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“By which time,” suggested Archer, “they would probably not want to.”

  “And would that,” asked Ransom, “be a matter for regret?”

  Merivale paused judicially.

  “No,” he said, “on the whole no. Art is an acquired taste. Still as we are ourselves artificial, or rather as the world we inhabit is artificial—but I grow involved. Let us to yon wine shop.”

  “And tell us,” he continued, as five minutes later he leant back against the bar to sip at a fine champagne, “Tell me who are we to meet at this dance club haunt of yours?”

  accompanied ladies. People came there with partners, not in search of them. It did not admit persons who were

  “Marjorie Fairfield—I believe you’ve met her—and a couple of others—I don’t know who they are. A lad called Christopher Hammond asked her.”

  “Christopher Hammond?” said Archer. “A tall dark fellow, with a wound scar across his forehead.

  Chapter III

  Night and a Night Club

  The average night club is a second-rate place for third-rate people. It is less a dance club than a drinking club. It is a place to which people go when they can get a drink nowhere else. If there were no drink regulations there would be fewer night clubs, or rather there would be different night clubs. For the night club is the protest of free people against the restraint of the drinking regulations. It is not the drink that is the attraction, but the tactics that have to be employed to get it. There is the argument with the porter in the doorway, the bargaining with the management, the offer of some dissipated shareholder to introduce the party as his guests. To pass through the close-watched doorway is to feel oneself the victor in a hazardous and honourable encounter. And as these forays are usually the sequel to some such masculine and cheery revel as an old boys’ or regimental dinner, partners have to be provided on the spot. The nature of such partners it is unnecessary to particularise.

  That is the average night club. The Wolves was a very different sort of place. It was run in the first place by a gentleman. It did not invite the co-operation of unaccompanied ladies. People came there with partners, not in search of them. It did not admit persons who were not introduced by members. It was clean. Evening dress was not optional. One was not forced to order drink.

  The room when they arrived was rather empty. Only four or five couples were dancing, and there were not more than twenty people in the room. Of the forty to fifty tables that were drawn in receding circles about the gleaming oval of the polished floor, scarcely six were occupied. Two of the chintz-covered Chesterfields were empty, and the waiters leant lazily against the wall in preparation for a strenuous evening. It was easy to see in a moment that Mrs Fairfield’s party had not arrived.

  “We have just time therefore,” said Ransom, “for a cocktail each.”

  The night club is popularly pictured as a place of sustained and unchecked hilarity. Actually this is not the case. It is open after all for six or seven hours, a day practically in itself; and, as the day, it has its own routine, its own rhythm, its pauses and intermissions, its crowded and its quiet hours.

  At half-past eleven the Wolves, after the noisy heat of Piccadilly, was peculiarly cool and quiet. The music was soft and smooth, and there were long intervals between each dance; huge blocks of ice stood in enamel bowls along the wall. An electric fan whirred drowsily in the roof.

  “The ideal setting,” Merivale asserted, “for some long contest of dialectic. What shall we discuss? Will Archer defend or oppose the Sitwells, or would our host prefer to shake a lance in honour of James Joyce? ”

  But the symposium did not materialise. For the two young men who had been discovered in the bar proceeded to justify their invitation with a rattle of small talk that reduced even Merivale to a relative degree of silence. They talked of night clubs and revues and restaurants, of France and Passchendael and cricket. They fulfilled completely the role of the young man about town who came home from the War with an M.C. and a captain’s gratuity, to a parental allowance and a life that begins the day at twelve with a breakfast of two aspirins and a cup of tea, and ends it between three and four in whatever night club happens to stand in greatest need of honorary members.

  “Luxury,” one of them asserted, “was good for trade.”

  Merivale beamed on him benignly. He was singularly at peace with life. Good food, good wine, good fellowship, and to-morrow there would be no reveille for a half-past seven breakfast. Ransom sat forward, his hand rested against his cheek, his eyes watching the door through which at any moment now Marjorie Fairfield would be stepping. Archer was silent. His face gave an appearance of studious attention. But he was not listening. There was an empty chair on either side of him. He leaned back, twisting between his long slim fingers the stem of a half-empty glass.

