Stephen McKenna

“ Eric tried to lose himself in the music. When that failed, he analyzed the orchestration and concentrated his attention on the conducting. Barbara’s presence made itself felt, and he knew that, for all preoccupation, he was waiting until the stage was dark enough for him to lean forward and steal a glance at her between Lady Maitland’s square grey head and Ivy’s dancing black curls. When he turned slowly and looked at her with all the artificial calm that he could put forth, she was sitting with one arm on the sill of the box, fingering a big fan and watching the stage with rapt enjoyment. ”

“ Eric said nothing for several moments, but he laughed to himself, and O’Rane gripped his arm as though the sneer in the laugh stung him.
“And I wonder what you think would be left for me, if I did give her up!” he resumed. “It’s no good trying to make me live in too rarified air. All this business about ‘the right thing’—I’m not cut out for Cyrano de Bergerac or for Sidney Carton; a good conscience, a glow of magnanimity—it does me no sort of good, Raney. I know what I want, I know how badly I want it. ”

“ She jabbed at the fire in reflective silence, and Eric, watching her through half-closed eyes, seemed to see rippling waves of unhappiness, disappointment, loneliness and discomfort rising until they submerged her and she ceased to struggle. She was white and tired; her arms were thin and her shoulder-blades sharply outlined under the green gauze of her dress, as she stolidly poked the fire and refused to look at him. The air of assured efficiency which she had worn in New York never seemed more than the assertive protest of extreme youth against patronage ”

“ The babble of voices rose and swelled until the chairman wound his way back to Eric’s side and led him into the dining-room. Detachment changed for a moment to antagonism as he walked between the long whispering rows: warm waves of scent beat upon his cheeks; before, behind and on either side he felt the magnetism of a thousand eyes drawing him out of his self-sufficiency and assailing his frozen reserve. As quickly as his companion would allow, he walked on, looking stiffly ahead, to the seat of honour. ”

“ Eric suddenly remembered his chill of misgiving as he drove to Eaton Place, expecting to be disappointed in her; a warm wave of compassion blinded him, and he asked himself how a man of Gaymer’s upbringing and traditions could bring himself to commit the social sin for which there was no pardon; if he had waited till Ivy was married, an intrigue would have been venial; if he had chosen a girl from a humbler walk of life, no one would have asked more than that he should behave liberally to her... ”

“ When Eric went into the garden before luncheon, he was astounded to find her reading under a tree. The others were working or playing golf; but she hailed him and explained that she had stayed behind with a head-ache. Her manner was free of challenge or appeal; she did not invite him to play the accomplice; there seemed nothing to hide, and in all the time that he had known her he had never understood her less than when she lay in white skirt and knitted silk coat, bare-headed and bare-armed, smoking cigarettes and turning the pages of a book which she was too indolent to cut. ”

“ A faint fragrance of violets lingered in the hall, provocative as the broken music of Sonia’s voice when she sang to herself overhead. Though he had always found her too metallically sure of herself to be attractive, Gaymer felt resentfully that he was being denied something that other men had and that ought to be his. O’Rane was waiting for him in the library, but he was bored with the company of men. Softness of voice and touch, lightness of step, sweetness of body, yielding gentleness... A man was incomplete without woman.... ”

“ People who see us will go away hungry and envious. Eric, you remember what it was like before that awful parting! I lived for you, and you lived for me. Everything we did and thought... Whenever we were ill or unhappy... There’s never been a love like ours; and, if I didn’t see it, I see it now. God punished me to shew me what I was throwing away... You know what this last year has been, Eric; if you threw away your chance of happiness—Ah, you’re hurting me!”
He had wrenched himself free of her embrace and sprung out of bed. Barbara fell forward with her face on the pillow. ”

“ Eric locked the door and began filling a pipe. Then he turned on all the lights and explored bedroom and bathroom on hands and knees. On the middle of the floor he found a crumpled handkerchief, scented with carnation; he fingered it irresolutely, then struck a match and tossed it flaming into the grate. Imagination or reality still scented the room with carnation, and he threw open the curtains, resting his arms on the stone sill of the window and leaning out into a starless night. A heavy dew was rising, and the stone was sticky with moisture. ”

“ Her deferential timidity, under the skin-deep manner of bustle and efficiency which had irritated him in New York, was no challenge to a man; her youth imposed an obligation on any one with the wit to see her as an emancipated school-girl; a libertine, when he had pierced the veneer of assurance, would find her insipid; and, even if Gaymer was insensible to discrimination and honourable restraint, Eric could not understand her allowing herself to fall into his hands. ”

“ Though he listened with only half his attention, Eric knew that it was a great speech from a man who had been known for more than forty years as one of the greatest after-dinner speakers in America. That much, at least, he had expected, but he was hardly prepared for the white-hot enthusiasm of the audience. This, if anything, should stimulate a man to better work than he had ever yet accomplished; but for two years all work had mysteriously lost its savour and purpose. ”

