CHAPTER XX

 

December 8^th 1926

 

Tiptoeing out of the back drawing-room, Hugh Ledwidge had hoped to find the refreshment of a little solitude; but on the landing he was caught by Joyce and Colin.  And Colin, it appeared, was tremendously keen on natives, had always been anxious to talk to a professional ethnologist about his experiences on shikar.  For nearly half an hour he had to listen, while the young man poured out his illiterate nonsense about India and Uganda.  An immense fatigue overwhelmed him.  His one desire was to escape, to get away from this parrot house of stupid chatter, back to delicious silence and a book.

      They left him, thank God, at last, and drawing a deep breath, he braced himself for the final ordeal of leave-taking.  That saying goodbye at the end of an evening was one of the things Hugh most intensely disliked.  To have to expose yourself yet once more to personal contact, to be compelled, weary as you were and thirsty for solitude, to grin again and gibber and make yet another effort of hypocrisy – how odious that could be!  Particularly with Mary Amberley.  There were evenings when the woman simply wouldn't allow you to say goodbye, but clung to you desperately, as though she were drowning.  Questions, confidences, scabrous discussions of people's love-affairs – anything to keep you a few minutes longer.  She seemed to regard each successive departure of a guest as the death of a fragment of her own being.  His heart sank as he made his way across the room towards her.  'Damned woman!' he thought, and positively hated her; hated her, as well as for all the other reasons, because Helen was still dancing with that groom; and now with a fresh access of malevolence, because, as he suddenly perceived through the mists of his dim sight, Staithes and that man Beavis were sitting with her.  All his insane thoughts about the plot came rushing back into his mind.  They had been talking about him, him and the fire-escape, him on the football field, him when they threw the slippers over the partition of his cubicle.  For a moment, he thought of turning back and slipping out of the house without a word.  But they had seen him coming, they would suspect the reason of his flight, they would laugh all the louder.  His common sense returned to him, it was all nonsense, there was no plot.  How could there be a plot?  And even if Beavis did remember, what reason had he to talk?  But all the same, all the same … Squaring his narrow shoulders, Hugh Ledwidge marched resolutely towards the anticipated ambush.

      To his immense relief, Mary Amberley let him go almost without a protest.  'Must you be off, Hugh?  So soon?'  That was all.  She seemed to be absent, thinking of something else.

      Beppo fizzled amiably; Staithes merely nodded; and now it was Beavis's turn.  Was that smile of his what it seemed to be – just vaguely and conventionally friendly?  Or did it carry hidden significances, did it secretly imply derisive reminders of those past shames?  Hugh turned and hurried away.  Why on earth, he wondered, did one ever go to these idiotic parties?  Kept on going, what was more, again and again, when one knew it was all utterly pointless and boring …

      Mark Staithes turned to Anthony.  'You realize who that is?' he asked.

      'Who?  Ledwidge?  Is he anyone special?'

      Staithes explained.

      'Goggler!'  Anthony laughed.  'Why, of course.  Poor Goggler!  How fiendish we were to him!'

      'That's why I've always pretended I didn't know who he was,' said Staithes, and smiled an anatomical smile of pity and contempt.  'I think it would be charitable,' he added, 'if you did the same.'  Protecting Hugh Ledwidge gave him genuine pleasure.

      Utterly pointless and boring – yes, and humiliating, Hugh was thinking, humiliating as well.  For there was always some humiliation.  A Beavis smiling; a Gerry Watchett, like an insolent groom …

      There was a hurrying of feet on the stairs behind him.  'Hugh! Hugh!'  He started almost guiltily and turned round.  'Why were you slinking away without saying goodnight to me?'

      Essaying a joke, 'You seemed so busy,' he began, twinkling up at Helen through his spectacles; then feel silent in sudden astonishment, almost in awe.

      She was standing there, three steps above him, one hand on the banister, the fingers of the other splayed out against the opposite wall, leaning forward as though on the brink of flight.  But what had happened to her, what miracle?  The flushed face that hung over him seemed to shine with an inward illumination.  This was not Helen, but some supernatural creature.  In the presence of such unearthly beauty, he blushed for the ignoble irrelevance of his waggery, his knowing look.

      'Busy?' she echoed.  'But I was only dancing.'  And it was as though some ingenuous and unconscious Moses had said to his bedazzled Israelites: 'I was only talking to Jehovah.'  'You had no excuse,' she went on.  Then quickly, as though a new and curious idea had suddenly occurred to her, 'Or were you cross with me for some reason?' she added in another tone.

      He began by shaking his head; but felt impelled, on second thoughts, to try to explain a little.  'Not cross,' he distinguished, 'just … just a bit unsociable.'

