “I’d better tell you the whole thing,” he had once said. “I’d rather you did know anyhow. Besides, people are bound to start talking soon, and they’ll ask you questions, and if you don’t know the answer to them you’ll start asking other people. That’s the way the trouble starts. Mrs Fairfield is a war widow, and she’s looked after by a cotton merchant who means to marry her if his wife divorces him. Those are the facts, and that’s about all there is to it.”

  It was nearly a year ago that Heritage had said that to him, and since then they had scarcely more than a couple of times referred to it. The situation had continued, apparently, on the same lines till it had been discontinued. An impossible situation. One that was better ended. And yet, as Heritage had once said himself, it was easy enough to drift into things.

  “I’d better ring the old boy up, I think. We might do a Turkish bath together.”

  “A wire to Heritage,” he said,” telling him to meet me at the R.A.C. at half-past four, and till then a comfortable, lazy couple of hours at the Rag.”

  Simon Merivale arrived at the R.A.C. at one minute to the half-hour to find Ransom reclining, his hands driven deep into his trouser pockets, in the least uncomfortable of the straight-backed chairs that the round hall of the club possessed.

  “I am not going to apologise,” Simon said. “It is you. not I, that are unpunctual.”

  “On the contrary,” said Ransom, “I arrived here at the exact time that I intended, which was twenty-four minutes past. On the rare occasions when I come here I can’t resist the temptation of letting loose one of your page-boys. I sit here in this elaborate hall with the busts of Roman emperors about me, and I hear echoing through innumerable passages, ’Captain Simon Merivale,’ and I say to myself, ’Did I really start all that.’ It gives me a fine sense of my own importance. If ever I were to write a play I should stage the first act of it in this hall. I would make a symbolic background out of those ceaselessly shouting page-boys.”

  “Symbolic, brother? But what of?”

  “Oh, anything. Just life, or of the desires, perhaps, the desires which disturb and undermine our comforts. We should be so comfortable but for our desires, and it would be a sound analogy. A club’s a refuge from life. It’s a place where a man can sit and smoke and forget he’s got a wife and a family and a business; and then in comes a nuisance of a page-boy to tell him that he’s wanted on the ’phone, or that somebody has come to see him, which is life shaking him out of his contentment. A fairly close parallel, I think.”

  They had relinquished as they talked their hats and sticks and gloves to the superintendent of the cloakroom, turned and walked slowly across the hall, downstairs towards the bath. Very cool and green it looked, the water of the large, wide swimming bath; very cool and green, retaining seemingly in its quivering, translucent depths on this November day the hues and sense of summer, making you feel as you looked at it that you had stepped but a moment since from the heat of a June day into some shaded prospect; your, ears were half strained to hear from behind the marble alcoves the tap of croquet balls and the ping of a tennis racquet and the shout of a girl’s voice: “Forty love. Well played, partner, well played.”

  “One could amuse oneself a lot in this place,” said Merivale, “if only one had it to oneself.”

  There can be few places more utterly reposeful than a Turkish bath. It is the negation of all effort, the parody of death. Behind you at the door you leave your worldly goods, your watch, your keys, your diary, your money. You take with you only the masseur’s tip.

  “As the dead,” murmured Merivale, “carry their two pences to Charon.”


  A boy kneels at your feet to unlace your shoes. With silent, unassertive tread you pass into that muted atmosphere. The attendant who directs you to your cubicle does not raise his voice above a whisper; like some ghostly ministrant he draws your curtain, switches on your light, leaves two towels beside you on the couch. You do not speak as you undress, you wrap the towels about you and walk to the place of judgment, the implacable tribunal, the tall brass weighing-machine that does not lie, that deals out with bandaged eyes to the rich and poor, the just and unjust, the fat and thin, impartial justice. Thus and thus, it says, you have behaved since your last coming here. Thus and thus has it fared with you in that other world. You have indulged your fleshly pleasures; you have overeaten and you have over-drunken. Potatoes have you not avoided, nor unburnt bread and beer in large quantities has been your portion. You have in the last four weeks put on four pounds. And with bowed head you bend before your sentence. “Go forth,” it says to you, “and be cleansed. Loose from you in my chambers of eternal heat the bonds of gluttony, and on your coming again see that you have not slipped back into the ways of folly.” And you step from the platform and push open the swinging soundless door, and the immense mantle of heat is cast upon you, and you sink into a canvas chair and are at peace.