“ Eric nodded slowly. It was so characteristic of her to remember and quote, even at the most critical moment of her life, a dog’s-eared phrase of extravagant adulation.
“Yes. And I might add that you’ve spoilt me for all other women. If one came to me now without blemish, straight from the right hand of the Creator, I should expect to find treachery or ingratitude... Will you please go back to your room?” ”

“ The house, low, warm and homely, was unchanged, his mother was unchanged, the servants were unchanged; Geoffrey came out of the library with his invariable, half-cleaned gun under his arm and the inseparable retriever at his side; only Sir Francis seemed older and more gaunt, speaking a little indistinctly and glad of an arm when he walked.
After the triumphal send-off in New York, the splendid isolation of the voyage and his reception in Liverpool, Eric subsided gratefully into the tranquillity of Lashmar Mill-House. ”

“ O’Rane and Gaymer were talking in whispers. Throughout dinner Lady Poynter, whose latest intellectual relaxation was in the works of Freud and Jung, had been interpreting all human relationships in terms of psycho-analysis; adopting her language, Eric found that all this remote, whispered discussion of Gaymer had created a fantastic image of a man sinister and dissolute, bearing on his face the stamp of evil passions and the ravages of debauchery. False images, Lady Poynter explained with annihilating sweeps of a massive arm, could only be corrected or dispelled by contact with reality. ”

“ And, when you’ve learned that lesson, you must learn that life has no endings of any kind short of death. We try to divide our lives into dramatic phases, but you know that there’s no finality about your first disappointment in love; it modifies the texture of your spirit and prepares you for something else just when the dramatist scrawls his ‘Curtain’ and the novelist writes ‘The End.’ Perhaps it prepares you for another and a different love, perhaps for marriage: no one but a fool would stop his play or novel with the clash of wedding-bells. ”

“ To act was so much second nature to her that her attitude of unfriended humility might be a pose; but Eric felt that, inasmuch as she had not descended to his duel of bitterness, she had prevailed in the encounter. He hated the whole evening, with its need to lie in her defence and his own bursting desire to escape the charge of magnanimity.
Eric drew his hand away, but he could not help looking at her flickering lids and reproachful eyes. So she had stood a score of times when she had goaded him to madness and his taut nerves had snapped. ”

“ To right and left rose an eager debate on sex and conduct. Eric had thrown them a bait which, he knew well, few men and no woman could resist. An “academic” discussion of sex enabled them to talk about themselves, to indulge their own sex-curiosity, to fancy themselves wholesomely fearless and unprejudiced; it enabled him to dine peacefully in the soothing haze of sham-intellectuality and to study anew the names on the table-plan. Next to Carstairs he saw Mrs. O’Rane deep in conversation with John Gaymer; next to him was Lady John, with O’Rane on her other side. ”

“ When you come in, Ivy, it’s all dark outside. It’s not what I should call easy to work with you. I want to break the typewriter and pick you up in my arms... Is it just a coincidence that I’ve happened to lunch at home every day this week? Or is it possible that I’ve been looking forward to it ever since the last moment when we were off duty together? Is it coincidence that I’ve been to the opera every night this week—Aida, ye all powerful gods! and another dose of Louise—and that I’ve sat two feet behind you so that I could see your face lit up and knew that you were happy? ”

“ The bachelor’s love of generalizing about marriage went swiftly to the doctor’s head. “One man ripens the peach, and another always eats it.... Well, George has embarked on the great adventure with his eyes open: every one knows that he wanted to marry Amy Loring, only she was a Catholic; the other woman he’s very fond of, but she’s not the great love of his life. He felt it was time to get married; it was a passionless, restful, convenient marriage for both. Barbara’s last act of independence, by the way, was formally to cut herself adrift from her church....” ”

“ If anything makes Gaymer run straight, it’ll be that reflection. You’ve behaved uncommonly well, Eric, if I may say so, though not better than she deserved; you’re giving up everything to her, but she was ready to give up everything to you. I’ve not finished with you yet; you’ve still to give your blessing to the marriage. Tell her quite simply that, as you can’t marry her yourself—Yes, you must do that... And that’s all you can do. If they’re coming to grief, you can’t stop them; you’ve already done what only one man in ten million would do. In future—you’re funking the future, aren’t you? ”

“ He raised himself on his elbow with a murmur of annoyance, when the door opened slowly and he saw a tall figure in a loose white wrap. For a startled, uncertain moment he remembered Lady Pentyre’s warning that the room was haunted and Barbara’s addition that the visitant was a woman who had been killed in the Civil War. While he did not believe in ghosts, his hand explored nervously for the electric-light switch; some one might be playing a practical joke, but Pentyre was still unable to walk without crutches, and Gaymer had barely had time to get to his own room. ”

“ The war was a fair test whether a man was a man—in courage, physical endurance, ability to command and to obey, herd-capacity to protect the female, the young, the home. Well, I couldn’t survive that test. Better a live crock than a dead hero, you may think, if you happen to be one of the crocks; but, when I left Gaymer last night, when I stood leaning against a tree in the Park picturing the pair of us as two males fighting for one female, I said, ‘You drunken brute, you’re the better man.’ And, if I feel that, a woman will feel it, too... ”