      The light behind her face seemed to leap up in a quivering rush of intenser flame.  Unsociable!  That was really too exquisitely funny!  The dancing had made her perfect, had transformed earth into heaven.  At the idea that one could be (preposterous word!) unsociable, that one could feel anything but an overflowing love for everyone and everything, she could only laugh.

      'You are funny, Hugh!'

      'I'm glad you think so.'  His tone was offended.  He had turned away his head.

      The silk of her dress rustled sharply; a little gust of perfume was cool on his cheek – and she was standing only one step above him, very close.  'You're not hurt because I said you were funny?' she asked.

      He lifted his eyes again and found her face on a level with his own.  Mollified by that expression of genuine solicitude he shook his head.

      'I didn't mean funny in the horrid way,' she explained.  'I meant … well, you know: nicely funny.  Funny, but a darling.'

      In threateningly personal circumstances, a well-timed foolery is a sure defence.  Smiling, Hugh raised his right hand to his heart.  'Je suit pénétré de reconnaissance,' was what he was going to say by way of acknowledgement for that 'darling.'  The courtly jape, the mock-heroic gesture were his immediate and automatic reaction to her words.  'Je suit pénétré …'

      But Helen gave him no time to take cover behind his dix-huitième waggery.  For she followed up her words by laying her two hands on his shoulders and kissing him on the mouth.

      For a moment he was almost annihilated with surprise and confusion and a kind of suffocating, chaotic joy.

      Helen drew back a little and looked at him.  He had gone very pale – looked as though he had seen a ghost.  She smiled – for he was funnier than ever – then bent forward and kissed him again.

      The first time she had kissed him, it had been out of the fullness of the life that was in her, because she was made perfect in a perfect world.  But his scared face was so absurdly comic that the sight of it somehow transformed this fullness of perfect life into a kind of mischievous wantonness.  The second time she kissed him, it was for fun; for fun and, at the same time, out of curiosity.  It was an experiment, made in a spirit of hilarious scientific enquiry.  She was a vivisector – licensed by perfection, justified by happiness.  Besides, Hugh had an extraordinarily nice mouth.  She had never kissed such full soft lips before; the experience had been startlingly pleasurable.  It was not only that she wanted to see, scientifically, what the absurd creature would do next; she also wanted to feel once more that cool resilience against her mouth, to experience that strange creeping of pleasure that tingled out from her lips and ran, quick and almost unbearable, like moths, along the surface of her body.

      'You were so sweet to take all that trouble,' she said by way of justification for the second kiss.  The moths had crept again, deliciously, had settled with an electric tremor of vibrating wings on her breasts.  'All that trouble about my education.'

      But 'Helen!' was all that he could whisper; and, before he had time to think, he had put his arms about her and kissed her.

      His mouth, for the third time; and those hurrying moths along the skin … But, oh, how quickly he drew away!'

      'Helen!' he repeated.

      They looked at one another; and now that he had had the time to think, Hugh found himself all of a sudden horribly embarrassed.  His hands dropped furtively from her body.  He didn't know what to say to her – or, rather, knew, but couldn't bring himself to say it.  His heart was beating with a painful violence.  'I love you, I want you,' he was crying, he was positively shouting, from behind his embarrassed silence.  But no word was uttered.  He smiled at her rather foolishly, and dropped his eyes – the eyes, he now reflected, that must look so hideous, like a fish's eyes, through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

      'How funny he is,' Helen thought.  But her scientific laughter had died down.  His shyness was infectious.  To put an end to the uncomfortable situation, 'I shall read all those books,' she said.  'And that reminds me, you must give me the list.'

      Grateful to her for supplying him with a subject about which it was possible to talk, he looked up at her again – for a moment only, because of those fish-eyes, goggling.  'I'll fill in the gaps and send it to you,' he said.  Then, after a second or two, he realized that in his improvidence he had exhausted the precisely impersonal topic of books in a single sentence.  The silence persisted, distressingly; and at last, in despair,  because there was nothing else to say, he decided to say goodnight.  Trying to charge his voice with an infinity of loving significance, 'Goodnight, Helen,' he said.  The words were intended to be as eloquent as a whole speech.  But would she hear the eloquence, would she understand the depths of his implied meaning?  He bent forward and kissed her again, quickly, very lightly, a kiss of tenderly respectful devotion.

      But he had not reckoned with Helen.  The embarrassment that had momentarily clouded her wanton perfection had evaporated at the touch of his lips; she was once more the laughing vivisector.

      'Kiss me again, Hugh,' she said.  And when he obeyed, she would not let him go; but kept his mouth pressed to hers, second after second …

      The noises of voices and music became suddenly louder; somebody had opened the drawing-room door.

