Love

III

Christopher had had an inspiration—sudden, as are all inspirations—the night before, after walking up and down his room for the best part of an hour: he would throw over his uncle and golf the next day, and devote the afternoon to calling on Catherine, thus getting in ahead, anyhow, of Stephen. How simple. Let his uncle be offended and disappointed as much as he liked, let him leave his thousands to the boot-boy for all he cared. He would go and see Catherine; and keep on going and seeing her, the whole afternoon if needs be, if she were out at the first shot. Whereupon, having arrived at this decision, peace enfolded him, and he went to bed and slept like a contented baby.

He began calling in Hertford Street at three.

She was out. The porter told him she was out when he inquired which floor she was on.

‘When will she be in?’ he asked.

The porter said he couldn’t say; and Christopher disliked the porter.

He went away and walked about in the park, on wet earth and with heavy drops falling on him in showers from the trees.

At half-past four he was back again. Tea time. She would be in to tea, unless she had it in some one else’s house; in which case he would call again when she had had time to finish it.

She was still out.

‘I’ll go up and ask for myself,’ said Christopher, who disliked the porter more than ever; and at this the porter began to dislike Christopher.

‘There’s only this one way in,’ said the porter, his manner hardening. ‘I’d be bound to have seen her.’

‘Which floor?’ said Christopher briefly.

‘First,’ said the porter, still more briefly.

The first-floor flat of a building in Hertford Street seemed removed, thought Christopher as he walked up to it on a very thick carpet, and ignored the lift, which had anyhow not been suggested by the hardened porter, from the necessity for travelling by tube. Yet she had said she always went to The Immortal Hour by tube. Was it possible that there existed people who enjoyed tubes? He thought it was not possible. And to emerge from the quiet mahoganied dignity of the entrance hall of these flats and proceed on one’s feet to the nearest tube instead of getting into at least a taxi, caused wonder to settle on his mind. A Rolls-Royce wouldn’t have been out of the picture, but at least there ought to be a taxi.

Why did she do such things, and tire herself out, and get her lovely little feet wet? He longed to take care of her, to prevent her in all her doings, to put his great strong body between her and everything that could in any way hurt her. He hoped George had taken this line. He was sure he must have. Any man would. Any man—the words brought him back to Stephen, who was, he was convinced, a suitor, even if she did forget his name. Perhaps she forgot because he was one of many. What so likely? One of many....

He felt suddenly uneasy again, and rang the bell of the flat in a great hurry, as if by getting in quickly he could somehow forestall and confound events.

The door was opened by Mrs. Mitcham, whom he was later so abundantly to know. All unconscious of the future they looked upon each other for the first time; and he saw a most respectable elderly person, not a parlourmaid, for she was without a cap, nor a lady’s maid he judged for some reason, though he knew little of ladies’ maids, but more like his idea—he had often secretly wished he had one—of a nanny; and she saw a fair, long-legged young man, with eyes like the eyes of children when they arrive at a birthday party.

‘Will Mrs. Cumfrit be in soon?’ he asked; and the way he asked matched the look in his eyes. ‘I know she is out—but how soon will she be in?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, considering the eager-eyed young gentleman.

‘Well, look here—could I come in and wait?’

Naturally Mrs. Mitcham hesitated.

‘Well, I’ll only have to wait downstairs, then, and I can’t stand that porter.’

Mrs. Mitcham happened not to be able to stand the porter either, and her face relaxed a little.

‘Is Mrs. Cumfrit expecting you, sir?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Christopher boldly; for so she was, the following Sunday week.

‘She usually tells me——’ began Mrs. Mitcham doubtfully; but she did draw a little aside, upon which he promptly went in. And as he gave her his hat and coat she hoped it was all right, for she thought she had her mistress’s friends and acquaintances at her fingers’ ends, and the young gentleman had certainly never been there before.

She took him towards the drawing-room.

‘What name shall I say, sir, when Mrs. Cumfrit comes in?’ she inquired, turning to him at the door.

