CHAPTER XV

 

During the weeks which followed their final scene, Walter and Marjorie lived in relations of a peculiar and unpleasant falsity.  They were very considerate to one another, very courteous, and whenever they were left together alone they made a great deal of polite unintimate conversation.  The name of Lucy Tantamount was never mentioned and no reference whatsoever was made to Walter's almost nightly absences.  There was a tacit agreement to pretend that nothing had happened and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

      In the first outburst of anger Marjorie had actually begun to pack her clothes.  She would leave at once, that very night, before he came back.  She would show him that there was a limit to the outrages and insults she would put up with.  Coming home reeking of that woman's scent!  It was disgusting.  He seemed to imagine that she was so abjectly devoted to him and materially so dependent on him, that he could go on insulting her without any fear of provoking her to open revolt.  She had made a mistake not to put her foot down before.  She oughtn't to have allowed herself to be touched by his misery the previous night.  But better late than never.  This time it was final.  She had her self-respect to consider.  She pulled out her trunks from the box-room and began to pack.

      But where was she going?  What was she going to do?  What should she live on?  The questions asked themselves more and more insistently with every minute.  The only relation she had was a married sister, who was poor and had a disapproving husband.  Mrs Cole had quarrelled with her.  There were no other friends who could or would support her.  She had been trained to no profession, she had no particular gifts.  Besides, she was going to have a baby, she would never find a job.  And after all and in spite of everything she was very fond of Walter, she loved him, she didn't know how she would be able to do without him.  And he had loved her, did still love her a little, she was sure.  And perhaps this madness would die down of its own accord; or perhaps she would be able to bring him round again gradually.  And in any case it was better not to act precipitately.  In the end she unpacked her clothes again and dragged the trunks back to the box-room.  Next day she started to play her comedy of pretence and deliberately feigned ignorance.

      On his side Walter was only too happy to play the part assigned to him in the comedy.  To say nothing, to act as though nothing particular had happened, suited him perfectly.  The evaporation of his anger, the slaking of his desire had reduced him from momentary strength and ruthlessness to his normal condition of gentle, conscience-stricken timidity.  Upon the fibres of the spirit bodily fatigue has a softening effect.  He came back from Lucy feeling guiltily that he had done Marjorie a great wrong and looking forward with dread to the outcry she was sure to raise.  But she was asleep when he crept to his room.  Or at any rate she pretended to be, she didn't call him.  And next day it was only the more than ordinarily courteous and formal manner of her greeting that so much as hinted at any untowardness.  Enormously relieved, Walter requited portentous silence with silence and politely trivial courtesy with a courtesy that, in his case, was more than merely formal, that came from the heart, that was a genuine attempt (so uneasy was his conscience) to be of service, to make solicitous and affectionate amends for past offences, to beg forgiveness in advance for the offences he had no intention of not committing in the future.

      That there had been no outcry, no reproaches, only a polite ignoring silence, was a great relief.  But as the days passed, Walter began to find the falsity of their relationship more and more distressing.  The comedy got on his nerves, the silence was accusatory.  He became more and more polite, solicitous, affectionate, but though he genuinely did like her, though he genuinely desired to make her happy, his nightly visits to Lucy made even his genuine affection for Marjorie seem a lie and his real solicitude had the air an hypocrisy, even to himself, so long as he persisted in doing, in the intervals of his kindness, precisely those things which he knew must make her unhappy.  'But if only,' he said to himself, with impotent complaining anger, 'if only she'd be content with what I can give her and stop distressing herself about what I can't.'  (For it was obvious, in spite of the comedy of silence and courtesy, that she was distressing herself.  Her thin, haggard face was alone sufficient to belie the studied indifference of her manner.)  'What I can give her is so much.  What I can't give is so unimportant.  At any rate for her,' he added; for he had no intention of cancelling his unimportant engagement with Lucy that evening.

     

                                             'Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

                                             Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

                                             Past reason hated.'

