CHAPTER XVIII

 

TWO hundred and thirteen Sloane Street.  The address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one.  It argued a reasonable prosperity, attested a certain distinction.  The knowledge of his address confirmed her already high opinion of the bearded stranger who had so surprisingly entered her life, as though in fulfilment of all the fortune-tellers’ prophecies that ever were made; had entered, yes, and intimately made himself at home.  She had been delighted, when the telegram came that morning, to think that at last she was going to find out something more about this man of mystery.  For dark and mysterious he had remained, remote even in the midst of the most intimate contacts.  Why, she didn’t even know his name.  ‘Call me Toto,’ he had suggested, when she asked him what it was.  And Toto she had had to call him, for lack of anything more definite or committal.  But today he was letting her further into his secret.  Rosie was delighted.  Her pink underclothing, she decided, as she looked in the long glass, was really ravishing.  She examined herself, turning first one way, then the other, looking over her shoulder to see the effect from behind.  She pointed a toe, bent and straightened a knee, applauding the length of her legs (‘Most women,’ Toto had said, ‘are like daschunds’), their slenderness and plump suavity of form.  In their white stockings of Milanese silk they looked delicious; and how marvellously, by the way, those Selfridge people had mended those stockings by their new patent process!  Absolutely like new, and only charged four shillings.  Well, it was time to dress.  Goodbye, then, to the pink underclothing and the long white legs.  She opened the wardrobe door.  The moving glass reflected, as it swung through its half-circle, pink bed, rose-wreathed walls, little friends of her own age, and the dying saint at his last communion.  Rosie selected the frock she had bought the other day at one of those little shops in Soho, where they sell such smart things so cheaply to a clientage of minor actresses and cocottes.  Toto hadn’t seen it yet.  She looked extremely distinguished in it.  The little hat, with its inch of veil hanging like a mask, unconcealing and inviting, from the brim, suited her to perfection.  One last dab of powder, one last squirt of synthetic lilies of the valley, and she was ready.  She closed the door behind her.  St Jerome was left to communicate in the untenanted pinkness.

       Mr Mercaptan sat at his writing-table – an exquisitely amusing affair in papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern Abbey in the romantic manner of Prince Albert’s later days – polishing to its final and gem-like perfection one of his middle articles.  It was on a splendid subject – the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’ – ‘that delicious droit,’ wrote Mr Mercaptan, ‘on which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England insist so firmly in their motto, Dieu et mon Droit – de Seigneur.’  That was charming, Mr Mercaptan thought, as he read it through.  And he liked that bit which began elegiacally: ‘But, alas! the Right of the First Night belongs to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as those dismal epochs invented by Morris or by Chesterton.  The Lord’s right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque imagination of the seventeenth century.  It never existed.  Or at least it did exist, but as something deplorably different from what we love to picture it.’  And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that Council of Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be continent on their wedding-night.  It was the Lord’s right – the droit of a heavenly Seigneur.  On this text of fact, Mr Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence.  How much happier we all should be if the real historical droit du Seigneur had in fact been the mythical right of our ‘pretty prurient imaginations’!  He looked forward to a golden age when all should be seigneurs possessing rights that should have broadened down into universal liberty.  And so on.  Mr Mercaptan read through his creation with a smile of satisfaction on his face.  Every here and there he made a careful correction in red ink.  Over ‘pretty prurient imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious hesitation.  Wasn’t it perhaps a little too strongly alliterative, a shade, perhaps, cheap?  Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicately prurient’ would be better.  He repeated the alternatives several times, rolling the sound of them round his tongue, judicially, like a tea-taster.  In the end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right.  ‘Pretty prurient’ – they were the mots justes, decidedly, without a question.

       Mr Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room.

       ‘What is it, Mrs Goldie?’ he called irritably, for it was not difficult to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones.  He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed.  In these critical moments of correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.

       But Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon.  The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt.

       ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected …?’ Mr Mercaptan began with an essay in offensive courtesy.

       But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely interrupted him.  ‘Look here, Mercaptan,’ he said.  ‘I want to have a talk with you.’

       ‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ Mr Mercaptan replied.  ‘And what, may I ask, about?’  He knew, of course, perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk disturbed him.

