Josephine had invited Aaron Sisson to dinner at a restaurant in Soho, one Sunday evening. They had a corner to themselves, and with a bottle of Burgundy she was getting his history from him.
His father had been a shaft-sinker, earning good money, but had been killed by a fall down the shaft when Aaron was only four years old. The widow had opened a shop: Aaron was her only child. She had done well in her shop. She had wanted Aaron to be a schoolteacher. He had served three years apprenticeship, then suddenly thrown it up and gone to the pit.
“But why?” said Josephine.
“I couldn’t tell you. I felt more like it.”
He had a curious quality of an intelligent, almost sophisticated mind, which had repudiated education. On purpose he kept the midland accent in his speech. He understood perfectly what a personification was — and an allegory. But he preferred to be illiterate.
Josephine found out what a miner’s checkweighman was. She tried to find out what sort of wife Aaron had — but, except that she was the daughter of a publican and was delicate in health, she could learn nothing.
“And do you send her money?” she asked.
“Ay,” said Aaron. “The house is mine. And I allow her so much a week out of the money in the bank. My mother left me a bit over a thousand when she died.”
“You don’t mind what I say, do you?” said Josephine.
“No I don’t mind,” he laughed.
He had this pleasant-seeming courteous manner. But he really kept her at a distance. In some things he reminded her of Robert: blond, erect, nicely built, fresh and English-seeming. But there was a curious cold distance to him, which she could not get across. An inward indifference to her — perhaps to everything. Yet his laugh was so handsome.
“Will you tell me why you left your wife and children?— Didn’t you love them?”
Aaron looked at the odd, round, dark muzzle of the girl. She had had her hair bobbed, and it hung in odd dark folds, very black, over her ears.
“Why I left her?” he said. “For no particular reason. They’re all right without me.”
Josephine watched his face. She saw a pallor of suffering under its freshness, and a strange tension in his eyes.
“But you couldn’t leave your little girls for no reason at all —”
“Yes, I did. For no reason — except I wanted to have some free room round me — to loose myself —”
“You mean you wanted love?” flashed Josephine, thinking he said lose .
“No, I wanted fresh air. I don’t know what I wanted. Why should I know?”
“But we must know: especially when other people will be hurt,” said she.
“Ah, well! A breath of fresh air, by myself. I felt forced to feel — I feel if I go back home now, I shall be FORCED— forced to love — or care — or something.”
“Perhaps you wanted more than your wife could give you,” she said.
“Perhaps less. She’s made up her mind she loves me, and she’s not going to let me off.”
“Did you never love her?” said Josephine.
“Oh, yes. I shall never love anybody else. But I’m damned if I want to be a lover any more. To her or to anybody. That’s the top and bottom of it. I don’t want to CARE, when care isn’t in me. And I’m not going to be forced to it.”
The fat, aproned French waiter was hovering near. Josephine let him remove the plates and the empty bottle.
“Have more wine,” she said to Aaron.
But he refused. She liked him because of his dead-level indifference to his surroundings. French waiters and foreign food — he noticed them in his quick, amiable-looking fashion — but he was indifferent. Josephine was piqued. She wanted to pierce this amiable aloofness of his.
She ordered coffee and brandies.
“But you don’t want to get away from EVERYTHING, do you? I myself feel so LOST sometimes — so dreadfully alone: not in a silly sentimental fashion, because men keep telling me they love me, don’t you know. But my LIFE seems alone, for some reason —”
“Haven’t you got relations?” he said.
“No one, now mother is dead. Nothing nearer than aunts and cousins in America. I suppose I shall see them all again one day. But they hardly count over here.”
“Why don’t you get married?” he said. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-five. How old are you?”
“Thirty-three.”
“You might almost be any age.— I don’t know why I don’t get married. In a way, I hate earning my own living — yet I go on — and I like my work —”
“What are you doing now?”
“I’m painting scenery for a new play — rather fun — I enjoy it. But I often wonder what will become of me.”
“In what way?”
She was almost affronted.
“What becomes of me? Oh, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter, not to anybody but myself.”
“What becomes of anybody, anyhow? We live till we die. What do you want?”
“Why, I keep saying I want to get married and feel sure of something. But I don’t know — I feel dreadful sometimes — as if every minute would be the last. I keep going on and on — I don’t know what for — and IT keeps going on and on — goodness knows what it’s all for.”
“You shouldn’t bother yourself,” he said. “You should just let it go on and on —”
“But I MUST bother,” she said. “I must think and feel —”
“You’ve no occasion,” he said.
“How —?” she said, with a sudden grunting, unhappy laugh. Then she lit a cigarette.
“No,” she said. “What I should really like more than anything would be an end of the world. I wish the world would come to an end.”
He laughed, and poured his drops of brandy down his throat.
“It won’t, for wishing,” he said.
“No, that’s the awful part of it. It’ll just go on and on — Doesn’t it make you feel you’d go mad?”
He looked at her and shook his head.
“You see it doesn’t concern me,” he said. “So long as I can float by myself.”
“But ARE you SATISFIED!” she cried.
“I like being by myself — I hate feeling and caring, and being forced into it. I want to be left alone —”
“You aren’t very polite to your hostess of the evening,” she said, laughing a bit miserably.
“Oh, we’re all right,” he said. “You know what I mean —”
“You like your own company? Do you?— Sometimes I think I’m nothing when I’m alone. Sometimes I think I surely must be nothing — nothingness.”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No. I only want to be left alone.”
“Not to have anything to do with anybody?” she queried ironically.
“Not to any extent.”
She watched him — and then she bubbled with a laugh.
“I think you’re funny,” she said. “You don’t mind?”
“No — why — It’s just as you see it.— Jim Bricknell’s a rare comic, to my eye.”
“Oh, him!— no, not actually. He’s self-conscious and selfish and hysterical. It isn’t a bit funny after a while.”
“I only know what I’ve seen,” said Aaron. “You’d both of you like a bloody revolution, though.”
“Yes. Only when it came he wouldn’t be there.”
“Would you?”
“Yes, indeed I would. I would give everything to be in it. I’d give heaven and earth for a great big upheaval — and then darkness.”
“Perhaps you’ll get it, when you die,” said Aaron.
“Oh, but I don’t want to die and leave all this standing. I hate it so.”
“Why do you?”
“But don’t you?”
“No, it doesn’t really bother me.”
“It makes me feel I can’t live.”
“I can’t see that.”
“But you always disagree with one!” said Josephine. “How do you like Lilly? What do you think of him?”
“He seems sharp,” said Aaron.
“But he’s more than sharp.”
“Oh, yes! He’s got his finger in most pies.”
“And doesn’t like the plums in any of them,” said Josephine tartly.
“What does he do?”
“Writes — stories and plays.”
“And makes it pay?”
“Hardly at all.— They want us to go. Shall we?” She rose from the table. The waiter handed her her cloak, and they went out into the blowy dark night. She folded her wrap round her, and hurried forward with short, sharp steps. There was a certain Parisian chic and mincingness about her, even in her walk: but underneath, a striding, savage suggestion as if she could leg it in great strides, like some savage squaw.
Aaron pressed his bowler hat down on his brow.
“Would you rather take a bus?” she said in a high voice, because of the wind.
“I’d rather walk.”
“So would I.”
They hurried across the Charing Cross Road, where great buses rolled and rocked, crammed with people. Her heels clicked sharply on the pavement, as they walked east. They crossed Holborn, and passed the Museum. And neither of them said anything.
When they came to the corner, she held out her hand.
“Look!” she said. “Don’t come any further: don’t trouble.”
“I’ll walk round with you: unless you’d rather not.”
“No — But do you want to bother?”
“It’s no bother.”
So they pursued their way through the high wind, and turned at last into the old, beautiful square. It seemed dark and deserted, dark like a savage wilderness in the heart of London. The wind was roaring in the great bare trees of the centre, as if it were some wild dark grove deep in a forgotten land.
Josephine opened the gate of the square garden with her key, and let it slam to behind him.
“How wonderful the wind is!” she shrilled. “Shall we listen to it for a minute?”
She led him across the grass past the shrubs to the big tree in the centre. There she climbed up to a seat. He sat beside her. They sat in silence, looking at the darkness. Rain was blowing in the wind. They huddled against the big tree-trunk, for shelter, and watched the scene.
Beyond the tall shrubs and the high, heavy railings the wet street gleamed silently. The houses of the Square rose like a cliff on this inner dark sea, dimly lighted at occasional windows. Boughs swayed and sang. A taxi-cab swirled round a corner like a cat, and purred to a standstill. There was a light of an open hall door. But all far away, it seemed, unthinkably far away. Aaron sat still and watched. He was frightened, it all seemed so sinister, this dark, bristling heart of London. Wind boomed and tore like waves ripping a shingle beach. The two white lights of the taxi stared round and departed, leaving the coast at the foot of the cliffs deserted, faintly spilled with light from the high lamp. Beyond there, on the outer rim, a policeman passed solidly.
Josephine was weeping steadily all the time, but inaudibly. Occasionally she blew her nose and wiped her face. But he had not realized. She hardly realized herself. She sat near the strange man. He seemed so still and remote — so fascinating.
“Give me your hand,” she said to him, subduedly.
He took her cold hand in his warm, living grasp. She wept more bitterly. He noticed at last.
“Why are you crying?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she replied, rather matter-of-fact, through her tears.
So he let her cry, and said no more, but sat with her cold hand in his warm, easy clasp.
“You’ll think me a fool,” she said. “I don’t know why I cry.”
“You can cry for nothing, can’t you?” he said.
“Why, yes, but it’s not very sensible.”
He laughed shortly.
“Sensible!” he said.
“You are a strange man,” she said.
But he took no notice.
“Did you ever intend to marry Jim Bricknell?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“I can’t imagine it,” he said.
“Why not?”
Both were watching blankly the roaring night of mid-London, the phantasmagoric old Bloomsbury Square. They were still hand in hand.
“Such as you shouldn’t marry,” he said.
“But why not? I want to.”
“You think you do.”
“Yes indeed I do.”
He did not say any more.
“Why shouldn’t I? she persisted. “I don’t know —”
And again he was silent.
“You’ve known some life, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Me? Why?”
“You seem to.”
Do I? I’m sorry. Do I seem vicious?— No, I’m not vicious.— I’ve seen some life, perhaps — in Paris mostly. But not much. Why do you ask?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“But what do you mean? What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Don’t be so irritating,” said she.
But he did not answer, and she became silent also. They sat hand in hand.
“Won’t you kiss me?” came her voice out of the darkness.
He waited some moments, then his voice sounded gently, half mocking, half reproachful.
“Nay! “he said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?” she asked.
He laughed, but did not reply.
She sat perfectly still for some time. She had ceased to cry. In the darkness her face was set and sullen. Sometimes a spray of rain blew across it. She drew her hand from his, and rose to her feet.
“Ill go in now,” she said.
“You’re not offended, are you?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
They stepped down in the darkness from their perch.
“I wondered.”
She strode off for some little way. Then she turned and said:
“Yes, I think it is rather insulting.”
“Nay,” he said. “Not it! Not it!”
And he followed her to the gate.
She opened with her key, and they crossed the road to her door.
“Good-night,” she said, turning and giving him her hand.
“You’ll come and have dinner with me — or lunch — will you? When shall we make it?” he asked.
“Well, I can’t say for certain — I’m very busy just now. I’ll let you know.”
A policeman shed his light on the pair of them as they stood on the step.
“All right,” said Aaron, dropping back, and she hastily opened the big door, and entered.
The Lillys had a labourer’s cottage in Hampshire — pleasant enough. They were poor. Lilly was a little, dark, thin, quick fellow, his wife was strong and fair. They had known Robert and Julia for some years, but Josephine and Jim were new acquaintances,— fairly new.
One day in early spring Lilly had a telegram, “Coming to see you arrive 4:30 — Bricknell.” He was surprised, but he and his wife got the spare room ready. And at four o’clock Lilly went off to the station. He was a few minutes late, and saw Jim’s tall, rather elegant figure stalking down the station path. Jim had been an officer in the regular army, and still spent hours with his tailor. But instead of being a soldier he was a sort of socialist, and a red- hot revolutionary of a very ineffectual sort.
“Good lad!” he exclaimed, as Lilly came up. “Thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not at all. Let me carry your bag.” Jim had a bag and a knapsack.
“I had an inspiration this morning,” said Jim. “I suddenly saw that if there was a man in England who could save me, it was you.”
“Save you from what?” asked Lilly, rather abashed.
“Eh —?” and Jim stooped, grinning at the smaller man.
Lilly was somewhat puzzled, but he had a certain belief in himself as a saviour. The two men tramped rather incongruously through the lanes to the cottage.
Tanny was in the doorway as they came up the garden path.
“So nice to see you! Are you all right?” she said.
“A-one” said Jim, grinning. “Nice of you to have me.”
“Oh, we’re awfully pleased.”
Jim dropped his knapsack on the broad sofa.
“I’ve brought some food,” he said.
“Have you! That’s sensible of you. We can’t get a great deal here, except just at week-ends,” said Tanny.
Jim fished out a pound of sausages and a pot of fish paste.
“How lovely the sausages,” said Tanny. “We’ll have them for dinner tonight — and we’ll have the other for tea now. You’d like a wash?”
But Jim had already opened his bag, taken off his coat, and put on an old one.
“Thanks,” he said.
Lilly made the tea, and at length all sat down.
“Well how unexpected this is — and how nice,” said Tanny.
“Jolly — eh?” said Jim.
He ate rapidly, stuffing his mouth too full.
“How is everybody?” asked Tanny.
“All right. Julia’s gone with Cyril Scott. Can’t stand that fellow, can you? What?”
“Yes, I think he’s rather nice,” said Tanny. “What will Robert do?”
“Have a shot at Josephine, apparently.”
“Really? Is he in love with her? I thought so. And she likes him too, doesn’t she?” said Tanny.
“Very likely,” said Jim.
“I suppose you’re jealous,” laughed Tanny.
“Me!” Jim shook his head. “Not a bit. Like to see the ball kept rolling.”
“What have you been doing lately?”
“Been staying a few days with my wife.”
“No, really! I can’t believe it.”
Jim had a French wife, who had divorced him, and two children. Now he was paying visits to this wife again: purely friendly. Tanny did most of the talking. Jim excited her, with his way of looking in her face and grinning wolfishly, and at the same time asking to be saved.
After tea, he wanted to send telegrams, so Lilly took him round to the village post-office. Telegrams were a necessary part of his life. He had to be suddenly starting off to keep sudden appointments, or he felt he was a void in the atmosphere. He talked to Lilly about social reform, and so on. Jim’s work in town was merely nominal. He spent his time wavering about and going to various meetings, philandering and weeping.
Lilly kept in the back of his mind the Saving which James had come to look for. He intended to do his best. After dinner the three sat cosily round the kitchen fire.
“But what do you really think will happen to the world?” Lilly asked Jim, amid much talk.
“What? There’s something big coming,” said Jim.
“Where from?”
“Watch Ireland, and watch Japan — they’re the two poles of the world,” said Jim.
“I thought Russia and America,” said Lilly.
“Eh? What? Russia and America! They’ll depend on Ireland and Japan. I know it. I’ve had a vision of it. Ireland on this side and Japan on the other — they’ll settle it.”
“I don’t see how,” said Lilly.
“I don’t see HOW— But I had a vision of it.”
“What sort of vision?”
“Couldn’t describe it.”
“But you don’t think much of the Japanese, do you?” asked Lilly.
“Don’t I! Don’t I!” said Jim. “What, don’t you think they’re wonderful?”
“No. I think they’re rather unpleasant.”
“I think the salvation of the world lies with them.”
“Funny salvation,” said Lilly. “I think they’re anything but angels.”
“Do you though? Now that’s funny. Why?”
“Looking at them even. I knew a Russian doctor who’d been through the Russo-Japanese war, and who had gone a bit cracked. He said he saw the Japs rush a trench. They threw everything away and flung themselves through the Russian fire and simply dropped in masses. But those that reached the trenches jumped in with bare hands on the Russians and tore their faces apart and bit their throats out — fairly ripped the faces off the bone.— It had sent the doctor a bit cracked. He said the wounded were awful,— their faces torn off and their throats mangled — and dead Japs with flesh between the teeth — God knows if it’s true. But that’s the impression the Japanese had made on this man. It had affected his mind really.”
Jim watched Lilly, and smiled as if he were pleased.
“No — really —!” he said.
“Anyhow they’re more demon than angel, I believe,” said Lilly.
“Oh, no, Rawdon, but you always exaggerate,” said Tanny.
“Maybe,” said Lilly.
“I think Japanese are fascinating — fascinating — so quick, and such FORCE in them —”
“Rather!— eh?” said Jim, looking with a quick smile at Tanny.
“I think a Japanese lover would be marvellous,” she laughed riskily.
“I s’d think he would,” said Jim, screwing up his eyes.
“Do you hate the normal British as much as I do?” she asked him.
“Hate them! Hate them!” he said, with an intimate grin.
“Their beastly virtue,” said she. “And I believe there’s nobody more vicious underneath.”
“Nobody!” said Jim.
“But you’re British yourself,” said Lilly to Jim.
“No, I’m Irish. Family’s Irish — my mother was a Fitz-patrick.”
“Anyhow you live in England.”
“Because they won’t let me go to Ireland.”
The talk drifted. Jim finished up all the beer, and they prepared to go to bed. Jim was a bit tipsy, grinning. He asked for bread and cheese to take upstairs.
“Will you have supper?” said Lilly. He was surprised, because Jim had eaten strangely much at dinner.
“No — where’s the loaf?” And he cut himself about half of it. There was no cheese.
“Bread’ll do,” said Jim.
“Sit down and eat it. Have cocoa with it,” said Tanny.
“No, I like to have it in my bedroom.”
“You don’t eat bread in the night?” said Lilly.
“I do.”
“What a funny thing to do.”
The cottage was in darkness. The Lillys slept soundly. Jim woke up and chewed bread and slept again. In the morning at dawn he rose and went downstairs. Lilly heard him roaming about — heard the woman come in to clean — heard them talking. So he got up to look after his visitor, though it was not seven o’clock, and the woman was busy.— But before he went down, he heard Jim come upstairs again.
Mrs. Short was busy in the kitchen when Lilly went down.
“The other gentleman have been down, Sir,” said Mrs. Short. “He asked me where the bread and butter were, so I said should I cut him a piece. But he wouldn’t let me do it. I gave him a knife and he took it for himself, in the pantry.”
“I say, Bricknell,” said Lilly at breakfast time, “why do you eat so much bread?”
“I’ve got to feed up. I’ve been starved during this damned war.”
“But hunks of bread won’t feed you up.”
“Gives the stomach something to work at, and prevents it grinding on the nerves,” said Jim.
“But surely you don’t want to keep your stomach always full and heavy.”
