Which Way?, page 7
“Love to. Where shall we look?”
“I’ve seen one or two possibles in Jermyn Street. I’ll look round.”
“Blue do you think, Guy?”
“Blue, yes. Or brown with cream. Or white might be nice. Come along. You’re walking me to my Underground, aren’t you?”
“All right.”
“I’ve got rather a tiresome board meeting this afternoon, and then off to Glasgow. What a life. Shall you write to me?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I think you’d better, to be on the safe side!”
“Did you happen to notice how the Craddock trial was going, Guy?”
“Didn’t have time, you were talking so much! But he did it of course. Burke’ll get him off though. Talking of the Denzels, would you like your husband to be as jealous as Derek?”
“Certainly not, except that anything’s better than complete indifference.”
“I believe you’d love it! You’d be so flattered.”
“Rubbish. One doesn’t want that sort of thing. One wants to be too close for misunderstandings. To have quiet as well as excitement. To be really together; like two different gases fused into one new force.”
“My dear, don’t want that. People don’t fuse. They try and try, but they’re too different. They think they’ve succeeded and when they find later that they haven’t they’re angry with each other.”
She looked sharply up at him, trouble and disquiet in her face. Because people did so desperately want to fuse. Were none of the couples around her really one? Were human beings as such condemned to be eternally cut off from each other, and yet to strive after fusion for ever in vain? How futile, how pathetic the necessity even to hold hands; to hold hands while the minds were encased in bright glass globes of their own individuality. Inevitable tragedy of passion and of love. …
“Would you have time to be very sweet and pay this bill for me, Claudia?” he asked. “Here’s two pound ten.”
“Sure darling,” said Claudia, as they walked out into the morning.
6
And when you’ve finished the song you’re through, That’s why they call it, I love you.
Folly to be Wise.
It happened one autumn evening that Claudia, having dined tête-à-tête with Guy at his house, got up, perhaps a little undecidedly, to go. She was now twenty-four and a half and for more than eighteen months she had been infinitely, astonishingly happy. Not only when with him; he didn’t make the bits between seem blank; he coloured everything. When she got up so uncertainly to go, and crossed the hearth to his armchair, saying:
“Get up and say good-bye!”
instead of getting up he said:
“You can’t go yet!”
and took her two hands and pulled her down on to the arm of his chair and then on to his knees. And it was nicer to be there than anywhere in the world. They kissed each other, and hugged each other and kissed each other and they sat there all settled down and happy till suddenly the springs of the chair broke. They jumped up and there was the underneath of the chair all sagging down. It was so shymaking and absurd, she felt she must carry it off somehow, so she led him off to the opposite armchair. But the atmosphere was different somehow.
They were still enjoying themselves, kissing each other, and then he asked her to kiss him again and she said, meaning nothing:
“Surely I’ve kissed you enough to last you the rest of your life.” And strangely enough, she had.
About two minutes later something seemed to snap. Something intangible; not the springs again. They both got up at once. He looked at her with a kind of abstract disgust she hoped never again to see on any face she cared for. She told him to call up a taxi and he went to the telephone without a word. He was very kind. He saw her home. He even held her hand, as though to reassure her that he was still there, because they were so very far apart. He said it was his fault that they had behaved so specially badly that evening and he was sorry. He even warned her against men. But really there was nothing to say. A voice inside her said almost aloud “There will never be anything to say again.” He was very anxious on the doorstep that she shouldn’t worry and should sleep. And, humouring him to the last, she slept quite well.
Claudia protracted the death agonies of the relationship as much as she could. She wrote him a four-page letter to say that everything was all right, and the past was over, and they’d be good and start all over again quite differently and easily and naturally, because dash it what friends they were. He sent a very sweet, brief answer to say he’d been feeling badly and yes they would start again. Next day they met by accident at a lunch party. It was unexpectedly jolly, and they walked together to his Underground station after, and it all seemed comfortable and ordinary and nice. She asked him to have her to lunch some time. She thought to herself it would be like the early days, as with any friend. She wanted to blot out the last tête-à-tête. He laughed and said maybe he would.
She thought he really would ring up and ask her to lunch. She had withdrawn so far already that she didn’t see why he should be afraid of her trying to start it all up again. She hoped to see him from time to time like the rest of the world so as not to feel branded. She used to answer the telephone feeling almost sick, and all empty inside except for something plunging about. She had six weeks of it. She felt frightened at having the whole stream of that year’s and last year’s happiness dammed off so suddenly, not even a trickle left. All colour and all comfort gone. There was just her own voice saying, “I’ve kissed you enough to last you the rest of your life,” and the secret voice in the taxi telling her, “There will never be anything to say again,” and his blank, stranger face of nothing but disgust, and those broken, sagging springs.
After six weeks she ran into him in the street. It wasn’t at all awkward. He got in the first attack by asking her why she never did anything about him now; then, which was nice and comforting of him, he said how pretty she was looking; then he explained, all serious and sweet, that he was being good about her and sacrificing himself and missing her frightfully. She just said: “Oh yeh?” a little derisively, and they smiled and passed on. The world did seem less hostile.
