December Love - Robert Hichens
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She looked half defiantly, half inquisitively at Lady Sellingworth.
"My dear Beryl!" said the latter, "for all these lacks in your
temperament you must wait."
"Wait? For how long?"
"Till you are fifty, perhaps."
"I know I shall want romance at fifty."
"Let us say sixty, then."
"Or," interrupted Craven, "until you are comfortably married."
"Comfortably married!" she cried. "_Quelle horreur!_"
"I had no idea Americans were so romantic," said Lady Sellingworth, with
just a touch of featherweight malice.
"Americans! I believe the longing for romance covers both sexes and all
the human race."
She let her eyes go into Craven's.
"Only up till a certain age," said Lady Sellingworth. "When we love to
sit by the fire, we can do very well without it. But we must be careful
to lay up treasure for our old age, mental treasure. We must cultivate
tastes and habits which have nothing to do with wildness. A man in
Sorrento taught me about that."
"A man in Sorrento!" said Miss Van Tuyn, suddenly and sharply on the
alert.
"Yes. He was a famous writer, and had, I dare say, been a famous lover
in his time. One day, as we drove beyond the town towards the hills,
he described to me the compensations old age holds for sensible people.
It's a question of cultivating and preparing the mind, of filling the
storehouse against the day of famine. He had done it, and assured me
that he didn't regret his lost youth or sigh after its unrecoverable
pleasures. He had accustomed his mind to its task."
"What task, dearest?"
"Acting in connexion with the soul--his word that--as a thoroughly
efficient substitute for his body as a pleasure giver."
At this moment the adoring eyes of the three musicians who were
"hairdressers in the daytime" focussed passionately upon Miss Van Tuyn,
distracted her attention. She felt masculinity intent upon her and
responded automatically.
"The dear boys! They are asking if they shall play the Pastorale for me.
Look at their eyes!" she said.
Craven did not bother to do that, but looked instead at hers, wondering
a little at her widespread energy in net casting. Was it possible that
once Lady Sellingworth had been like that, ceaselessly on the
lookout for worship, requiring it as a right, even from men who were
hairdressers in the daytime? As the musicians began to play he met her
eyes again and felt sure that it could not have been so. Whatever she
had done, whatever she had been, she could never have frequented the
back stairs. That thought seemed a rather cruel thrust at Miss Van Tuyn.
But there is a difference in vanities. Wonderful variety of nature!
When the players had finished the Pastorale and "A Mezzanotte," and
had been rewarded by a long look of thanks from Miss Van Tuyn which
evidently drove them over the borders of admiration into the regions
of unfulfilled desire, Lady Sellingworth said she must go. And then an
unexpected thing happened. It appeared that Miss Van Tuyn had asked a
certain famous critic, who though English by birth was more Parisian
than most French people, to call for her at the restaurant and take her
on to join a party at the Cafe Royal. She, therefore, could not go yet,
and she begged Lady Sellingworth to stay on and to finish up the
evening in the company of Georgians at little marble tables. But Lady
Sellingworth laughingly jibbed at the Cafe Royal.
"I should fall out of my _assiette_ there!" she said.
"But no one is ever surprised at the Cafe Royal, dearest. It is the one
place in London where--Ah! here is Jennings come to fetch us!"
A very small man, with a pointed black beard and wandering green eyes,
wearing a Spanish sombrero and a black cloak, and carrying an ebony
stick nearly as tall as himself, at this moment slipped furtively into
the room, and, without changing his delicately plaintive expression,
came up to Miss Van Tuyn and ceremoniously shook hands with her.
Lady Sellingworth looked for a moment at Craven.
"May I escort you home?" he said. "At any rate, let me get you a taxi."
"Lady Sellingworth, may I introduce Ambrose Jennings," said Miss Van
Tuyn in a rather firm voice at this moment.
Lady Sellingworth bent kindly to the little man far down below her.
After a word or two she said:
"Now I must go."
"Must you really? Then Mr. Craven will get you a taxi."
"If it's fine, I will walk. It seems more suitable to walk home after
dining here."
"Walk! Then let us all walk together, and we'll persuade you into the
Cafe Royal."
"Dick Garstin will be there," said Ambrose Jennings in a frail voice,
"Enid Blunt, a Turkish refugee from Smyrna who writes quite decent
verse, Thapoulos, Penitence Murray, who is just out of prison, and Smith
the sculptor, with his mistress, a round-faced little Russian girl.
She's the dearest little Bolshevik I know."
He looked plaintively yet critically at Lady Sellingworth, and pulled
his little black beard with fingers covered with antique rings.
"Dear little bloodthirsty thing!" he added to Lady Sellingworth. "You
would like her. I know it."