 

Literature, as usual, had been misleading.  So far from making him hate and despise, having and enjoying had only made him long for more having and enjoying.  True, he was still rather ashamed of his longing.  He wanted it to be justified by something higher - by love.  ('After all,' he argued, 'there's nothing impossible or unnatural in being in love with two women at the same time.  Genuinely in love.')  He accompanied his ardours with all the delicate and charming tenderness of his rather weak and still adolescent nature.  He treated Lucy, not as the hard, ruthless amusement-hunter he had so clearly recognized her as being before he became her lover, but as an ideally gracious and sensitive being, to be adored as well as desired, a sort of combined child, mother and mistress, whom one should maternally protect and be maternally protected by, as well as virilely and yes! faunishly make love to.  Sensuality and sentiment, desire and tenderness are as often friends as they are enemies.  There are some people who no sooner enjoy, but they despise what they have enjoyed.  But there are others in whom the enjoyment is associated with kindliness and affection.  Walter's desire to justify his longings by love was only, on final analysis, the articulately moral expression of his natural tendency to associate the act of sexual enjoyment with a feeling of tenderness, at once chivalrously protective and childishly self-abased.  In him sensuality produced tenderness; and conversely, where there was no sensuality, tenderness remained undeveloped.  His relations with Marjorie were too sexless and platonic to be fully tender.  It was as a hard, angrily cynical sensualist that Walter had conquered Lucy.  But put into action, his sensuality sentimentalized him.  The Walter who had held Lucy naked in his arms was different from the Walter who had only desired to do so; and this new Walter required, in sheer self-preservation, to believe that Lucy felt no less tenderly under the influence of his caresses than he did himself.  Tenderness can only live in an atmosphere of tenderness.  To have gone on believing, as the old Walter had believed, that she was hard, selfish, incapable of warm feeling, would have killed the soft tenderness of the new Walter.  It was essential for him to believe her tender.  He did his best to deceive himself.  Every movement of languor and abandonment was eagerly interpreted by him as a symptom of inner softening, of trustfulness and surrender.  Every loving word - and Lucy was fashionably free with her 'darlings' and 'angels' and 'beloveds,' her rapturous or complimentary phrases - was treasured as a word come straight from the depths of the heart.  To these marks of an imaginary softness and warmth of feeling he responded with a grateful redoubling of his own tenderness; and this redoubled tenderness was doubly anxious to find an answering tenderness in Lucy. Love produced a desire to be loved.  Desire to be loved begot a strained precarious belief that he was loved.  The belief that he was loved strengthened his love.  And so, self-intensified, the circular process began again.

      Lucy was touched by his adoring tenderness, touched and surprised.  She had had him because she was bored, because his lips were soft and his hands knew how to caress and because, at the last moment, she had been amused and delighted by his sudden conversion from abjectness to conquering impertinence.  What a queer evening it had been!  Walter sitting opposite to her at dinner with that hard look on his face, as though he were terribly angry and wanted to grind his teeth; but being very amusing, telling the most malicious stories about everybody, producing the most fantastic and grotesque pieces of historical information, the most astonishing quotations from old books.  When dinner was over, 'We'll go back to your house,' he said.  But Lucy wanted to go and see Nellie Wallace's turn at the Victoria Palace and then drop in at the Embassy for some food and a little dancing, and then perhaps drive round to Cuthbert Arkwright's on the chance that ... Not that she had any real and active desire to go to the music hall, or dance, or listen to Cuthbert's conversation.  She only wanted to assert her will against Walter's.  She only wanted to dominate, to be the leader and make him do what she wanted, not what he wanted.  But Walter was not to be shaken.  He said nothing, merely smiled.  And when the taxi came to the restaurant door, he gave the address in Bruton Street.

      'But this is a rape,' she protested.

      Walter laughed.  'Not yet,' he answered.  'But it's going to be.'

      And in the grey and rose-coloured sitting-room it almost was.  Lucy provoked and submitted to all the violences of sensuality.  But what she had not expected to provoke was the adoring and passionate tenderness which succeeded those first violences.  The hard look of anger faded from his face and it was as though a protection had been stripped from him and he were left bare, in the quivering, vulnerable nakedness of adoring love.  His caresses were like the soothing of pain or terror, like the appeasements of anger, like delicate propitiations.  His words were sometimes like whispered and fragmentary prayers to a god, sometimes words of whispered comfort to a sick child.  Lucy was surprised, touched, almost put to shame by this passion of tenderness.

