Kept Page 9

  Eric had hardly spoken to Hammond at the Wolves, and had, indeed, mentally classified him as being on the whole a rather poisonous sort of person. But he welcomed him now as can only one compatriot another in a city of entire strangers.

  “Hullo,” he said, “it is nice to see you.”

  Hammond’s reception of him was less effusive.

  “Yes, oh, er—Somerset. Of course; yes, the Wolves. Enjoying yourself? Good. Sorry, can’t stop; so long. See you later.”

  And before Eric had time to say another word Hammond was half-way across the room. He was not, let it be conceded in his favour, having a particularly easy evening. He had been instructed by Manon Granta “to come early and keep an eye on things,” which meant that he had throughout the evening to be at her elbow whenever she might need him, and at the other end of the room whenever she did not. He had not been allowed to bring a partner. “Oh no, dear, that would be quite impossible,” she had said. “You’re to be my adjutant, you see. I couldn’t spare you; oh no, really, dear, I’m sorry.” He knew, however, several of the girls there, and one or two of them certainly would expect him to ask them for a dance. This, however, he dared not do. He could not risk being engaged for a dance at a moment when he might be needed by his hostess.

  “I am going to have,” he thought, “hell’s own evening.”

  Self-pity was not, however, one of Hammond’s indulgences. He had no one to blame for this business but himself. He had brought it on himself, and he was not going to shirk the issue now. If you made love to a woman, it was your own look-out; you must take what came to you. Still, he could scarcely have foreseen that it was in this way that things were destined to develop; could not have foreseen during those long, slow-passing nights, when he had tossed from one side to the other of his bed, trying to choose between Manon, whom he felt half loved him, and by whom he was quite attracted, and that little girl at the tobacconist’s who smiled when she sold him his cigarettes, and with whom he was more than half in love. And he could not believe that his choice was so entirely wrong, so entirely contemptible.

  He was a poor man. He received from his father, a north-country solicitor who had in the 1919 election contested unsuccessfully a local seat in the Labour interests, an allowance of fifty pounds a year to supplement the three pounds a week which he was paid by the Graviston motor works. His prospects were not good. It seemed unlikely that he would be selected as a racer. His parents would leave him enough money to ensure a comfortable, if not an indulgent, middle age; but that was twenty to twenty-five years off, and he had, till then, to face the prospect of livelihood on four to seven pounds a week. And a poor man had no right to make love to persons inferior socially to himself. Had he been rich he could have settled money on the girl, he could have looked after her and given her a good time. As things were he could only have made her unhappy and left her conquest the easier for his successors. By making love to a girl you assumed responsibilities in regard to her; and he was not in a position to accept those responsibilities. Love was an economic proposition. One could make love only where one could afford to make it, where one could accept the consequent responsibilities. With Manon it would be different. There would be no such trouble in her case. It would be, he had anticipated, a jolly, pleasant sort of affair with not a great deal of heart at stake. And because he had known that one attraction lives till another attraction displaces it, he had set himself to forget in his courtship of Manon Granta the bright eyes of the girl who had sold him cigarettes. Of two evils he had chosen the one which had appeared to him the lesser, and he refused to believe that his choice was as contemptible as the conventionalities of opinion would have it seem to be. Had he to make the choice again he would act in precisely the same manner. He could not have known then that it was to end by his falling genuinely in love with Manon, and being treated with a tolerant, good-natured, slightly contemptuous affection that would change unaccountably to a cold, haughty, disdainful cruelty. He could not have known. It was one of the things one never could tell in advance. You might be wildly in love with a woman, only to find after a few weeks or days that she meant nothing to you, and then again you might begin an affair as this had begun, half-heartedly, to find yourself wildly, desperately in love. Even admitting, which he refused to admit, that he had chosen like a cad, it was no one but himself that was paying for it. “I am going to have,” he assured himself, “the most per-bloody evening of my life.”

  Eric Somerset, who knew nothing of the tides that were agitating Hammond’s conduct, made no allowance for this casual treatment of him.

  “Swine. Thinks himself too good,” he thought, as he watched-Hammond vanish into the crowd about the buffet.

  Behind him unexpectedly came the crash of cymbals.

  The music again. He must get out of this before the dancing started, and he hurried across towards the gallery of the staircase. From the drawing-room and balcony and staircase one by one the couples strolled back into the room, laughing and talking to one another, hesitating for a moment to catch the music’s rhythm before they turned into each other’s arms to dance. Eric watched them enviously. They looked so happy, and he, too, could be so happy if only there were someone for him to dance with. Beside his elbow a couple were standing talking, suddenly the girl turned away and laughed, then seemed to turn back to look at him, and again to turn away and laugh. He flushed hotly. Were they laughing at him, he wondered, at him because he could not find anyone to dance with him, because he looked so helpless and so ridiculous? What was he to do though? He couldn’t go away. There was no one for him to dance with, no one even that he knew who would introduce him to anyone. If only Merivale would come, or Heritage. He began to endure such miseries of self-consciousness as he had not known since he had joined his battery and had stood before the orderly room with his valise and suitcase in the square waiting for the adjutant to return from lunch, wondering whether the sergeants and corporals, who so formally saluted him as they passed, were not laughing at him to themselves, whether there was not implied in the stiffness of their salute the insult of theatrical respect. In the same way he began to fancy that everyone in the drawing-room was looking at him and asking themselves who was that absurd-looking boy who had found no one to dance with him. He turned angrily away, and walking over to the buffet, picked up the first sandwich that was there. It was pâté de foie gras, and for half a second he ceased to be unhappy. He stretched out his hand for another when a familiar and good-natured voice sounded in his ear.