      'Goodnight, Hugh,' she whispered against his lips; then loosed her hold and ran up the stairs two at a time.

     

      Looking after her, as she ran out of the room to say goodnight to old Ledwidge, Gerry had smiled to himself complacently.  Pink in the face; with shining eyes.  As though she'd drunk a bottle of champagne.  Absolutely buffy with the dancing.  It was fun when they lost their heads like that; lost them so enthusiastically, so ungrudgingly, so completely.  Not keeping anything back, but chucking it all out of the window, so to speak.  Most girls were so damned avaricious and calculating.  They'd only lose half their heads and carefully keep the other half to play the outraged virgin with.  Mean little bitches!  But with Helen you felt that the engine was all out.  She stepped on the gas and didn't care what was in the way.  He liked that sort of thing, and liked it not only because he hoped to profit by the lost head, but also disinterestedly, because he couldn't help admiring people who let themselves go and didn't care two hoots about the consequences.  There was something fine and generous and spirited about such people.  He was like that himself, when he could afford it.  Guts: that was what she'd got.  And the makings of a temperament, he was thinking with an inward satisfaction, when a touch on his arm from behind made him suddenly start.  His surprise turned almost instantaneously to anger.  There was nothing he hated more than to be taken unawares, off his guard.  He turned sharply round and, seeing that the person who had touched him was Mary Amberley, tried to readjust his face.  Vainly; the hard resentful eyes belied his smile.

      But Mary was herself too angry to notice the signs of his annoyance.  'I want to talk to you, Gerry,' she said in a low voice that she tried to keep level and unemotional, but that trembled in spite of all her efforts.

      'Christ!' he thought; 'a scene,' and felt angrier than ever with the tiresome woman.  'Talk away,' he said aloud; and, with an offensive air of detachment, he took out his cigarette-case, opened and proffered it.

      'Not here,' she said.

      Gerry pretended not to understand her.  'Sorry.  I thought you didn't mind people smoking here.'

      'Fool!'  Her anger broke out with sudden violence.  Then, catching him by the sleeve, 'Come!' she commanded, and almost dragged him to the door.

      Running upstairs, Helen was in time to see her mother and Gerry mounting from the drawing-room landing towards the higher floors of the tall house.  'I shall have to find somebody else to dance with,' was all she thought; and a moment later she had found little Peter Quinn and was gliding away once more into paradise.

 

      'Talk of floaters!' said Anthony as their hostess left the room with Gerry Watchett.  'I didn't realize that Gerry was the present incumbent …'

      Beppo nodded.  'Poor Mary!' he sighed.

      'On the contrary,' said Staithes, 'rich Mary!  She'll be poor later.'

      'And nothing can be done about it?' asked Anthony.

      'She'd hate you if you tried.'

      Anthony shook his head.  'These dismal compulsions!  Like cuckoos in August.  Like stags in October.'

      'She showed symptoms of having a compulsion about me,' said Staithes.  'Just after I first met her, it was.  But I soon cured her of that.  And then that ruffian Watchett turned up.'

      'Fascinating, the way these aristocrats can behave!'  Anthony's tone was one of scientific enthusiasm.

      Staithes's flayed face twisted itself into a grimace of contempt.  'Just a coarse, vulgar gangster,' he said.  'How on earth you ever put up with him at Oxford, I simply cannot imagine.'  In fact, of course, he was busily imagining that Anthony had done it out of mere ignoble toadyism.

      'Just snobbery,' said Anthony, depriving the other of half his pleasure by the easy confession.  But, then, I insist, people like Gerry are an essential part of any liberal education.  There was something really rather magnificent about him when he was rich.  A certain detached and disinterested recklessness.  Now …' He raised his hand and let it fall again.  'Just a gangster – you're quite right.  But that's the fascinating thing – the ease with which aristocrats turn into gangsters.  Very comprehensible, when you come to think of it.  Here's a man brought up to believe that he had a divine right to the best of everything.  And so long as he gets his rights it's all noblesse oblige and honour and all the rest of it.  Inextricably mixed up with insolence, of course; but genuinely there.  Now, take away his income; the oddest things are liable to happen.  Providence intended you to have the best of everything; therefore intended you to have the means for procuring the best of everything; therefore when the means don't come to you legitimately, justifies you in getting them illegitimately.  In the past, our Gerry would have gone in for banditry or simony.  He'd have made an admirable condottiere, an almost perfect cardinal. But nowadays the church and the army are too respectable, too professional.  They've no place for amateurs.  The impoverished nobleman finds himself driven into business.  Selling cars.  Touting stocks and shares.  Promoting dubious companies.  To the accompaniment, of course, if he's presentable, of a judicious prostitution of his body.  If he has the luck to be born with a gift of the gab, he can make a good living out of the politer forms of blackmail and sycophancy – as a gossip writer.  Noblesse oblige; but so does poverty.  And when they both oblige simultaneously – well, we of the middle classes had better start counting the silver.  Instead of which …' He shrugged his shoulders.  'Poor Mary!'

