Love in these Days Page 4

  Chapter IV

  Love Among the Worldlings

  It was half-past three before Christopher Stirling had exhausted the conversational capacities of his brother and his prospective client. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?” it was suggested. Christopher Stirling shook his head. There had been during the morning less than a brief half-hour of fitful sunshine. The sky was covered now with pile upon pile of thick slow-moving clouds. By half-past five the light would have begun to fade. It was scarcely worth while going back to the studio for ninety minutes’ painting. There were a couple of exhibitions he would like to see, and a call or two that might be profitably paid.

  “And for me,” said Humphrey, “an office waits in Blackfriars. Till Sunday, Christopher.” And with a light heart and a springy stride, he turned eastwards towards Fleet Street.

  That had been a good morning’s business. A prosperous client was seeking to become more prominent through his daughter’s wedding. And Humphrey had let fall casually a few remarks on the social value of such publicity as is provided by a portrait in the Royal Academy. The old boy had, in the vernacular of the hour, “eaten it.” The sequel had been a lunch with Christopher, and the result of the undertaking would be a cheque for himself of eighty pounds.

  Eighty pounds in four hours. Twenty pounds an hour. At that rate his yearly income would be well beyond five figures. One should do this sort of thing more often. There might be a future for the right sort of matrimonial agency. “Discreet publicity for debutantes.” One could find worse slogans. Portraits and photographs and introductions. It only needed organizing.

  Eighty pounds within four hours. Imperceptibly the pace of his stride had slackened. One could not waste the last two hours of such a day inside an office. Brokerage on an eighth per cent: when one had been working at the rate of six shillings a minute in the morning. Unthinkable. Especially when there were so many other ways of passing the enchanted period of a twilit afternoon.

  At the corner of Chancery Lane he paused. He had told his secretary that he would be back to sign his letters by half-past four, and he had a vague recollection of having promised to discuss with his partner a certain point of policy. Policies could wait, though, and so could letters. There was nothing that was not improved by waiting. And it was several weeks since that dark-eyed, dark-haired girl in the quiet, softly-lighted shop behind St. Paul’s had had the privilege of serving him with tea. Eighty pounds, after all, within four hours!

  Six minutes later with a feeling of safety and relief and with the pulse of his heart beating ever such a little faster, he closed behind him the felt-lined door that surmounted the winding flight of stairs which lead downwards to the unruffled depths of the Balkan Tea Rooms.

  The atmosphere was warm and slightly scented. Against a background of rose-pink paper were hung gold-shot, blue damask curtains. Between a pale primrose ceiling and three wide-mouthed alabaster bowls the lighting of the room quivered like autumn sunshine.

  “Your usual, Mr. Stirling?”

  “My usual, Mildred.”

  She was tall and twenty and a little plump. Her skin was pale, but very clear. Her full, moist lips stood in no need of carmined artifice. The dark hair that was brushed back from the low forehead bunched like clustering flowers about her ears. Beneath the close-plucked eyebrows the brown eyes were curiously right.

  “You’re quite a stranger,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  “I’ve been very busy.”

  “Busy getting off somewhere else?”

  “Is that likely?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ll get your tea,” she said.

  She returned a few moments later with a tray.

  “You’ve brought two cups?” he asked.

  The brown eyes twinkled.

  “You said your usual, Mr. Stirling.”

  She set out the plates upon the table, and sat down on the deeply-sprung couch beside him. Into each cup she poured a saucerful of hot water, allowed it to stand there for a moment, then swirling the water as one does brandy, quickly round the cup, she poured it away into the basin. With a slow languid movement she lifted the teapot from the tray. As she did so, the sleeve of her frock slipped back over her elbow, leaving the white arm bare. Her eyes met his as she handed him his cup, in a curious appraising glance; a glance acknowledging the existence of an intimacy that was unconfessed. And as always when she looked at him in that way he felt the blood through his veins beat faster.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “What else can you expect, sitting here all day long in artificial light?”

  “It’s your own choice.”

  Between them not a word of pleading or avowal had ever passed. There had been no need for it. Of such moments as these the significance is implicit. She had only to look him in the eyes to know.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” she said.

  “Right or wrong, that’s not the way I look at things. Pleasant or unpleasant, that’s all I ask myself.”

  “I don’t,” she answered.

  Was she wrong, though, not to? Pleasant or unpleasant: that was perhaps the way to look at things; when, as she was, at least, you were not responsible to anyone. Pleasant or unpleasant. But then how pleasant was it going to be? It would be jolly of course to be looked after, to buy silk stockings without having to save out of one’s lunch money; to be able to stay in bed as long as one wanted to; to drive when the sun shone through country lanes; to sit when fog and rain were in the streets in a mass of cushions before a high-heaped fire. That would be jolly enough all right. But the other things. . . .