  Somerset was not too happy. He was beginning to feel tired. One couldn’t stay up till three or four in the morning and feel fresh next day—at least he couldn’t. It was all very well for Merivale who was on leave, and Archer who could work in his own time, and Heritage who did no work at all; but if you had to be in Lincoln’s Inn at half-past nine. . . . He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t thirsty, but he knew that, if only because it was there, he would spend the next three hours munching egg sandwiches and drinking fizz. He would be sluggish all to-morrow. And he couldn’t afford to be that, competition was too keen. If you slacked off, the other fellows would get in front of you. It had been a jolly evening and a jolly dinner, but it was going to be spoilt by being carried on too long. Why hadn’t people the sense to stop at the right time. He sat backwards in his chair, drove his hand deep into his pocket, and moodily surveyed the antics in the arms of a slim, willowy young woman of a rotund, white-haired, flabby-cheeked vulgarian.

  “God!” he thought.” He must be nearly seventy. It’s disgusting. She’s a lady, too. How women like that can—”

  The music rose to a crescendo of broken rhythm, quickening the dancers to a higher level of sensation. For a moment the lights were lowered, and over the undulating couples played fitfully the wavering lustre of the limelight, green and blue and pink and yellow, sweeping from one side of the dance floor to the other, surprising suddenly a shadowed hand press or the momentary caress of cheek on cheek. Then once again came the full blaze of the gilded candelabra, a final crash of cymbals, a last wailing note of the oboe.

  And then suddenly the miracle occurred.

  At the far end of the room, hesitating for a moment in the doorway, she stood in a pale grey mauve dress with hooped flounces of silver tissue, her warm-coloured oval face clasped round the head by a helmet of warm brown hair, her hand raised towards her forehead to smooth her fringe. And to Eric Somerset, watching her with every nerve atune, came piercingly such a sensation as had never before come to him, a sensation that comes to most men and women at one time or another of their lives, a sensation not to be analysed or explained, but to be accepted as a miracle simply; for it is a miracle, this sudden appreciation in the presence of another person, a person seen for the first time, and of whom we can know nothing, that there has entered into our life something that will reshape there everything it encounters; that from this day forth nothing, whatever the outcome, is going to be the same again: that a force not to be ignored has laid its hold on us, a force that we must face and take account of, probably on its own terms.

  He half rose in his chair, his fingers clasped tightly to the edge of the table; then at his elbow he heard Ransom Heritage’s voice.

  “Why, but there’s Marjorie.”

  And in a panic-stricken moment Eric realised that it was for her that they had been waiting, and that in a moment he would be introduced to her.

  She was accompanied by another woman and two men of rather nondescript appearance. They were youngish, between twenty-five and thirty-five, were fresh coloured and clean shaven, the sort of men whom you accept as ordinary, decent fellows till they do anything to prove themselves to be otherwise. Of the woman who walked
between them, however, it was scarcely possible not to form an immediate and quite definite opinion: at once you either liked or you didn’t like her. And, after she had been in the room ten minutes, you either liked her quite a lot, or hated her. She was a large woman with masses of jet-black hair, drawn back, unparted from her forehead, with eyes that were jet black too, and a skin of that particular shade of white that cannot be described as colourless. A soft creamed surface, powdered, but un-painted: as unpainted as the warm red mouth that was set loosely over two shining and even rows of teeth.

  With a smile of welcome on his lips, Ransom slipped down the room to greet her.

  “Now this is one of the surprises that keep one still in love with life,” he said. “How thoughtful of you, Marjorie. It can’t be six weeks since I saw Lady Manon, but it seems at least six years. And Christopher Hammond. Let me see, surely we’ve met before. Roger Partington—why, of course, in ’17 at that bombing course at Hythe. Now this is going to be a very jolly party. Let me see—do you know everyone? That’s Simon Merivale, an indifferent soldier and a worse dancer. And this is Vernon Archer. You’ll see his photograph stuck on the cigar advertisements—’ See what Vernon Archer, the celebrated painter, says’—you know the sort of thing. And here’s the baby of the party, Eric Somerset—he means well. And then—oh, yes, let me see. What are the names of our two new friends? Ferguson and Smythe, that’s the lot, splendid.”

