Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 269
ETTA STACKPOLE — now Lady Hudson — had been Dudley Leicester’s first and very ardent passion. She was very much his age, and, commencing in a boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had lasted many years. She was the only daughter of the Stackpoles of Cove Place, and she had all the wilfulness of an only daughter, and all the desperate acquisitiveness of the Elizabethan freebooters from whom she was descended. Robert Grimshaw said once that her life was a series of cutting-out expeditions; her maids used to declare that they certainly could not trust their young men in the hall if Miss Etta was likely to come down the stairs. It was perhaps her utter disrespect for the dictates of class that made Dudley Leicester finally and quite suddenly break off from her.
It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had the merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester — one of those men who are essentially monogamous — had suffered unheard-of agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the landscape near the Park to look like hell; he had supported somehow innumerable Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole cousins, and Boveys. But the name of Bugle stuck in his gorge. “Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished gold capitals over the signboard of the vets front-door! It had made him have a little sick feeling that he had never had before. And that same afternoon Etta’s maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted with pitiful rage, to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta soon, or she herself would never get married. She said that her young man — her third young man that it had happened to — had got ideas above his place because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited at table. So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third footman too. His name was Moddle....
That very afternoon — it had been six years before — Dudley Leicester had announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced it to the maid Agnes first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage overcoming him that he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits of class.
“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for myself; but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken her apron down from her eyes to jump for joy.
And very gradually — the process had taken years — hot rage had given way to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at her side at the dinner-table, and she talked to him — about concerts! She had a deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to her neighbour it was with so much abandonment always that she appeared to be about to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to rest her white breasts upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself always with a peculiar, musky scent that her father, years ago, had discovered in Java.
“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the best man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching. If I shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I can get hold of. Real tears!... But to look at, she’s like a bad kodak — over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be so décolletée, and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had her do it down at Well-lands..,.
“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”
“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley said grimly.
“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday Pop. We were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East Kent to Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you remember? It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to the Shires, but stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with Joachim and Strauss and Hies and Piatti! I wonder what they played? I’ve got the programme still. Those quaint old green programmes! I’ll look it up and let you know. But oh, it’s all gone! They’re all dead; there are no Pops now and St. James’s Hall.... And yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you remember how dear old Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his cello in shape?”
Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that moment wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as a matter of fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if they rose very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost invariably of a singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta Stackpole, who, like many troublesome but delightful things, had become a habit to be broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it were, chopped her off in the very middle because of a train of thought. She could carry on with the Traceys, the Greshams, the Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it pained him he could yet just bear it, for he imagined that he would be able to defend his hearth against them. But when it had come to Bugle, the farrier’s son, and to Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly come into his head that you couldn’t keep these creatures off your hearth. He knew it had been as impossible as it would be sickening....
So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only how Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked it. Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great Southern Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he passed his time in travelling from one end of the world to the other, whilst Etta carried on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug harbour in Curzon Street, or from the very noble property known as Well-lands in Surrey. But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the Hudsons lived in the same street, their points of contact were almost non-existent, and since their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta Stackpole had never met. His mother, indeed, who had managed his estate a little too economically till her death three years ago, had let Hangham, the Leicesters’ place, which was just next door to Cove Park, and Etta, perhaps because she thought it was full time, or perhaps because she had stipulated for some agreeable arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately “made a match” with the director of railways. And although it would be hard to say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it down in his own words that railway directors were not in it. But vaguely and without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had gathered — it is impossible to know how one does gather these things, or perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea for his simple brain — that the Hudsons were one of several predatory and semi-detached couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with each other. They hit where they liked, like what used to be called “chain shot,” dangerous missiles consisting of two cannon-balls chained one to the other and whirling through Society. Robert Grimshaw had certainly gained this impression from his two friends, the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de Mauvesine, the wives of two of the diplomatic body in London, two ladies who, though they were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta Hudson, were yet in a perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It was as if, witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and imagined that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a fairyland — from a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t imagine how it was possible to be married and yet to be so absolutely free. They couldn’t, indeed, imagine how it was possible to be so absolutely free in any state, whether married, single, or any of the intermediary stages. And, indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that moment opposite them at the table, was leaning across the little blonde man who was always known as Mr. “Phyllis” Trevor, for much the same reason that Dudley Leicester came afterwards to be known as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester — Senhora de Bogota was leaning, a splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her diminutive neighbours form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent to Madame de Mauvesine:
“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien de pareilles!”