  For a few moments you turn listlessly the pages of an evening paper, then even the effort of reading grows excessive, and you lie back waiting for the fine dew of sweat to break out along your legs and arms. You are safe, armoured, shut away. For two hours nothing can molest you. All is quiet. Only an occasional murmur of conversation, the rustle of a newspaper, the clap of hands to summon some swift and silent servitor.

  “How wise the Romans were,” said Merivale, “to commit suicide in their baths. The genuine euthanasia. No one who is really warm can be unhappy. There is no anodyne like heat. Do you remember how at school we used to sit on the hot-water pipes in our study on the evenings before we were going to be caned. It was more effective than the most elaborate padding. And it’s not only physical, it’s mental. There was a man at the club the other day who left untouched on his plate the greater portion of a most excellent salmon steak. Now there’s only one thing that that particular fellow cares for more than food, and that’s wine, so I suspected there must be something pretty wrong with him.

  “’There is,’ he said. ’My salary is drawn to the end of January. The limit of my overdraft is reached. My tailors are growing restive. I have received, however, a tip. Archimedes for the 2.30. I have put on it the remainder of my balance which is ten pounds, the odds were 30 to 1. In half-an-hour’s time I shall either have made £300 and be in a position to pay the majority of my bills and find myself in addition with a useful degree of credit, either that or I shall be for the next three months without any tangible means of livelihood. Are you surprised that I should not feel hungry?’

  “The next half-hour we spent beside the tape machine. Three favourites in succession justified the world’s confidence. ’It is time now,’ my friend asserted, ’for an outsider.’ Slowly the minutes passed. 2.80, 2.35, 2.40. Then the machine began to tick. ’2.30,’ it went. ’Sardou, Lucifer, Barabbas.’

  “’Well, and what now?’ I said. He was not a man to welcome sympathy.

  “‘I am going,’ he answered, ’to have a Turkish bath.’

  “And indeed you know he could not have chosen better. Where else could he have found a completer peace; where, brother Heritage, where, I ask you?”

  “Yes,” replied Ransom with an air of pronounced finality. “Yes.”

  Simon Merivale turned in his chair and eyed him sternly.

  “That is not the right answer, brother,” he said sadly. “I suspect that you were not listening to me. It is very foolish of you. I shall only pass through this world once. You should let me be of what help I can to you. It’s very foolish of you, brother, very foolish. However—”

  And he relapsed into the damping comfort of his chair.

  “It’s no use, I suppose, my talking if you won’t listen.”

  “Quite,” Ransom answered, “quite.”

  And indeed it was not possible in the heat of a Turkish bath to follow the thread of even the simplest argument. One should be content for certain moments to be the creature of sensation simply; an organism that could feel but could not reason. The paper that Ransom had been reading slipped off his knees on to the floor. He lay back and closed his eyes, and let memory have its will of him. And as always when he relaxed the pressure of immediate concerns there stood before him the details of that October morning when he had heard over the telephone and for the last time the sound of Marjorie’s voice. Since then he had seen nothing of her, had heard nothing of her; nothing definite at least. Someone had said something, somewhere, though, about young Somerset. Two barristers in the short bar at the Troc. “Young Somerset,” one of them had said, “what’s he playing at just now? He’s doing no work. Merton’s perfectly sick with him. He’ll muck himself up for good if he’s not careful.” “Some woman, I believe, a married woman,” the other had answered. “I saw them dancing together at Claridge’s the other week. From the way he was looking at her, he must be mad about her.” “And what’s she like Pretty awful?” “Oh no, not at all,” the answer had come. “A nice, quiet-looking sort of girl, brown hair, not bobbed or anything, but a fringe. And a very jolly simple sort of frock, a grey-mauvy sort of thing.”