  She glanced, as she sipped her tea, over the rim of her cup at the smooth-skinned, freshly-coloured, delicately-featured face. Yes, he was good-looking, and his eyes were kind, and he had money enough apparently. Did she though want him to make love to her? For that was, she was too practical not to realize, the acid test. And it was so hard to tell. Men were unexpected in those things. There had been, for instance, that really gorgeous-looking boy, with the hair like burnished copper, and the little brushed-back moustache, who just took your breath away when you looked at him. The moment he had walked into the shop she had vowed that sooner or later she would make him kiss her. And when at last he had, it had been—well, what had it been like?—a cool smooth pebble. And then on the other hand there was Henry: Henry who was so awkward and ill-dressed and ill-conditioned, whom she had met at the Palais de Danse, and who would wait for her in the evenings in the street to make clumsy, inarticulate love to her in cinemas and on the tops of buses, but who continued always in an odd way to thrill her, because . . . well, because she supposed, her kisses clearly meant so much to him. She was not to him, she knew, just anyone; as to Humphrey Stirling as likely as not she would be.

  “You don’t love me,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “Love’s a big word,” he answered. “And a vague word. It means something different to everyone. In my way I do.”

  “Your way?”

  With a quick turn of the wrist she emptied the dregs of her cup into the basin, and began to count the tealeaves round the side.

  “This year, next year, some time .... ”

  “Suppose,” said Humphrey, “that you were to come to a small party at my brother’s place on Sunday?”

  She looked up quickly.

  “A party? What sort of a party?”

  “A cocktail party, twelve o’clock onward.”

  “Who’ll be there?”

  “Anyone who chooses to drop in. It would be nice of you to come.”

  He had given the invitation in a carelessly off-hand manner, as though it were nothing in particular that he was offering, as though, were she to accept, it would be she who would be conferring the favour. But he could see that he had made an impression on her. There was surprise and in its way a rather pathetic gratitude in the wide brown eyes.

  “You wouldn’t be wanting me there,” she said.


  “One always wants you.”

  “In that crowd?”

  “That crowd will be only my friends and my brother’s friends. Where else should you be?”

  She flushed, then nodded her head.

  “Very well,” she said, “I’ll come. Won’t they be all awfully smart?”

  “They’ll all envy you your looks,” he said, “but perhaps you’d allow me to make you a little present so that they may envy you your frock as well.”

  • • • • • • • •

  “Mr. Brackenridge, sir,” announced Christopher’s valet on his master’s return at seven minutes to six to the small house that adjoined his studio, “is waiting for you in the dining-room.”

  “But we are expected, Robinson, to be changed by ten minutes to seven.”

  “That, sir, is what I ventured to explain to him.”

  Christopher shrugged his shoulders.

  “He insisted, though, on seeing us? Ah well, our vanity is flattered, and if it amuses him to talk to us while we have our bath . . . will you offer him the choice between a whisky and a cocktail.”

  “Mr. Brackenridge, sir, has already expressed his preference for a bronx.”

  “Then in twenty minutes’ time, Robinson, you will show Mr. Brackenridge into the bathroom. With our shave no one may interfere.”

  Christopher’s valet inclined his head deferentially.

  “And in your absence, sir, a female voice that I was unable to recognize rang up but would leave no name.”

  “An act, Robinson, of exemplary discretion. For the moment that is, we believe, all.”

  It was a short, dapper little person who carried in his hand the dregs of his fourth cocktail, and in his person the hilarity of its predecessors, that exactly twenty minutes later was shown into the large tile-paved bathroom that represented one of Christopher’s few concessions to prosperity.

  “Old man,” he said, the moment the door had been closed behind him. “I’ve now done at last what you have prophesied for the last thirteen months I should do.”

  Languidly Christopher raised his head above the steaming stretch of scented water.

  “And with whom, Geoffrey,” he asked, “have you elected to fall in love?”

  “Nobody that you know, but ...”

  “In that case you need tell me no more,” Christopher interrupted. “She is a widow of about thirty-two, earning an income of six or seven hundred pounds a year.”

  A puzzled and slightly injured expression disturbed the serene complacence of Geoffrey Brackenridge’s face.

  “You know her then?”

  “I assure you,” Christopher protested, “that I am learning of her existence for the first time.” “Then how did you guess?”

  “The key to a man’s character, my dear Geoffrey, is the woman that he lives with, and as I know your character pretty well, it follows that I should recognize the key that fits it. There can be only one satisfactory woman for the materialist without ambition.”

  The materialist without ambition was the label that had been affixed laughingly enough three summers back by Humphrey Stirling, at the close of one of those anapæstic evenings when one finds oneself talking in blank verse. And Brackenridge in spite of its truth had not resented it. “Why should I?” he had retorted. “It’s what I am and what I meant to be.” And they had laughed and filled up his glass and warned him jokingly against the perils of being too consistent. For “consistent,” if he was nothing else, Geoffrey Brackenridge was.

  In the spring of 1919 at the age of thirty-two he had returned to civilian pleasures and a yearly income of fifteen hundred pounds, with the fixed intention of making the remaining forty years of his life as restful, comfortable and independent as the five preceding ones had been grubby, disciplined and hazardous. “There’s only one thing the army’s taught me,” he had maintained, “that’s organization. I’m going to organize my life.” And he had proceeded to. Material pleasures were to him the only ones that remained, and he was going to make sure of them. His income, two thirds of which he derived from government securities, and a third from his periodic visits to the board room of Messrs. Joshua, Benn & Isaacs, wine merchants of Soho, was so divided proportionately among his pleasures that there was a margin of ten per cent for unexpected eventualities. “Otherwise,” he explained, “I should find myself in debt, and debt’s uncomfortable. You always find yourself spending a tenth more than you expect.”