“I do, my boy. I do. It needs keeping solid. I’m losing life, if I don’t. I tell you I’m losing life. Let me put something inside me.”
“I don’t believe bread’s any use.”
During breakfast Jim talked about the future of the world.
I reckon Christ’s the finest thing time has ever produced,” said he; “and will remain it.”
“But you don’t want crucifixions ad infinitum ,” said Lilly.
“What? Why not?”
“Once is enough — and have done.”
“Don’t you think love and sacrifice are the finest things in life?” said Jim, over his bacon.
“Depends WHAT love, and what sacrifice,” said Lilly. “If I really believe in an Almighty God, I am willing to sacrifice for Him. That is, I’m willing to yield my own personal interest to the bigger creative interest.— But it’s obvious Almighty God isn’t mere Love.”
“I think it is. Love and only love,” said Jim. “I think the greatest joy is sacrificing oneself to love.”
“To SOMEONE you love, you mean,” said Tanny.
“No I don’t. I don’t mean someone at all. I mean love — love — love. I sacrifice myself to love. I reckon that’s the highest man is capable of.”
“But you can’t sacrifice yourself to an abstract principle,” said Tanny.
“That’s just what you can do. And that’s the beauty of it. Who represents the principle doesn’t matter. Christ is the principle of love,” said Jim.
“But no!” said Tanny. “It MUST be more individual. It must be SOMEBODY you love, not abstract love in itself. How can you sacrifice yourself to an abstraction.”
“Ha, I think Love and your Christ detestable,” said Lilly —“a sheer ignominy.”
“Finest thing the world has produced,” said Jim.
“No. A thing which sets itself up to be betrayed! No, it’s foul. Don’t you see it’s the Judas principle you really worship. Judas is the real hero. But for Judas the whole show would have been manque .”
“Oh yes,” said Jim. “Judas was inevitable. I’m not sure that Judas wasn’t the greatest of the disciples — and Jesus knew it. I’m not sure Judas wasn’t the disciple Jesus loved.”
“Jesus certainly encouraged him in his Judas tricks,” said Tanny.
Jim grinned knowingly at Lilly.
“Then it was a nasty combination. And anything which turns on a Judas climax is a dirty show, to my thinking. I think your Judas is a rotten, dirty worm, just a dirty little self-conscious sentimental twister. And out of all Christianity he is the hero today. When people say Christ they mean Judas. They find him luscious on the palate. And Jesus fostered him —” said Lilly.
“He’s a profound figure, is Judas. It’s taken two thousand years to begin to understand him,” said Jim, pushing the bread and marmalade into his mouth.
“A traitor is a traitor — no need to understand any further. And a system which rests all its weight on a piece of treachery makes that treachery not only inevitable but sacred. That’s why I’m sick of Christianity.— At any rate this modern Christ-mongery.”
“The finest thing the world has produced, or ever will produce — Christ and Judas —” said Jim.
“Not to me,” said Lilly. “Foul combination.”
It was a lovely morning in early March. Violets were out, and the first wild anemones. The sun was quite warm. The three were about to take out a picnic lunch. Lilly however was suffering from Jim’s presence.
“Jolly nice here,” said Jim. “Mind if I stay till Saturday?”
There was a pause. Lilly felt he was being bullied, almost obscenely bullied. Was he going to agree? Suddenly he looked up at Jim.
“I’d rather you went tomorrow,” he said.
Tanny, who was sitting opposite Jim, dropped her head in confusion.
“What’s tomorrow?” said Jim.
“Thursday,” said Lilly.
“Thursday,” repeated Jim. And he looked up and got Lilly’s eye. He wanted to say “Friday then?”
“Yes, I’d rather you went Thursday,” repeated Lilly.
“But Rawdon —!” broke in Tanny, who was suffering. She stopped, however.
“We can walk across country with you some way if you like,” said Lilly to Jim. It was a sort of compromise.
“Fine!” said Jim. “We’ll do that, then.”
It was lovely sunshine, and they wandered through the woods. Between Jim and Tanny was a sort of growing rapprochement , which got on Lilly’s nerves.
“What the hell do you take that beastly personal tone for?” cried Lilly at Tanny, as the three sat under a leafless great beech-tree.
“But I’m not personal at all, am I, Mr. Bricknell?” said Tanny.
Jim watched Lilly, and grinned pleasedly.
“Why shouldn’t you be, anyhow?” he said.
“Yes!” she retorted. “Why not!”
“Not while I’m here. I loathe the slimy creepy personal intimacy.— ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Bricknell, that it’s lovely to be able to talk quite simply to somebody? Oh, it’s such a relief, after most people —-’” Lilly mimicked his wife’s last speech savagely.
“But I MEAN it,” cried Tanny. “It is lovely.”
“Dirty messing,” said Lilly angrily.
Jim watched the dark, irascible little man with amusement. They rose, and went to look for an inn, and beer. Tanny still clung rather stickily to Jim’s side.
But it was a lovely day, the first of all the days of spring, with crocuses and wall-flowers in the cottage gardens, and white cocks crowing in the quiet hamlet.
When they got back in the afternoon to the cottage, they found a telegram for Jim. He let the Lillys see it —“Meet you for a walk on your return journey Lois.” At once Tanny wanted to know all about Lois. Lois was a nice girl, well-to-do middle-class, but also an actress, and she would do anything Jim wanted.
“I must get a wire to her to meet me tomorrow,” he said. “Where shall I say?”
Lilly produced the map, and they decided on time and station at which Lois coming out of London, should meet Jim. Then the happy pair could walk along the Thames valley, spending a night perhaps at Marlowe, or some such place.
Off went Jim and Lilly once more to the postoffice. They were quite good friends. Having so inhospitably fixed the hour of departure, Lilly wanted to be nice. Arrived at the postoffice, they found it shut: half-day closing for the little shop.
“Well,” said Lilly. “We’ll go to the station.”
They proceeded to the station — found the station-master — were conducted down to the signal-box. Lilly naturally hung back from people, but Jim was hob-nob with the station-master and the signal man, quite officer- and-my-men kind of thing. Lilly sat out on the steps of the signal- box, rather ashamed, while the long telegram was shouted over the telephone to the junction town — first the young lady and her address, then the message “Meet me X. station 3:40 tomorrow walk back great pleasure Jim.”
Anyhow that was done. They went home to tea. After tea, as the evening fell, Lilly suggested a little stroll in the woods, while Tanny prepared the dinner. Jim agreed, and they set out. The two men wandered through the trees in the dusk, till they came to a bank on the farther edge of the wood. There they sat down.
And there Lilly said what he had to say. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s nothing but love and self-sacrifice which makes you feel yourself losing life.”
“You’re wrong. Only love brings it back — and wine. If I drink a bottle of Burgundy I feel myself restored at the middle — right here! I feel the energy back again. And if I can fall in love — But it’s becoming so damned hard —”
“What, to fall in love?” asked Lilly.
“Yes.”
“Then why not leave off trying! What do you want to poke yourself and prod yourself into love, for?”
“Because I’m DEAD without it. I’m dead. I’m dying.”
“Only because you force yourself. If you drop working yourself up —”
“I shall die. I only live when I can fall in love. Otherwise I’m dying by inches. Why, man, you don’t know what it was like. I used to get the most grand feelings — like a great rush of force, or light — a great rush — right here, as I’ve said, at the solar plexus. And it would come any time — anywhere — no matter where I was. And then I was all right.
“All right for what?— for making love?”
“Yes, man, I was.”
“And now you aren’t?— Oh, well, leave love alone, as any twopenny doctor would tell you.”
“No, you’re off it there. It’s nothing technical. Technically I can make love as much as you like. It’s nothing a doctor has any say in. It’s what I feel inside me. I feel the life going. I know it’s going. I never get those inrushes now, unless I drink a jolly lot, or if I possibly could fall in love. Technically, I’m potent all right — oh, yes!”
“You should leave yourself and your inrushes alone.”
“But you can’t. It’s a sort of ache.”
“Then you should stiffen your backbone. It’s your backbone that matters. You shouldn’t want to abandon yourself. You shouldn’t want to fling yourself all loose into a woman’s lap. You should stand by yourself and learn to be by yourself. Why don’t you be more like the Japanese you talk about? Quiet, aloof little devils. They don’t bother about being loved. They keep themselves taut in their own selves — there, at the bottom of the spine — the devil’s own power they’ve got there.”
Jim mused a bit.
“Think they have?” he laughed. It seemed comic to him.
“Sure! Look at them. Why can’t you gather yourself there?”
“At the tail?”
“Yes. Hold yourself firm there.”
Jim broke into a cackle of a laugh, and rose. The two went through the dark woods back to the cottage. Jim staggered and stumbled like a drunken man: or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia: as if he had no power in his lower limbs.
“Walk there —!” said Lilly, finding him the smoothest bit of the dark path. But Jim stumbled and shambled, in a state of nauseous weak relaxation. However, they reached the cottage: and food and beer — and Tanny, piqued with curiosity to know what the men had been saying privately to each other.
After dinner they sat once more talking round the fire.
Lilly sat in a small chair facing the fire, the other two in the armchairs on either side the hearth.
“How nice it will be for you, walking with Lois towards London tomorrow,” gushed Tanny sentimentally.
“Good God!” said Lilly. “Why the dickens doesn’t he walk by himself, without wanting a woman always there, to hold his hand.”
“Don’t be so spiteful,” said Tanny. “YOU see that you have a woman always there, to hold YOUR hand.”
“My hand doesn’t need holding,” snapped Lilly.
“Doesn’t it! More than most men’s! But you’re so beastly ungrateful and mannish. Because I hold you safe enough all the time you like to pretend you’re doing it all yourself.”
“All right. Don’t drag yourself in,” said Lilly, detesting his wife at that moment. “Anyhow,” and he turned to Jim, “it’s time you’d done slobbering yourself over a lot of little women, one after the other.”
“Why shouldn’t I, if I like it?” said Jim.
“Yes, why not?” said Tanny.
“Because it makes a fool of you. Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your legs. I’d be ashamed if I were you.”
“Would you? “said Jim.
“I would. And it’s nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees all go rickety.”
“Think that’s it?” said Jim.
“What else is it. You haven’t been here a day, but you must telegraph for some female to be ready to hold your hand the moment you go away. And before she lets go, you’ll be wiring for another. YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, you want to be loved — a man of your years. It’s disgusting —”
“I don’t see it. I believe in love —” said Jim, watching and grinning oddly.
“Bah, love! Messing, that’s what it is. It wouldn’t matter if it did you no harm. But when you stagger and stumble down a road, out of sheer sloppy relaxation of your will —-”
At this point Jim suddenly sprang from his chair at Lilly, and gave him two or three hard blows with his fists, upon the front of the body. Then he sat down in his own chair again, saying sheepishly:
“I knew I should have to do it, if he said any more.”
Lilly sat motionless as a statue, his face like paper. One of the blows had caught him rather low, so that he was almost winded and could not breathe. He sat rigid, paralysed as a winded man is. But he wouldn’t let it be seen. With all his will he prevented himself from gasping. Only through his parted lips he drew tiny gasps, controlled, nothing revealed to the other two. He hated them both far too much.
For some minutes there was dead silence, whilst Lilly silently and viciously fought for his breath. Tanny opened her eyes wide in a sort of pleased bewilderment, and Jim turned his face aside, and hung his clasped hands between his knees.
“There’s a great silence, suddenly!” said Tanny.
“What is there to say?” ejaculated Lilly rapidly, with a spoonful of breath which he managed to compress and control into speech. Then he sat motionless again, concerned with the business of getting back his wind, and not letting the other two see.
Jim jerked in his chair, and looked round.
“It isn’t that I don’t like the man,” he said, in a rather small voice. “But I knew if he went on I should have to do it.”
To Lilly, rigid and physically preoccupied, there sounded a sort of self-consciousness in Jim’s voice, as if the whole thing had been semi-deliberate. He detected the sort of maudlin deliberateness which goes with hysterics, and he was colder, more icy than ever.
Tanny looked at Lilly, puzzled, bewildered, but still rather pleased, as if she demanded an answer. None being forthcoming, she said:
“Of course, you mustn’t expect to say all those things without rousing a man.”
Still Lilly did not answer. Jim glanced at him, then looked at Tanny.
“It isn’t that I don’t like him,” he said, slowly. “I like him better than any man I’ve ever known, I believe.” He clasped his hands and turned aside his face.
“Judas!” flashed through Lilly’s mind.
Again Tanny looked for her husband’s answer.
“Yes, Rawdon,” she said. “You can’t say the things you do without their having an effect. You really ask for it, you know.”
“It’s no matter.” Lilly squeezed the words out coldly. “He wanted to do it, and he did it.”
A dead silence ensued now. Tanny looked from man to man.
“I could feel it coming on me,” said Jim.
“Of course!” said Tanny. “Rawdon doesn’t know the things he says.” She was pleased that he had had to pay for them, for once.
It takes a man a long time to get his breath back, after a sharp blow in the wind. Lilly was managing by degrees. The others no doubt attributed his silence to deep or fierce thoughts. It was nothing of the kind, merely a cold struggle to get his wind back, without letting them know he was struggling: and a sheer, stock-stiff hatred of the pair of them.
“I like the man,” said Jim. “Never liked a man more than I like him.” He spoke as if with difficulty.
“The man” stuck safely in Lilly’s ears.
“Oh, well,” he managed to say. “It’s nothing. I’ve done my talking and had an answer, for once.”
“Yes, Rawdy, you’ve had an answer, for once. Usually you don’t get an answer, you know — and that’s why you go so far — in the things you say. Now you’ll know how you make people feel.”
“Quite!” said Lilly.
“I don’t feel anything. I don’t mind what he says,” said Jim.
“Yes, but he ought to know the things he DOES say,” said Tanny. “He goes on, without considering the person he’s talking to. This time it’s come back on him. He mustn’t say such personal things, if he’s not going to risk an answer.”
“I don’t mind what he says. I don’t mind a bit,” said Jim.
“Nor do I mind,” said Lilly indifferently. “I say what I feel — You do as you feel — There’s an end of it.”
A sheepish sort of silence followed this speech. It was broken by a sudden laugh from Tanny.
“The things that happen to us!” she said, laughing rather shrilly. “Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, we’re all struck into silence!”
“Rum game, eh!” said Jim, grinning.
“Isn’t it funny! Isn’t life too funny!” She looked again at her husband. “But, Rawdy, you must admit it was your own fault.”
Lilly’s stiff face did not change.
“Why FAULT!” he said, looking at her coldly. “What is there to talk about?”
“Usually there’s so much,” she said sarcastically.
A few phrases dribbled out of the silence. In vain Jim, tried to get Lilly to thaw, and in vain Tanny gave her digs at her husband. Lilly’s stiff, inscrutable face did not change, he was polite and aloof. So they all went to bed.
In the morning, the walk was to take place, as arranged, Lilly and Tanny accompanying Jim to the third station across country. The morning was lovely, the country beautiful. Lilly liked the countryside and enjoyed the walk. But a hardness inside himself never relaxed. Jim talked a little again about the future of the world, and a higher state of Christlikeness in man. But Lilly only laughed. Then Tanny managed to get ahead with Jim, sticking to his side and talking sympathetic personalities. But Lilly, feeling it from afar, ran after them and caught them up. They were silent.
“What was the interesting topic?” he said cuttingly.
“Nothing at all!” said Tanny, nettled. “Why must you interfere?”
“Because I intend to,” said Lilly.
And the two others fell apart, as if severed with a knife. Jim walked rather sheepishly, as if cut out.
So they came at last past the canals to the wayside station: and at last Jim’s train came. They all said goodbye. Jim and Tanny were both waiting for Lilly to show some sign of real reconciliation. But none came. He was cheerful and aloof.
“Goodbye,” he said to Jim. “Hope Lois will be there all right. Third station on. Goodbye! Goodbye!”
“You’ll come to Rackham?” said Jim, leaning out of the train.
“We should love to,” called Tanny, after the receding train.
“All right,” said Lilly, non-committal.
But he and his wife never saw Jim again. Lilly never intended to see him: a devil sat in the little man’s breast.
“You shouldn’t play at little Jesus, coming so near to people, wanting to help them,” was Tanny’s last word.
Tanny went away to Norway to visit her people, for the first time for three years. Lilly did not go: he did not want to. He came to London and settled in a room over Covent Garden market. The room was high up, a fair size, and stood at the corner of one of the streets and the market itself, looking down on the stalls and the carts and the arcade. Lilly would climb out of the window and sit for hours watching the behaviour of the great draught-horses which brought the mountains of boxes and vegetables. Funny half-human creatures they seemed, so massive and fleshy, yet so Cockney. There was one which could not bear donkeys, and which used to stretch out its great teeth like some massive serpent after every poor diminutive ass that came with a coster’s barrow. Another great horse could not endure standing. It would shake itself and give little starts, and back into the heaps of carrots and broccoli, whilst the driver went into a frenzy of rage.
There was always something to watch. One minute it was two great loads of empty crates, which in passing had got entangled, and reeled, leaning to fall disastrously. Then the drivers cursed and swore and dismounted and stared at their jeopardised loads: till a thin fellow was persuaded to scramble up the airy mountains of cages, like a monkey. And he actually managed to put them to rights. Great sigh of relief when the vans rocked out of the market.
Again there was a particular page-boy in buttons, with a round and perky behind, who nimbly carried a tea-tray from somewhere to somewhere, under the arches beside the market. The great brawny porters would tease him, and he would stop to give them cheek. One afternoon a giant lunged after him: the boy darted gracefully among the heaps of vegetables, still bearing aloft his tea-tray, like some young blue-buttoned acolyte fleeing before a false god. The giant rolled after him — when alas, the acolyte of the tea-tray slipped among the vegetables, and down came the tray. Then tears, and a roar of unfeeling mirth from the giants. Lilly felt they were going to make it up to him.
Another afternoon a young swell sauntered persistently among the vegetables, and Lilly, seated in his high little balcony, wondered why. But at last, a taxi, and a very expensive female, in a sort of silver brocade gown and a great fur shawl and ospreys in her bonnet. Evidently an assignation. Yet what could be more conspicuous than this elegant pair, picking their way through the cabbage-leaves?
And then, one cold grey afternoon in early April, a man in a black overcoat and a bowler hat, walking uncertainly. Lilly had risen and was just retiring out of the chill, damp air. For some reason he lingered to watch the figure. The man was walking east. He stepped rather insecurely off the pavement, and wavered across the setts between the wheels of the standing vans. And suddenly he went down. Lilly could not see him on the ground, but he saw some van-men go forward, and he saw one of them pick up the man’s hat.
“I’d better go down,” said Lilly to himself.
So he began running down the four long flights of stone stairs, past the many doors of the multifarious business premises, and out into the market. A little crowd had gathered, and a large policeman was just rowing into the centre of the interest. Lilly, always a hoverer on the edge of public commotions, hung now hesitating on the outskirts of the crowd.