 

      Upstairs, in the bedroom, the torrent of Mary's reproaches and abuse streamed on, unceasingly.  Gerry did not even look at her.  Averted, he seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the Pascin hanging over the mantelpiece.  The painting showed two women lying foreshortened on a bed, naked.

      'I like this picture,' he said with deliberate irrelevance, when Mrs Amberley had paused for breath.  'You can see that the man who painted it had just finished making love to those girls.  Both of them.  At the same time,' he added.

      Mary Amberley went very pale; her lips trembled, her nostrils fluttered as though with a separate and uncontrollable life of their own.

      'You haven't even been listening to me,' she cried.  'Oh, you're awful, you're horrible!'  The torrent began to flow again, more vehemently than ever.

      Still turning his back to her, Gerry went on looking at the Pascin nudes; then at last, blowing out a final cloud of tobacco-smoke, he threw the stump of his cigarette into the fireplace and turned round.

      'When you've quite done,' he said in a tired voice, 'we may as well go to bed.'  And after a little pause, while, unable to speak, she glared furiously in his face, 'Seeing that that's what you really want,' he added, and, smiling ironically, advanced across the room towards her.  When he was quite near her, he halted and held out his hands invitingly.  They were large hands, immaculately kept, but coarse, insensitive, brutal.  'Hideous hands,' Mary thought as she looked at them, 'odious hands!'  All the more odious now, because it was by their very ugliness and brutality that she had first been attracted, was even at this very moment being attracted, shamefully, in spite of all the reasons she had for hating him.  'Well, aren't you coming?' he asked in the same bored, derisive tone.

      For answer, she hit out at his face.  But he was too quick for her, caught the flying hand in mid-air and, when she tried to bring the other into play, caught that too.  She was helpless in his grasp.

      Still smiling down at her, and without a word, he pushed her backwards, step by step, towards the bed.

      'Beast!' she kept repeating, 'beast!' and struggled, vainly, and found obscure pleasure in her helplessness.  He pushed her against the end of the low divan, further and further, inexorably, and at last she lost her balance and fell back across the counterpane – (fell back, while, with one knee on the edge of the bed, he bent over her, still smiling the same derisive smile).  'Beast, beast!'  But in fact, as she secretly admitted to herself – and the consciousness was intoxicating in its shamefulness – in fact, she really wanted to be treated as he was treating her – like a prostitute, like an animal; and in her own house, what was more, with her guests all waiting for her, and the door unlocked, and her daughters wondering where she was, perhaps at this very moment coming up the stairs to look for her.  Yes, she really wanted it.  Still struggling, she gave herself up to the knowledge, to the direct physical intuition that this intolerable degradation was the accomplishment of an old desire, was a revelation marvellous as well as horrible, was the Apocalypse, the whose Apocalypse at once, angel and beast, plague, lamb and whore in a single divine, revolting, overwhelming experience.

 

      'Civilization and sexuality,' Anthony was saying: 'there's a definite correlation.  The higher the one, the intenser the other.'

      'My word,' said Beppo, fizzling with pleasure, 'we must be civilized!'

      'Civilization means food and literature all round.  Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all.  First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.  And this in a safe urban world, where there are no risks, no physical fatigues.  In a town like this, for example, one can live for years at a time without being aware that there's such a thing as nature.  Everything's man-made and punctual and convenient.  But people can have too much of convenience; they want excitement, they want risks and surprises.  Where are they going to find them under our dispensation?  In money-making, in politics, in occasional war, in sport, and finally in sex.  But most people can't be speculators or active politicians; and war's getting to be too much of a good thing; and the more elaborate and dangerous sports are only for the rich.  So that sex is all that's left.  As material civilization rises, the intensity and importance of sexuality also rises.  Must rise, inevitably.  And since at the same time food and literature have increased the amount of available appetite …' He shrugged his shoulders.  'Well, you see!'

      Beppo was charmed.  'You explain it all,' he cried.  'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.'  He felt, delightedly, that Anthony's argument gave, not only absolution, but also a plenary indulgence – to everyone (for Beppo unselfishly wanted everyone to be as happy as he was) and for everything, everything, from the ravishing barmen at Toulon to those top-booted tarts (so definitely not for him) on the Kurfürstendamm.