  It had been suggested to him that, while fifteen hundred was a quite pleasant income for a bachelor, it was not more than adequate. Three thousand, say, would add considerably to the sum of his life’s amusement.

  “Certainly,” he had answered, “I should like to have more money. But I don’t want to make more money. The pleasure that more money would bring me would not begin to compensate me for the inconvenience of having to earn it. It’s a question of exchange you see. I might double my income but in the process I should enormously reduce the time in which I had to be enjoying it, and I should reduce also the energy that I should need for its enjoying. If I set out to earn three thousand pounds a year, I should have to give up late nights and long week-ends, and golf in the middle of the week. On the principle of exchange it isn’t worth it. I’m a practical man. I work things out.”

  The materialist without ambition was a good working label for Geoffrey Brackenridge, and now apparently he was going to pigeon-hole love as he had pigeon-holed golf and travel and a quiet taste for baccarat.

  “I am waiting,” he said, “for your explanation.”

  Languidly Christopher slid his body along the smooth, pale, coloured tiling of his bath, and leant his head back till the softened water crept upwards over his forehead towards his eyes.

  “As a man with an affection for stability,” he answered, “you would look naturally in your associate for such presumably wifely properties as placidity and reliability. It was inevitable therefore that she should be between the years of twenty-nine and thirty-five, for it is between those years that woman becomes practical without ceasing to be attractive. She is not a virgin. . . .”

  “Don’t be indelicate.”

  “I am in my bath. She is, let me continue, not a virgin, for if she had preserved her innocence for a dozen years, she would be setting on it now either emotionally or financially a price that would be beyond your means. She is not a wanton, for the wanton makes upon a man, during the months few or many of her absorption in him, demands as exclusive as any wife. She is not married, for as a peace-loving citizen you would not wish to embroil yourself in any proprietary affray, or challenge notoriety in the divorce courts. I assumed her, therefore, to be a widow.”

  Grudgingly Brackenridge admitted that the analysis was sound.

  “But the rest of it?” he persisted.

  “If she had no money of her own,” Christopher explained, “she would not be wearing clothes that would confer credit on you when you took her out. And were you to undertake the finances of her wardrobe, you would have to reconstruct your way of life to meet so considerable an obligation. If on the other hand her income was a four figure one, it seemed to me that your fifteen hundred would not be adequate for the type of entertainments to which she was accustomed. I assumed seven hundred therefore.”

  “Which is about what her typewriting bureau brings her in.”

  “That it should be earned rather than inherited was,” Christopher continued placidly, “I admit, a guess. But it did seem to me that you would prefer an associate who would be at an office for the greater part of the day, so as to leave you free for golf and bridge and cricket. And as you seem yourself so thoroughly contented, I could only imagine that the lady was in every respect ideal.”

  There was an element of discomfiture but not of ill-humour in the smile with which Brackenridge acknowledged the logic of his friend’s deduction.

  “You’d better see her,” he said, “and then you’ll know for certain that she is.”

  To which suggestion Chr
istopher responded with his invariable invitation to a bronx on Sunday.

  Chapter V

  A Cocktail Party

  A Cocktail party at Christopher Stirling’s corresponded more closely to Graham’s account than do parties usually to their guests’ description of them. The people who gathered there would be certainly unlikely to meet each other at any house. The varieties of costume were as marked as the varieties of accent. There were inelegant creatures exquisitely gowned, and exquisite creatures clad about in shawls. There were men who looked like women and women who looked like men. There were men in plus fours and men in morning coats; the width of trouser ranged from ten inches to twenty-six.

  “It’s more than a cocktail party,” someone had once remarked, “it’s a social cocktail. All manner of strange things shaken up together.”

  Sometimes people would ask Christopher where he found them all. But he would shrug his shoulders and wave his long, white fingers in the air and answer vaguely: “Nowhere in particular, they’re just folk I’ve met at odd times and got to like.”

  “But there must be something,” Joan Faversham was insisting on the following Sunday, “that they have all in common.”

  It was her third visit to Christopher’s, but the atmosphere was still new to her. With eager curiosity, she strained her ears at the fragmentary bursts of talk around her.

  There were about thirty in the room in all. At the long table by the window, at which the cocktails were being mixed under Graham’s superintendence by a white-haired, white-coated servitor, a pale-faced young man with unshingled hair and a black, high-necked jumper was eating foie gras sandwiches as though he had had no breakfast and expected to have no lunch. Beside him a thick-jowled pugilist whose square splayed fingers were struggling hard to prevent his cuffs from slipping completely over the edge of his frayed blue sleeve, was explaining to a lady of maturing figure the difficulties of keeping weight down out of training. A little to her right two exquisitely-attired guardsmen were disputing with a civilian the propriety of the double-breasted waistcoat, and on her left an animated literary discussion was being waged.