“What is it?” he said, to a rather sniffy messenger boy.
“Drunk,” said the messenger boy: except that, in unblushing cockney, he pronounced it “Drank.”
Lilly hung further back on the edge of the little crowd.
“Come on here. Where d’ you want to go?” he heard the hearty tones of the policeman.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” came the testy drunken answer.
“All right, are yer! All right, and then some,— come on, get on your pins.”
“I’m all right! I’m all right.”
The voice made Lilly peer between the people. And sitting on the granite setts, being hauled up by a burly policeman, he saw our acquaintance Aaron, very pale in the face and a little dishevelled.
“Like me to tuck the sheets round you, shouldn’t you? Fancy yourself snug in bed, don’t you? You won’t believe you’re right in the way of traffic, will you now, in Covent Garden Market? Come on, we’ll see to you.” And the policeman hoisted the bitter and unwilling Aaron.
Lilly was quickly at the centre of the affair, unobtrusive like a shadow, different from the other people.
“Help him up to my room, will you?” he said to the constable. “Friend of mine.”
The large constable looked down on the bare-headed wispy, unobtrusive Lilly with good-humoured suspicion and incredulity. Lilly could not have borne it if the policeman had uttered any of this cockney suspicion, so he watched him. There was a great gulf between the public official and the odd, quiet little individual — yet Lilly had his way.
“Which room?” said the policeman, dubious.
Lilly pointed quickly round. Then he said to Aaron:
“Were you coming to see me, Sisson? You’ll come in, won’t you?”
Aaron nodded rather stupidly and testily. His eyes looked angry. Somebody stuck his hat on his head for him, and made him look a fool. Lilly took it off again, and carried it for him. He turned and the crowd eased. He watched Aaron sharply, and saw that it was with difficulty he could walk. So he caught him by the arm on the other side from the policeman, and they crossed the road to the pavement.
“Not so much of this sort of thing these days,” said the policeman.
“Not so much opportunity,” said Lilly.
“More than there was, though. Coming back to the old days, like. Working round, bit by bit.”
They had arrived at the stairs. Aaron stumbled up.
“Steady now! Steady does it!” said the policeman, steering his charge. There was a curious breach of distance between Lilly and the constable.
At last Lilly opened his own door. The room was pleasant. The fire burned warm, the piano stood open, the sofa was untidy with cushions and papers. Books and papers covered the big writing desk. Beyond the screen made by the bookshelves and the piano were two beds, with washstand by one of the large windows, the one through which Lilly had climbed.
The policeman looked round curiously.
“More cosy here than in the lock-up, sir!” he said.
Lilly laughed. He was hastily clearing the sofa.
“Sit on the sofa, Sisson,” he said.
The policeman lowered his charge, with a —
“Right we are, then!”
Lilly felt in his pocket, and gave the policeman half a crown. But he was watching Aaron, who sat stupidly on the sofa, very pale and semi-conscious.
“Do you feel ill, Sisson?” he said sharply.
Aaron looked back at him with heavy eyes, and shook his head slightly.
“I believe you are,” said Lilly, taking his hand.
“Might be a bit o’ this flu, you know,” said the policeman.
“Yes,” said Lilly. “Where is there a doctor?” he added, on reflection.
“The nearest?” said the policeman. And he told him. “Leave a message for you, Sir?”
Lilly wrote his address on a card, then changed his mind.
“No, I’ll run round myself if necessary,” he said.
And the policeman departed.
“You’ll go to bed, won’t you?” said Lilly to Aaron, when the door was shut. Aaron shook his head sulkily.
“I would if I were you. You can stay here till you’re all right. I’m alone, so it doesn’t matter.”
But Aaron had relapsed into semi-consciousness. Lilly put the big kettle on the gas stove, the little kettle on the fire. Then he hovered in front of the stupefied man. He felt uneasy. Again he took Aaron’s hand and felt the pulse.
“I’m sure you aren’t well. You must go to bed,” he said. And he kneeled and unfastened his visitor’s boots. Meanwhile the kettle began to boil, he put a hot-water bottle into the bed.
“Let us get your overcoat off,” he said to the stupefied man. “Come along.” And with coaxing and pulling and pushing he got off the overcoat and coat and waistcoat.
At last Aaron was undressed and in bed. Lilly brought him tea. With a dim kind of obedience he took the cup and would drink. He looked at Lilly with heavy eyes.
“I gave in, I gave in to her, else I should ha’ been all right,” he said.
“To whom?” said Lilly.
“I gave in to her — and afterwards I cried, thinking of Lottie and the children. I felt my heart break, you know. And that’s what did it. I should have been all right if I hadn’t given in to her —”
“To whom?” said Lilly.
“Josephine. I felt, the minute I was loving her, I’d done myself. And I had. Everything came back on me. If I hadn’t given in to her, I should ha’ kept all right.”
“Don’t bother now. Get warm and still —”
“I felt it — I felt it go, inside me, the minute I gave in to her. It’s perhaps killed me.”
“No, not it. Never mind, be still. Be still, and you’ll be all right in the morning.”
“It’s my own fault, for giving in to her. If I’d kept myself back, my liver wouldn’t have broken inside me, and I shouldn’t have been sick. And I knew —”
“Never mind now. Have you drunk your tea? Lie down. Lie down, and go to sleep.”
Lilly pushed Aaron down in the bed, and covered him over. Then he thrust his hands under the bedclothes and felt his feet — still cold. He arranged the water bottle. Then he put another cover on the bed.
Aaron lay still, rather grey and peaked-looking, in a stillness that was not healthy. For some time Lilly went about stealthily, glancing at his patient from time to time. Then he sat down to read.
He was roused after a time by a moaning of troubled breathing and a fretful stirring in the bed. He went across. Aaron’s eyes were open, and dark looking.
“Have a little hot milk,” said Lilly.
Aaron shook his head faintly, not noticing.
“A little Bovril?”
The same faint shake.
Then Lilly wrote a note for the doctor, went into the office on the same landing, and got a clerk, who would be leaving in a few minutes, to call with the note. When he came back he found Aaron still watching.
“Are you here by yourself?” asked the sick man.
“Yes. My wife’s gone to Norway.”
“For good?”
“No,” laughed Lilly. “For a couple of months or so. She’ll come back here: unless she joins me in Switzerland or somewhere.”
Aaron was still for a while.
“You’ve not gone with her,” he said at length.
“To see her people? No, I don’t think they want me very badly — and I didn’t want very badly to go. Why should I? It’s better for married people to be separated sometimes.”
“Ay!” said Aaron, watching the other man with fever-darkened eyes.
“I hate married people who are two in one — stuck together like two jujube lozenges,” said Lilly.
“Me an’ all. I hate ’em myself,” said Aaron.
“Everybody ought to stand by themselves, in the first place — men and women as well. They can come together, in the second place, if they like. But nothing is any good unless each one stands alone, intrinsically.”
“I’m with you there,” said Aaron. “If I’d kep’ myself to myself I shouldn’t be bad now — though I’m not very bad. I s’ll be all right in the morning. But I did myself in when I went with another woman. I felt myself go — as if the bile broke inside me, and I was sick.”
“Josephine seduced you?” laughed Lilly.
“Ay, right enough,” replied Aaron grimly. “She won’t be coming here, will she?”
“Not unless I ask her.”
“You won’t ask her, though?”
“No, not if you don’t want her.”
“I don’t.”
The fever made Aaron naive and communicative, unlike himself. And he knew he was being unlike himself, he knew that he was not in proper control of himself, so he was unhappy, uneasy.
“I’ll stop here the night then, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“You’ll have to,” said Lilly. “I’ve sent for the doctor. I believe you’ve got the flu.”
“Think I have?” said Aaron frightened.
“Don’t be scared,” laughed Lilly.
There was a long pause. Lilly stood at the window looking at the darkening market, beneath the street-lamps.
“I s’ll have to go to the hospital, if I have,” came Aaron’s voice.
“No, if it’s only going to be a week or a fortnight’s business, you can stop here. I’ve nothing to do,” said Lilly.
“There’s no occasion for you to saddle yourself with me,” said Aaron dejectedly.
“You can go to your hospital if you like — or back to your lodging — if you wish to,” said Lilly. “You can make up your mind when you see how you are in the morning.”
“No use going back to my lodgings,” said Aaron.
“I’ll send a telegram to your wife if you like,” said Lilly.
Aaron was silent, dead silent, for some time.
“Nay,” he said at length, in a decided voice. “Not if I die for it.”
Lilly remained still, and the other man lapsed into a sort of semi- sleep, motionless and abandoned. The darkness had fallen over London, and away below the lamps were white.
Lilly lit the green-shaded reading lamp over the desk. Then he stood and looked at Aaron, who lay still, looking sick. Rather beautiful the bones of the countenance: but the skull too small for such a heavy jaw and rather coarse mouth. Aaron half-opened his eyes, and writhed feverishly, as if his limbs could not be in the right place. Lilly mended the fire, and sat down to write. Then he got up and went downstairs to unfasten the street door, so that the doctor could walk up. The business people had gone from their various holes, all the lower part of the tall house was in darkness.
Lilly waited and waited. He boiled an egg and made himself toast. Aaron said he might eat the same. Lilly cooked another egg and took it to the sick man. Aaron looked at it and pushed it away with nausea. He would have some tea. So Lilly gave him tea.
“Not much fun for you, doing this for somebody who is nothing to you,” said Aaron.
“I shouldn’t if you were unsympathetic to me,” said Lilly. “As it is, it’s happened so, and so we’ll let be.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly eight o’clock.”
“Oh, my Lord, the opera.”
And Aaron got half out of bed. But as he sat on the bedside he knew he could not safely get to his feet. He remained a picture of dejection.
“Perhaps we ought to let them know,” said Lilly.
But Aaron, blank with stupid misery, sat huddled there on the bedside without answering.
“Ill run round with a note,” said Lilly. “I suppose others have had flu, besides you. Lie down!”
But Aaron stupidly and dejectedly sat huddled on the side of the bed, wearing old flannel pyjamas of Lilly’s, rather small for him. He felt too sick to move.
“Lie down! Lie down!” said Lilly. “And keep still while I’m gone. I shan’t be more than ten minutes.”
“I don’t care if I die,” said Aaron.
Lilly laughed.
“You’re a long way from dying,” said he, “or you wouldn’t say it.”
But Aaron only looked up at him with queer, far-off, haggard eyes, something like a criminal who is just being executed.
“Lie down!” said Lilly, pushing him gently into the bed. “You won’t improve yourself sitting there, anyhow.”
Aaron lay down, turned away, and was quite still. Lilly quietly left the room on his errand.
The doctor did not come until ten o’clock: and worn out with work when he did come.
“Isn’t there a lift in this establishment?” he said, as he groped his way up the stone stairs. Lilly had heard him, and run down to meet him.
The doctor poked the thermometer under Aaron’s tongue and felt the pulse. Then he asked a few questions: listened to the heart and breathing.
“Yes, it’s the flu,” he said curtly. “Nothing to do but to keep warm in bed and not move, and take plenty of milk and liquid nourishment. I’ll come round in the morning and give you an injection. Lungs are all right so far.”
“How long shall I have to be in bed?” said Aaron.
“Oh — depends. A week at least.”
Aaron watched him sullenly — and hated him. Lilly laughed to himself. The sick man was like a dog that is ill but which growls from a deep corner, and will bite if you put your hand in. He was in a state of black depression.
Lilly settled him down for the night, and himself went to bed. Aaron squirmed with heavy, pained limbs, the night through, and slept and had bad dreams. Lilly got up to give him drinks. The din in the market was terrific before dawn, and Aaron suffered bitterly.
In the morning he was worse. The doctor gave him injections against pneumonia.
“You wouldn’t like me to wire to your wife?” said Lilly.
“No,” said Aaron abruptly. “You can send me to the hospital. I’m nothing but a piece of carrion.”
“Carrion!” said Lilly. “Why?”
“I know it. I feel like it.”
“Oh, that’s only the sort of nauseated feeling you get with flu.”
“I’m only fit to be thrown underground, and made an end of. I can’t stand myself —”
He had a ghastly, grey look of self-repulsion.
“It’s the germ that makes you feel like that,” said Lilly. “It poisons the system for a time. But you’ll work it off.”
At evening he was no better, the fever was still high. Yet there were no complications — except that the heart was irregular.
“The one thing I wonder,” said Lilly, “is whether you hadn’t better be moved out of the noise of the market. It’s fearful for you in the early morning.”
“It makes no difference to me,” said Aaron.
The next day he was a little worse, if anything. The doctor knew there was nothing to be done. At evening he gave the patient a calomel pill. It was rather strong, and Aaron had a bad time. His burning, parched, poisoned inside was twisted and torn. Meanwhile carts banged, porters shouted, all the hell of the market went on outside, away down on the cobble setts. But this time the two men did not hear.
“You’ll feel better now,” said Lilly, “after the operation.”
“It’s done me harm,” cried Aaron fretfully. “Send me to the hospital, or you’ll repent it. Get rid of me in time.”
“Nay,” said Lilly. “You get better. Damn it, you’re only one among a million.”
Again over Aaron’s face went the ghastly grimace of self-repulsion.
“My soul’s gone rotten,” he said.
“No,” said Lilly. “Only toxin in the blood.”
Next day the patient seemed worse, and the heart more irregular. He rested badly. So far, Lilly had got a fair night’s rest. Now Aaron was not sleeping, and he seemed to struggle in the bed.
“Keep your courage up, man,” said the doctor sharply. “You give way.”
Aaron looked at him blackly, and did not answer.
In the night Lilly was up time after time. Aaron would slip down on his back, and go semi-conscious. And then he would awake, as if drowning, struggling to move, mentally shouting aloud, yet making no sound for some moments, mentally shouting in frenzy, but unable to stir or make a sound. When at last he got some sort of physical control he cried: “Lift me up! Lift me up!”
Lilly hurried and lifted him up, and he sat panting with a sobbing motion, his eyes gloomy and terrified, more than ever like a criminal who is just being executed. He drank brandy, and was laid down on his side.
“Don’t let me lie on my back,” he said, terrified. “No, I won’t,” said Lilly. Aaron frowned curiously on his nurse. “Mind you don’t let me,” he said, exacting and really terrified.
“No, I won’t let you.”
And now Lilly was continually crossing over and pulling Aaron on to his side, whenever he found him slipped down on his back.
In the morning the doctor was puzzled. Probably it was the toxin in the blood which poisoned the heart. There was no pneumonia. And yet Aaron was clearly growing worse. The doctor agreed to send in a nurse for the coming night.
“What’s the matter with you, man!” he said sharply to his patient. “You give way! You give way! Can’t you pull yourself together?”
But Aaron only became more gloomily withheld, retracting from life. And Lilly began to be really troubled. He got a friend to sit with the patient in the afternoon, whilst he himself went out and arranged to sleep in Aaron’s room, at his lodging.
The next morning, when he came in, he found the patient lying as ever, in a sort of heap in the bed. Nurse had had to lift him up and hold him up again. And now Aaron lay in a sort of semi-stupor of fear, frustrated anger, misery and self-repulsion: a sort of interlocked depression.
The doctor frowned when he came. He talked with the nurse, and wrote another prescription. Then he drew Lilly away to the door.
“What’s the matter with the fellow?” he said. “Can’t you rouse his spirit? He seems to be sulking himself out of life. He’ll drop out quite suddenly, you know, if he goes on like this. Can’t you rouse him up?”
“I think it depresses him partly that his bowels won’t work. It frightens him. He’s never been ill in his life before,” said Lilly.
“His bowels won’t work if he lets all his spirit go, like an animal dying of the sulks,” said the doctor impatiently. “He might go off quite suddenly — dead before you can turn round —”
Lilly was properly troubled. Yet he did not quite know what to do. It was early afternoon, and the sun was shining into the room. There were daffodils and anemones in a jar, and freezias and violets. Down below in the market were two stalls of golden and blue flowers, gay.
“The flowers are lovely in the spring sunshine,” said Lilly. “I wish I were in the country, don’t you? As soon as you are better we’ll go. It’s been a terrible cold, wet spring. But now it’s going to be nice. Do you like being in the country?”
“Yes,” said Aaron.
He was thinking of his garden. He loved it. Never in his life had he been away from a garden before.
“Make haste and get better, and we’ll go.”
“Where?” said Aaron.
“Hampshire. Or Berkshire. Or perhaps you’d like to go home? Would you?”
Aaron lay still, and did not answer.
“Perhaps you want to, and you don’t want to,” said Lilly. “You can please yourself, anyhow.”
There was no getting anything definite out of the sick man — his soul seemed stuck, as if it would not move.
Suddenly Lilly rose and went to the dressing-table.
“I’m going to rub you with oil,” he said. “I’m going to rub you as mothers do their babies whose bowels don’t work.”
Aaron frowned slightly as he glanced at the dark, self-possessed face of the little man.
“What’s the good of that?” he said irritably. “I’d rather be left alone.”
“Then you won’t be.”
Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body — the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then Aaron was covered up again, and Lilly sat down in fatigue to look at his patient.
He saw a change. The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face. Aaron was regaining himself. But Lilly said nothing. He watched his patient fall into a proper sleep.
And he sat and watched him sleep. And he thought to himself: “I wonder why I do it. I wonder why I bother with him. . . . Jim ought to have taught me my lesson. As soon as this man’s really better he’ll punch me in the wind, metaphorically if not actually, for having interfered with him. And Tanny would say, he was quite right to do it. She says I want power over them. What if I do? They don’t care how much power the mob has over them, the nation, Lloyd George and Northcliffe and the police and money. They’ll yield themselves up to that sort of power quickly enough, and immolate themselves pro bono publico by the million. And what’s the bonum publicum but a mob power? Why can’t they submit to a bit of healthy individual authority? The fool would die, without me: just as that fool Jim will die in hysterics one day. Why does he last so long!
“Tanny’s the same. She does nothing really but resist me: my authority, or my influence, or just ME. At the bottom of her heart she just blindly and persistently opposes me. God knows what it is she opposes: just me myself. She thinks I want her to submit to me. So I do, in a measure natural to our two selves. Somewhere, she ought to submit to me. But they all prefer to kick against the pricks. Not that THEY get many pricks. I get them. Damn them all, why don’t I leave them alone? They only grin and feel triumphant when they’ve insulted one and punched one in the wind.
“This Aaron will do just the same. I like him, and he ought to like me. And he’ll be another Jim: he WILL like me, if he can knock the wind out of me. A lot of little Stavrogins coming up to whisper affectionately, and biting one’s ear.
“But anyhow I can soon see the last of this chap: and him the last of all the rest. I’ll be damned for ever if I see their Jims and Roberts and Julias and Scotts any more. Let them dance round their insipid hell-broth. Thin tack it is.
“There’s a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they’ve exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for — they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics — even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers — the American races — and the South Sea Islanders — the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven — Europeans, Asiatics, Africans — everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases.
“Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself on his own pride.
“I suppose really I ought to have packed this Aaron off to the hospital. Instead of which here am I rubbing him with oil to rub the life into him. And I KNOW he’ll bite me, like a warmed snake, the moment he recovers. And Tanny will say ‘Quite right, too,’ I shouldn’t have been so intimate. No, I should have left it to mechanical doctors and nurses.
“So I should. Everything to its own. And Aaron belongs to this little system, and Jim is waiting to be psychoanalysed, and Tanny is waiting for her own glorification.
“All right, Aaron. Last time I break my bread for anybody, this is. So get better, my flautist, so that I can go away.
“It was easy for the Red Indians and the Others to take their hook into death. They might have stayed a bit longer to help one to defy the white masses.
“I’ll make some tea —”
Lilly rose softly and went across to the fire. He had to cross a landing to a sort of little lavatory, with a sink and a tap, for water. The clerks peeped out at him from an adjoining office and nodded. He nodded, and disappeared from their sight as quickly as possible, with his kettle. His dark eyes were quick, his dark hair was untidy, there was something silent and withheld about him. People could never approach him quite ordinarily.
He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid.
His face was dark and hollow, he seemed frail, sitting there in the London afternoon darning the black woollen socks. His full brow was knitted slightly, there was a tension. At the same time, there was an indomitable stillness about him, as it were in the atmosphere about him. His hands, though small, were not very thin. He bit off the wool as he finished his darn.
As he was making the tea he saw Aaron rouse up in bed.
“I’ve been to sleep. I feel better,” said the patient, turning round to look what the other man was doing. And the sight of the water steaming in a jet from the teapot seemed attractive.
“Yes,” said Lilly. “You’ve slept for a good two hours.”
“I believe I have,” said Aaron.
“Would you like a little tea?”
“Ay — and a bit of toast.”
“You’re not supposed to have solid food. Let me take your temperature.”
The temperature was down to a hundred, and Lilly, in spite of the doctor, gave Aaron a piece of toast with his tea, enjoining him not to mention it to the nurse.
In the evening the two men talked.
“You do everything for yourself, then?” said Aaron.
“Yes, I prefer it.”
“You like living all alone?”
“I don’t know about that. I never have lived alone. Tanny and I have been very much alone in various countries: but that’s two, not one.”
“You miss her then?”
“Yes, of course. I missed her horribly in the cottage, when she’d first gone. I felt my heart was broken. But here, where we’ve never been together, I don’t notice it so much.”
“She’ll come back,” said Aaron.
“Yes, she’ll come back. But I’d rather meet her abroad than here — and get on a different footing.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s something with marriage altogether, I think. Egoisme a deux —”
“What’s that mean?”
“Egoisme a deux ? Two people, one egoism. Marriage is a self- conscious egoistic state, it seems to me.”
“You’ve got no children?” said Aaron.
“No. Tanny wants children badly. I don’t. I’m thankful we have none.”
“Why?”
“I can’t quite say. I think of them as a burden. Besides, there ARE such millions and billions of children in the world. And we know well enough what sort of millions and billions of people they’ll grow up into. I don’t want to add my quota to the mass — it’s against my instinct —”
“Ay!” laughed Aaron, with a curt acquiescence.
“Tanny’s furious. But then, when a woman has got children, she thinks the world wags only for them and her. Nothing else. The whole world wags for the sake of the children — and their sacred mother.”
“Ay, that’s DAMNED true,” said Aaron.
“And myself, I’m sick of the children stunt. Children are all right, so long as you just take them for what they are: young immature things like kittens and half-grown dogs, nuisances, sometimes very charming. But I’ll be hanged if I can see anything high and holy about children. I should be sorry, too, it would be so bad for the children. Young brats, tiresome and amusing in turns.”
“When they don’t give themselves airs,” said Aaron,
“Yes, indeed. Which they do half the time. Sacred children, and sacred motherhood, I’m absolutely fed stiff by it. That’s why I’m thankful I have no children. Tanny can’t come it over me there.”
“It’s a fact. When a woman’s got her children, by God, she’s a bitch in the manger. You can starve while she sits on the hay. It’s useful to keep her pups warm.”
“Yes.”
“Why, you know,” Aaron turned excitedly in the bed, “they look on a man as if he was nothing but an instrument to get and rear children. If you have anything to do with a woman, she thinks it’s because you want to get children by her. And I’m damned if it is. I want my own pleasure, or nothing: and children be damned.”
“Ah, women — THEY must be loved, at any price!” said Lilly. “And if you just don’t want to love them — and tell them so — what a crime.”
“A crime!” said Aaron. “They make a criminal of you. Them and their children be cursed. Is my life given me for nothing but to get children, and work to bring them up? See them all in hell first. They’d better die while they’re children, if childhood’s all that important.”
“I quite agree,” said Lilly. “If childhood is more important than manhood, then why live to be a man at all? Why not remain an infant?”
“Be damned and blasted to women and all their importances,” cried Aaron. “They want to get you under, and children is their chief weapon.”
“Men have got to stand up to the fact that manhood is more than childhood — and then force women to admit it,” said Lilly. “But the rotten whiners, they’re all grovelling before a baby’s napkin and a woman’s petticoat.”
“It’s a fact,” said Aaron. But he glanced at Lilly oddly, as if suspiciously. And Lilly caught the look. But he continued:
“And if they think you try to stand on your legs and walk with the feet of manhood, why, there isn’t a blooming father and lover among them but will do his best to get you down and suffocate you — either with a baby’s napkin or a woman’s petticoat.”
Lilly’s lips were curling; he was dark and bitter.
“Ay, it is like that,” said Aaron, rather subduedly.
“The man’s spirit has gone out of the world. Men can’t move an inch unless they can grovel humbly at the end of the journey.”
“No,” said Aaron, watching with keen, half-amused eyes.
“That’s why marriage wants readjusting — or extending — to get men on to their own legs once more, and to give them the adventure again. But men won’t stick together and fight for it. Because once a woman has climbed up with her children, she’ll find plenty of grovellers ready to support her and suffocate any defiant spirit. And women will sacrifice eleven men, fathers, husbands, brothers and lovers, for one baby — or for her own female self-conceit —”
“She will that,” said Aaron.
“And can you find two men to stick together, without feeling criminal, and without cringing, and without betraying one another? You can’t. One is sure to go fawning round some female, then they both enjoy giving each other away, and doing a new grovel before a woman again.”
“Ay,” said Aaron.
After which Lilly was silent.
“One is a fool,” said Lilly, “to be lachrymose. The thing to do is to get a move on.”
Aaron looked up with a glimpse of a smile. The two men were sitting before the fire at the end of a cold, wet April day: Aaron convalescent, somewhat chastened in appearance.
“Ay,” he said rather sourly. “A move back to Guilford Street.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” said Lilly. “I was reading an old Baden history. They made a law in 1528 — not a law, but a regulation — that: if a man forsakes his wife and children, as now so often happens, the said wife and children are at once to be dispatched after him. I thought that would please you. Does it?”
“Yes,” said Aaron briefly.
“They would have arrived the next day, like a forwarded letter.”
“I should have had to get a considerable move on, at that rate,” grinned Aaron.
“Oh, no. You might quite like them here.” But Lilly saw the white frown of determined revulsion on the convalescent’s face.
“Wouldn’t you?” he asked.
Aaron shook his head.
“No,” he said. And it was obvious he objected to the topic. “What are you going to do about your move on?”
“Me!” said Lilly. “I’m going to sail away next week — or steam dirtily away on a tramp called the Maud Allen Wing .”
“Where to?”
“Malta.”
“Where from?”
“London Dock. I fixed up my passage this morning for ten pounds. I am cook’s assistant, signed on.”
Aaron looked at him with a little admiration.
“You can take a sudden jump, can’t you?” he said.
“The difficulty is to refrain from jumping: overboard or anywhere.”
Aaron smoked his pipe slowly.
“And what good will Malta do you?” he asked, envious.
“Heaven knows. I shall cross to Syracuse, and move up Italy.”
“Sounds as if you were a millionaire.”
“I’ve got thirty-five pounds in all the world. But something will come along.”
“I’ve got more than that,” said Aaron.
“Good for you,” replied Lilly.
He rose and went to the cupboard, taking out a bowl and a basket of potatoes. He sat down again, paring the potatoes. His busy activity annoyed Aaron.
“But what’s the good of going to Malta? Shall YOU be any different in yourself, in another place? You’ll be the same there as you are here.”
“How am I here?”
“Why, you’re all the time grinding yourself against something inside you. You’re never free. You’re never content. You never stop chafing.”
Lilly dipped his potato into the water, and cut out the eyes carefully. Then he cut it in two, and dropped it in the clean water of the second bowl. He had not expected this criticism.
“Perhaps I don’t,” said he.
“Then what’s the use of going somewhere else? You won’t change yourself.”
“I may in the end,” said Lilly.
“You’ll be yourself, whether it’s Malta or London,” said Aaron.
“There’s a doom for me,” laughed Lilly. The water on the fire was boiling. He rose and threw in salt, then dropped in the potatoes with little plops. “There there are lots of mes. I’m not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man. Otherwise you’d have stayed in your old place with your family.”
“The man in the middle of you doesn’t change,” said Aaron.
“Do you find it so?” said Lilly.
“Ay. Every time.”
“Then what’s to be done?”
“Nothing, as far as I can see. You get as much amusement out of life as possible, and there’s the end of it.”
“All right then, I’ll get the amusement.”
“Ay, all right then,” said Aaron. “But there isn’t anything wonderful about it. You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren’t. You’re no more than a man who drops into a pub for a drink, to liven himself up a bit. Only you give it a lot of names, and make out as if you were looking for the philosopher’s stone, or something like that. When you’re only killing time like the rest of folks, before time kills you.”
Lilly did not answer. It was not yet seven o’clock, but the sky was dark. Aaron sat in the firelight. Even the saucepan on the fire was silent. Darkness, silence, the firelight in the upper room, and the two men together.
“It isn’t quite true,” said Lilly, leaning on the mantelpiece and staring down into the fire.
“Where isn’t it? You talk, and you make a man believe you’ve got something he hasn’t got? But where is it, when it comes to? What have you got, more than me or Jim Bricknell! Only a bigger choice of words, it seems to me.”
Lilly was motionless and inscrutable like a shadow.
“Does it, Aaron!” he said, in a colorless voice.
“Yes. What else is there to it?” Aaron sounded testy.
“Why,” said Lilly at last, “there’s something. I agree, it’s true what you say about me. But there’s a bit of something else. There’s just a bit of something in me, I think, which ISN’T a man running into a pub for a drink —”
“And what —?”
The question fell into the twilight like a drop of water falling down a deep shaft into a well.
“I think a man may come into possession of his own soul at last — as the Buddhists teach — but without ceasing to love, or even to hate. One loves, one hates — but somewhere beyond it all, one understands, and possesses one’s soul in patience and in peace —”
“Yes,” said Aaron slowly, “while you only stand and talk about it. But when you’ve got no chance to talk about it — and when you’ve got to live — you don’t possess your soul, neither in patience nor in peace, but any devil that likes possesses you and does what it likes with you, while you fridge yourself and fray yourself out like a worn rag.”
“I don’t care,” said Lilly, “I’m learning to possess my soul in patience and in peace, and I know it. And it isn’t a negative Nirvana either. And if Tanny possesses her own soul in patience and peace as well — and if in this we understand each other at last — then there we are, together and apart at the same time, and free of each other, and eternally inseparable. I have my Nirvana — and I have it all to myself. But more than that. It coincides with her Nirvana.”
“Ah, yes,” said Aaron. “But I don’t understand all that word- splitting.”
“I do, though. You learn to be quite alone, and possess your own soul in isolation — and at the same time, to be perfectly WITH someone else — that’s all I ask.”
“Sort of sit on a mountain top, back to back with somebody else, like a couple of idols.”
“No — because it isn’t a case of sitting — or a case of back to back. It’s what you get to after a lot of fighting and a lot of sensual fulfilment. And it never does away with the fighting and with the sensual passion. It flowers on top of them, and it would never flower save on top of them.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“The possessing one’s own soul — and the being together with someone else in silence, beyond speech.”
“And you’ve got them?”
“I’ve got a BIT of the real quietness inside me.”
“So has a dog on a mat.”
“So I believe, too.”
“Or a man in a pub.”
“Which I don’t believe.”
“You prefer the dog?”
“Maybe.”
There was silence for a few moments.
“And I’m the man in the pub,” said Aaron.
“You aren’t the dog on the mat, anyhow,”
“And you’re the idol on the mountain top, worshipping yourself.”
“You talk to me like a woman, Aaron.”
“How do you talk to ME, do you think?”
“How do I?”
“Are the potatoes done?”
Lilly turned quickly aside, and switched on the electric light. Everything changed. Aaron sat still before the fire, irritated. Lilly went about preparing the supper.
The room was pleasant at night. Two tall, dark screens hid the two beds. In front, the piano was littered with music, the desk littered with papers. Lilly went out on to the landing, and set the chops to grill on the gas stove. Hastily he put a small table on the hearth- rug, spread it with a blue-and-white cloth, set plates and glasses. Aaron did not move. It was not his nature to concern himself with domestic matters — and Lilly did it best alone.
The two men had an almost uncanny understanding of one another — like brothers. They came from the same district, from the same class. Each might have been born into the other’s circumstance. Like brothers, there was a profound hostility between them. But hostility is not antipathy.
Lilly’s skilful housewifery always irritated Aaron: it was so self- sufficient. But most irritating of all was the little man’s unconscious assumption of priority. Lilly was actually unaware that he assumed this quiet predominance over others. He mashed the potatoes, he heated the plates, he warmed the red wine, he whisked eggs into the milk pudding, and served his visitor like a housemaid. But none of this detracted from the silent assurance with which he bore himself, and with which he seemed to domineer over his acquaintance.
At last the meal was ready. Lilly drew the curtains, switched off the central light, put the green-shaded electric lamp on the table, and the two men drew up to the meal. It was good food, well cooked and hot. Certainly Lilly’s hands were no longer clean: but it was clean dirt, as he said.
Aaron sat in the low arm-chair at table. So his face was below, in the full light. Lilly sat high on a small chair, so that his face was in the green shadow. Aaron was handsome, and always had that peculiar well-dressed look of his type. Lilly was indifferent to his own appearance, and his collar was a rag.
So the two men ate in silence. They had been together alone for a fortnight only: but it was like a small eternity. Aaron was well now — only he suffered from the depression and the sort of fear that follows influenza.
“When are you going?” he asked irritably, looking up at Lilly, whose face hovered in that green shadow above, and worried him.
“One day next week. They’ll send me a telegram. Not later than Thursday.”
“You’re looking forward to going?” The question was half bitter.
“Yes. I want to get a new tune out of myself.”
“Had enough of this?”
“Yes.”
A flush of anger came on Aaron’s face.
“You’re easily on, and easily off,” he said, rather insulting.
“Am I?” said Lilly. “What makes you think so?”
“Circumstances,” replied Aaron sourly.
To which there was no answer. The host cleared away the plates, and put the pudding on the table. He pushed the bowl to Aaron.
“I suppose I shall never see you again, once you’ve gone,” said Aaron.
“It’s your choice. I will leave you an address.”
After this, the pudding was eaten in silence.
“Besides, Aaron,” said Lilly, drinking his last sip of wine, “what do you care whether you see me again or not? What do you care whether you see anybody again or not? You want to be amused. And now you’re irritated because you think I am not going to amuse you any more: and you don’t know who is going to amuse you. I admit it’s a dilemma. But it’s a hedonistic dilemma of the commonest sort.”
“I don’t know hedonistic. And supposing I am as you say — are you any different?”
“No, I’m not very different. But I always persuade myself there’s a bit of difference. Do you know what Josephine Ford confessed to me? She’s had her lovers enough. ‘There isn’t any such thing as love, Lilly,’ she said. ‘Men are simply afraid to be alone. That is absolutely all there is in it: fear of being alone.’”
“What by that?” said Aaron.
“You agree?”
“Yes, on the whole.”
“So do I— on the whole. And then I asked her what about woman. And then she said with a woman it wasn’t fear, it was just boredom. A woman is like a violinist: any fiddle, any instrument rather than empty hands and no tune going.”
“Yes — what I said before: getting as much amusement out of life as possible,” said Aaron.
“You amuse me — and I’ll amuse you.”
“Yes — just about that.”
“All right, Aaron,” said Lilly. “I’m not going to amuse you, or try to amuse you any more.”
“Going to try somebody else; and Malta.”
“Malta, anyhow.”
“Oh, and somebody else — in the next five minutes.”
“Yes — that also.”
“Goodbye and good luck to you.”
“Goodbye and good luck to you, Aaron.”
With which Lilly went aside to wash the dishes. Aaron sat alone under the zone of light, turning over a score of Pelleas . Though the noise of London was around them, it was far below, and in the room was a deep silence. Each of the men seemed invested in his own silence.
Aaron suddenly took his flute, and began trying little passages from the opera on his knee. He had not played since his illness. The noise came out a little tremulous, but low and sweet. Lilly came forward with a plate and a cloth in his hand.
“Aaron’s rod is putting forth again,” he said, smiling.
“What?” said Aaron, looking up.
“I said Aaron’s rod is putting forth again.”
“What rod?”
“Your flute, for the moment.”
“It’s got to put forth my bread and butter.”
“Is that all the buds it’s going to have?”
“What else!”
“Nay — that’s for you to show. What flowers do you imagine came out of the rod of Moses’s brother?”
“Scarlet runners, I should think if he’d got to live on them.”
“Scarlet enough, I’ll bet.”
Aaron turned unnoticing back to his music. Lilly finished the wiping of the dishes, then took a book and sat on the other side of the table.
“It’s all one to you, then,” said Aaron suddenly, “whether we ever see one another again?”
“Not a bit,” said Lilly, looking up over his spectacles. “I very much wish there might be something that held us together.”
“Then if you wish it, why isn’t there?”
“You might wish your flute to put out scarlet-runner flowers at the joints.”
“Ay — I might. And it would be all the same.”
The moment of silence that followed was extraordinary in its hostility.
“Oh, we shall run across one another again some time,” said Aaron.
“Sure,” said Lilly. “More than that: I’ll write you an address that will always find me. And when you write I will answer you.”
He took a bit of paper and scribbled an address. Aaron folded it and put it into his waistcoat pocket. It was an Italian address.
“But how can I live in Italy?” he said. “You can shift about. I’m tied to a job.”
“You — with your budding rod, your flute — and your charm — you can always do as you like.”
“My what?”
“Your flute and your charm.”
“What charm?”
“Just your own. Don’t pretend you don’t know you’ve got it. I don’t really like charm myself; too much of a trick about it. But whether or not, you’ve got it.”
“It’s news to me.”
“Not it.”