       ‘About this,’ said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a roll of paper.

       Mr Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out.  It was a copy of the Weekly World.  ‘Ah!’ said Mr Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted surprise.  ‘The World.  You have read my little article?’

       ‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Lypiatt.

       Mr Mercaptan modestly laughed.  ‘It hardly deserves it,’ he said.

       Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to him, and speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful deliberation: ‘It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,’ he said.

       ‘Come, come!’ protested Mr Mercaptan.  ‘A critic must be allowed to criticize.’

       ‘But there are limits,’ said Lypiatt.

       ‘Oh, I quite agree,’ Mr Mercaptan eagerly conceded.  ‘But, after all, Lypiatt, you can’t pretend that I have come anywhere near those limits.  If I had called you a murderer, or even an adulterer – then, I admit, you would have some cause to complain.  But I haven’t.  There’s nothing like a personality in the whole thing.’

       Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a pool of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.

       ‘You’ve merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a quack, raving fustian, spouting mock heroics.  That’s all.’

       Mr Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and misunderstood.  He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand.  ‘I merely suggested,’ he said, ‘that you protest too much.  You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic.  All this folie de grandeur, all that hankering after terribiltà …’ sagely Mr Mercaptan shook his head, ‘it’s lead so many people astray.  And, in any case, you can’t really expect me to find it very sympathetic.’  Mr Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered.  He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep – for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long – that when you sat right back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length.  It was under the white satin that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic home.  He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls, pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs.  He looked at his cabinet of bibelots in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any mediæval French original, and the Italian medals.  He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis’, black and neat on the page, with the red corrections attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost invariably discovery of, the inevitable word.  No, really, one couldn’t expect him to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic.

       ‘But I don’t expect you to,’ said Lypiatt, ‘and, good God! I don’t want you to.  But you call me insincere.  That’s what I can’t and won’t stand.  How dare you do that?’  His voice was growing louder.

       Once more, Mr Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped.  ‘At the most,’ he corrected, ‘I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures.  Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.’

       Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control.  All the accumulated anger and bitterness of the last days burst out.  His show had been a hopeless failure.  Not a picture sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good, that had praised for the wrong, the insulting reasons.  ‘Bright and effective work,’ ‘Mr Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.’  Damn them! damn them! And then, when the dailies had all had their yelp, here was Mercaptan in the Weekly World taking him as a text for what was practically an essay on insincerity on art.  ‘How dare you?’ he furiously shouted.  ‘You – how dare you talk about sincerity?  What can you know about sincerity you disgusting little bug!’ And avenging himself on the person of Mr Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him, against the fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent, Lypiatt sprang up and, seizing the author of the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis’ by the shoulders, he shook him, he bumped him up and down in his chair, he cuffed him over the head.  ‘How can you have the impudence,’ he asked, letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, ‘to touch anything that even attempts to be decent and big?’  All these years, these wretched years of poverty and struggle and courageous hope and failure and repeated disappointment; and now this last failure, more complete than all.  He was trembling with anger; at least one forgot unhappiness while one was angry.

       Mr Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified surprise.  ‘Really, really,’ he repeated, ‘too barbarous.  Scuffling like hobbledehoys.’

       ‘If you knew,’ Lypiatt began; but he checked himself.  If you knew, he was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion – But how could Mercaptan understand?  And it would sound as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy.  ‘Bug!’ he shouted instead, ‘bug!’  And he struck out again with the flat of his hand.  Mr Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps, blinking.

       ‘Really,’ he protested, ‘really….’

       Insincere?  Perhaps it was half true.  Lypiatt seized his man more furiously than before and shook him, shook him.  ‘And then that vile insult about the vermouth advertisement,’ he cried out.  That had rankled.  Those flaring, vulgar posters!  ‘You thought you could mock me and spit at me with impunity, did you?  I’ve stood it so long, you thought I’d always stand it?  Was that it?  But you’re mistaken.’  He lifted his fist.  Mr Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect his head.  ‘Vile bug of a coward,’ said Lypiatt, ‘why don’t you defend yourself like a man?  You can only be dangerous with words.  Very witty and spiteful and cutting about these vermouth posters, wasn’t it?  But you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I challenged you.’

       ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mr Mercaptan, peering up from under his defences, ‘I didn’t invent that particular piece of criticism.  I borrowed the apéritif.’  He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.

       ‘You borrowed it, did you?’ Lypiatt contemptuously repeated.  ‘And who from, may I ask?’  Not that it interested him in the least to know.

       ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘it was from our friend Myra Viveash.’

       Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his menacing hand in his pocket, he turned away.  ‘Oh!’ he said non-committally, and was silent again.

       Relieved, Mr Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of his right hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.

       Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane Street, looking at the numbers of the doors of the houses.  A hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred and one – she was getting near now.  Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a secret, as delightful and amusing as hers.  Rosie liked to think so; it made life more exciting.  How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie reflected, she herself must look.  Would anyone who saw her now, sauntering along like this, would anyone guess that, ten houses farther down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a young poet, was waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival?  Of course they wouldn’t and couldn’t guess!  That was the fun and the enormous excitement of the whole thing.  Formidable in her light-hearted detachment, formidable in the passion which at will she could give rein to and check again, the great lady swam beautifully along through the sunlight to satisfy her caprice.  Like Diana, she stooped over the shepherd boy.  Eagerly the starving young poet waited, waited in his garret.  Two hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen.  Rosie looked at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn’t after all be very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely strarving.  She stepped in and, standing in the hall, looked at the board with the names.  Ground floor: Mrs Budge.  First floor: F. de M. Rowbotham.  Second Floor: P. Mercaptan.

       P. Mercaptan…. But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a real young poet’s name!  Mercaptan – she felt more than ever pleased with her selection.  The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice.  Mercaptan … Mercaptan…. She wondered what the P. stood for.  Peter, Philip, Patrick, Pendennis even?  She could hardly have guessed that Mr Mercaptan’s father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted, thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur’.

       A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie mounted the stairs.  Twenty-five steps to the first floor – one flight of thirteen, which was rather disagreeably ominous, and one of twelve.  Then two flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front door, a bell-push like a round eye, a brass nameplate.  For a great lady thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt her heart beating rather unpleasantly fast.  It was those stairs, no doubt.  She halted a moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.

       The door was opened by an aged servant of the most forbiddingly respectable appearance.

       ‘Mr Mercaptan at home?’

       The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling, angry complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make out.  Mr Mercaptan had left orders, she gathered, that he wasn’t to be disturbed.  But someone had come and disturbed him, ‘fairly shoved his way in, so rude and inconsiderate,’ all the same.  And now he’d been once disturbed, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t be disturbed again.  But she didn’t know what things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way in like that.  Bolshevism, she called it.

       Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark hall,  Still querulously denouncing the Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person led the way down a corridor and, throwing open a door, announced, in a tone of grievance: ‘A lady to see you, Master Paster’ – for Mrs Goldie was an old family retainer, and one of the few who knew the secret of Mr Mercaptan’s Christian name, one of the fewer still who were privileged to employ it.  Then, as soon as Rosie had stepped across the threshold, she cut off her retreat with a bang and went off, muttering all the time, towards her kitchen.

       It certainly wasn’t a garret.  Half a glance, the first whiff of potpourri, the feel of the carpet beneath her feet, had been enough to prove that.  But it was not the room which occupied Rosie’s attention, it was its occupants.  One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie’s very young eyes, quite old, was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece.  The other, sleeker and more genial in appearance, was sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window.  And neither of them – Rosie glanced desperately from one to the other, hoping vainly that she might have overlooked a blond beard – neither of them was Toto.

       The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet her.

       ‘An unexpected pleasure,’ he said, in a voice that alternately boomed and fluted.  ‘Too delightful!  But to what do I owe - ?  Who, may I ask?’

       He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered hers.  The sleek man shook it with cordiality, almost with tenderness.

       ‘I … I think I must have made a mistake,’ she said.  ‘Mr Mercaptan …?’

       The sleek man smiled.  ‘I am Mr Mercaptan.’

       ‘You live on the second floor?’