And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a peaked, almost eel-like, face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to the ceiling that was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with chains of roses and gambolling cherubs.
CHAPTER VI.
ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them home from the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof, and the horse, checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the kerb. They were midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was about half-past twelve of a fine night.
“We’re getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless Dudley Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”
It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful woman. He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He saw her bend forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of the cab, and the next moment she was on the pavement. He thought so slowly that he had no time to think anything at all before he found himself, too, on the kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and thankful driver.
“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us...”
She hooked herself on to his arm.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen at the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She moved herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop him in her black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her features appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very deep and full of chords.
“Whatever you can say against me...” she began and paused.
Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is at that hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses sounding in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.
“You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was conscious that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round to gaze upon them.
“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you can’t say I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.”
“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were alone in the car; it was not anyone else.”
They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung him round.
“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the back streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my shrieking, you can’t prove it. But I can prove that you called me a penguin in your last nice letter to me.”
In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night, her warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her subtle and comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were an invisible cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she, leaning her body forward, her face back to him, to draw him along, as in a picture a nymph might lead away a stripling into scented obscurities into leafy woods.
“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity, “that I couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly knew what a penguin was.”
“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are remembering them now.”
She laughed again.
“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that day — the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop — we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary place in London — the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”
She shivered under her cloak.
“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”
“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses. I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”
He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but she cried:
“Oh, you traitor! You have called her one of these names. Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”
The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.
“Go away,” she said—”go away.”
“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.
“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her. Suddenly she slackened her steps.
“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it now. You feel like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am now.”
She paused, and then she brought out:
“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me. Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”
Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite: “Why should anyone want to down you?”
“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would their dinners be — where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me for an attraction?...
“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t you — about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley, it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”
Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black, deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass of windows, the sound of his footsteps — for her tread was soundless, as if she moved without stepping — the cold, the solitude, all these things and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long, early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not act at the bidding of duty.
No man, indeed, can serve two women — no man, at any rate, who is essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley Leicester.
“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.
“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you — you knew I shouldn’t betray you — it was because you were afraid of what the other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions, but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you.”
Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.
“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game — if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish — I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through....
“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....
“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you did call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”
He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home” — as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him.
For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times — after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always — always — just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value.
And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils!
He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home” again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found its vent in his saying:
“You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.”
“Then put it up for me,” she said saucily. Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He trembled — as he had been used to tremble — when his hands touched her warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly.
It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had the merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester — one of those men who are essentially monogamous — had suffered unheard-of agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the landscape near the Park to look like hell; he had supported somehow innumerable Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole cousins, and Boveys. But the name of Bugle stuck in his gorge. “Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished gold capitals over the signboard of the vets front-door! It had made him have a little sick feeling that he had never had before. And that same afternoon Etta’s maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted with pitiful rage, to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta soon, or she herself would never get married. She said that her young man — her third young man that it had happened to — had got ideas above his place because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited at table. So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third footman too. His name was Moddle....
That very afternoon — it had been six years before — Dudley Leicester had announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced it to the maid Agnes first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage overcoming him that he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits of class.
“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for myself; but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken her apron down from her eyes to jump for joy.
And very gradually — the process had taken years — hot rage had given way to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at her side at the dinner-table, and she talked to him — about concerts! She had a deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to her neighbour it was with so much abandonment always that she appeared to be about to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to rest her white breasts upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself always with a peculiar, musky scent that her father, years ago, had discovered in Java.
“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the best man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching. If I shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I can get hold of. Real tears!... But to look at, she’s like a bad kodak — over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be so décolletée, and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had her do it down at Well-lands..,.
“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”
“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley said grimly.
“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday Pop. We were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East Kent to Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you remember? It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to the Shires, but stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with Joachim and Strauss and Hies and Piatti! I wonder what they played? I’ve got the programme still. Those quaint old green programmes! I’ll look it up and let you know. But oh, it’s all gone! They’re all dead; there are no Pops now and St. James’s Hall.... And yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you remember how dear old Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his cello in shape?”
Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that moment wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as a matter of fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if they rose very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost invariably of a singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta Stackpole, who, like many troublesome but delightful things, had become a habit to be broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it were, chopped her off in the very middle because of a train of thought. She could carry on with the Traceys, the Greshams, the Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it pained him he could yet just bear it, for he imagined that he would be able to defend his hearth against them. But when it had come to Bugle, the farrier’s son, and to Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly come into his head that you couldn’t keep these creatures off your hearth. He knew it had been as impossible as it would be sickening....
So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only how Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked it. Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great Southern Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he passed his time in travelling from one end of the world to the other, whilst Etta carried on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug harbour in Curzon Street, or from the very noble property known as Well-lands in Surrey. But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the Hudsons lived in the same street, their points of contact were almost non-existent, and since their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta Stackpole had never met. His mother, indeed, who had managed his estate a little too economically till her death three years ago, had let Hangham, the Leicesters’ place, which was just next door to Cove Park, and Etta, perhaps because she thought it was full time, or perhaps because she had stipulated for some agreeable arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately “made a match” with the director of railways. And although it would be hard to say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it down in his own words that railway directors were not in it. But vaguely and without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had gathered — it is impossible to know how one does gather these things, or perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea for his simple brain — that the Hudsons were one of several predatory and semi-detached couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with each other. They hit where they liked, like what used to be called “chain shot,” dangerous missiles consisting of two cannon-balls chained one to the other and whirling through Society. Robert Grimshaw had certainly gained this impression from his two friends, the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de Mauvesine, the wives of two of the diplomatic body in London, two ladies who, though they were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta Hudson, were yet in a perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It was as if, witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and imagined that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a fairyland — from a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t imagine how it was possible to be married and yet to be so absolutely free. They couldn’t, indeed, imagine how it was possible to be so absolutely free in any state, whether married, single, or any of the intermediary stages. And, indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that moment opposite them at the table, was leaning across the little blonde man who was always known as Mr. “Phyllis” Trevor, for much the same reason that Dudley Leicester came afterwards to be known as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester — Senhora de Bogota was leaning, a splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her diminutive neighbours form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent to Madame de Mauvesine:
“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien de pareilles!”
And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a peaked, almost eel-like, face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to the ceiling that was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with chains of roses and gambolling cherubs.
CHAPTER VI.
ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them home from the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof, and the horse, checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the kerb. They were midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was about half-past twelve of a fine night.
“We’re getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless Dudley Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”
It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful woman. He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He saw her bend forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of the cab, and the next moment she was on the pavement. He thought so slowly that he had no time to think anything at all before he found himself, too, on the kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and thankful driver.
“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us...”
She hooked herself on to his arm.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen at the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She moved herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop him in her black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her features appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very deep and full of chords.
“Whatever you can say against me...” she began and paused.
Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is at that hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses sounding in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.
“You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was conscious that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round to gaze upon them.
“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you can’t say I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.”
“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were alone in the car; it was not anyone else.”
They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung him round.
“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the back streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my shrieking, you can’t prove it. But I can prove that you called me a penguin in your last nice letter to me.”
In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night, her warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her subtle and comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were an invisible cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she, leaning her body forward, her face back to him, to draw him along, as in a picture a nymph might lead away a stripling into scented obscurities into leafy woods.
“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity, “that I couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly knew what a penguin was.”
“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are remembering them now.”
She laughed again.
“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that day — the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop — we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary place in London — the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”
She shivered under her cloak.
“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”
“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses. I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”
He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but she cried:
“Oh, you traitor! You have called her one of these names. Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”
The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.
“Go away,” she said—”go away.”
“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.
“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her. Suddenly she slackened her steps.
“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it now. You feel like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am now.”
She paused, and then she brought out:
“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me. Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”
Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite: “Why should anyone want to down you?”
“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would their dinners be — where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me for an attraction?...
“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t you — about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley, it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”
Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black, deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass of windows, the sound of his footsteps — for her tread was soundless, as if she moved without stepping — the cold, the solitude, all these things and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long, early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not act at the bidding of duty.
No man, indeed, can serve two women — no man, at any rate, who is essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley Leicester.
“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.
“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you — you knew I shouldn’t betray you — it was because you were afraid of what the other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions, but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you.”
Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.
“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game — if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish — I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through....
“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....
“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you did call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”
He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home” — as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him.
For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times — after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always — always — just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value.
And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils!
He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home” again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found its vent in his saying:
“You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.”
“Then put it up for me,” she said saucily. Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He trembled — as he had been used to tremble — when his hands touched her warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly.