‘Mr. Christopher Monckton,’ he said,—abstractedly, because he was going to see Catherine’s room, the room she probably spent most of her time in, her shrine; and Mrs. Mitcham hesitating a little—for suppose she had done wrong, letting in a stranger, and the tea-table put ready with poor Mr. Cumfrit’s silver spoons and sugar-basin on it? Ought she not rather to have asked the young gentleman to wait in the hall?—Mrs. Mitcham, with doubt in her heart, opened the door and allowed him to pass in, eyeing him as he passed.

No, he didn’t look like that sort of person at all, she rebuked and encouraged herself. She knew a gentleman when she saw one. Still, she left the door a tiny crack open, so that she would be able to hear if—— Also, she thought it as well to cross the hall with careful footsteps, and cast an appraising eye over his coat.

It was the coat of a gentleman; a rough coat, a worn coat, but unmistakable, and she went softly back into her kitchen, leaving its door wide open, and while she as noiselessly as possible cut bread and butter she listened for the sound of her mistress coming in, and, even more attentively, in order to be quite on the safe side, for the sound of any one going out.

The last thing, however, in the world that the young man who had just got into the drawing-room wanted to do was to go out of it again. He wanted to stay where he was for ever. Wonderful to have this little time alone with her things before she herself appeared. It was like reading the enchanting preface to a marvellous book. Next to being with her, this was the happiest of situations. For these things were as much expressions of herself as the clothes she wore. They would describe her to him, let him into at least a part, and a genuine part, of her personality.

And then, at his very first glance round, he felt it was not her room at all, but a man’s room. George’s room. George still going on. And going on flagrantly, shamelessly, in his great oak chairs and tables, and immense oil paintings, and busts, marble busts, corpsey white things on black pedestals in corners. Did nobody ever really die, then? he asked himself indignantly. Was there no end to people’s insistence on somehow surviving? Hardened into oak, gathered up into busts and picture frames, the essence of George still solidly cohabited with his widow. How in such a mausoleum could she ever leave off remembering him? Clearly she didn’t want to, or she would have chucked all this long ago, and had bright things, colour, flowers, silky soft things, things like herself, about her. She didn’t want to. She had canonised George, in that strange way people did canonise quite troublesome and unpleasant persons once they were safely dead.

He stood staring round him, and telling himself that he knew how it had happened—oh yes, he could see it all—how at the moment of George’s death Catherine, flooded with pity, with grief, perhaps with love now that she was no longer obliged to love, had clung on to his arrangements, not suffering a thing to be touched or moved or altered, pathetically anxious to keep it exactly as he used to, to keep him still alive at least in his furniture. Other widows he had heard of had done this; and widowers—but fewer of them—had done it too. He could imagine it easily, if one loved some one very much, or was desperately sorry because one hadn’t. But to go on year after year? Yet, once one had begun, how stop? There was only one way to stop happily and naturally, and that was to marry again.

And then, as he was looking round, his nose lifted in impatient scorn of George’s post-mortem persistence, and quite prepared to see whisky and cigars, grown dusty, on some table in a corner—why not? they would only be in keeping with all the rest—he caught sight of a little white object on the heavy sofa at right angles to a fireplace in which feebly flickered the minutest of newly lit fires. A bit of her. A trace, at last, of her.

He darted across and pounced on it. Soft, white, sweet with the sweetness he had noticed when he was near her, it was a small fox fur, a thing a woman puts round her neck.

He snatched it up, and held it to his face. How like her, how like her. He was absorbed in it, buried in it, breathing its delicate sweet smell; and Catherine, coming in quietly with her latchkey, saw him like this, over there by the sofa with his back to the door.

She stood quiet in the doorway, watching him with surprised amusement, because it seemed so funny. Really, to have this sort of thing happening to one’s boa at one’s age! Queer young man. Perhaps having all that flaming red hair made one....

But, though he had heard no sound, he was aware of her, and turned round quickly, and caught her look of amusement, and flushed a deep red.

He put the fur carefully down on the sofa again and came over to her. ‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’ he said defiantly, throwing back his head.