  He presented them with a sweeping inclusive gesture.

  “Lady Manon Granta, Mrs Fairfield, Roger Partington, and Christopher Hammond. That’s that then, and now that we all know each other, let’s decide what we would like to eat. I’m quite sure, Manon, that all through that long revue that’s been so boring you, you’ve been saying to yourself: ’ Now what I should really like for supper is caviare followed by a quail.’ You have? admirable, and Marjorie too. How simple this is going to be. Now we shall want a couple of magnums, waiter, and caviare and quails for ten, and cocktails—what about cocktails? A clover club for you, Manon, Marjorie a bronx, and two martinis—right. And you say you won’t have one, Eric—nor I’ll either; so that’ll be one clover club, one bronx, two martinis, four monkey gland. You must make the most of the supper, Manon. You’ll have to do a lot of dancing—only two of you among eight men. Perhaps we’d better have one before the cocktails come, so as to give you an appetite for it.” And stretching out his hand, he led her towards the floor.

  Marjorie, as her eyes followed them, frowned a little. If only he weren’t so charming towards every one. There was nothing in it, she knew that; but she would be able to value more highly the many nice things he said to her, if she had not heard him say very much the same sort of things to so many other people. That torrent of delighted welcome—” But, my dear Marjorie, and how nice you are looking “—in early days how it had thrilled her that. But you could not continue to be thrilled when you had heard it used for the benefit of at least a dozen people. As always, he was talking right through the dance, amusingly it seemed, for the smile “that Lady Manon turned up to him was more than one of mere convention. And, as she watched them, she felt jealous suddenly; unhappily, impotently jealous of this woman whom she had never seen before to-night, but who in some unaccountable way represented for her the background of Ransom’s life.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” That was the first thing she asked Merivale as she rose in response to an outstretched hand and a murmured, “Shall we?”

  “Who? Lady Manon?” And for a moment before beginning to dance he stood watching them, watching the light of the candelabra gleam on the waved masses of black hair, on the white opulence of her neck and shoulders, noting the luxuriant sway beneath the black sheath of marocain of her full firm figure. “Pretty?” he said. “No, not pretty, and not everybody’s type. But, oh well, she’s the woman of thirty-seven, and whatever the fashion is there’ll be men to fall for her.”

  At the table in the corner the other men stayed talking. Christopher Hammond sat alone, a vacant chair on either side of him. He looked worried and unhappy, his fingers were toying with a roll, and his weak, girlish, irresolute face twitched every now and then. His evening coat was shabby, the silk facings a little worn, and there were only two buttons on a sleeve that did not fit tightly at the cuff. At a glance Ransom had settled it as pre-war, “and pretty pre-pre-war too,” he had added.

  “Who the devil is the fellow?” Archer wondered, and as he was at the end of the table furthest from him, turned for information to Roger Partington, the fourth of Lady Manon’s party.

  “Who is he?” Partington answered. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know any of them. I was sitting in the club after lunch to-day and a fellow came up to me and said: ‘Look here, I’ve had to let a party down, to-night, dinner and theatre and dance, goodish show it’ll be. Will you take it on? ’ Well, I had nothing to do. I said ’Yes.’ They gave me a first-class dinner at Claridge’s and a box at the Winter Garden, and I don’t know who the devil paid for it. That fellow doesn’t look as if he’d got a bean. He doesn’t seem to know Mrs Fairfield awfully well, and she’d never met Lady Manon before. I’ve been trying to place them the whole evening. I rather got the impression myself that at the last moment the young fellow had decided he’d better have some chaperons, and we were about all he could collect at such short notice. At any rate, here we are and I’ve enjoyed myself. People can ask me out like this every day of the week if they want to.”