      'No, I'm not like that, not like that,' she protested in answer to his whispered adorations.  She could not accept such love on false pretences.  But his soft lips, brushing her skin, his lightly drawn fingertips were soothing and caressing her into tenderness, were magically transforming her into the gentle, loving, warm-hearted object of his adoration, were electrically charging her with all those qualities his whispers had attributed to her and the possession of which she had denied.

      She drew his head on to her breast, she ran her fingers through his hair.  'Darling Walter,' she whispered, 'darling Walter.'  There was a long silence, a warm still happiness.  And then suddenly, just because this silent happiness was so deep and perfect and therefore, in her eyes, intrinsically rather absurd and even rather dangerous in its flawless impersonality, rather menacing to her conscious will.  'Have you gone to sleep, Walter?' she asked and tweaked his ear.

      In the days that followed Walter desperately did his best to credit her with the emotions he himself experienced.  But Lucy did not make it easy for him.  She did not want to feel that deep tenderness which is a surrender of the will, a breaking down of personal separateness.  She wanted to be herself, Lucy Tantermount, in full command of the situation, enjoying herself consciously to the last limit, ruthlessly having her fun; free, not only financially and legally, but emotionally too - emotionally free to have him or not to have him.  To drop him as she had taken him, at any moment, whenever she liked.  She had no wish to surrender herself.  And that tenderness of his - why, it was touching, no doubt, and flattering and rather charming in itself, but a little absurd and, in its anxious demand for a response from her side, really rather tiresome.  She would let herself go a little way towards surrender, would suffer herself to be charged by his caresses with some of his tenderness; only to suddenly draw herself back from him into a teasing, provocative detachment.  And Walter would be woken from his dream of love into a reality of what Lucy called 'fun', into the cold daylight of sharply consciously, laughingly deliberate sensuality.  She left him unjustified, his guiltiness unpalliated.

      'Do you love me?' he asked her one night.  He knew she didn't.  But perversely he wanted to have his knowledge confirmed, made explicit.

      'I think you're a darling,' said Lucy.  She smiled up at him.  But Walter's eyes remained unanswering sombre and despairing.

      'But do you love me?' he insisted.  Propped on his elbow, he hung over her almost menacingly.  Lucy was lying on her back, her hands clasped under her head, her flat breasts lifted by the pull of the stretched muscles.  He looked down at her; under his fingers was the curved elastic warmth of the body he had so completely and utterly possessed.  But the owner of the body smiled up at him through half-closed eyelids, remote and unattained.  'Do you love me?'

      'You're enchanting.'  Something like mockery shone between the dark lashes.

      'But that isn't an answer to my question.  Do you love me?'

      Lucy shrugged up her shoulders and made a little grimace.  'Love?' she repeated.  'It's rather a big word, isn't it?'  Disengaging one of her hands from under her head she raised it to give a little tug to the lock of brown hair that had fallen across Walter's forehead.  'Your hair's too long,' she said.

      'Then why did you have me?' Walter insisted.

      'If you knew how absurd you looked with your solemn face and your hair in your eyes!'  She laughed.  'Like a constipated sheep dog.'

      Walter brushed back the drooping lock.  'I want to be answered,' he went on obstinately.  'Why did you have me?'

      'Why?  Because it amused me.  Because I wanted to.  Isn't that fairly obvious?'

      'Without loving?'

      'Why must you always bring in love?' she asked impatiently.

      'Why?' he repeated.  'But how can you leave it out?'

      'But if I can have what I want without it, why should I put it in?  And besides, one doesn't put it in.  It happens to one.  How rarely!  Or perhaps it never happens; I don't know.  Anyhow, what's one to do in the intervals?'  She took him again by the forelock and pulled his face down towards her own.  'In the intervals, Walter darling, there's you.'

      His mouth was within an inch or two of hers.  He stiffened his neck and would not let himself be pulled down any further.  'Not to mention all the others,' he said.

      Lucy tugged harder at his hair.  'Idiot!' she said, frowning.  'Instead of being grateful for what you've got.'

      'But what have I got?'  Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes.  'What have I got?'

      Lucy still frowned.  'Who don't you kiss me?' she demanded, as though she were delivering an ultimatum.  Walter did not answer, did not stir.  'Oh, very well.'  She pushed him away.  'Two can play at that game.'