"I'm sure I should. There is something so alluring about Bolshevism when
it's safely tucked up at the Cafe Royal. But I will only walk to the
door."
"And then Mr. Craven will get you a taxi," said Miss Van Tuyn. "Shall we
go?"
They fared forth into the London night--Craven last.
He realized that Miss Van Tuyn had made up her mind to keep both him
and Jennings as her possessions of the evening, and to send Lady
Sellingworth, if she would go home early, back to Berkeley Square
without an escort. Her cult for her friend, though doubtless genuine,
evidently weakened when there was any question of the allegiance of men.
Craven made up his mind that he would not leave Lady Sellingworth until
they were at the door of Number 18A, Berkeley Square.
In the street he found himself by the side of Miss Van Tuyn, behind Lady
Sellingworth and Ambrose Jennings, who were really a living caricature
as they proceeded through the night towards Shaftesbury Avenue. The
smallness of Jennings, accentuated by his bat-like cloth cloak, his
ample sombrero and fantastically long stick, made Lady Sellingworth look
like a moving tower as she walked at his side, like a leaning tower when
she bent graciously to catch the murmur of his persistent conversation.
And as over the theatres in letters of fire were written the names
of the stars in the London firmament--Marie Lohr, Moscovitch, Elsie
Janis--so over, all over, Lady Sellingworth seemed to be written for
Craven to read: "I am really not a Bohemian."
"Do you genuinely wish Lady Sellingworth to finish the evening at the
Cafe Royal?" he asked of his companion.
"Yes. They would love her there. She would bring a new note."
"Probably. But would she love them?"
"I don't think you quite understand her," said Miss Van Tuyn.
"I'm quite sure I don't. Still--"
"In past years I am certain she has been to all the odd cafes of Paris."
"Perhaps. But one changes. And you yourself said there were--or was it
had been?--two Adela Sellingworths, and that you only knew one."
"Yes. But perhaps at the Cafe Royal I should get to know the other."
"May she not be dead?"
"I have a theory that nothing of us really dies while we live. Our abode
changes. We know that. But I believe the inhabitant is permanent. We are
what we were, with, of course, innumerable additions brought to us by
the years. For instance, I believe that Lady Sellingworth now is what
she was, to all intents and purposes, with additions which naturally
have made great apparent changes in her. An old moss-covered house,
overgrown with creepers, looks quite different from the same house when
it is new and bare. But go inside--the rooms are the same, and under the
moss and the creepers are the same walls."
"It may be so. But what a difference the moss and the creepers make.
Some may be climbing roses."
Craven felt the shrewd girlish eyes were looking at him closely.
"In her case some of them certainly are!" she said. "Oh, do look at them
turning the corner! If Cirella were here he would have a subject for one
of his most perfect caricatures. It is the leaning tower of Pisa with a
bat."
The left wing of Ambrose Jennings's cloak flew out as he whirled into
Regent Street by Lady Sellingworth's side.
CHAPTER VI
At the door of the Cafe Royal they stopped, and Miss Van Tuyn laid a
hand on Lady Sellingworth's arm.
"Do come in, dearest. It will really amuse you," she said urgently.
"And--I'll be truthful--I want to show you off to the Georgians as my
friend. I want them to know how wonderful an Edwardian can be."
"Please--please!" pleaded Jennings from under his sombrero. "Dick would
revel in you. You would whip him into brilliance. I know it. You admire
his work, surely?"
"I admire it very much."
"And he is more wonderful still when he's drunk. And to-night--I feel
it--he will be drunk. I pledge myself that Dick Garstin will be drunk."
"I'm sure it would be a very great privilege to see Mr. Garstin drunk.
But I must go home. Good night, dear Beryl."
"But the little Bolshevik! You must meet the little Bolshevik!" cried
Jennings.
Lady Sellingworth shook her deer-like head, smiling.
"Good night, Mr. Craven."
"But he is going to get you a taxi," said Miss Van Tuyn.
"Yes, and if you will allow me I am going to leave you at your door,"
said Craven, with decision.
A line appeared in Miss Van Tuyn's low forehead, but she only said:
"And then you will come back and join us."
"Thank you," said Craven.
He took off his hat. Miss Van Tuyn gave him a long and eloquent look,
which was really not unlike a Leap Year proposal. Then she entered the
cafe with Jennings. Craven thought at that moment that her back looked
unusually rigid.
A taxi was passing. He held up his hand. It stopped. Lady Sellingworth
and he got in, after he had given the address to the chauffeur.
"What a lovely girl Beryl Van Tuyn is!" said Lady Sellingworth, as they
drove off.
"She is--very lovely."
"And she has a lot of courage, moral courage."