       ‘I never laid claims to being a mathematician,’ said the sleek man, smiling as though to applaud himself, ‘but I have always calculated that …’ he hesitated … ‘enfin, que ma demeure se trouve, en effet, on the second floor.  Lypiatt will bear me out, I’m sure.’  He turned to the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had stood all the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily at the ground.

       Lypiatt looked up.  ‘I must be going,’ he said abruptly.  And he walked towards the door.  Like vermouth posters, like vermouth posters! – so that was Myra’s piece of mockery!  All his anger had sunk like a quenched flame.  He was altogether quenched, put out with unhappiness.

       Politely Mr Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the door for him.  ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said airily.

       Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall.  The front door banged behind him.

       ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where Rosie was still irresolutely standing.  ‘Talk about the furor poeticus!  But do sit down, I beg you.  On Crébillon,’ he explained, ‘because the soul of that great writer undoubtedly tenants it, undoubtedly.  You know his book, of course?  You know Le Sopha?’

       Sinking into Crébillon’s soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she didn’t know Le Sopha.  She had begun to recover her self-possession.  If this wasn’t the young poet, it was certainly a young poet.  And a very peculiar one, too.  As a great lady she laughingly accepted the odd situation.

       ‘Not know Le Sopha?’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan.  ‘Oh! but, my dear and mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once.  No education can be called complete without a knowledge of that divine book.’  He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white vellum.  ‘The hero’s soul,’ he explained, handing her the volume, ‘passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa.  He is doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves.  The book is the record of the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.’

       ‘Dear me!’ said Rosie, looking at the title-page.

       ‘But now,’ said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of Crébillon, ‘won’t you please explain?  To what happy quidproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?’

       ‘Well,’ said Rosie, and hesitated.  It was really rather difficult to explain.  ‘I was to meet a friend of mine.’

       ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.

       ‘Who sent me a telegram,’ Rosie went on.

       ‘He sent you a telegram!’ Mr Mercaptan echoed.

       ‘Changing the – the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him here at this address.’

       ‘Here?’

       Rosie nodded.  ‘On the s-second floor,’ she made it more precise.

       ‘But I live on the second floor,’ said Mr Mercaptan.  ‘You don’t mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?’

       Rosie smiled.  ‘I don’t know what he’s called,’ she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was genuinely grande dame.

       ‘You don’t know his name?’  Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter.  ‘But that’s too good,’ he said.

       ‘S-second floor,’ he wrote in the telegram.’  Rosie was now perfectly at her ease.  When I saw your name, I thought it was his name.  I must say,’ she added, looking sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her eyelids, ‘it seemed to me a very charming name.’

       ‘You overwhelm me,’ said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful, snouty face.  ‘As for your name – I am too discreet a galantuomo to ask.  And, in and case, what does it matter?  A rose by any other name …’

       ‘But, as a matter of fact,’ she said, raising and lowering once again her smooth, white lids, ‘my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any rate, Rosie.’

       ‘So you are sweet by right!’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate.  ‘Let’s order tea on the strength of it.’  He jumped up and rang the bell.  ‘How I congratulate myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!’

       Rosie said nothing.  This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.

       ‘What puzzles me,’ he went on, ‘is why your anonymous friend should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others.  He must know me, or, at any rate, know about me.’

       ‘I should imagine,’ said Rosie, ‘that you have a lot of friends.’

       Mr Mercaptan laughed – the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo.  ‘Des amis, des amies – with and without the mute “e”,’ he declared.

       The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.

       ‘Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.’

       Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously.  ‘The other gentleman’s gone, has he?’ she asked.  And having assured herself of his absence, she renewed her complaint.  ‘Shoving in like that,’ she said.  ‘Bolshevism, that’s what I …’

       ‘All right, all right, Mrs Goldie.  Let’s have our tea as quickly as possible.’  Mr Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.

       ‘Very well, Master Paster.’  Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.

       ‘But tell me,’ Mr Mercaptan went on, ‘if it isn’t indiscreet – what does your friend look like?’

       ‘W-well,’ Rosie answered, ‘he’s fair, and though he’s quite young he wears a beard.’  With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto’s broad blond fan.

       ‘A beard! But, good, heavens,’ Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh, ‘it’s Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!’