“Fact, it is.”
“Ha! Somebody will always take a fancy to you. And you can live on that, as well as on anything else.”
“Why do you always speak so despisingly?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Have you any right to despise another man?”
“When did it go by rights?”
“No, not with you.”
“You answer me like a woman, Aaron.”
Again there was a space of silence. And again it was Aaron who at last broke it.
“We’re in different positions, you and me,” he said.
“How?”
“You can live by your writing — but I’ve got to have a job.”
“Is that all?” said Lilly.
“Ay. And plenty. You’ve got the advantage of me.”
“Quite,” said Lilly. “But why? I was a dirty-nosed little boy when you were a clean-nosed little boy. And I always had more patches on my breeches than you: neat patches, too, my poor mother! So what’s the good of talking about advantages? You had the start. And at this very moment you could buy me up, lock, stock, and barrel. So don’t feel hard done by. It’s a lie.”
“You’ve got your freedom.”
“I make it and I take it.”
“Circumstances make it for you.”
“As you like.”
“You don’t do a man justice,” said Aaron.
“Does a man care?”
“He might.”
“Then he’s no man.”
“Thanks again, old fellow.”
“Welcome,” said Lilly, grimacing.
Again Aaron looked at him, baffled, almost with hatred. Lilly grimaced at the blank wall opposite, and seemed to ruminate. Then he went back to his book. And no sooner had he forgotten Aaron, reading the fantasies of a certain Leo Frobenius, than Aaron must stride in again.
“You can’t say there isn’t a difference between your position and mine,” he said pertinently.
Lilly looked darkly over his spectacles.
“No, by God,” he said. “I should be in a poor way otherwise.”
“You can’t say you haven’t the advantage — your JOB gives you the advantage.”
“All right. Then leave it out with my job, and leave me alone.”
“That’s your way of dodging it.”
“My dear Aaron, I agree with you perfectly. There is no difference between us, save the fictitious advantage given to me by my job. Save for my job — which is to write lies — Aaron and I are two identical little men in one and the same little boat. Shall we leave it at that, now?”
“Yes,” said Aaron. “That’s about it.”
“Let us shake hands on it — and go to bed, my dear chap. You are just recovering from influenza, and look paler than I like.”
“You mean you want to be rid of me,” said Aaron.
“Yes, I do mean that,” said Lilly.
“Ay,” said Aaron.
And after a few minutes more staring at the score of Pelleas , he rose, put the score away on the piano, laid his flute beside it, and retired behind the screen. In silence, the strange dim noise of London sounding from below, Lilly read on about the Kabyles. His soul had the faculty of divesting itself of the moment, and seeking further, deeper interests. These old Africans! And Atlantis! Strange, strange wisdom of the Kabyles! Old, old dark Africa, and the world before the flood! How jealous Aaron seemed! The child of a jealous God. A jealous God! Could any race be anything but despicable, with such an antecedent?
But no, persistent as a jealous God himself, Aaron reappeared in his pyjamas, and seated himself in his chair.
“What is the difference then between you and me, Lilly?” he said.
“Haven’t we shaken hands on it — a difference of jobs.”
“You don’t believe that, though, do you?”
“Nay, now I reckon you’re trespassing.”
“Why am I? I know you don’t believe it.”
“What do I believe then?” said Lilly.
“You believe you know something better than me — and that you are something better than me. Don’t you?”
“Do YOU believe it?”
“What?”
“That I AM something better than you, and that I KNOW something better?”
“No, because I don’t see it,” said Aaron.
“Then if you don’t see it, it isn’t there. So go to bed and sleep the sleep of the just and the convalescent. I am not to be badgered any more.”
“Am I badgering you?” said Aaron.
“Indeed you are.”
“So I’m in the wrong again?”
“Once more, my dear.”
“You’re a God-Almighty in your way, you know.”
“So long as I’m not in anybody else’s way — Anyhow, you’d be much better sleeping the sleep of the just. And I’m going out for a minute or two. Don’t catch cold there with nothing on —
“I want to catch the post,” he added, rising.
Aaron looked up at him quickly. But almost before there was time to speak, Lilly had slipped into his hat and coat, seized his letters, and gone.
It was a rainy night. Lilly turned down King Street to walk to Charing Cross. He liked being out of doors. He liked to post his letters at Charing Cross post office. He did not want to talk to Aaron any more. He was glad to be alone.
He walked quickly down Villiers Street to the river, to see it flowing blackly towards the sea. It had an endless fascination for him: never failed to soothe him and give him a sense of liberty. He liked the night, the dark rain, the river, and even the traffic. He enjoyed the sense of friction he got from the streaming of people who meant nothing to him. It was like a fox slipping alert among unsuspecting cattle.
When he got back, he saw in the distance the lights of a taxi standing outside the building where he lived, and heard a thumping and hallooing. He hurried forward.
It was a man called Herbertson.
“Oh, why, there you are!” exclaimed Herbertson, as Lilly drew near. “Can I come up and have a chat?”
“I’ve got that man who’s had flu. I should think he is gone to bed.”
“Oh!” The disappointment was plain. “Well, look here I’ll just come up for a couple of minutes.” He laid his hand on Lilly’s arm. “I heard you were going away. Where are you going?”
“Malta.”
“Malta! Oh, I know Malta very well. Well now, it’ll be all right if I come up for a minute? I’m not going to see much more of you, apparently.” He turned quickly to the taxi. “What is it on the clock?”
The taxi was paid, the two men went upstairs. Aaron was in bed, but he called as Lilly entered the room.
“Hullo!” said Lilly. “Not asleep? Captain Herbertson has come in for a minute.”
“Hope I shan’t disturb you,” said Captain Herbertson, laying down his stick and gloves, and his cap. He was in uniform. He was one of the few surviving officers of the Guards, a man of about forty-five, good- looking, getting rather stout. He settled himself in the chair where Aaron had sat, hitching up his trousers. The gold identity plate, with its gold chain, fell conspicuously over his wrist.
“Been to ‘Rosemary,’” he said. “Rotten play, you know — but passes the time awfully well. Oh, I quite enjoyed it.”
Lilly offered him Sauterne — the only thing in the house.
“Oh, yes! How awfully nice! Yes, thanks, I shall love it. Can I have it with soda? Thanks! Do you know, I think that’s the very best drink in the tropics: sweet white wine, with soda? Yes — well!— Well — now, why are you going away?”
“For a change,” said Lilly.
“You’re quite right, one needs a change now the damned thing is all over. As soon as I get out of khaki I shall be off. Malta! Yes! I’ve been in Malta several times. I think Valletta is quite enjoyable, particularly in winter, with the opera. Oh — er — how’s your wife? All right? Yes!— glad to see her people again. Bound to be — Oh, by the way, I met Jim Bricknell. Sends you a message hoping you’ll go down and stay — down at Captain Bingham’s place in Surrey, you know. Awfully queer lot down there. Not my sort, no. You won’t go down? No, I shouldn’t. Not the right sort of people.”
Herbertson rattled away, rather spasmodic. He had been through the very front hell of the war — and like every man who had, he had the war at the back of his mind, like an obsession. But in the meantime, he skirmished.
“Yes. I was on guard one day when the Queen gave one of her tea- parties to the blind. Awful affair. But the children are awfully nice children. Prince of Wales awfully nice, almost too nice. Prince Henry smart boy, too — oh, a smart boy. Queen Mary poured the tea, and I handed round bread and butter. She told me I made a very good waiter. I said, Thank you, Madam. But I like the children. Very different from the Battenbergs. Oh!—” he wrinkled his nose. “I can’t stand the Battenbergs.”
“Mount Battens,” said Lilly.
“Yes! Awful mistake, changing the royal name. They were Guelfs, why not remain it? Why, I’ll tell you what Battenberg did. He was in the Guards, too —”
The talk flowed on: about royalty and the Guards, Buckingham Palace and St. James.
“Rather a nice story about Queen Victoria. Man named Joyce, something or other, often used to dine at the Palace. And he was an awfully good imitator — really clever, you know. Used to imitate the Queen. ‘Mr. Joyce,’ she said, ‘I hear your imitation is very amusing. Will you do it for us now, and let us see what it is like?’ ‘Oh, no, Madam! I’m afraid I couldn’t do it now. I’m afraid I’m not in the humour.’ But she would have him do it. And it was really awfully funny. He had to do it. You know what he did. He used to take a table-napkin, and put it on with one corner over his forehead, and the rest hanging down behind, like her veil thing. And then he sent for the kettle-lid. He always had the kettle-lid, for that little crown of hers. And then he impersonated her. But he was awfully good — so clever. ‘Mr. Joyce,’ she said. ‘We are not amused. Please leave the room.’ Yes, that is exactly what she said: ‘WE are not amused — please leave the room.’ I like the WE, don’t you? And he a man of sixty or so. However, he left the room and for a fortnight or so he wasn’t invited — Wasn’t she wonderful — Queen Victoria?”
And so, by light transitions, to the Prince of Wales at the front, and thus into the trenches. And then Herbertson was on the subject he was obsessed by. He had come, unconsciously, for this and this only, to talk war to Lilly: or at Lilly. For the latter listened and watched, and said nothing. As a man at night helplessly takes a taxi to find some woman, some prostitute, Herbertson had almost unthinkingly got into a taxi and come battering at the door in Covent Garden, only to talk war to Lilly, whom he knew very little. But it was a driving instinct — to come and get it off his chest.
And on and on he talked, over his wine and soda. He was not conceited — he was not showing off — far from it. It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn’t know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear.
In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover.
“I used to be awfully frightened,” laughed Herbertson. “Now you say, Lilly, you’d never have stood it. But you would. You’re nervous — and it was just the nervous ones that did stand it. When nearly all our officers were gone, we had a man come out — a man called Margeritson, from India — big merchant people out there. They all said he was no good — not a bit of good — nervous chap. No good at all. But when you had to get out of the trench and go for the Germans he was perfect — perfect — It all came to him then, at the crisis, and he was perfect.
“Some things frighten one man, and some another. Now shells would never frighten me. But I couldn’t stand bombs. You could tell the difference between our machines and the Germans. Ours was a steady noise — drrrrrrrr!— but their’s was heavy, drrrrRURUrrrrRURU!— My word, that got on my nerves. . . .
“No I was never hit. The nearest thing was when I was knocked down by an exploding shell — several times that — you know. When you shout like mad for the men to come and dig you out, under all the earth. And my word, you do feel frightened then.” Herbertson laughed with a twinkling motion to Lilly. But between his brows there was a tension like madness.
“And a funny thing you know — how you don’t notice things. In — let me see — 1916, the German guns were a lot better than ours. Ours were old, and when they’re old you can’t tell where they’ll hit: whether they’ll go beyond the mark, or whether they’ll fall short. Well, this day our guns were firing short, and killing our own men. We’d had the order to charge, and were running forward, and I suddenly felt hot water spurting on my neck —” He put his hand to the back of his neck and glanced round apprehensively. “It was a chap called Innes — Oh, an awfully decent sort — people were in the Argentine. He’d been calling out to me as we were running, and I was just answering. When I felt this hot water on my neck and saw him running past me with no head — he’d got no head, and he went running past me. I don’t know how far, but a long way. . . . Blood, you know — Yes — well —
“Oh, I hated Chelsea — I loathed Chelsea — Chelsea was purgatory to me. I had a corporal called Wallace — he was a fine chap — oh, he was a fine chap — six foot two — and about twenty-four years old. He was my stand- back. Oh, I hated Chelsea, and parades, and drills. You know, when it’s drill, and you’re giving orders, you forget what order you’ve just given — in front of the Palace there the crowd don’t notice — but it’s AWFUL for you. And you know you daren’t look round to see what the men are doing. But Wallace was splendid. He was just behind me, and I’d hear him, quite quiet you know, ‘It’s right wheel, sir.’ Always perfect, always perfect — yes — well. . . .
“You know you don’t get killed if you don’t think you will. Now I never thought I should get killed. And I never knew a man get killed if he hadn’t been thinking he would. I said to Wallace I’d rather be out here, at the front, than at Chelsea. I hated Chelsea — I can’t tell you how much. ‘Oh no, sir!’ he said. ‘I’d rather be at Chelsea than here. I’d rather be at Chelsea. There isn’t hell like this at Chelsea.’ We’d had orders that we were to go back to the real camp the next day. ‘Never mind, Wallace,’ I said. ‘We shall be out of this hell-on-earth tomorrow.’ And he took my hand. We weren’t much for showing feeling or anything in the guards. But he took my hand. And we climbed out to charge — Poor fellow, he was killed —” Herbertson dropped his head, and for some moments seemed to go unconscious, as if struck. Then he lifted his face, and went on in the same animated chatty fashion: “You see, he had a presentiment. I’m sure he had a presentiment. None of the men got killed unless they had a presentiment — like that, you know. . . .”
Herbertson nodded keenly at Lilly, with his sharp, twinkling, yet obsessed eyes. Lilly wondered why he made the presentiment responsible for the death — which he obviously did — and not vice versa. Herbertson implied every time, that you’d never get killed if you could keep yourself from having a presentiment. Perhaps there was something in it. Perhaps the soul issues its own ticket of death, when it can stand no more. Surely life controls life: and not accident.
“It’s a funny thing what shock will do. We had a sergeant and he shouted to me. Both his feet were off — both his feet, clean at the ankle. I gave him morphia. You know officers aren’t allowed to use the needle — might give the man blood poisoning. You give those tabloids. They say they act in a few minutes, but they DON’T. It’s a quarter of an hour. And nothing is more demoralising than when you have a man, wounded, you know, and crying out. Well, this man I gave him the morphia before he got over the stunning, you know. So he didn’t feel the pain. Well, they carried him in. I always used to like to look after my men. So I went next morning and I found he hadn’t been removed to the Clearing Station. I got hold of the doctor and I said, ‘Look here! Why hasn’t this man been taken to the Clearing Station?’ I used to get excited. But after some years they’d got used to me. ‘Don’t get excited, Herbertson, the man’s dying.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘he’s just been talking to me as strong as you are.’ And he had — he’d talk as strong and well as you or me, then go quiet for a bit. I said I gave him the morphia before he came round from the stunning. So he’d felt nothing. But in two hours he was dead. The doctor says that the shock does it like that sometimes. You can do nothing for them. Nothing vital is injured — and yet the life is broken in them. Nothing can be done — funny thing — Must be something in the brain —”
“It’s obviously not the brain,” said Lilly. “It’s deeper than the brain.”
“Deeper,” said Herbertson, nodding.
“Funny thing where life is. We had a lieutenant. You know we all buried our own dead. Well, he looked as if he was asleep. Most of the chaps looked like that.” Herbertson closed his eyes and laid his face aside, like a man asleep and dead peacefully. “You very rarely see a man dead with any other look on his face — you know the other look.—” And he clenched his teeth with a sudden, momentaneous, ghastly distortion.—“Well, you’d never have known this chap was dead. He had a wound here — in the back of the head — and a bit of blood on his hand — and nothing else, nothing. Well, I said we’d give him a decent burial. He lay there waiting — and they’d wrapped him in a filthy blanket — you know. Well, I said he should have a proper blanket. He’d been dead lying there a day and a half you know. So I went and got a blanket, a beautiful blanket, out of his private kit — his people were Scotch, well-known family — and I got the pins, you know, ready to pin him up properly, for the Scots Guards to bury him. And I thought he’d be stiff, you see. But when I took him by the arms, to lift him on, he sat up. It gave me an awful shock. ‘Why he’s alive!’ I said. But they said he was dead. I couldn’t believe it. It gave me an awful shock. He was as flexible as you or me, and looked as if he was asleep. You couldn’t believe he was dead. But we pinned him up in his blanket. It was an awful shock to me. I couldn’t believe a man could be like that after he’d been dead two days. . . .
“The Germans were wonderful with the machine guns — it’s a wicked thing, a machine gun. But they couldn’t touch us with the bayonet. Every time the men came back they had bayonet practice, and they got awfully good. You know when you thrust at the Germans — so — if you miss him, you bring your rifle back sharp, with a round swing, so that the butt comes up and hits up under the jaw. It’s one movement, following on with the stab, you see, if you miss him. It was too quick for them — But bayonet charge was worst, you know. Because your man cries out when you catch him, when you get him, you know. That’s what does you. . . .
“No, oh no, this was no war like other wars. All the machinery of it. No, you couldn’t stand it, but for the men. The men are wonderful, you know. They’ll be wiped out. . . . No, it’s your men who keep you going, if you’re an officer. . . . But there’ll never be another war like this. Because the Germans are the only people who could make a war like this — and I don’t think they’ll ever do it again, do you?
“Oh, they were wonderful, the Germans. They were amazing. It was incredible, what they invented and did. We had to learn from them, in the first two years. But they were too methodical. That’s why they lost the war. They were too methodical. They’d fire their guns every ten minutes — regular. Think of it. Of course we knew when to run, and when to lie down. You got so that you knew almost exactly what they’d do — if you’d been out long enough. And then you could time what you wanted to do yourselves.
“They were a lot more nervous than we were, at the last. They sent up enough light at night from their trenches — you know, those things that burst in the air like electric light — we had none of that to do — they did it all for us — lit up everything. They were more nervous than we were. . . .”
It was nearly two o’clock when Herbertson left. Lilly, depressed, remained before the fire. Aaron got out of bed and came uneasily to the fire.
“It gives me the bellyache, that damned war,” he said.
“So it does me,” said Lilly. “All unreal.”
“Real enough for those that had to go through it.”
“No, least of all for them,” said Lilly sullenly. “Not as real as a bad dream. Why the hell don’t they wake up and realise it!”
“That’s a fact,” said Aaron. “They’re hypnotised by it.”
“And they want to hypnotise me. And I won’t be hypnotised. The war was a lie and is a lie and will go on being a lie till somebody busts it.”
“It was a fact — you can’t bust that. You can’t bust the fact that it happened.”
“Yes you can. It never happened. It never happened to me. No more than my dreams happen. My dreams don’t happen: they only seem.”
“But the war did happen, right enough,” smiled Aaron palely.
“No, it didn’t. Not to me or to any man, in his own self. It took place in the automatic sphere, like dreams do. But the ACTUAL MAN in every man was just absent — asleep — or drugged — inert — dream-logged. That’s it.”
“You tell ’em so,” said Aaron.
“I do. But it’s no good. Because they won’t wake up now even — perhaps never. They’ll all kill themselves in their sleep.”
“They wouldn’t be any better if they did wake up and be themselves — that is, supposing they are asleep, which I can’t see. They are what they are — and they’re all alike — and never very different from what they are now.”
Lilly stared at Aaron with black eyes.
“Do you believe in them less than I do, Aaron?” he asked slowly.
“I don’t even want to believe in them.”
“But in yourself?” Lilly was almost wistful — and Aaron uneasy.
“I don’t know that I’ve any more right to believe in myself than in them,” he replied. Lilly watched and pondered.