"Is it?" he could not help saying.
"Yes. She lives as she chooses to live. And yet she isn't married."
"Would marriage make it all easier for her?"
"Much, if she married the man who suited her."
"I wonder what sort of a man that would be."
"So does she, I think. But she's a strange girl. I should not be
surprised if she were never to marry at all."
"Don't you think she would fall in love?"
"Yes. For I think every living woman is capable of that. But she has the
sort of intellect which would not be tricked for very long by the heart.
Any weakness of hers would soon be over, I fancy."
"I dare say you are right. In fact I believe you are generally right.
She told me you were a book of wisdom. And I feel that it is true."
"Here is Berkeley Square."
"How wrong it is of these chauffeurs to drive so fast! It is almost as
bad as in Paris. They defy the law. I should like to have this man up."
He got out. She followed him, looking immensely tall in the dimness.
"I am not going back to the Cafe Royal," he said.
"But it will be amusing. And I think they are certainly expecting you."
"I am not going there."
She rang. Instantly the door was opened by the handsome middle-aged
butler.
"Then come in for a little while," she said casually. "Murgatroyd, you
might bring us up some tea and lemon, or will you have whisky and soda,
Mr. Craven?"
"I would much rather have tea and lemon, please," he said.
A great fire was burning in the hall. Again Craven felt that he was in
a more elegant London than the London of modern days. As he went up
the wide, calm staircase, and tasted the big silence of the house, he
thought of the packed crowd in the Cafe Royal, of the uproar there, of
the smoke wreaths, of the staring heterogeneous faces, of the shouting
or sullenly folded lips, of the--perhaps--tipsy man of genius, of
Jennings with his green eyes, his black beard, his tall ebony staff, of
the "little bloodthirsty thing" with the round Russian face, of Miss Van
Tuyn in the midst of it all, sitting by the side of Enid Blunt, smoking
cigarettes, and searching the men's faces for the looks which were food
for her craving. And he loved the contrast which was given to him.
"Do go in and sit by the fire, and I'll come in a moment," said the
husky voice he was learning to love. "I'm just going to take off my
hat."
Craven opened the great mahogany door and went in.
The big room was very dimly lighted by two standard electric lamps, one
near the fireplace, the other in a distant corner where a grand piano
stood behind a huge china bowl in which a pink azalea was blooming.
There was a low armchair near the fire by a sofa. He sat down in it,
and picked up a book which lay on a table close beside it. What did she
read--this book of wisdom?
"_Musiciens d'aujourd'hui_," by Romain Rolland.
Craven thought he was disappointed. There was no revelation for him in
that. He held the book on his knee, and wondered what he had expected
to find, what type of book. What special line of reading was Lady
Sellingworth's likely to be? He could imagine her dreaming over "Wisdom
and Destiny," or perhaps over "The Book of Pity and of Death." On the
other hand, it seemed quite natural to think of her smiling her mocking
smile over a work of delicate, or even of bitter, irony, such as
Anatole France's story of Pilate at the Baths of Baies, or study of
the Penguins. He could not think that she cared for sentimental books,
though she might perhaps have a taste for works dealing with genuine
passion.
He heard the door open gently, and got up. Lady Sellingworth came in.
She had not changed her dress, which was a simple day dress of black.
She had only taken off her fur and hat, and now came towards him, still
wearing white gloves and holding a large black fan in her hand.
"What's that you've got?" she asked. "Oh--my book!"
"Yes. I took it up because I wondered what you were reading. I think
what people read by preference tells one something of what they are. I
was interested to know what you read. Forgive my curiosity."
She sat down by the fire, opened the fan, and held it between her face
and the flames.
"I read all sorts of things."
"Novels?"
"I very seldom read a novel now. Here is our tea. But I know you would
rather have a whisky-and-soda."
"As a rule I should, but not to-night. I want to drink what you are
drinking."
"And to smoke what I am smoking?" she said, with a faintly ironic smile.
"Yes--please."
She held out a box of cigarettes. The butler went out of the room.
"I love this house," said Craven abruptly. "I love its atmosphere."
"It isn't a modern atmosphere, is it?"
"Neither distinctively modern, nor in the least old-fashioned. I think
the right adjective for it would be perhaps--"
He paused and sat silent for a moment.
"I hardly know. There's something remote, distinguished and yet very
warm and intimate about it."
He looked at her and added, almost with hardihood.
"It's not a cold, or even a reserved house."
"Coldness and unnecessary reserve are tiresome--indeed, I might almost
say abhorrent--to me."
She had given him his tea and lemon and taken hers.
"But not aloofness?"
"You have travelled?"
"Yes."
