CHAPTER IV

 

Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene.  He decided to wear white flannel trousers - white flannel trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach-coloured tie.  And what shoes?  White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather pleasing about the notion of black patent leather.  He lay in bed for several minutes considering the problem.

      Before he went down - patent leather was his final choice - he looked at himself critically in the glass.  His hair might have been more golden, he reflected.  As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge in it.  But his forehead was good.  His forehead made up in height what his chin lacked in prominence.  His nose might have been longer, but it would pass.  His eyes might have been blue and not green.  But his coat was very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than he actually was.  His legs, in their white casing, were long and elegant.  Satisfied, he descended the stairs.  Most of the party had already finished their breakfast.  He found himself alone with Jenny.

      'I hope you slept well,' he said.

      'Yes, isn't it lovely?' Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods.  'But we have such awful thunderstorms last week.'

      Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity.  He might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time.  Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines.  Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.

      'They are very alarming, these thunderstorms,' he said, helping himself to porridge.  'Don't you think so?  Or are you above being frightened?'

      'No.  I always go to bed in a storm.  One is so much safer lying down.'

      'Why?'

      'Because,' said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, 'because lightning goes downwards and not flat ways.  When you're lying down you're out of the current.'

      'That's very ingenious.'

      'It's true.'

      There was a silence.  Denis finished his porridge and helped himself to bacon.  For lack of anything better to say, and because Mr Scogan's absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to Jenny and asked:

      'Do you consider yourself a femme supérieure?'  He had to repeat the question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.

      'No,' she said rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis was saying.  'Certainly not.  Has anyone been suggesting that I am?'

      'No,' said Denis.  'Mr Scogan told Mary she was one.'

      'Did he?'  Jenny lowered her voice.  'Shall I tell you what I think of that man?  I think he's slightly sinister.'

      Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her deafness and closed the door.  Denis could not induce her to say anything more, could not induce her even to listen.  She just smiled at him, smiled and occasionally nodded.

      Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast pipe and to read his morning paper.  An hour later, when Anne came down, she found him still reading.  By this time he had got to the Court Circular and the Forthcoming Weddings.  He got up to meet her as she approached, a Hamadryad in white muslin, across the grass.

      'Why, Denis,' she exclaimed, 'you look perfectly sweet in your white trousers.'

      Denis was dreadfully taken aback.  There was no possible retort.  'You speak as though I were a child in a new frock,' he said, with a show of irritation.

      'But that's how I feel about you, Denis dear.'

      'Then you oughtn't to.'

      'But I can't help it.  I'm so much older than you.'

      'I like that,' he said.  'Four years older.'

      'And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why shouldn't I say so?  And why did you put them on, if you didn't think you were going to look sweet in them?'

      'Let's go into the garden,' said Denis.  He was put out; the conversation had taken such a preposterous and unexpected turn.  He had planned a very different opening, in which he was to lead off with, 'You look adorable this morning,' or something of the kind, and she was to answer, 'Do I?' and then there was to be a pregnant silence.  And now she had got in first with the trousers.  It was provoking; his pride was hurt.

      That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace to the pool had a beauty which did depend on colour so much as on forms.  It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun.  The silver of water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene.  It was a landscape in black and white.  For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews.  You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour.  The July borders blazed and flared under the sun.  Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.

      Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion.  'It's like passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace,' he said, and took a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air.  '"In fragrant volleys they let fly ...” How does it go?

 

                                                                  '"Well shot, ye firemen!  O how sweet

                                                                    And round your equal fires do meet;

                                                                    Whose shrill report no ear can tell,

                                                                    But echoes to the eye and smell ..."'

 

      'You have a bad habit of quoting,' said Anne.  'As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating.'

      Denis apologized.  'It's the fault of one's education.  Things somehow seem more real and vivid when can apply somebody's else's ready-made phrase about them.  And then there are lots of lovely names and words - Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pompanazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them.  That's what comes of the higher education.'

      'You may regret your education,' said Anne; 'I'm ashamed of my lack of it.  Look at those sunflowers!  Aren't they magnificent?'

      'Dark faces and golden crowns - they're kings in Ethiopia.  And I like the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy from the ground.  Do they look up in envy?  That's the literary touch, I'm afraid.  Education again.  It always comes back to that.'  He was silent.

      Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple tree.  'I'm listening,' she said.

      He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the bench, gesticulating a little as he talked.  'Books,' he said - 'books.  One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world.  Great thick books and the universe and the mind and ethics.  You've no idea how many there are.  I must have ready twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years.  Twenty tons of ratiocination.  Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.'

      He went on walking up and down.  His voice rose, fell, was silent a moment, and then talked on.  He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his arms.  Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture.  He was a nice boy, and today he looked charming - charming!

      One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything.  One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it.  One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life.... Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptive simple.  In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.  Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?  Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

      'My poor Denis!'  Anne was touched.  He was really too pathetic as he stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers.  'But does one suffer about these things?'  It seems very extraordinary.'

      'You're like Scogan,' cried Denis bitterly.  'You regard me as a specimen for an anthropologist.  Well, I suppose I am.'

      'No, no,' she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that indicated that he was to sit down beside her.  He sat down.  'Why can't you just take things for granted and as they come?' she asked.  'It's so much simpler.'

      'Of course it is,' said Denis.  'But it's a lesson to be learnt gradually.  There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of first.'

      'I've always taken things as they come,' said Anne.  'It seems so obvious.  One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones.  There's nothing more to be said.'

      'Nothing - for you.  But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one.  I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along.  Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything's that delightful.  Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience.  I make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth and goodness.  I have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos.  Pleasure is one of the mystical roads to union with the infinite - the ecstasies of drinking, dancing, love-making.  As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they're the broad highway to divinity.  And to think that I'm only just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing!  It's incredible to me that anyone should have escaped these horrors.'

      'It's still more incredible to me,' said Anne, 'that anyone should have been a victim of them.  I should like to see myself believing that men are the highway to divinity.'  The amused malice of her smile planted two little folds on either side of her mouth, and through their half-closed lids her eyes shone with laughter.  'What you need, Denis, is a nice plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular work.'

      'What I need is you.'  That was what he ought to have retorted, that was what he wanted passionately to say.  He could not say it.  His desire fought against his shyness.  'What I need is you.'  Mentally he shouted the words, but not a sound issued from his lips.  He looked at her despairingly.  Couldn't she see what was going on inside him?  Couldn't she understand?  'What I need is you.'  He would say it, he would - he would.

      'I think I shall go and bathe,' said Anne.  'It's so hot.'  The opportunity had passed.