She laughed and shook hands and said she was very glad he had come. She was so easy, so easy; taking things so much as a matter of course, things that were so little a matter of course that they made him tremble—things like drying her shoes the night before in the taxi, or feeling on his face the soft white fur. If she would be shy, be self-conscious for even an instant, he thought, he would be more master of himself as well as of her. But she wasn’t. Not a trace of it. Just simple friendliness, as if everything he said and did was usual, was inevitable, was what she quite expected, or else didn’t matter one way or the other. She wasn’t even surprised to see him. Yet he had assured her he never could get away on Saturdays.

‘I couldn’t help coming,’ he said, the flush fixed on his face. ‘You didn’t expect me to wait really till Sunday week, did you?’

‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ she said, ringing the bell for tea and sitting down at the tea-table and beginning to pull off her gloves.

They stuck because they were wet with the rain she had been out in.

‘Let me do that,’ he said, eagerly, watching her every movement.

She held out her hands at once.

‘You’ve been walking in the rain,’ he said reproachfully, pulling away at the soaked gloves. Then, looking down at her face, the grey hard daylight of the March afternoon full on it from the high windows, he saw that she was tired—fagged out, in fact—and he added, alarmed, ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Doing?’ she repeated, smiling up at the way he was staring at her. ‘Why, coming home as quickly as I could out of the rain.’

‘But why do you look so tired?’

She laughed. ‘Do I look tired?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not a bit.’

‘Then why do you look as if you had walked hundreds of miles and not slept for weeks?’

‘I told you you ought to see me in daylight,’ she said, with amused eyes on his face of concern. ‘You’ve only seen me lit up at night, or in the dark. I looked just the same then, only you couldn’t see me. Anybody can look not tired if it’s dark enough.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ he said. ‘You’ve been walking about, and going in tubes. Look here, I wish you’d tell me something——’

‘I’ll tell you anything,’ she said.

What sweet eyes she had, what incredibly sweet eyes, if only they weren’t so tired....

‘But you must sit down,’ she went on. ‘You’re so enormous that it hurts my neck to have to look up at you.’

He threw himself into the chair next to her. ‘What I want to know is——’ he began, leaning forward.

He broke off as the door opened, and Mrs. Mitcham came in with the tea.

‘Go on,’ said Catherine encouragingly. ‘Unless it’s something overwhelmingly indiscreet.’

‘Well, I was only going to ask you—do you like tubes?’

She laughed. She was always laughing. ‘No,’ she said, pouring out the tea.

The teapot was impressive; all the tea arrangements were impressive, except the part you ate. On that had descended a severely restraining hand, thinning the butter on the bread, withholding the currants from the cake. Not that Christopher saw anything of this, because he saw only Catherine; but afterwards, when he went over the visit in his head, he somehow was aware of a curious contrast between the tea and the picture frames.

‘Then why do you go in them?’ he asked, Mrs. Mitcham having gone again and shut the door.

‘Because they’re cheap.’

His answer to that was to glance round the room—round, in his mind’s eye, Hertford Street as well, and Park Lane so near by, and the reserved expensiveness of the entrance hall, and the well-got-up, even if personally objectionable, porter.

She followed his glance. ‘Tubes and this,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know. They don’t match, do they. Perhaps,’ she went on, ‘I needn’t be so frightfully careful. But I’m rather scared just to begin with. I shall know better after the first year——’

‘What first year?’ he asked, as she paused; but he wasn’t really listening, because she had put up her hands and taken off her hat, and for the first time he saw her without her being half extinguished.

He gazed at her. She went on talking. He didn’t hear. She had dark hair, brushed off her forehead. It had tiny silver threads in it. He saw them. She was, as he had felt, as he had somehow known she was, older than himself,—but only a little; nothing to matter; just enough to make it proper that he should adore her, that his place should be at her feet. He gazed at her forehead,—so candid, with something dove-like about it, with something extraordinarily good, and reassuring, and infinitely kind, but with faint lines on it as though she were worried. And then her grey eyes, beautifully spaced, very light grey with long dark eyelashes, had a pathetic look in them of having been crying. He hadn’t noticed that before. At the theatre they had shone. He hoped she hadn’t been crying, and wasn’t worried, and that her laughing now wasn’t only being put on for him, for the visitor.