       ‘Well, whoever it was,’ said Rosie severely, ‘he played a very stupid sort of joke.’

       ‘For which I thank him.  De tout on cœur.’

       Rosie smiled and looked sideways.  ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I shall give him a piece of my mind.’

       Poor Aunt Aggie!  Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed!  In the light of Mr Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly did look a bit comical.

       After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room.  They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell.  Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan’s.  Yes, poor Aunt Aggie!  And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the ‘Droit du Seigneur’, it was poor everybody.  Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibert Journal, his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.

       ‘Bravo!’ she cried from the depths of Crébillon.  She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up under her.  ‘Bravo!’ she cried as Mr Mercaptan finished his reading and looked up for his applause.

       Mr Mercaptan bowed.

       ‘You express so exquisitely what we …’ and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, ‘what we all only feel and aren’t clever enough to say.’

       Mr Mercaptan was charmed.  He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon.  ‘Feeling,’ he said, ‘is the important thing.’

       Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’

       ‘I quite agree,’ she said.

       Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals.  He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it.  Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.

 

       It was on the evening of the same day.  Rosie lay on her sofa – a poor, high-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa – lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings.  She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘goodbye’ (or rather, ‘À bientôt, mon amie’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the flyleaf:

 

TO

BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,

WITH GRATITUDE,

FROM

CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.

      

À bientôt – she had promised to come again very soon.  She thought of the essay on the ‘Jus Primæ Noctus’ – ah! what we’ve all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say.  We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious….

       ‘I am proud to constitute myself’ – Mr Mercaptan had said of it – ‘l’esprit d’escalier des dames galantes.’

       Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed.

       She read the book slowly.  Her French, indeed, wasn’t good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else.  She wished it were better.  Perhaps if it were better she wouldn’t be yawning like this.  It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together.  Mr Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.

       In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys.  He was not succeeding.

       Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering.  With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more.  Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee-stall.  What was it?  He wished now that he had listened more attentively.

       She’s bored with me.  Already.  It was obvious.

       Perhaps he was too rustic for her.  Shearwater looked at his hands.  Yes, the nails were dirty.  He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them.  He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks that morning.

       Determinedly he took up his pen.  ‘The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood …’ he began a new paragraph.  But he got no further than the first seven words.

       If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if – if – if – Past conditionals, hopelessly past.  He might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead of a barrister’s clerk.  He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women.  If he had met her years ago – during the war, should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards….

       He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing.  Imbecile!  He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys.  He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a physiological necessity.

       O God, what a fool he had been!

       And then, what about Rosie?  What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that sort of thing?  Now he came to think of it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology of frogs.  Having found that out, he had really given up exploring further.  How could he have been so stupid?

       Rosie had been in love with him, he supposed.  Had he been in love with her?  No.  He had taken care not to be.  On principle.  He had married her as a measure of intimate hygiene; out of protective affection, too, certainly out of affection; and a little for amusement, as one might buy a puppy.

       Mrs Viveash had opened his eyes; seeing her, he had also begun to notice Rosie.  It seemed to him that he had been a loutish cad as well as an imbecile.

       What should he do about it?  He sat for a long time wondering.

       In the end he decided that the best thing would be to go and tell Rosie all about it, all about everything.

       About Mrs Viveash too?  Yes, about Mrs Viveash too.  He would get over Mrs Viveash more easily and more rapidly if he did.  And he would begin to try and find out about Rosie.  He would explore her.  He would discover all the other things besides an incapacity to learn physiology that were in her.  He would discover her, he would quicken his affection for her into something livelier and more urgent.  And they would begin again; more satisfactorily this time; with knowledge and understanding; wise from their experience.

       Shearwater got up from his chair before the writing-table, lurched pensively towards the door, bumping into the revolving bookcase and the armchair as he went, and walked down the passage to the drawing-room.  Rosie did not turn her head as he came in, but went on reading without changing her position, her slippered feet still higher than her head, her legs still charmingly avowing themselves.

       Shearwater came to a halt in front of the empty fireplace.  He stood there with his back to it, as though warming himself before an imaginary flame.  It was, he felt, the safest, the most strategic point from which to talk.

       ‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

       ‘Le Sopha,’ said Rosie.

       ‘What’s that?’

       ‘What’s that? Rosie scornfully echoed.  ‘Why, it’s one of the great French classics.’

       ‘Who by?’

       ‘Crébillon the younger.’

       ‘Never heard of him,’ said Shearwater.

       There was a silence.  Rosie went on reading.

       ‘It just occurred to me,’ Shearwater began again in his rather ponderous, infelicitous way, ‘that you mightn’t be very happy, Rosie.’

       ‘Rosie looked up at him and laughed.  ‘What put that into your head?’ she asked.  ‘I’m perfectly happy.’

       Shearwater was left a little at a loss.  ‘Well, I’m very glad to hear it,’ he said.  ‘I only thought … that perhaps you might think … that I rather neglected you.’

       Rosie laughed again.  ‘What is all this about?’ she said.

       ‘I have it rather on my conscience,’ said Shearwater.  ‘I begin to see … something has made me see … that I’ve not…. I don’t treat you very well.’

       ‘But I don’t n-notice it, I assure you,’ put in Rosie, still smiling.

       ‘I leave you out too much,’ Shearwater went on with a kind of desperation, running his fingers through his thick black hair.  ‘We don’t share enough together.  You’re too much outside my life.’

       ‘But after all,’ said Rosie, ‘we are a civ-vilized couple.  We don’t want to live in one another’s pockets, do we?’

       ‘No, but we’re only really no more than strangers,’ said Shearwater.  ‘That isn’t right.  And it’s my fault.  I’ve never tried to get into touch with your life.  But you did your best to understand mine … at the beginning of our marriage.’

       ‘Oh, then-n!’ said Rosie, laughing.  ‘You found out what a little idiot I was.’

       ‘Don’t make a joke of it,’ said Shearwater.  ‘It isn’t a joke.  It’s very serious.  I tell you, I’ve come to see how stupid and inconsiderate and un-understanding I’ve been with you.  I’ve come to see quite suddenly.  The fact is,’ he went on with a rush, like an uncorked fountain, ‘I’ve been seeing a woman recently whom I like very much, and who doesn’t like me.’  Speaking of Mrs Viveash, unconsciously he spoke her language.  For Mrs Viveash people always euphemistically ‘liked’ one another rather a lot, even when it was a case of the most frightful and excruciating passion, the most complete abandonments.’  And somehow that’s made me see a lot of things which I’d been blind to before – blind deliberately, I suppose.  It’s made me see, among other things, that I’ve really been to blame towards you, Rosie.’

       Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly disguised.  So James was embarking on his little affairs, was he?  It seemed incredible, and also, as she looked at her husband’s face – the face, behind its bristlingly manly mask, of a harassed baby – also rather pathetically absurd.  She wondered who it could be.  But she displayed no curiosity.  She would find out soon enough.

       ‘I’m sorry you should have been unhappy about it,’ she said.

       ‘It’s finished now.’  Shearwater made a decided little gesture.

       ‘Ah, no!’ said Rosie.  ‘You should persevere.’  She looked at him, smiling.

       Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy detachment.  He had imagined the conversation so very differently, as something so serious, so painful and, at the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did not know how to go on.  ‘But I thought,’ he said hesitatingly, ‘that you … that we … after this experience … I would try to get closer to you …’ (Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) … ‘We might start again, from a different place, so to speak.’

       ‘But, cher ami,’ protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the preferred tongue of Mr Mercaptan, ‘you can’t seriously expect us to do the Darby and Joan business, can you?  You’re distressing yourself quite unnecessarily on my account.  I don’t find you neglect me or anything like it.  You have your life – naturally.  And I have mine.  We don’t get in one another’s way.’

       ‘But do you think that’s the ideal sort of married life?’ asked Shearwater.

       ‘It’s obviously the most civ-vilized,’ Rosie answered, laughing.

       Confronted by Rosie’s civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.

       ‘Well, if you don’t want,’ he said.  ‘I’d hoped … I’d thought …’

       He went back to his study to think things over.  The more he thought them over, the more he blamed himself.  And incessantly the memory of Mrs Viveash tormented him.