  There was no proof, of course, that it was Marjorie. There must be women enough in the world with brown fringed hair and grey-mauve frocks. But it was about Marjorie that Eric had asked those questions in the morning after that evening at the Wolves. And a fever of jealousy had seized him, and he had left his drink unfinished and walked out angrily into Piccadilly. He remembered reading in a novel once that no man under forty ended a love affair without a feeling of relief. And at the time he had felt that to be true. However deeply one might have loved, one was glad always to regain one’s freedom, to be at liberty to go where one liked, to do what one liked, to make love where one liked. It was the first weeks only of a love affair that were exciting. How mysterious, how strange seemed through the golddrenched mist of a September morning the most familiar, the most prosaic landscape. And how wonderful for a while did that woman seem who wore love’s glowing garment of illusion. But the mist faded, the garment fell. It was the same landscape on which day after day one’s eyes had rested, and the one woman became like all the others. Long ago Ransom had noticed that usually within a month he began to find himself addressing his companion at odd moments by the name of her predecessor. “Now that’s curious,” he had thought. “One would have supposed that it would be at the beginning that one would be making mistakes like that, at the beginning before that other memory had been supplanted. Why should I be making the mistake now, after several weeks, when this girl has become a part almost of my life?” Later he had found the explanation. A woman in the early days of a love affair is new and strange and marvellous. She is unique, and for what is unique there can be but one name, one label. But when she is no longer new and strange and marvellous, when she has ceased to be unique and has become one of several, then her personality loses its clear outline, the impact she makes upon the consciousness is similar in every detail to the impact that has been made upon it at other times by other women. And in the unguarded drowsy moment it is impossible to recognise whether the impact is being made by her or by another. “In fact,” he had decided, “when I start calling a girl by the name of another girl I shall know that it’s about time the show was ending.”

  With Marjorie, though, that had never happened, never once had he found himself calling her by that other name. Always she had been distinct to him, always herself. And yet never strange or enigmatic, never mysterious. Some people might call her obvious. But she was not that any more than a tale by Turgenev could be obvious. She was like one of those pools that are so clear, you cannot tell how deep they are. It had always amused him to liken his friends to writers, and of Marj
orie he had always thought in terms of Turgenev. She was profound as Turgenev was profound, and as beautiful as Turgenev was, with the same kind of seemingly effortless perfection. He had known no woman who had seemed to him more intrinsically pure. And if she was weak, was not weakness perhaps the complement of her qualities.

  He had made no effort to replace her, had felt indeed that it was impossible to replace her. In time, of course, he would find himself wanting another woman, would find himself perhaps imagining himself in love with another woman. But it would not be the same. He had never felt for anyone quite as he had felt for Marjorie. He had felt more intensely for other women. That wild passion that eight years ago had torn him, that did not come twice in life. It had been a madness that, a divine madness. That full ivory white face, with black, wide-set, unfathomable eyes, and its black mane of hair dragged backwards from the forehead, not for one moment had he been rid of it: it had been beside him as he marched westward through Poperinghe towards Potije; beside him as he had drunk and joked and rollicked in the mess; beside him as he had staggered along a duck-board track, between a maze of shell-holes, under the flickering radiance of the Very light; beside him as he had leant cold and wet and stiff against a bulwark waiting for the dawn; beside him during those long, sleepless nights of tormented jealousy behind the lines when he had watched the minutes tick away on the illuminated dial of his watch. Ten to eleven, he had told himself, the theatres are emptying now. She is standing in the stalls while a man helps her into her cloak, the ermine cloak that he has lifted so often and so impatiently from her white shoulders. They will be going on to dance together. They will be sitting side by side at a small round table. The magic mantle of music will be cast over them. She will lean forward on her elbows, her eyes, through the trailing smoke of her cigarette, will be smiling softly. The infinite spell of her fascination will be hard upon him. They will dance, and as they dance her troubling fragrance will rise from her. Ah God, that some other man should be beside her, pressed close to her, desiring her! Minute by minute he had watched on the illuminated dial the slow passage of those hours that for her would be passing on feet so swiftly sandalled. Two o’clock at last. Ciro’s would be closed. They would be standing in the hall waiting for the taxi. The huge, fat commissionaire would be mumbling to the driver the address in Hertford Street. They would be alone together in the warm darkness, the darkness that would be perfumed by her presence. And then, what then? Night after night as the hand had crept forward from two to three he had lain biting into his arm in tortured recollection of all those other nights at Ciro’s, and how they had ended in a torrent of enraptured kisses. Ah, the long nights of ecstasy! Say what they would, you only cared once like that.