  “My dear Eric, but what an appetite.”

  And turning he was confronted by the elegant soldierly figure of Ransom Heritage.

  “Oh, you,” he said. The relief on his face was too genuine to be counterfeit, and Ransom, remembering perhaps how he himself had felt in a strange house in those days before he had come through a seeing of himself into perspective, to have outgrown self-consciousness, let his hand rest affectionately for a moment on Eric’s shoulder.

  “It is nice to see you,” he said, adding, to make easier the boy’s admission, “and have you been clever enough to get rid of your partner on to someone else already?” But it was an unneeded strategy. Eric had passed beyond the reach of vanity.

  “I haven’t brought a partner,” he blurted out. “I didn’t realise it was going to be this sort of party. It isn’t at all the kind of thing that I expected. I thought there would be introductions and things, and I don’t know a soul here.”

  “Perhaps, though,” smiled Ransom, “others of us do; at any rate we’ll do our best. Merivale is coming with his sister, and his brother’s bringing a girl, I think. Mrs Fairfield told me she’d be here, and there’re bound to be one or two others. Let’s wait till the music stops, and we’ll see what can be done.”

  At the sound of Mrs Fairfield’s name Eric’s heart had bounded wildly. Nothing else mattered if she was coming, if once again he was to be allowed to dance with her. For the sake of that one dance he would stand all the evening in a co
rner of a room, and he wouldn’t care who laughed at him or who noticed him. He would have his answer for them. Was he not waiting to dance with the one, the only woman in the world? So dazzled was he at the prospect that for a moment or two he did not realise that Heritage also was alone.

  “Haven’t you anyone with you?” he asked.

  Ransom shook his head. He had received the invitation as he was superintending Giles packing for a weekend visit, had tossed the Card carelessly on to his mantel-piece, had forgotten its existence on his return to London, and had only realised five days before the dance that he had neither accepted the invitation nor found a partner to take there with him. He had immediately rung up Marjorie to find that she had herself received an invitation and had arranged to go there with Roger Partington, whose wife had refused to accompany him because the card, Lady Manon not knowing that he was married, had been sent to him and not to her.

  “No, Eric, no,” Ransom said, “when you have come to my mature and disillusioned stage of life you will find that you go to dances chiefly for the supper and champagne. Manon’s suppers are, I have reason to remember, beyond criticism. And wine and a woman’s company cannot be enjoyed together. One intoxication ousts the other. It is equally impossible to enjoy food if your companion’s sole need at supper is sufficient nutriment to sustain her for another couple of hours’ dancing. She sups for dancing’s sake, we sup for supper’s sake, two rival principles, you know; art for art’s sake, and art for the state’s sake. Art and eating. Same thing in the end. As indeed most things are.”

  Eric never knew at such moments whether to take Heritage seriously. It sounded sense and obviously wasn’t. He contented himself with a question. “Doesn’t the waiting bore you awfully?” he asked.

  Ransom shook his head.

  “If all things bore you a little,” he said, “you’ll find that nothing’ll bore you much. The ideal philosophy. And, besides, I like looking on at things. You don’t, though, and there’s the music stopping, and I see a most charming girl with a very inadequate partner. We must alter that. In the meantime I’ll book you a couple of dances with Mrs Fairfield when she arrives. Oh, and there are the Merivales. I never knew, Simon, that you danced.”

  Simon Merivale laughed with a customary display of heavy geniality. “I don’t. I hate it. But this brother of mine insisted upon coming, and even if we don’t chaperone our women, we must look after our young men. Do you know each other, Miss Tristram, Miss Sybyl Merivale—Major Heritage, Mr Eric Somerset.”

  At that same moment Roger Partington arrived with Mrs Fairfield.

  “In fact,” Merivale remarked, “it only requires that nice young couple from the Wolves to make our party complete. I shouldn’t incidentally,” he added, “be in the least surprised to find they were here. Those lads get everywhere. In the meantime I hear music off. We seem to be an odd number. I am thirsty, and I dislike dancing. Partington, you may dance this one with Miss Tristram, while my brother and sister amuse each other. Eric and I will shake a lance among those sandwiches.”