  And a broad good-natured smile spread across the clear skinned, clean-shaven face.

  At the other side of Archer, Ferguson was trying to make himself agreeable to young Somerset. But Eric was not listening. His eyes were following Marjorie as she danced, noting with hungry haste, as though never again he would so have the chance to note, the slow sway of her body, the changing colour of her hair as the lamplight fell on it, the upright carriage of her head, the tapered grace of the fingers that rested against the black cloth of her partner’s coat; noted also the soft colouring of her cheeks, the burnt hazel of the eyes, the sprayed freckles about her nose, noted these, and, noting them, half closed his eyes that he might isolate and recapture in his imagination the stilled perfection of that haunting presence.

  The music ceased. The dancers were returning to the table and the long tray of cocktails with which the waiter had just arrived.

  “Now where’s yours, Lady Manon?” Ransom was saying. “Ah, that little pink fellow, and here’s your bronx, Marjorie. The rest of you, you’d better sort yours out. And I don’t think we’re going to have time for another dance, so we’d better get settled down.”

  It was not for Eric a particularly jolly meal. He felt very young and childish and unhappy. He could think of nothing to say. He listened with envy to the flow of small talk that came so easily to those other men.

  Merivale was sitting next to Lady Manon with Ransom on his right-hand side, and Partington next to him. Marjorie was on the other side between Ferguson and Vernon Archer. As far as Eric could gather, they were discussing pictures.

  “When’s your next exhibition?” Marjorie was saying. “Lucky brute,” thought Eric, “having a name that’ll make a woman interested in you before you’ve said or done anything to attract her.”

  “Not till November,” Archer said. “I’ve got to get two or three portraits finished first.”

  “I never knew such a man as you,” laughed Ransom.

  “You seem to be producing an exhibition every second month. You must work fearfully hard.”

  “But then he enjoys his work, don’t you, Mr Archer?” —this from Manon Granta. “I always imagine that you’re never happy unless you’re working.”

  “And I’m only happy,” interjected Ferguson, “when I’m not.”

  “But then you’re not, if you’ll forgive my saying it, an artist. An artist’s different. Isn’t that so, Mr Archer?” She spoke pleasantly, but assertively.

  Archer laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it quite like that,
Lady Manon. You know what Browning said about never sitting down to his desk without distaste, or rising from it without relief. I should say it was more like this: It’s not that one is happy when one is working, but that one’s unhappy when one’s not working, which isn’t the same thing.”

  The point was discussed generally for a few moments and then once again the conversation became personal and quiet.

  Vernon Archer continued his discussion of modern art with Marjorie. Lady Manon was talking in a low voice, behind her fan, to Christopher Hammond. Ransom was reminding Roger Partington of certain mutual acquaintances. Merivale was concerned solely with his quail. “The old war-horse,” he murmured, “is well stabled.”

  The club was beginning to fill up. Supper was ending. Restaurants were closing. The centre of the floor had grown congested, had reached, in fact, that most awkward of all points of congestion when you imagine, seeing a number of blank spaces, that you have more room than you have actually, guide carelessly, and consequently four or five times barge heavily into another couple. The music was more strident now, the room noisier and warmer. There was a constant hailing of acquaintances, a waving of hands and a shouting of Christian names.

  “It’s getting hot,” said Manon Granta. And she opened out to its full her wide, pink, ostrich fan; and, as she passed its soft feathers across her face, she spoke quickly and quietly to Christopher.

  “I’ve an invitation for you,” she said, “next week-end at Gowan Castle. You’ll catch the 12.15 from Paddington.”

  An excited look passed quickly into one of despondency across Hammond’s face.

  “I can’t,” he said, “I’m sorry. It’s awfully good of you, but I can’t.”

  Lady Manon shook her fan impatiently. “Don’t be silly. It’s not been easy for me to get that invitation.”

  “But I’m going to stay with my people.”

  “Your people can wait.”

  “Really though, Manon—”