After they’d met she felt she couldn’t bear another six weeks. She used to ring him up, and write, and make suggestions for meeting, and he always had most polite, convincing, regretful excuses. She used to think, “I mustn’t be touchy. I hate difficult women who want to be exacting and make themselves felt instead of being natural.” She must nearly have driven him mad, but all the same she didn’t ask much. She really didn’t want to own him or any part of his life, or land him with any responsibility for hers. She couldn’t quite go on loving a man who was sick of the sight of her. But it seemed unfair, since he had forgotten that it had ever been nice, that he had ever felt soft towards her, that he wouldn’t let her forget she’d made a fool of herself. Having loved him so much she hardly could forget him. He had been too important. Why shouldn’t he make it easy for her by letting a new relationship take the old one’s place? But what man ever believed a woman could stop adoring him? He felt tired and worried and a cad.
She ran him down at last. She was feeling rather gay and unemotional and pleased with life. She suddenly thought, “Its being over has at least the advantage that now we can occasionally be pleasant, useful companions and escorts for each other in the ordinary way.” And then he let her have it all. He was a married man much older than she, they mustn’t meet again, my dear, how good he was going to be about her (she quite expected to hear him say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you, my boy”) and what a sacrifice it was and how it was all because he liked her so very, very much in a different way and was so really fond of her. There was nothing for it but another, “Oh, yeh?” and another smile.
7
J’en vais pleurer, moi, qui me laissais dire
Que mon sourire
Etait si doux.
Musset.
Sont elles assez loins, toutes ces allégresses,
Et toutes ces candeurs!
Verlaine.
Claudia Heseltine was not actually pretty. She had a very thin face, two profiles stuck together as they say, with a pointed nose and chin and permanently surprised eyebrows and an exceedingly sweet mouth. Her hair was in the half-grown stage, barbered into curls round the ears and nape. She had a good figure, looked effective and dressed well. She had chosen at the age of twenty-four to look smart rather than young. Very little of all this was apparent as she got off at the strange station and began looking for a strange chauffeur who might be looking for a strange guest, for a thick weight of fog lay over the Midlands. It was the first of January and the New Year had opened with complete darkness.
Claudia had been dancing the New Year in till four o’clock that morning. It had been a good party, noisy and vulgar but with an element of genuine gaiety. For the most part she had enjoyed the evening and from time to time she had dramatised her troubles and herself, dancing to forget. She had been the youngest person there. Sometimes she had chosen to think that she was also the unhappiest; sometimes she had leaned to the theory that under their masks they were all unhappy, making the best of a bad world, strangers dancing together to forget. Not such a bad way of forgetting, God help the dancers! It was fun dramatising things. Her mouth had twisted into laughter as men who didn’t care for her began, as the evening latened, to think that perhaps they did. Lights and noise and movement and champagne and human companionship with its streak of casual, transient kindness, they made a good drug mixed together that both soothed and exhilarated. It all helped.
She thought, as the strange chauffeur tucked a fur rug round her in the strange car, that that party had been a swan song, a farewell to her old life with the old year. A good farewell, a good life, a good year until lately. She had had twenty-two years that hadn’t been life at all, just preparation for the next two years of pleasure strangely ordinary and innocent to bring so much disaster. Now she had got to make a new life. She must. It had been a very fitting swan song. Everyone had been there except Guy himself, everyone at least of her older, livelier set. All the people who would never look at her without smiling and thinking of Guy, though they would see Guy night after night and not think of her.
Very, very slowly, the strange car carried her through the dense mass of fog towards the new life. The fog gave a strange effect of shutting away from her the old year, the past and the future. It was so enveloping, so isolating, and the car slurred on so slowly that time seemed to stand still while she set her house in order. She felt rather happy—she even felt that she had accepted this hunt ball invitation by divine providence and would meet her fate at the end of the drive. She did not think last year’s troubles could follow her through such a weight and thickness of all-covering fog.
This time last year a whole orchestra had played in her heart. London had all gone colour of the rose, rabbits had gambolled about Piccadilly, lilacs had flowered out of manholes and violets along the pavement curbs. Guy had been so sweet and such fun early last year, and the year before last. Well, of course, she had been incredibly silly from first to last, and love that isn’t mutual isn’t love at all. It is worth nothing to anyone and is therefore worthless. One cannot possess what one doesn’t want, and so though Guy couldn’t help knowing about it her love had not so much been given to Guy as thrown down the drain. She had rather chased him, poor darling, and so meaninglessly too. Damn a woman who chased a man without even having a scheme. It had been rather an impossible position for Guy; the truth will broadcast itself; no doubt his friends had laughed at him and she was not dangerous enough to do him credit. She had only wanted to go on being friends, see him a little, but still she had scarcely been a friend of his choosing and he couldn’t force himself to be a friend for ever, just to help her through life, if friendship were dead. So it had to be the way it was now. He had asked her to go to hell, charmingly, inoffensively, unmistakably, irrevocably. There was nothing to be done ever. He would never be sweet to her or give her fun any more, he would never find her sweet or funny again. Well, funny perhaps but not in quite the same way! Poor sweet, how she must have bored him at the end.