“No,” he said. “That’s not true — I KNEW the war was false: humanly quite false. I always knew it was false. The Germans were false, we were false, everybody was false.”
“And not you?” asked Aaron shrewishly.
“There was a wakeful, self-possessed bit of me which knew that the war and all that horrible movement was false for me. And so I wasn’t going to be dragged in. The Germans could have shot my mother or me or what they liked: I wouldn’t have joined the WAR. I would like to kill my enemy. But become a bit of that huge obscene machine they called the war, that I never would, no, not if I died ten deaths and had eleven mothers violated. But I would like to kill my enemy: Oh, yes, more than one enemy. But not as a unit in a vast obscene mechanism. That never: no, never.”
Poor Lilly was too earnest and vehement. Aaron made a fine nose. It seemed to him like a lot of words and a bit of wriggling out of a hole.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve got men and nations, and you’ve got the machines of war — so how are you going to get out of it? League of Nations?”
“Damn all leagues. Damn all masses and groups, anyhow. All I want is to get MYSELF out of their horrible heap: to get out of the swarm. The swarm to me is nightmare and nullity — horrible helpless writhing in a dream. I want to get myself awake, out of it all — all that mass- consciousness, all that mass-activity — it’s the most horrible nightmare to me. No man is awake and himself. No man who was awake and in possession of himself would use poison gases: no man. His own awake self would scorn such a thing. It’s only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass-psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene.”
“Ha — well,” said Aaron. “It’s the wide-awake ones that invent the poison gas, and use it. Where should we be without it?”
Lilly started, went stiff and hostile.
“Do you mean that, Aaron?” he said, looking into Aaron’s face with a hard, inflexible look.
Aaron turned aside half sheepishly.
“That’s how it looks on the face of it, isn’t it?” he said.
“Look here, my friend, it’s too late for you to be talking to me about the face of things. If that’s how you feel, put your things on and follow Herbertson. Yes — go out of my room. I don’t put up with the face of things here.”
Aaron looked at him in cold amazement.
“It’ll do tomorrow morning, won’t it?” he asked rather mocking.
“Yes,” said Lilly coldly. “But please go tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, I’ll go all right,” said Aaron. “Everybody’s got to agree with you — that’s your price.”
But Lilly did not answer. Aaron turned into bed, his satirical smile under his nose. Somewhat surprised, however, at this sudden turn of affairs.
As he was just going to sleep, dismissing the matter, Lilly came once more to his bedside, and said, in a hard voice:
“I’m NOT going to pretend to have friends on the face of things. No, and I don’t have friends who don’t fundamentally agree with me. A friend means one who is at one with me in matters of life and death. And if you’re at one with all the rest, then you’re THEIR friend, not mine. So be their friend. And please leave me in the morning. You owe me nothing, you have nothing more to do with me. I have had enough of these friendships where I pay the piper and the mob calls the tune.
“Let me tell you, moreover, your heroic Herbertsons lost us more than ever they won. A brave ant is a damned cowardly individual. Your heroic officers are a sad sight AFTERWARDS, when they come home. Bah, your Herbertson! The only justification for war is what we learn from it. And what have they learnt?— Why did so many of them have presentiments, as he called it? Because they could feel inside them, there was nothing to come after. There was no life-courage: only death-courage. Nothing beyond this hell — only death or love — languishing —”
“What could they have seen, anyhow?” said Aaron.
“It’s not what you see, actually. It’s the kind of spirit you keep inside you: the life spirit. When Wallace had presentiments, Herbertson, being officer, should have said: ‘None of that, Wallace. You and I, we’ve got to live and make life smoke.’— Instead of which he let Wallace be killed and his own heart be broken. Always the death-choice — And we won’t, we simply will not face the world as we’ve made it, and our own souls as we find them, and take the responsibility. We’ll never get anywhere till we stand up man to man and face EVERYTHING out, and break the old forms, but never let our own pride and courage of life be broken.”
Lilly broke off, and went silently to bed. Aaron turned over to sleep, rather resenting the sound of so many words. What difference did it make, anyhow? In the morning, however, when he saw the other man’s pale, closed, rather haughty face, he realised that something had happened. Lilly was courteous and even affable: but with a curious cold space between him and Aaron. Breakfast passed, and Aaron knew that he must leave. There was something in Lilly’s bearing which just showed him the door. In some surprise and confusion, and in some anger, not unmingled with humorous irony, he put his things in his bag. He put on his hat and coat. Lilly was seated rather stiffly writing.
“Well,” said Aaron. “I suppose we shall meet again.”
“Oh, sure to,” said Lilly, rising from his chair. “We are sure to run across one another.”
“When are you going?” asked Aaron.
“In a few days’ time.”
“Oh, well, I’ll run in and see you before you go, shall I?”
“Yes, do.”
Lilly escorted his guest to the top of the stairs, shook hands, and then returned into his own room, closing the door on himself.
Aaron did not find his friend at home when he called. He took it rather as a slap in the face. But then he knew quite well that Lilly had made a certain call on his, Aaron’s soul: a call which he, Aaron, did not at all intend to obey. If in return the soul-caller chose to shut his street-door in the face of the world-friend — well, let it be quits. He was not sure whether he felt superior to his unworldly enemy or not. He rather thought he did.
The opera season ended, Aaron was invited by Cyril Scott to join a group of musical people in a village by the sea. He accepted, and spent a pleasant month. It pleased the young men musically-inclined and bohemian by profession to patronise the flautist, whom they declared marvellous. Bohemians with well-to-do parents, they could already afford to squander a little spasmodic and self-gratifying patronage. And Aaron did not mind being patronised. He had nothing else to do.
But the party broke up early in September. The flautist was detained a few days at a country house, for the amusement of the guests. Then he left for London.
In London he found himself at a loose end. A certain fretful dislike of the patronage of indifferent young men, younger than himself, and a certain distaste for regular work in the orchestra made him look round. He wanted something else. He wanted to disappear again. Qualms and emotions concerning his abandoned family overcame him. The early, delicate autumn affected him. He took a train to the Midlands.
And again, just after dark, he strolled with his little bag across the field which lay at the end of his garden. It had been mown, and the grass was already growing long. He stood and looked at the line of back windows, lighted once more. He smelled the scents of autumn, phlox and moist old vegetation and corn in sheaf. A nostalgia which was half at least revulsion affected him. The place, the home, at once fascinated and revolted him.
Sitting in his shed, he scrutinised his garden carefully, in the starlight. There were two rows of beans, rather disshevelled. Near at hand the marrow plants sprawled from their old bed. He could detect the perfume of a few carnations. He wondered who it was had planted the garden, during his long absence. Anyhow, there it was, planted and fruited and waning into autumn.
The blind was not drawn. It was eight o’clock. The children were going to bed. Aaron waited in his shed, his bowels stirred with violent but only half-admitted emotions. There was his wife, slim and graceful, holding a little mug to the baby’s mouth. And the baby was drinking. She looked lonely. Wild emotions attacked his heart. There was going to be a wild and emotional reconciliation.
Was there? It seemed like something fearful and imminent. A passion arose in him, a craving for the violent emotional reconciliation. He waited impatiently for the children to be gone to bed, gnawed with restless desire.
He heard the clock strike nine, then half-past, from the village behind. The children would be asleep. His wife was sitting sewing some little frock. He went lingering down the garden path, stooping to lift the fallen carnations, to see how they were. There were many flowers, but small. He broke one off, then threw it away. The golden rod was out. Even in the little lawn there were asters, as of old.
His wife started to listen, hearing his step. He was filled with a violent conflict of tenderness, like a sickness. He hesitated, tapping at the door, and entered. His wife started to her feet, at bay.
“What have you come for!” was her involuntary ejaculation.
But he, with the familiar odd jerk of his head towards the garden, asked with a faint smile:
“Who planted the garden?”
And he felt himself dropping into the twang of the vernacular, which he had discarded.
Lottie only stood and stared at him, objectively. She did not think to answer. He took his hat off, and put it on the dresser. Again the familiar act maddened her.
“What have you come for?” she cried again, with a voice full of hate. Or perhaps it was fear and doubt and even hope as well. He heard only hate.
This time he turned to look at her. The old dagger was drawn in her.
“I wonder,” he said, “myself.”
Then she recovered herself, and with trembling hand picked up her sewing again. But she still stood at bay, beyond the table. She said nothing. He, feeling tired, sat down on the chair nearest the door. But he reached for his hat, and kept it on his knee. She, as she stood there unnaturally, went on with her sewing. There was silence for some time. Curious sensations and emotions went through the man’s frame seeming to destroy him. They were like electric shocks, which he felt she emitted against him. And an old sickness came in him again. He had forgotten it. It was the sickness of the unrecognised and incomprehensible strain between him and her.
After a time she put down her sewing, and sat again in her chair.
“Do you know how vilely you’ve treated me?” she said, staring across the space at him. He averted his face.
Yet he answered, not without irony.
“I suppose so.”
“And why?” she cried. “I should like to know why.”
He did not answer. The way she rushed in made him go vague.
“Justify yourself. Say why you’ve been so vile to me. Say what you had against me,” she demanded.
“What I HAD against her,” he mused to himself: and he wondered that she used the past tense. He made no answer.
“Accuse me,” she insisted. “Say what I’ve done to make you treat me like this. Say it. You must THINK it hard enough.”
“Nay,” he said. “I don’t think it.”
This speech, by which he merely meant that he did not trouble to formulate any injuries he had against her, puzzled her.
“Don’t come pretending you love me, NOW. It’s too late,” she said with contempt. Yet perhaps also hope.
“You might wait till I start pretending,” he said.
This enraged her.
“You vile creature! “she exclaimed. “Go! What have you come for?”
“To look at YOU,” he said sarcastically.
After a few minutes she began to cry, sobbing violently into her apron. And again his bowels stirred and boiled.
“What have I done! What have I done! I don’t know what I’ve done that he should be like this to me,” she sobbed, into her apron. It was childish, and perhaps true. At least it was true from the childish part of her nature. He sat gloomy and uneasy.
She took the apron from her tear-stained face, and looked at him. It was true, in her moments of roused exposure she was a beautiful woman — a beautiful woman. At this moment, with her flushed, tear-stained, wilful distress, she was beautiful.
“Tell me,” she challenged. “Tell me! Tell me what I’ve done. Tell me what you have against me. Tell me.”
Watching like a lynx, she saw the puzzled, hurt look in his face. Telling isn’t so easy — especially when the trouble goes too deep for conscious comprehension. He couldn’t tell what he had against her. And he had not the slightest intention of doing what she would have liked him to do, starting to pile up detailed grievances. He knew the detailed grievances were nothing in themselves.
“You CAN’T,” she cried vindictively. “You CAN’T. You CAN’T find anything real to bring against me, though you’d like to. You’d like to be able to accuse me of something, but you CAN’T, because you know there isn’t anything.”
She watched him, watched. And he sat in the chair near the door, without moving.
“You’re unnatural, that’s what you are,” she cried. “You’re unnatural. You’re not a man. You haven’t got a man’s feelings. You’re nasty, and cold, and unnatural. And you’re a coward. You’re a coward. You run away from me, without telling me what you’ve got against me.”
“When you’ve had enough, you go away and you don’t care what you do,” he said, epigrammatic.
She paused a moment.
“Enough of what?” she said. “What have you had enough of? Of me and your children? It’s a nice manly thing to say. Haven’t I loved you? Haven’t I loved you for twelve years, and worked and slaved for you and tried to keep you right? Heaven knows where you’d have been but for me, evil as you are at the bottom. You’re evil, that’s what it is — and weak. You’re too weak to love a woman and give her what she wants: too weak. Unmanly and cowardly, he runs away.”
“No wonder,” he said.
“No,” she cried. “It IS no wonder, with a nature like yours: weak and unnatural and evil. It IS no wonder.”
She became quiet — and then started to cry again, into her apron. Aaron waited. He felt physically weak.
“And who knows what you’ve been doing all these months?” she wept. “Who knows all the vile things you’ve been doing? And you’re the father of my children — the father of my little girls — and who knows what vile things he’s guilty of, all these months?”
“I shouldn’t let my imagination run away with me,” he answered. “I’ve been playing the flute in the orchestra of one of the theatres in London.”
“Ha!” she cried. “It’s more than that. Don’t think I’m going to believe you. I know you, with your smooth-sounding lies. You’re a liar, as you know. And I know you’ve been doing other things besides play a flute in an orchestra. You!— as if I don’t know you. And then coming crawling back to me with your lies and your pretense. Don’t think I’m taken in.”
“I should be sorry,” he said.
“Coming crawling back to me, and expecting to be forgiven,” she went on. “But no — I don’t forgive — and I can’t forgive — never — not as long as I live shall I forgive what you’ve done to me.”
“You can wait till you’re asked, anyhow,” he said.
“And you can wait,” she said. “And you shall wait.” She took up her sewing, and stitched steadily, as if calmly. Anyone glancing in would have imagined a quiet domestic hearth at that moment. He, too, feeling physically weak, remained silent, feeling his soul absent from the scene.
Again she suddenly burst into tears, weeping bitterly.
“And the children,” she sobbed, rocking herself with grief and chagrin. “What have I been able to say to the children — what have I been able to tell them?”
“What HAVE you told them?” he asked coldly.
“I told them you’d gone away to work,” she sobbed, laying her head on her arms on the table. “What else could I tell them? I couldn’t tell them the vile truth about their father. I couldn’t tell THEM how evil you are.” She sobbed and moaned.
He wondered what exactly the vile truth would have been, had she started to tell it. And he began to feel, coldly and cynically, that among all her distress there was a luxuriating in the violent emotions of the scene in hand, and the situation altogether.
Then again she became quiet, and picked up her sewing. She stitched quietly, wistfully, for some time. Then she looked up at him — a long look of reproach, and sombre accusation, and wifely tenderness. He turned his face aside.
“You know you’ve been wrong to me, don’t you?” she said, half wistfully, half menacing.
He felt her wistfulness and her menace tearing him in his bowels and loins.
“You do know, don’t you?” she insisted, still with the wistful appeal, and the veiled threat.
“You do, or you would answer,” she said. “You’ve still got enough that’s right in you, for you to know.”
She waited. He sat still, as if drawn by hot wires.
Then she slipped across to him, put her arms round him, sank on her knees at his side, and sank her face against his thigh.
“Say you know how wrong you are. Say you know how cruel you’ve been to me,” she pleaded. But under her female pleading and appeal he felt the iron of her threat.
“You DO know it,” she murmured, looking up into his face as she crouched by his knee. “You DO know it. I can see in your eyes that you know it. And why have you come back to me, if you don’t know it! Why have you come back to me? Tell me!” Her arms gave him a sharp, compulsory little clutch round the waist. “Tell me! Tell me!” she murmured, with all her appeal liquid in her throat.
But him, it half overcame, and at the same time, horrified. He had a certain horror of her. The strange liquid sound of her appeal seemed to him like the swaying of a serpent which mesmerises the fated, fluttering, helpless bird. She clasped her arms round him, she drew him to her, she half roused his passion. At the same time she coldly horrified and repelled him. He had not the faintest feeling, at the moment, of his own wrong. But she wanted to win his own self-betrayal out of him. He could see himself as the fascinated victim, falling to this cajoling, awful woman, the wife of his bosom. But as well, he had a soul outside himself, which looked on the whole scene with cold revulsion, and which was as unchangeable as time.
“No,” he said. “I don’t feel wrong.”
“You DO!” she said, giving him a sharp, admonitory clutch. “You DO. Only you’re silly, and obstinate, babyish and silly and obstinate. An obstinate little boy — you DO feel wrong. And you ARE wrong. And you’ve got to say it.”
But quietly he disengaged himself and got to his feet, his face pale and set, obstinate as she said. He put his hat on, and took his little bag. She watched him curiously, still crouching by his chair.
“I’ll go,” he said, putting his hand on the latch.
Suddenly she sprang to her feet and clutched him by the shirt-neck, her hand inside his soft collar, half strangling him.
“You villain,” she said, and her face was transfigured with passion as he had never seen it before, horrible. “You villain!” she said thickly. “What have you come here for?”
His soul went black as he looked at her. He broke her hand away from his shirt collar, bursting the stud-holes. She recoiled in silence. And in one black, unconscious movement he was gone, down the garden and over the fence and across the country, swallowed in a black unconsciousness.
She, realising, sank upon the hearth-rug and lay there curled upon herself. She was defeated. But she, too, would never yield. She lay quite motionless for some time. Then she got up, feeling the draught on the floor. She closed the door, and drew down the blind. Then she looked at her wrist, which he had gripped, and which pained her. Then she went to the mirror and looked for a long time at her white, strained, determined face. Come life, come death, she, too would never yield. And she realised now that he would never yield.
She was faint with weariness, and would be glad to get to bed and sleep.
Aaron meanwhile had walked across the country and was looking for a place to rest. He found a cornfield with a half-built stack, and sheaves in stook. Ten to one some tramp would have found the stack. He threw a dozen sheaves together and lay down, looking at the stars in the September sky. He, too, would never yield. The illusion of love was gone for ever. Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul. So far, man had yielded the mastery to woman. Now he was fighting for it back again. And too late, for the woman would never yield.
But whether woman yielded or not, he would keep the mastery of his own soul and conscience and actions. He would never yield himself up to her judgment again. He would hold himself forever beyond her jurisdiction.
Henceforth, life single, not life double.
He looked at the sky, and thanked the universe for the blessedness of being alone in the universe. To be alone, to be oneself, not to be driven or violated into something which is not oneself, surely it is better than anything. He thought of Lottie, and knew how much more truly herself she was when she was alone, with no man to distort her. And he was thankful for the division between them. Such scenes as the last were too horrible and unreal.
As for future unions, too soon to think about it. Let there be clean and pure division first, perfected singleness. That is the only way to final, living unison: through sheer, finished singleness.
Having no job for the autumn, Aaron fidgetted in London. He played at some concerts and some private shows. He was one of an odd quartette, for example, which went to play to Lady Artemis Hooper, when she lay in bed after her famous escapade of falling through the window of her taxi-cab. Aaron had that curious knack, which belongs to some people, of getting into the swim without knowing he was doing it. Lady Artemis thought his flute lovely, and had him again to play for her. Aaron looked at her and she at him. She, as she reclined there in bed in a sort of half-light, well made-up, smoking her cigarettes and talking in a rather raucous voice, making her slightly rasping witty comments to the other men in the room — of course there were other men, the audience — was a shock to the flautist. This was the bride of the moment! Curious how raucous her voice sounded out of the cigarette smoke. Yet he liked her — the reckless note of the modern, social freebooter. In himself was a touch of the same quality.
“Do you love playing?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said, with that shadow of irony which seemed like a smile on his face.
“Live for it, so to speak,” she said.
“I make my living by it,” he said.
“But that’s not really how you take it?” she said. He eyed her. She watched him over her cigarette. It was a personal moment.