      Repelled, Walter anxiously bent down to kiss her.  Her voice had been hard with menace; he was terrified of losing her.  'I'm a fool,' he said.

      'You are.'  Lucy averted her face.

      'I'm sorry.'

      But she would not make peace.  'No, no,' she said, and when, with a hand on her cheek, he tried to turn her face back towards his kisses, she made a quick fierce movement and bit him in the ball of the thumb.  Full of hatred and desire, he took her by force.

      'Still bothering about love?' she asked at last, breaking the silence of that languid convalescence which succeeds the fever of accomplished desires.

      Reluctantly, almost with pain, Walter roused himself to answer.  Her question in that deep silence was like the spurt of a match in the darkness of the night.  The night is limitless, enormous, pricked with stars.  The match is struck and all the stars are instantly abolished; there are no more distances and profundities.  The universe is reduced to a little luminous cave scooped out of the solid blackness, crowded with brightly lit faces, with hands and bodies and the near familiar objects of common life.  In that deep night of silence Walter had been happy.  Convalescent after the fever, he held her in his arms, hating no more, but filled with a drowsy tenderness.  His spirit seemed to float in the warm serenity between being and annihilation.  She stirred within his arms, she spoke, and that marvellous unearthly serenity wavered and broke like a smooth reflecting surface of water suddenly disturbed.

      'I wasn't bothering about anything.'  He opened his eyes to find her looking at him, amused and curious.  Walter frowned.  'Why do you stare at me?' he asked.

      'I didn't know it was prohibited.'

      'Have you been looking at me like that all this time?'  The idea was strangely unpleasant to him.

      'For hours,' Lucy answered.  'But admiringly, I assure you.  I thought you looked really charming.  Quite a sleeping beauty.'  She was smiling, mockingly; but she spoke the truth.  Aesthetically, with a connoisseur's appreciation, she had really been admiring him as he lay there, pale, with closed eyes and as though dead, at her side.

      Walter was not mollified by the flattery.  'I don't like you to exult over me,' he said, still frowning.

      'Exult?'

      'As though you'd killed me.'

      'What an incorrigible romantic!'  She laughed.  But it was true, all the same.  He had looked dead; and death, in these circumstances, had something slightly ridiculous and humiliating about it.  Herself alive, wakefully and consciously alive, she had studied his beautiful deadness.  Admiringly, but with amused detachment, she had looked at this pale exquisite creature which she had used for her delight and which was now dead.  'What a fool!' she had thought.  And 'why do people make themselves miserable, instead of taking the fun that comes to them?'  She had expressed her thoughts in the mocking question which recalled Walter from his eternity.  Bothering about love - what a fool!

      'All the same,' insisted Walter, 'you were exulting.'

      Romantic, romantic!' she jeered. 'You think in such an absurdly unmodern way about everything.  Killing and exulting over corpses and love and all the rest of it.  It's absurd.  You might as well walk about in a stock and a swallow-tail coat.  Try to be a little more up to date.'

      'I prefer to be human.'

      'Living modernly's living quickly,' she went on.  'You can't cart a wagon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days.  When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind.  The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly.  But it's too ponderous nowadays.  There's no room for it in the aeroplane.'

      'Not even for a heart?' asked Walter.  'I don't so much care about the soul.'  He had cared a great deal about the soul once.  But now that his life no more consisted in reading the philosophers, he was somehow less interested in it.  'But the heart,' he added, 'the heart ...'

      Lucy shook her head.  'Perhaps it's a pity,' she admitted.  'But you can't get something for nothing.  If you like speed, if you want to cover the ground, you can't have luggage.  The thing is to know what you want and be ready to pay for it.  I know exactly what I want; so I sacrifice the luggage.  If you choose the travel in a furniture van, you may.  But don't expect me to come along with you, my sweet Walter.  And don't expect me to take your grand piano in my two-seater monoplane.'

      There was a long silence.  Walter shut his eyes.  He wished he were dead.  The touch of Lucy's hand on his face made him start.  He felt her taking his lower lip between her thumb and forefinger.  She pinched it gently.

      'You have the most delicious mouth,' she said.