“Serve him right,” smiled Claudia to herself, undisturbed by this mortifying and accurate vision.
She felt quite safe and happy. The car was taking her to a new life. The fog had shut out Guy. Just as he had shut her out for ever and ever more, with the old year.
8
Who, now, when evening darkens the water and the stream is dull,
Slowly, in a delicate frock, with her leghorn hat in her hand,
At your side from under the golden osiers moves,
Faintly smiling, shattered by the charm of your voice?
There to-day, as in the days when I knew you well,
The willow sheds upon the stream its narrow leaves. …
Who, now, under the yellow willows at the water’s edge
Closes defeated lips upon the trivial word unspoken,
And lifts her soft eyes freighted with a heavy pledge
To your eyes empty of pledges, even of pledges broken?
Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Claudia didn’t meet her fate at the hunt ball, and the fog and the New Year did not shut Guy for ever out of her mind. But at first she thought both these had happened, so spirited a flirtation did she have with a very nice, pleasing young man; laughing with him and making eyes at him gaily of an evening and talking, beautifully and earnestly on barren hillsides during the day. When she got back to London she wanted never to see him again. But she wanted to have another similar young man. She provided herself with a succession of them, tiring of them too quickly to do them much harm.
She knew plenty of men who were real friends as well as plenty of women. Old childhood’s playmates, ex-flames now married or well over any risk from her, and the happy, devoted husbands of women she was fond of, such as Tommy Reynolds and Noel Carstairs. But these did not suffice. She had acquired a taste for relationships at once more frivolous and more sentimental. More than a taste; what she called “that sort of thing” had become a habit and therefore in some sort a need. But she could no more go far with any of them than she could do without them altogether. As soon as a serious element came in, Guy would be too vividly presented to her by affinity or contrast. There would be neither heart nor spontaneity left.
At first the resilience of her spirits led her to suppose that she would get over Guy and marry soon. Dear Guy. It wasn’t as if she loved him any more. She wanted to be friends with him for the sake of other days and accordingly resented his retirement into inaccessible mystery. But as to loving him, there could be no more question of that now that she recognised him as the stranger he had always been. Why she even knew him better. He would never surprise her now. In any case the Guy he had been when she had loved him didn’t exist any more; the Guy she had thought him had never existed; the Guy she thought him now probably didn’t exist either; while equally what she had been, what he had thought her and what she had thought herself, was gone for ever too. She had no hankering for his hand or his heart, since everything was changed in so many ways. Because it was changed she wanted the casual friendship of the new Guy to obliterate the old one. But she had only the old Guy, always lying in wait for her, always ready to pounce if she should try too hard to set up an interloper in his room. She had no idea of being faithful to ghosts, but she could not have managed to kiss one of his would-be successors. Some sudden vision of the past Guy would come out of the blue and oust the present from its place.
Claudia took very energetic measures about the haunting habits of the particularly silly past. She decided that the chief obstacle to human happiness was that its first necessities were irreconcilable opposites; to be free and not to be lonely. So far as anyone could combine these two ideals, she could; being so happily placed in her home life. She must take a lot of trouble about her friends and fill her life with independent interests and resources.
It was not in Claudia to go, as the females crossed in love sometimes do, to the good. She had to have her parties and her attractive, attracted young men. She had to be hospitable. She took much pride in her person so that she was well-dressed, well-barbered and well, if slightly, made up. She adored London. She was very gay-minded. She was always hoping to push off on to somebody else the slum visiting with which Rosemary Crane had landed her. She swore she would give it up every time she had to see Mrs. Scut of Limehouse, who had no roof to her mouth and yammered, surrounded by more smells than any even of her neighbours.
Equally of course Claudia couldn’t go to the bad. Her ideas of self-respect were rather material: constant clean underclothes, two baths a day, creditable young men. Still, she was fastidious. And loving no man, she recovered something of her lost soul, the love of and wonder at beauty she had had at thirteen. She became far fonder of the country, and a little, but not very much, fonder of country life. She hunted more regularly in the winter, and bought a dog to comfort, she said, her childless middle age.
Happy in her home, happy in her friends, enjoying herself so easily in so many ways, Claudia could not see why she should not attain once more to actual happiness. But happiness cannot be dragged in from the outside. It is either there of its own accord inside you, or it is not. When it is there, outside things act as stimulants, releasing it in lovely bubbles within. If it is not there the outside things fill in the time and are as good a substitute as you can get. Claudia was her usual self, gay go up, gay go down, a little temperamental but not introspective, and having plenty of fun.