“ Valentine Arden had christened her “the haggard Venus”; her big sunken eyes and white cheeks had a morbid fascination of their own, compelling as ever; physical delicacy and nervous vitality still contended for possession of her tall, wasted body; tragedy and defiance alternated in the swift changes of her expression, as she flashed by the window of his compartment. For all his resolution and training, Eric felt his heart stop as it had stopped in Tokio, when he read the news of her marriage ”

“ Eric composed himself as comfortably as possible in a room where everything jarred upon him. She ought not to have been living there by herself, she was lonely, uncomfortable and probably ill-fed; she ought not to allow a man to come and see her, she ought not to dream of drinking a brandy and soda, she ought not to have brandy or cigars in the house, she ought not to know that she did not mind inhaling cigar-smoke in her sleep. The incident of the photograph recurred to his mind, and he wondered whether he was being offered refreshment which she had provided for Gaymer... ”

“ It must be seventeen years since we first met. D’you remember the Phoenix dinners at Oxford? Jim Loring, Summertown, Draycott, Sinclair—they’re all gone; George Oakleigh—married; you, Jack Waring and me—knocked out to a certain extent; Knightrider and Deganway pursuing the noiseless tenour of their way... You can crowd a great deal into seventeen years....”
“I’ve never forgotten the night when you cast our horoscopes for us,” murmured Eric. ”

“ As he watched her, his mind went back to their first conversation in New York, and he felt that he had foreseen everything as well as if she carried her future branded on her forehead. It was a tragedy from which he could see no escape, perfect material for the third act of a play; and the psychology and emotion had been presented to him without any strain on his imagination... But artistic detachment was an indecency when a mere child was being ruined and heartbroken for the passing pleasure of a man like Gaymer. She was spiritually ruined whether Gaymer married her or not.... ”

“ Three years ago to a day he had reached finality; Barbara was falling in love with him, when she had sworn by the Cross to offer herself in reparation to Jack Waring: and in those easy, sane, clear-cut days Eric had decided to end their intimacy before either clouded it with tragedy. And then she had appealed to his compassion and sent for him... perhaps to see if he could continue to resist her. And he had gone back; and his resistance had broken down. A man only paid for his own weakness.... ”

“ After resolving never to go back to England, Eric felt that nothing would now keep him away. There was almost everything to be said against it, and, in its favour, only that he had secured a cabin where others had tried and failed. The reason was frivolous, his mind was aimless; and he accepted the reason, because it chimed with his mood of aimlessness. Moreover—a reason yet more frivolous!—Justus Grant was arranging a farewell dinner for him, and, after being bidden God-speed, he could not decently loiter in New York any longer. Of such stuff were made the cardinal decisions of a man’s life. ”

“ Eric was disquieted that Gaymer should have seen them together. Most men would be glad to be relieved so promptly of their responsibilities, but under his mask of indifference Gaymer was capable of being piqued at finding himself so quickly supplanted; it was almost an invitation to see whether he could reestablish his ascendancy, a challenge to his idleness and vanity, his taste for mischief and his love of power. ”

“ Eric asked. “Will you threaten him with an action for breach of promise?”
“I’ll do anything!”
He shook his head and waited for her to calm herself.
“In the first place you couldn’t prove that there’d ever been a promise to marry,” he began. “In the next place, as it’s never been announced, you couldn’t prove damage. He’s not kept you from marrying any one else; and a jury wouldn’t give a farthing for your heart or feelings. And it’s fantastic to think that you can make a man marry you by threatening an action if he doesn’t. What kind of married life do you look forward to after that? ”

“ Gaymer was so sure of himself that he must inevitably overpower her; people always seemed to win if they were convinced that they would win....
And, conversely, no man ever won unless he believed in himself. Eric pulled himself together physically, holding his head up and walking boldly instead of shambling. He believed in himself and he believed in Ivy. Unless a woman were dead to honour and gratitude, he had nothing to fear. ”

“ As wine followed wine and course followed course, Eric felt that rules could be framed for the legal profession, binding its private life as straitly as the inhibitions of caste-law. At one remove he had watched it in the days when he shared chambers in Pump Court with Jack Waring and observed the grub of the pupil-room, who lunched with fellow-grubs in Hall, developing through the chrysalis stage of the newly-called junior into the practising barrister who first marshalled a judge and was later bidden by younger marshals to dine with the judge in his lodgings. ”

“ It was waste of breath to tell any one so superficially self-confident that a girl of nineteen might need protection from risks older and more insidious than she would deign to admit. His eyes wandered for a moment to the corner where John Gaymer was talking to Amy Loring; it was hard for one man to say what attraction any other man exerted over women, but Gaymer was undeniably popular ”

“ But we can’t marry; so we mustn’t upset each other by thinking about it. I’m going away to try and get cured, and you must get well yourself and make your own life just as though we’d never thought of marrying. You remember that I made a will some weeks ago? I’m arranging for certain money to be paid you—”
“Eric!”
“Yes. That’ll make you independent. I want to see you happily married. You told me that, if I were dead or if we’d never met, you’d probably marry John Gaymer. I want you to pretend that we’ve never met. ”