She stopped short in what she had been saying, noticing that he wasn’t listening and was looking at her with extreme earnestness. Her expression changed to amusement.

‘Why do you look at me so solemnly?’ she asked.

‘Because I’m terribly afraid you’ve been crying.’

‘Crying?’ she wondered. ‘What should I have been crying about?’

‘I don’t know. How should I know? I don’t know anything.’

He leaned over and timidly touched her sleeve. He had to. He couldn’t help it. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

‘Tell me some things,’ he said.

‘I have been telling you, and you didn’t listen,’ she said.

‘Because I was looking at you. You know, I’ve never seen you once in my life before without your hat.’

‘Never once in your life before,’ she repeated smiling. ‘As if you had been seeing me since your cradle.’

‘I’ve always known you,’ he said solemnly; and at this she rather quickly offered him some cake, which he ignored.

‘In my dreams,’ he went on, gazing at her with eyes which were, she was afraid, a little—well, not those of an ordinary caller.

‘Oh—dreams. My dear Mr. Monckton. Do,’ she said, waving intangiblenesses aside, ‘have some more tea.’

‘You must call me Chris.’

‘But why?’

‘Because we’ve known each other always. Because we’re going to know each other always. Because I—because I——’

‘Well but, you know, we haven’t,’ she interrupted—for who could tell what her impetuous new friend might be going to say next? ‘Not really. Not outside make-believe. Not beyond The Immortal Hour. Can you see the cigarettes anywhere? Yes—there they are. Over there on that table. Will you get them?’

He got up and fetched them.

‘You’ve no idea how lonely I am,’ he said, putting them down near her.

‘Are you? I’m very sorry. But—are you really? I should imagine you with heaps and heaps of friends. You’re so—so——’ She hesitated. ‘So warm-hearted,’ she finished; and couldn’t help smiling as she said it, for he was apparently very warm-hearted indeed. His heart, like his hair, seemed incandescent.

‘Heaps and heaps of friends don’t make one less lonely as long as one hasn’t got—well, the one person. No, I won’t smoke. Who is Stephen?’

How abrupt. She couldn’t leap round with this quickness. ‘Stephen?’ she repeated, a little bewildered. Then she remembered, and her face again brimmed with amusement.

‘Oh yes—you thought I was going to take him to the Zoo to-morrow,’ she said. ‘The Zoo! Why, he’s preaching to-morrow evening at St. Paul’s. You’d better go and listen.’

He caught hold of her hands. ‘You must tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘You must.’

‘I told you I’ll tell you anything,’ she said, pulling her hands away.

‘Is Stephen—are you—you’re not going to marry Stephen?’

For a moment she stared at him in profound astonishment. Then she burst into laughter, and laughed and laughed till her eyes really did cry.

‘Oh, my dear boy—oh, my dear, dear boy!’ she laughed, wiping her eyes while he sat and watched her.

And at that moment Mrs. Mitcham appeared at the door and announced two ladies—their miserable name sounded like Fanshawe—and two ladies, who might well be Fanshawes, immediately swam in and enveloped Catherine in arms of enormous length, it seemed to him, kissing her effusively—how deeply he hated them—and exclaiming in incoherent twitters that they had come to carry her off, that the car was there, that they wouldn’t take no, that Ned was waiting——

Lord, what snakes.

He went away at once. No good staying just to see her being clawed away by Fanshawes to the waiting Ned. And who the devil was Ned? Yes, there he was—waiting right enough, sitting snugly in a Daimler that looked very new and expensive, while the porter, a changed man, hovered solicitously near. Ned needed every bit of the new Daimler and the fur rug and the hideously smart chauffeur to make up for the shape of his silly nose, thought Christopher, scornfully striding off down the street.