“I don’t think about it,” he said.
“I’m sure you don’t. You wouldn’t be so good if you did. You’re awfully lucky, you know, to be able to pour yourself down your flute.”
“You think I go down easy?” he laughed.
“Ah!” she replied, flicking her cigarette broadcast. “That’s the point. What should you say, Jimmy?” she turned to one of the men. He screwed his eyeglass nervously and stiffened himself to look at her.
“I— I shouldn’t like to say, off-hand,” came the small-voiced, self- conscious answer. And Jimmy bridled himself and glanced at Aaron.
“Do you find it a tight squeeze, then?” she said, turning to Aaron once more.
“No, I can’t say that,” he answered. “What of me goes down goes down easy enough. It’s what doesn’t go down.”
“And how much is that?” she asked, eying him.
“A good bit, maybe,” he said.
“Slops over, so to speak,” she retorted sarcastically. “And which do you enjoy more, trickling down your flute or slopping over on to the lap of Mother Earth — of Miss, more probably!”
“Depends,” he said.
Having got him a few steps too far upon the personal ground, she left him to get off by himself.
So he found London got on his nerves. He felt it rubbed him the wrong way. He was flattered, of course, by his own success — and felt at the same time irritated by it. This state of mind was by no means acceptable. Wherever he was he liked to be given, tacitly, the first place — or a place among the first. Among the musical people he frequented, he found himself on a callow kind of equality with everybody, even the stars and aristocrats, at one moment, and a backstairs outsider the next. It was all just as the moment demanded. There was a certain excitement in slithering up and down the social scale, one minute chatting in a personal tete-a-tete with the most famous, or notorious, of the society beauties: and the next walking in the rain, with his flute in a bag, to his grubby lodging in Bloomsbury. Only the excitement roused all the savage sarcasm that lay at the bottom of his soul, and which burned there like an unhealthy bile.
Therefore he determined to clear out — to disappear. He had a letter from Lilly, from Novara. Lilly was drifting about. Aaron wrote to Novara, and asked if he should come to Italy, having no money to speak of. “Come if you want to. Bring your flute. And if you’ve no money, put on a good suit of clothes and a big black hat, and play outside the best cafe in any Italian town, and you’ll collect enough to get on with.”
It was a sporting chance. Aaron packed his bag and got a passport, and wrote to Lilly to say he would join him, as invited, at Sir William Franks’. He hoped Lilly’s answer would arrive before he left London. But it didn’t.
Therefore behold our hero alighting at Novara, two hours late, on a wet, dark evening. He hoped Lilly would be there: but nobody. With some slight dismay he faced the big, crowded station. The stream of people carried him automatically through the barrier, a porter having seized his bag, and volleyed various unintelligible questions at him. Aaron understood not one word. So he just wandered after the blue blouse of the porter.
The porter deposited the bag on the steps of the station front, fired off more questions and gesticulated into the half-illuminated space of darkness outside the station. Aaron decided it meant a cab, so he nodded and said “Yes.” But there were no cabs. So once more the blue- bloused porter slung the big bag and the little bag on the strap over his shoulder, and they plunged into the night, towards some lights and a sort of theatre place.
One carriage stood there in the rain — yes, and it was free.
“Keb? Yes — orright — sir. Whe’to? Where you go? Sir William Franks? Yes, I know. Long way go — go long way. Sir William Franks.”
The cabman spattered his few words of English. Aaron gave the porter an English shilling. The porter let the coin lie in the middle of his palm, as if it were a live beetle, and darted to the light of the carriage to examine the beast, exclaiming volubly. The cabman, wild with interest, peered down from the box into the palm of the porter, and carried on an impassioned dialogue. Aaron stood with one foot on the step.
“What you give — he? One franc?” asked the driver.
“A shilling,” said Aaron.
“One sheeling. Yes. I know that. One sheeling English”— and the driver went off into impassioned exclamations in Torinese. The porter, still muttering and holding his hand as if the coin might sting him, filtered away.
“Orright. He know — sheeling — orright. English moneys, eh? Yes, he know. You get up, sir.”
And away went Aaron, under the hood of the carriage, clattering down the wide darkness of Novara, over a bridge apparently, past huge rain- wet statues, and through more rainy, half-lit streets.
They stopped at last outside a sort of park wall with trees above. The big gates were just beyond.
“Sir William Franks — there.” In a mixture of Italian and English the driver told Aaron to get down and ring the bell on the right. Aaron got down and in the darkness was able to read the name on the plate.
“How much?” said Aaron to the driver.
“Ten franc,” said the fat driver.
But it was his turn now to screw down and scrutinise the pink ten- shilling note. He waved it in his hand.
“Not good, eh? Not good moneys?”
“Yes,” said Aaron, rather indignantly. “Good English money. Ten shillings. Better than ten francs, a good deal. Better — better —”
“Good — you say? Ten sheeling —” The driver muttered and muttered, as if dissatisfied. But as a matter of fact he stowed the note in his waistcoat pocket with considerable satisfaction, looked at Aaron curiously, and drove away.
Aaron stood there in the dark outside the big gates, and wished himself somewhere else. However, he rang the bell. There was a huge barking of dogs on the other side. Presently a light switched on, and a woman, followed by a man, appeared cautiously, in the half- opened doorway.
“Sir William Franks?” said Aaron.
“Si, signore.”
And Aaron stepped with his two bags inside the gate. Huge dogs jumped round. He stood in the darkness under the trees at the foot of the park. The woman fastened the gate — Aaron saw a door — and through an uncurtained window a man writing at a desk — rather like the clerk in an hotel office. He was going with his two bags to the open door, when the woman stopped him, and began talking to him in Italian. It was evident he must not go on. So he put down the bags. The man stood a few yards away, watchfully.
Aaron looked down at the woman and tried to make out something of what she was saying, but could not. The dogs still barked spasmodically, drops fell from the tall, dark trees that rose overhead.
“Is Mr. Lilly here? Mr. Lilly?” he asked.
“Signor Lillee. No, Signore —”
And off the woman went in Italian. But it was evident Lilly was not at the house. Aaron wished more than ever he had not come, but had gone to an hotel.
He made out that the woman was asking him for his name —“Meester —? Meester —?” she kept saying, with a note of interrogation.
“Sisson. Mr. Sisson,” said Aaron, who was becoming impatient. And he found a visiting card to give her. She seemed appeased — said something about telephone — and left him standing.
The rain had ceased, but big drops were shaken from the dark, high trees. Through the uncurtained window he saw the man at the desk reach the telephone. There was a long pause. At length the woman came back and motioned to him to go up — up the drive which curved and disappeared under the dark trees.
“Go up there?” said Aaron, pointing.
That was evidently the intention. So he picked up his bags and strode forward, from out of the circle of electric light, up the curved drive in the darkness. It was a steep incline. He saw trees and the grass slopes. There was a tang of snow in the air.
Suddenly, up ahead, a brilliant light switched on. He continued uphill through the trees along the path, towards it, and at length, emerged at the foot of a great flight of steps, above which was a wide glass entrance, and an Italian manservant in white gloves hovering as if on the brink.
Aaron emerged from the drive and climbed the steps. The manservant came down two steps and took the little bag. Then he ushered Aaron and the big bag into a large, pillared hall, with thick Turkish carpet on the floor, and handsome appointments. It was spacious, comfortable and warm; but somewhat pretentious; rather like the imposing hall into which the heroine suddenly enters on the film.
Aaron dropped his heavy bag, with relief, and stood there, hat in hand, in his damp overcoat in the circle of light, looking vaguely at the yellow marble pillars, the gilded arches above, the shadowy distances and the great stairs. The butler disappeared — reappeared in another moment — and through an open doorway came the host. Sir William was a small, clean old man with a thin, white beard and a courtly deportment, wearing a black velvet dinner jacket faced with purple silk.
“How do you do, Mr. Sisson. You come straight from England?”
Sir William held out his hand courteously and benevolently, smiling an old man’s smile of hospitality.
“Mr. Lilly has gone away?” said Aaron.
“Yes. He left us several days ago.”
Aaron hesitated.
“You didn’t expect me, then?”
“Yes, oh, yes. Yes, oh, yes. Very glad to see you — well, now, come in and have some dinner —”
At this moment Lady Franks appeared — short, rather plump, but erect and definite, in a black silk dress and pearls round her throat.
“How do you do? We are just at dinner,” she said. “You haven’t eaten? No — well, then — would you like a bath now, or —?”
It was evident the Franks had dispensed much hospitality: much of it charitable. Aaron felt it.
“No,” he said. “I’ll wash my hands and come straight in, shall I?”
“Yes, perhaps that would be better —”
“I’m afraid I am a nuisance.”
“Not at all — Beppe —” and she gave instructions in Italian.
Another footman appeared, and took the big bag. Aaron took the little one this time. They climbed the broad, turning stairs, crossed another handsome lounge, gilt and ormolu and yellow silk chairs and scattered copies of The Graphic or of Country Life , then they disappeared through a doorway into a much narrower flight of stairs. Man can so rarely keep it up all the way, the grandeur.
Two black and white chamber-maids appeared. Aaron found himself in a blue silk bedroom, and a footman unstrapping his bag, which he did not want unstrapped. Next minute he was beckoned and allured by the Italian servants down the corridor, and presented to the handsome, spacious bathroom, which was warm and creamy-coloured and glittering with massive silver and mysterious with up-to-date conveniences. There he was left to his own devices, and felt like a small boy finding out how it works. For even the mere turning on of the taps was a problem in silver mechanics.
In spite of all the splendours and the elaborated convenience, he washed himself in good hot water, and wished he were having a bath, chiefly because of the wardrobe of marvellous Turkish towels. Then he clicked his way back to his bedroom, changed his shirt and combed his hair in the blue silk bedroom with the Greuze picture, and felt a little dim and superficial surprise. He had fallen into country house parties before, but never into quite such a plushy sense of riches. He felt he ought to have his breath taken away. But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu ! Connu ! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn’t be known better, from the film.
So Aaron tied his tie in front of a big Venice mirror, and nothing was a surprise to him. He found a footman hovering to escort him to the dining-room — a real Italian footman, uneasy because milady’s dinner was unsettled. He entered the rather small dining-room, and saw the people at table.
He was told various names: bowed to a young, slim woman with big blue eyes and dark hair like a photograph, then to a smaller rather colourless young woman with a large nose: then to a stout, rubicund, bald colonel, and to a tall, thin, Oxford-looking major with a black patch over his eye — both these men in khaki: finally to a good- looking, well-nourished young man in a dinner-jacket, and he sat down to his soup, on his hostess’ left hand. The colonel sat on her right, and was confidential. Little Sir William, with his hair and his beard white like spun glass, his manner very courteous and animated, the purple facings of his velvet jacket very impressive, sat at the far end of the table jesting with the ladies and showing his teeth in an old man’s smile, a little bit affected, but pleasant, wishing everybody to be happy.
Aaron ate his soup, trying to catch up. Milady’s own confidential Italian butler, fidelity itself, hovered quivering near, spiritually helping the newcomer to catch up. Two nice little entree dishes, specially prepared for Aaron to take the place of the bygone fish and vol au-vents of the proper dinner, testified to the courtesy and charity of his hostess.
Well, eating rapidly, he had more or less caught up by the time the sweets came. So he swallowed a glass of wine and looked round. His hostess with her pearls, and her diamond star in her grey hair, was speaking of Lilly and then of music to him.
“I hear you are a musician. That’s what I should have been if I had had my way.”
“What instrument?” asked Aaron.
“Oh, the piano. Yours is the flute, Mr. Lilly says. I think the flute can be so attractive. But I feel, of course you have more range with the piano. I love the piano — and orchestra.”
At that moment, the colonel and hostess-duties distracted her. But she came back in snatches. She was a woman who reminded him a little of Queen Victoria; so assured in her own room, a large part of her attention always given to the successful issue of her duties, the remainder at the disposal of her guests. It was an old-fashioned, not unpleasant feeling: like retrospect. But she had beautiful, big, smooth emeralds and sapphires on her fingers. Money! What a curious thing it is! Aaron noticed the deference of all the guests at table: a touch of obsequiousness: before the money! And the host and hostess accepted the deference, nay, expected it, as their due. Yet both Sir William and Lady Franks knew that it was only money and success. They had both a certain afterthought, knowing dimly that the game was but a game, and that they were the helpless leaders in the game. They had a certain basic ordinariness which prevented their making any great hits, and which kept them disillusioned all the while. They remembered their poor and insignificant days.
“And I hear you were playing in the orchestra at Covent Garden. We came back from London last week. I enjoyed Beecham’s operas so much.”
“Which do you like best?” said Aaron.
“Oh, the Russian. I think Ivan . It is such fine music.”
“I find Ivan artificial.”
“Do you? Oh, I don’t think so. No, I don’t think you can say that.”
Aaron wondered at her assurance. She seemed to put him just a tiny bit in his place, even in an opinion on music. Money gave her that right, too. Curious — the only authority left. And he deferred to her opinion: that is, to her money. He did it almost deliberately. Yes — what did he believe in, besides money? What does any man? He looked at the black patch over the major’s eye. What had he given his eye for?— the nation’s money. Well, and very necessary, too; otherwise we might be where the wretched Austrians are. Instead of which — how smooth his hostess’ sapphires!
“Of course I myself prefer Moussorgsky,” said Aaron. “I think he is a greater artist. But perhaps it is just personal preference.”
“Yes. Boris is wonderful. Oh, some of the scenes in Boris !”
“And even more Kovantchina ,” said Aaron. “I wish we could go back to melody pure and simple. Yet I find Kovantchina , which is all mass music practically, gives me more satisfaction than any other opera.”
“Do you really? I shouldn’t say so: oh, no — but you can’t mean that you would like all music to go back to melody pure and simple! Just a flute — just a pipe! Oh, Mr. Sisson, you are bigoted for your instrument. I just LIVE in harmony — chords, chords!” She struck imaginary chords on the white damask, and her sapphires swam blue. But at the same time she was watching to see if Sir William had still got beside his plate the white medicine cachet which he must swallow at every meal. Because if so, she must remind him to swallow it. However, at that very moment, he put it on his tongue. So that she could turn her attention again to Aaron and the imaginary chord on the white damask; the thing she just lived in. But the rubicund bald colonel, more rubicund after wine, most rubicund now the Marsala was going, snatched her attention with a burly homage to her femininity, and shared his fear with her with a boyish gallantry.
When the women had gone up, Sir William came near and put his hand on Aaron’s shoulder. It was evident the charm was beginning to work. Sir William was a self-made man, and not in the least a snob. He liked the fundamental ordinariness in Aaron, the commonness of the common man.
“Well now, Mr. Sisson, we are very glad to see you! Very glad, indeed. I count Mr. Lilly one of the most interesting men it has ever been my good fortune to know. And so for your own sake, and for Mr. Lilly’s sake, we are very glad to see you. Arthur, my boy, give Mr. Sisson some Marsala — and take some yourself.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said the well-nourished young man in nice evening clothes. “You’ll take another glass yourself, Sir?”
“Yes, I will, I will. I will drink a glass with Mr. Sisson. Major, where are you wandering off to? Come and take a glass with us, my boy.”
“Thanks, Sir William,” drawled the young major with the black patch.
“Now, Colonel — I hope you are in good health and spirits.”
“Never better, Sir William, never better.”
“I’m very glad to hear it; very glad indeed. Try my Marsala — I think it is quite good. Port is beyond us for the moment — for the moment —”
And the old man sipped his brown wine, and smiled again. He made quite a handsome picture: but he was frail.
“And where are you bound, Mr. Sisson? Towards Rome?”
“I came to meet Lilly,” said Aaron.
“Ah! But Lilly has fled over the borders by this time. Never was such a man for crossing frontiers. Wonderful person, to be able to do it.”
“Where has he gone?” said Aaron.
“I think to Geneva for the moment. But he certainly talked of Venice. You yourself have no definite goal?”
“No.”
“Ah! You have not come to Italy to practice your art?”
“I shall HAVE to practice it: or else — no, I haven’t come for that.”
“Ah, you will HAVE to practice it. Ah, yes! We are all under the necessity to eat. And you have a family in England? Am I not right?”
“Quite. I’ve got a family depending on me.”
“Yes, then you must practice your art: you must practice your art. Well — shall we join the ladies? Coffee will no doubt be served.”
“Will you take my arm, Sir?” said the well-nourished Arthur.
“Thank you, thank you,” the old man motioned him away.
So they went upstairs to where the three women were sitting in the library round the fire, chattering not very interested. The entry of Sir William at once made a stir.
The girl in white, with the biggish nose, fluttered round him. She was Arthur’s wife. The girl in soft blue spread herself on the couch: she was the young Major’s wife, and she had a blue band round her hair. The Colonel hovered stout and fidgetty round Lady Franks and the liqueur stand. He and the Major were both in khaki — belonging to the service on duty in Italy still.
Coffee appeared — and Sir William doled out creme de menthe . There was no conversation — only tedious words. The little party was just commonplace and dull — boring. Yet Sir William, the self-made man, was a study. And the young, Oxford-like Major, with his English diffidence and his one dark, pensive, baffled eye was only waiting to be earnest, poor devil.
The girl in white had been a sort of companion to Lady Franks, so that Arthur was more or less a son-in-law. In this capacity, he acted. Aaron strayed round uneasily looking at the books, bought but not read, and at the big pictures above. It was Arthur who fetched out the little boxes containing the orders conferred on Sir William for his war-work: and perhaps more, for the many thousands of pounds he had spent on his war-work.
There were three orders: one British, and quite important, a large silver star for the breast: one Italian, smaller, and silver and gold; and one from the State of Ruritania, in silver and red-and- green enamel, smaller than the others.
“Come now, William,” said Lady Franks, “you must try them all on. You must try them all on together, and let us see how you look.”
The little, frail old man, with his strange old man’s blue eyes and his old man’s perpetual laugh, swelled out his chest and said:
“What, am I to appear in all my vanities?” And he laughed shortly.
“Of course you are. We want to see you,” said the white girl.
“Indeed we do! We shouldn’t mind all appearing in such vanities — what, Lady Franks!” boomed the Colonel.
“I should think not,” replied his hostess. “When a man has honours conferred on him, it shows a poor spirit if he isn’t proud of them.”
“Of course I am proud of them!” said Sir William. “Well then, come and have them pinned on. I think it’s wonderful to have got so much in one life-time — wonderful,” said Lady Franks.
“Oh, Sir William is a wonderful man,” said the Colonel. “Well — we won’t say so before him. But let us look at him in his orders.”
Arthur, always ready on these occasions, had taken the large and shining British star from its box, and drew near to Sir William, who stood swelling his chest, pleased, proud, and a little wistful.
“This one first, Sir,” said Arthur.
Sir William stood very still, half tremulous, like a man undergoing an operation.