      Staithes said nothing.  If social progress, he was thinking, just meant greater piggishness for more people, why then – then, what?

      'Do you remember that remark of Dr Johnson's?' Anthony began again with a note of elation in his voice.  It had suddenly come to him, an unexpected gift from his memory to his discursive reason – come to enrich the pattern of his thinking, to fill out his argument and extend its scope.  His voice reflected the sudden triumphant pleasure that he felt.  'How does it go? “A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money.” Something like that.  Admirable!'  He laughed aloud.  'The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbours's wives!  The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller!  The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence – that sort of innocence.  With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.'

      There was a silence.  Staithes looked at his watch.  'Time one was getting out of here,' he said.  'But the problem,' he added, turning round in his chair to scan the room, 'the problem is one's hostess.'

      They got up, and while Beppo hurried off to greet a couple of young acquaintances on the other side of the room, Staithes and Anthony made their way to the door.

      'The problem,' Staithes kept repeating, 'the problem …'

      On the landing, however, they met Mrs Amberley and Gerry coming down the stairs.

      'We were looking for you,' said Anthony.  'To say goodnight.'

      'So soon?' cried Mary with a sudden access of anxiety.

      But they were firm.  A couple of minutes later the three of them, Staithes, Gerry Watchett and Anthony, were walking up the street together.

      It was Gerry who broke the silence.  'These old hags,' he said in a tone of meditative rancour, and shook his head.  Then more cheerfully, 'What about a game of poker?' he suggested.  But Anthony didn't know how, and Mark Staithes didn't desire, to play poker; he had to go off alone in search of more congenial company.

      'Good riddance,' said Mark.  'And now what about coming to my rooms for an hour?'

 

      It was the most important thing, Hugh Ledwidge felt as he walked home, the most important and also the most extraordinary, most incredible thing that had ever happened to him.  So beautiful, so young.  'Fashioned so slenderly.'  (If only she had thrown herself into the Thames and he had rescued her!  'Helen! My poor child!'  And, 'Hugh!' she would have murmured gratefully.  'Hugh …')  But even without the suicide it had been astonishing enough.  Her mouth against his.  Oh, why hadn't he shown more courage, more presence of mind?  All the things he might have said to her, the gestures he ought to have made!  And yet, in a certain sense, it was better that he should have behaved as he did – stupidly, timidly, ineptly.  Better, because it proved more conclusively that she cared for him; because it gave a higher value to her action, so young, so pure – and yet spontaneously, under no compulsion of his, in the teeth, indeed, of what had almost been his resistance, she had stepped down, laid her hands on his shoulders, had kissed him.  Kissed him in spite of everything, he repeated to himself with a kind of astonished triumph that mingled strangely with his sense of shame, his conviction of weakness and futility; in spite of everything.  Non più andrai, he hummed to himself as he walked along; then, as though the dank London night were a morning on the downs in spring, broke out into unequivocal singing.

 

                                Delle belle turbando il riposo,

                                      Narcissetto, Adoncino d'amor …

 

      At home, he sat down at once to his desk and began to write to her.

 

      'Helen, Helen … If I repeat the syllables too often, they lose their sense, become just a noise in my silent room – terrifying in their meaninglessness.  But if I say the name just two or three times, very softly, how rich it becomes, how full!  Charged with echoes and reminders.  Not so much, for me, of the original Greek Helen.  I can't feel that she was ever anything but a mature woman – never anything but married to Menelaus and eloping with Paris.  Never really young, as you are – exquisitely, exquisitely, like a flower.  No, it's more Poe's Helen I catch sight of through the name.  The beauty that carries the traveller back to his own native shore – takes him home.  Not to the obvious, worldly home of the passions.  No; to that further, rarer, lovelier home, beyond and above them.  Beyond and above; and yet implying, yet including, even while transcending, the passions …

 

      It was a long letter; but he was in time, running out, to catch the midnight post.  The sense of triumph with which he returned the second time was almost unalloyed.  Momentarily, he had forgotten his shyness, his humiliating cowardice; he remembered only that consciousness of soaring power that had filled him while he wrote the letter.  Exalted above his ordinary self, he forgot, when undressing, to put his truss away in the chest of drawers, so that Mrs Brinton shouldn't see it when she came in with his early tea in the morning.  In bed, he lay for a long time thinking tenderly, paternally, poetically, thinking at the same time with desire, but a desire so lingeringly gentle that lasciviousness assumed the quality of prayer, thinking of Helen's exquisite youthfulness, fashioned so slenderly, and her innocence, her slender innocence, and those unexpected, those extraordinary kisses.