  And with his hand raised in blessing he walked slowly away from them towards the buffet. Roger Partington turned to Blanch Tristram: “Shall we then?” he said. She nodded, and Ransom and Marjorie were left together.

  She looked at him inquisitively, and a little pucker forced its way into the smooth unwrinkled surface of her forehead.

  “Alone, Ransom?”

  “As you wouldn’t come with me.”

  “You should have asked me sooner.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “One forgets, my dear, how popular you are.”

  An affectionate, slightly mocking smile flickered across his lips, a smile that she did not understand, and that in a way alarmed her, alarmed her because it seemed to express that side of his nature that was not expressed by that long, slow, kindly, sympathetic smile that so endeared him to her; that other side which was able to accept uncritically the paradox of their relationship.

  “And you’re angry now with me, I suppose, because you hadn’t time to find another partner.”

  “I didn’t ask another partner.”

  Between her eyes the small frown deepened. “I don’t think—Oh, I don’t know,” she added quickly. “I wish I understood you.”

  “Why worry,” he said, and the mocking smile on his lips grew tender. “We like each other. Isn’t that enough.” She watched him closely, as would in a boxing match one adversary another.

  “Perhaps it would be,” she said slowly, “if I knew how much you did.”

  “Rather a lot. Rather more than you think perhaps.”

  She tossed her head back. “And would that be difficult,” she retorted.

  But Ransom was one of those who refuse to quarrel.

  “It’s you who is saying it,” he said, and slipping an arm through hers he led her towards the ballroom. As they passed through out of the passage they very nearly collided with Blanch Tristram and Roger Partington, who were coming back laughing towards the lounge.

  “They seem to be getting on pretty well together,” she remarked, as in fact they were. The ballroom was very crowded, and Roger who was not by any means an expert dancer had suggested that it would be more amusing to sit out and watch the others.

  When they had begun that game of spotting likenesses, which, foolish enough though it may be, rarely fails for a while to be entertaining.

  “On the right-hand side going towards the band, you will observe,” Roger would remark, “Lord Curzon dancing extremely jauntily with a rejuvenation of Lillie Langtry. Really at his time of life.”

  “And at the corner,” Blanch Tristram would rejoin, “you may perhaps have noticed that Ivor Novello is treading on the instep of Mary Queen of Scots. I always thought he was a good dancer.”

  For a few minutes they amused themselves with such absurdities; then Blanch remarked in a perfectly serious voice:

  “I hear that they are going to take Louden to Australia, because the Australians have had no practice at playing fast left-handers.”

  “But Louden isn’t a left-hand bowler,” Roger said.

  “Lure,” she quietly and triumphantly replied, “Lure. Fifteen love.”

  To Roger who had no sisters, who had been meeting nothing for the last few years but a highly sophisticated type of woman, Blanch was as refreshing as is a glass of water in the morning when one has been drinking heavily overnight. She was so fresh, so full of life. Her prettiness had no need of artifice. There was no paint upon her lips, no black pencilling upon her eyelids. He felt ten years younger, a contemporary almost of this young girl who was stepping so confidently and so gaily to meet the future.

  “That is a nice man,” she said to Ransom afterwards. “Who is he? I didn’t catch his name.”

  “Roger Partington.”

  “Tell me about him, then, I’m interested.”

  She did not learn much, however. “Roger Partington,” he said. “I don’t know him at all well. He’s scarcely more than an acquaintance. He had just come down from Cambridge before the War and was thinking of going on the Stock Exchange. But his family lost most of their money in the War, and he married on his gratuity, thinking that jobs would be as easy to find after the War as they had been during it, found it wasn’t, and had to take the first thing that came along. I’m not certain what it is exactly—something to do with foreign exchanges. He did try and explain it to me once. But I’m a fool at money.”

  “I don’t mean that so much,” she said; “about himself more. You say he’s married?”

  Ransom nodded.

  “Then why isn’t she here?”

  Ransom smiled. “How should I know,” he said.

  If they had not been dancing she would have stamped her foot.

  “I think it’s perfectly awful,” she said, “the way all you people go about the place without your wives.”

  “She may be ill.”

  “Oh, no,” she retorted. “I can tell that by the way you answered me—I can te
ll that. And I think it’s terrible. You’re all of you so casual about marriage. I’m not going to have any nonsense like that when I marry.”

  A wave of colour swept angrily across her cheeks.

  “You’re very pretty,” Ransom thought, “and pretty hard. You’ll make things intense enough for whoever gets you. But I expect he’ll think you’re worth it.”

  Ransom answered her obliquely. “The War’s pretty unsettling, you know,” he said.

  “Oh, the War, the War, the War,” she said, impatiently. “I hear about nothing from any of you except the War. You seem to think the War’s an excuse for everything. You do no work and you behave dishonourably, and then say, ’Oh, it’s the War,’ and pretend it doesn’t matter. And it does matter.” Her eyes glowed as she spoke, and the colour came hotly into her cheeks. “The whole crowd of you,” she added, “I get so impatient at times with you.”