“And it goes just here — the level of the heart. This is where it goes.” And carefully he pinned the large, radiating ornament on the black velvet dinner-jacket of the old man.
“That is the first — and very becoming,” said Lady Franks.
“Oh, very becoming! Very becoming!” said the tall wife of the Major — she was a handsome young woman of the tall, frail type.
“Do you think so, my dear?” said the old man, with his eternal smile: the curious smile of old people when they are dead.
“Not only becoming, Sir,” said the Major, bending his tall, slim figure forwards. “But a reassuring sign that a nation knows how to distinguish her valuable men.”
“Quite!” said Lady Franks. “I think it is a very great honour to have got it. The king was most gracious, too — Now the other. That goes beside it — the Italian —”
Sir William stood there undergoing the operation of the pinning-on. The Italian star being somewhat smaller than the British, there was a slight question as to where exactly it should be placed. However, Arthur decided it: and the old man stood before the company with his two stars on his breast.
“And now the Ruritanian,” said Lady Franks eagerly.
“That doesn’t go on the same level with the others, Lady Franks,” said Arthur. “That goes much lower down — about here.”
“Are you sure?” said Lady Franks. “Doesn’t it go more here?”
“No no, no no, not at all. Here! Isn’t it so, Sybil?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Sybil.
Old Sir William stood quite silent, his breast prepared, peering over the facings of his coat to see where the star was going. The Colonel was called in, and though he knew nothing about it, he agreed with Arthur, who apparently did know something. So the star was pinned quite low down. Sir William, peeping down, exclaimed:
“Well, that is most curious now! I wear an order over the pit of my stomach! I think that is very curious: a curious place to wear an order.”
“Stand up! Stand up and let us look!” said Lady Franks. “There now, isn’t it handsome? And isn’t it a great deal of honour for one man? Could he have expected so much, in one life-time? I call it wonderful. Come and look at yourself, dear”— and she led him to a mirror.
“What’s more, all thoroughly deserved,” said Arthur.
“I should think so,” said the Colonel, fidgetting.
“Ah, yes, nobody has deserved them better,” cooed Sybil.
“Nor on more humane and generous grounds,” said the Major, sotto voce.
“The effort to save life, indeed,” returned the Major’s young wife: “splendid!”
Sir William stood naively before the mirror and looked at his three stars on his black velvet dinner-jacket.
“Almost directly over the pit of my stomach,” he said. “I hope that is not a decoration for my greedy APPETITE.” And he laughed at the young women.
“I assure you it is in position, Sir,” said Arthur. “Absolutely correct. I will read it out to you later.”
“Aren’t you satisfied? Aren’t you a proud man! Isn’t it wonderful?” said Lady Franks. “Why, what more could a man want from life? He could never EXPECT so much.”
“Yes, my dear. I AM a proud man. Three countries have honoured me —” There was a little, breathless pause.
“And not more than they ought to have done,” said Sybil.
“Well! Well! I shall have my head turned. Let me return to my own humble self. I am too much in the stars at the moment.”
Sir William turned to Arthur to have his decorations removed. Aaron, standing in the background, felt the whole scene strange, childish, a little touching. And Lady Franks was so obviously trying to console her husband: to console the frail, excitable old man with his honours. But why console him? Did he need consolation? And did she? It was evident that only the hard-money woman in her put any price on the decorations.
Aaron came forward and examined the orders, one after the other. Just metal playthings of curious shiny silver and gilt and enamel. Heavy the British one — but only like some heavy buckle, a piece of metal merely when one turned it over. Somebody dropped the Italian cross, and there was a moment of horror. But the lump of metal took no hurt. Queer to see the things stowed in their boxes again. Aaron had always imagined these mysterious decorations as shining by nature on the breasts of heroes. Pinned-on pieces of metal were a considerable come-down.
The orders were put away, the party sat round the fire in the comfortable library, the men sipping more creme de menthe , since nothing else offered, and the couple of hours in front promising the tedium of small-talk of tedious people who had really nothing to say and no particular originality in saying it.
Aaron, however, had reckoned without his host. Sir William sat upright in his chair, with all the determination of a frail old man who insists on being level with the young. The new guest sat in a lower chair, smoking, that curious glimmer on his face which made him so attractive, and which only meant that he was looking on the whole scene from the outside, as it were, from beyond a fence. Sir William came almost directly to the attack.
“And so, Mr. Sisson, you have no definite purpose in coming to Italy?”
“No, none,” said Aaron. “I wanted to join Lilly.”
“But when you had joined him —?”
“Oh, nothing — stay here a time, in this country, if I could earn my keep.”
“Ah!— earn your keep? So you hope to earn your keep here? May I ask how?”
“By my flute.”
“Italy is a poor country.”
“I don’t want much.”
“You have a family to provide for.”
“They are provided for — for a couple of years.”
“Oh, indeed! Is that so?”
The old man got out of Aaron the detailed account of his circumstances — how he had left so much money to be paid over to his wife, and had received only a small amount for himself.
“I see you are like Lilly — you trust to Providence,” said Sir William.
“Providence or fate,” said Aaron.
“Lilly calls it Providence,” said Sir William. “For my own part, I always advise Providence plus a banking account. I have every belief in Providence, plus a banking account. Providence and no banking account I have observed to be almost invariably fatal. Lilly and I have argued it. He believes in casting his bread upon the waters. I sincerely hope he won’t have to cast himself after his bread, one of these days. Providence with a banking account. Believe in Providence once you have secured enough to live on. I should consider it disastrous to believe in Providence BEFORE. One can never be SURE of Providence.”
“What can you be sure of, then?” said Aaron.
“Well, in moderation, I can believe in a little hard cash, and in my own ability to earn a little hard cash.”
“Perhaps Lilly believes in his own ability, too.”
“No. Not so. Because he will never directly work to earn money. He works — and works quite well, I am told: but only as the spirit moves him, and never with any eye to the market. Now I call that TEMPTING Providence, myself. The spirit may move him in quite an opposite direction to the market — then where is Lilly? I have put it to him more than once.”
“The spirit generally does move him dead against the market,” said Aaron. “But he manages to scrape along.”
“In a state of jeopardy: all the time in a state of jeopardy,” said the old man. “His whole existence, and that of his wife, is completely precarious. I found, in my youth, the spirit moved me to various things which would have left me and my wife starving. So I realised in time, this was no good. I took my spirit in hand, therefore, and made him pull the cart which mankind is riding in. I harnessed him to the work of productive labour. And so he brought me my reward.”
“Yes,” said Aaron. “But every man according to his belief.”
“I don’t see,” said Sir William, “how a man can BELIEVE in a Providence unless he sets himself definitely to the work of earning his daily bread, and making provision for future needs. That’s what Providence means to me — making provision for oneself and one’s family. Now, Mr. Lilly — and you yourself — you say you believe in a Providence that does NOT compel you to earn your daily bread, and make provision. I confess myself I cannot see it: and Lilly has never been able to convince me.”
“I don’t believe in a kind-hearted Providence,” said Aaron, “and I don’t believe Lilly does. But I believe in chance. I believe, if I go my own way, without tying my nose to a job, chance will always throw something in my way: enough to get along with.”
“But on what do you base such a very unwarrantable belief?”
“I just feel like that.”
“And if you are ever quite without success — and nothing to fall back on?”
“I can work at something.”
“In case of illness, for example?”
“I can go to a hospital — or die.”
“Dear me! However, you are more logical than Lilly. He seems to believe that he has the Invisible — call it Providence if you will — on his side, and that this Invisible will never leave him in the lurch, or let him down, so long as he sticks to his own side of the bargain, and NEVER works for his own ends. I don’t quite see how he works. Certainly he seems to me a man who squanders a great deal of talent unworthily. Yet for some reason or other he calls this true, genuine activity, and has a contempt for actual work by which a man makes provision for his years and for his family. In the end, he will have to fall back on charity. But when I say so, he denies it, and says that in the end we, the men who work and make provision, will have to fall back on him. Well, all I can say is, that SO FAR he is in far greater danger of having to fall back on me, than I on him.”
The old man sat back in his chair with a little laugh of triumph. But it smote almost devilishly on Aaron’s ears, and for the first time in his life he felt that there existed a necessity for taking sides.
“I don’t suppose he will do much falling back,” he said.
“Well, he is young yet. You are both young. You are squandering your youth. I am an old man, and I see the end.”
“What end, Sir William?”
“Charity — and poverty — and some not very congenial ‘job,’ as you call it, to put bread in your mouth. No, no, I would not like to trust myself to your Providence, or to your Chance. Though I admit your Chance is a sounder proposition than Lilly’s Providence. You speculate with your life and your talent. I admit the nature which is a born speculator. After all, with your flute, you will speculate in other people’s taste for luxury, as a man may speculate in theatres or trains de luxe . You are the speculator. That may be your way of wisdom. But Lilly does not even speculate. I cannot see his point. I cannot see his point. I cannot see his point. Yet I have the greatest admiration for his mentality.”
The old man had fired up during this conversation — and all the others in the room had gone silent. Lady Franks was palpably uneasy. She alone knew how frail the old man was — frailer by far than his years. She alone knew what fear of his own age, what fear of death haunted him now: fear of his own non-existence. His own old age was an agony to him; worse than an agony, a horror. He wanted to be young — to live, to live. And he was old, he was breaking up. The glistening youth of Aaron, the impetuousness of Lilly fascinated him. And both these men seemed calmly to contradict his own wealth and honours.
Lady Franks tried to turn off the conversation to the trickles of normal chit-chat. The Colonel was horribly bored — so were all the women — Arthur was indifferent. Only the young Major was implicated, troubled in his earnest and philosophic spirit.
“What I can’t see,” he said, “is the place that others have in your scheme.”
“Is isn’t a scheme,” said Aaron.
“Well then, your way of life. Isn’t it pretty selfish, to marry a woman and then expect her to live on very little indeed, and that always precarious, just because you happen to believe in Providence or in Chance: which I think worse? What I don’t see is where others come in. What would the world be like if everybody lived that way?”
“Other people can please themselves,” said Aaron.
“No, they can’t — because you take first choice, it seems to me. Supposing your wife — or Lilly’s wife — asks for security and for provision, as Sir William says. Surely she has a right to it.”
“If I’ve no right to it myself — and I HAVE no right to it, if I don’t want it — then what right has she?”
“Every right, I should say. All the more since you are improvident.”
“Then she must manage her rights for herself. It’s no good her foisting her rights on to me.”
“Isn’t that pure selfishness?”
“It may be. I shall send my wife money as long as I’ve money to send.”
“And supposing you have none?”
“Then I can’t send it — and she must look out for herself.”
“I call that almost criminal selfishness.”
“I can’t help it.”
The conversation with the young Major broke off.
“It is certainly a good thing for society that men like you and Mr. Lilly are not common,” said Sir William, laughing.
“Becoming commoner every day, you’ll find,” interjaculated the Colonel.
“Indeed! Indeed! Well. May we ask you another question, Mr. Sisson? I hope you don’t object to our catechism?”
“No. Nor your judgment afterwards,” said Aaron, grinning.
“Then upon what grounds did you abandon your family? I know it is a tender subject. But Lilly spoke of it to us, and as far I could see. . . .”
“There were no grounds,” said Aaron. “No, there weren’t I just left them.”
“Mere caprice?”
“If it’s a caprice to be begotten — and a caprice to be born — and a caprice to die — then that was a caprice, for it was the same.”
“Like birth or death? I don’t follow.”
“It happened to me: as birth happened to me once — and death will happen. It was a sort of death, too: or a sort of birth. But as undeniable as either. And without any more grounds.”
The old, tremulous man, and the young man were watching one another.
“A natural event,” said Sir William.
“A natural event,” said Aaron.
“Not that you loved any other woman?”
“God save me from it.”
“You just left off loving?”
“Not even that. I went away.”
“What from?”
“From it all.”
“From the woman in particular?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, that.”
“And you couldn’t go back?”
Aaron shook his head.
“Yet you can give no reasons?”
“Not any reasons that would be any good. It wasn’t a question of reasons. It was a question of her and me and what must be. What makes a child be born out of its mother to the pain and trouble of both of them? I don’t know.”
“But that is a natural process.”
“So is this — or nothing.”
“No,” interposed the Major. “Because birth is a universal process — and yours is a specific, almost unique event.”
“Well, unique or not, it so came about. I didn’t ever leave off loving her — not as far as I know. I left her as I shall leave the earth when I die — because it has to be.”
“Do you know what I think it is, Mr. Sisson?” put in Lady Franks. “I think you are just in a wicked state of mind: just that. Mr. Lilly, too. And you must be very careful, or some great misfortune will happen to you.”
“It may,” said Aaron.
“And it will, mark my word, it will.”
“You almost wish it might, as a judgment on me,” smiled Aaron.
“Oh, no, indeed. I should only be too sorry. But I feel it will, unless you are careful.”
“I’ll be careful, then.”
“Yes, and you can’t be too careful.”
“You make me frightened.”
“I would like to make you very frightened indeed, so that you went back humbly to your wife and family.”
“It would HAVE to be a big fright then, I assure you.”
“Ah, you are really heartless. It makes me angry.”
She turned angrily aside.
“Well, well! Well, well! Life! Life! Young men are a new thing to me!” said Sir William, shaking his head. “Well, well! What do you say to whiskey and soda, Colonel?”
“Why, delighted, Sir William,” said the Colonel, bouncing up.
“A night-cap, and then we retire,” said Lady Franks.
Aaron sat thinking. He knew Sir William liked him: and that Lady Franks didn’t. One day he might have to seek help from Sir William. So he had better placate milady. Wrinkling the fine, half mischievous smile on his face, and trading on his charm, he turned to his hostess.
“You wouldn’t mind, Lady Franks, if I said nasty things about my wife and found a lot of fault with her. What makes you angry is that I know it is not a bit more her fault than mine, that we come apart. It can’t be helped.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. I disapprove of your way of looking at things altogether. It seems to me altogether cold and unmanly and inhuman. Thank goodness my experience of a man has been different.”
“We can’t all be alike, can we? And if I don’t choose to let you see me crying, that doesn’t prove I’ve never had a bad half hour, does it? I’ve had many — ay, and a many.”
“Then why are you so WRONG, so wrong in your behaviour?”
“I suppose I’ve got to have my bout out: and when it’s out, I can alter.”
“Then I hope you’ve almost had your bout out,” she said.
“So do I,” said he, with a half-repentant, half-depressed look on his attractive face. The corners of his mouth grimaced slightly under his moustache.
“The best thing you can do is to go straight back to England, and to her.”
“Perhaps I’d better ask her if she wants me, first,” he said drily.
“Yes, you might do that, too.” And Lady Franks felt she was quite getting on with her work of reform, and the restoring of woman to her natural throne. Best not go too fast, either.
“Say when,” shouted the Colonel, who was manipulating the syphon.
“When,” said Aaron.
The men stood up to their drinks.
“Will you be leaving in the morning, Mr. Sisson?” asked Lady Franks.
“May I stay till Monday morning?” said Aaron. They were at Saturday evening.
“Certainly. And you will take breakfast in your room: we all do. At what time? Half past eight?”
“Thank you very much.”
“Then at half past eight the man will bring it in. Goodnight.”
Once more in his blue silk bedroom, Aaron grimaced to himself and stood in the middle of the room grimacing. His hostess’ admonitions were like vitriol in his ears. He looked out of the window. Through the darkness of trees, the lights of a city below. Italy! The air was cold with snow. He came back into his soft, warm room. Luxurious it was. And luxurious the deep, warm bed.
He was still asleep when the man came noiselessly in with the tray: and it was morning. Aaron woke and sat up. He felt that the deep, warm bed, and the soft, warm room had made him sleep too well: robbed him of his night, like a narcotic. He preferred to be more uncomfortable and more aware of the flight of the dark hours. It seemed numbing.
The footman in his grey house-jacket was neat and Italian and sympathising. He gave good-morning in Italian — then softly arranged the little table by the bedside, and put out the toast and coffee and butter and boiled egg and honey, with silver and delicate china. Aaron watched the soft, catlike motions of the man. The dark eyes glanced once at the blond man, leaning on his elbow on the pillow. Aaron’s face had that watchful, half-amused expression. The man said something in Italian. Aaron shook his head, laughed, and said:
“Tell me in English.”
The man went softly to the window curtains, and motioned them with his hand.
“Yes, do,” said Aaron.
So the man drew the buff-coloured silk curtains: and Aaron, sitting in bed, could see away beyond red roofs of a town, and in the further heaven great snowy mountains.
“The Alps,” he said in surprise.
“Gli Alpi — si, signore.” The man bowed, gathered up Aaron’s clothes, and silently retired.
Aaron watched through the window. It was a frosty morning at the end of September, with a clear blue morning-sky, Alpine, and the watchful, snow-streaked mountain tops bunched in the distance, as if waiting. There they were, hovering round, circling, waiting. They reminded him of marvellous striped sky-panthers circling round a great camp: the red-roofed city. Aaron looked, and looked again. In the near distance, under the house elm-tree tops were yellowing. He felt himself changing inside his skin.
So he turned away to his coffee and eggs. A little silver egg-cup with a curious little frill round it: honey in a frail, iridescent glass bowl, gold-iridescent: the charm of delicate and fine things. He smiled half mockingly to himself. Two instincts played in him: the one, an instinct for fine, delicate things: he had attractive hands; the other, an inclination to throw the dainty little table with all its niceties out of the window. It evoked a sort of devil in him.
He took his bath: the man had brought back his things: he dressed and went downstairs. No one in the lounge: he went down to the ground floor: no one in the big hall with its pillars of yellow marble and its gold arches, its enormous, dark, bluey-red carpet. He stood before the great glass doors. Some red flowers still were blooming in the tubs, on the steps, handsome: and beautiful chrysanthemums in the wide portico. Beyond, yellow leaves were already falling on the green grass and the neat drive. Everywhere was silent and empty. He climbed the wide stairs, sat in the long, upper lounge where the papers were. He wanted his hat and coat, and did not know where to find them. The windows looked on to a terraced garden, the hill rising steeply behind the house. He wanted to go out.
So he opened more doors, and in a long drawing-room came upon five or six manservants, all in the grey house-jackets, all clean-shaven, neat, with neat black hair, all with dusters or brushes or feather brooms, and all frolicking, chattering, playing like so many monkeys. They were all of the same neat, smallish size. They were all laughing. They rolled back a great rug as if it were some football game, one flew at the curtains. And they merely looked at Aaron and went on chattering, and laughing and dusting.
Surprised, and feeling that he trespassed, he stood at the window a moment looking out. The noise went on behind him. So he turned, smiling, and asked for his hat, pointing to his head. They knew at once what he wanted. One of the fellows beckoned him away, down to the hall and to the long cupboard place where hats and coats and sticks were hung. There was his hat; he put it on, while the man chattered to him pleasantly and unintelligibly, and opened for him the back door, into the garden.