"Well, you know how, when travelling, it is easy to get into intimacies
with people whom one doesn't want to be intimate with at home."
"Yes. I know all about that."
"At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but many
others less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I can
only call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?"
"I think it would probably be called so by some."
"By whom?"
"Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!"
She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had something
almost of youth in it.
"I wonder," he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laugh
had filled up, "I wonder whether I am one of them?"
"I don't think you are."
"And Ambrose Jennings?"
"That's a clever man!" was her reply.
And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and to
the type of clever mind which, unable to create, analyses the creations
of others sensitively.
"But I much prefer the creators," she presently said.
"So do I. They are like the fresh air compared with the air in a
carefully closed room," said Craven. "Talking of closed rooms, don't you
think it is strange the liking many brilliant men and women have, both
creators and analysers of creators, for the atmosphere of garish or
sordid cafes?"
"You are thinking of the Cafe Royal?"
"Yes. Do you know it?"
"Don't tell Beryl--but I have never been in it. Nevertheless, I know
exactly what it is like."
"By hearsay?"
"Oh, no. In years gone by I have been into many of the cafes in Paris."
"And did you like them and the life in them?"
"In those days they often fascinated me, as no doubt the Cafe Royal and
its life fascinates Beryl to-day. The hectic appeals to something in
youth, when there is often fever in the blood. Strong lights, noise, the
human pressure of crowds, the sight of myriads of faces, the sound of
many voices--all that represents life to us when we are young. Calm,
empty spaces, single notes, room all round us for breathing amply and
fully, a face here or there--that doesn't seem like life to us then.
Beryl dines with me alone sometimes. But she must finish up in the
evening with a crowd if she is near the door of the place where the
crowd is. And you must not tell me you never like the Cafe Royal, for if
you do I shall not believe you."
"I do like it at times," he acknowledged. "But to-night, sitting here,
the mere thought of it is almost hateful to me. It is all vermilion and
orange colour, while this . . ."
"Is drab!"
"No, indeed! Dim purple, perhaps, or deepest green."
"You couldn't bear it for long. You would soon begin longing for
vermilion again."
"You seem to think me very young. I am twenty-nine."
"Have you ceased to love wildness already?"
"No," he answered truthfully. "But there is something there which makes
me feel as if it were almost vulgar."
"No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful--beautiful, even.
It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midst
of the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkest
clouds. Do you ever read William Watson?"
"I have read some of his poems."
"There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. 'Pass,
thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to
stay--'"
She stopped and held her fan a little higher.
"I don't know it," he said.
"It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the
wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know
when to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away."
"But if the heart wants to remain?"
"Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more
disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that.
And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old
wildness--that must give youth nausea of the soul."
She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar
and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through
his veins.
Suddenly he thought of the "old guard," and he knew that not one of the
truly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as
this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.
"After all," he thought, "it isn't the envelope that matters; it is the
letter inside."
Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of
spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady
Sellingworth's eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a
certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he
believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew
that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.
And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had
led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that
possibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth's abrupt
desertion of the "old guard" and plunge into old age. But even he did
not know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way.
And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved her and
who was almost certain, barring the explosion of a moral bombshell, and
perhaps even then, to go on loving her.
No one knew why Lady Sellingworth had abruptly and finally emerged from
the world of illusions in which she had lived. But possibly a member of
the underworld, a light-fingered gentleman of brazen assurance, had long
ago guessed the reason for her sudden departure from the regiment of
which she had been a conspicuous member; possibly he had guessed, or
surmised, why she had sent in her papers. But even he could scarcely be
certain.
The truth of the matter was this.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
Lady Sellingworth belonged to a great English family, and had been
brought up in healthy splendour, saved from the canker of too much
luxury by the aristocratic love of sport which is a tradition in such
English families as hers. As a girl she had been what a certain sporting
earl described as "a leggy beauty." Even then she had shown a decided
inclination to run wild and had seldom checked the inclination.
Unusually tall and athletic, rather boyish in appearance, and of the
thin, greyhound type, she had excelled in games and held her own in
sports. She had shot in an era when comparatively few women shot, and in
the hunting-field she had shown a reckless courage which had fascinated
the hard-riding men who frequented her father's house. As she grew older
her beauty had rapidly developed, and with it an insatiable love of
admiration. Early she had realized that she was going to be a beauty,
and had privately thanked the gods for her luck. She could scarcely have
borne not to be a beauty; but, mercifully, it was all right. Woman's
greatest gift was to be hers. When she looked into the glass and knew
that, when she looked into men's eyes and knew it even more definitely,
she felt merciless and eternal. In the dawn no end was in sight; in the
dawn no end seemed possible.
From the age of sixteen onwards hers was the intimate joy, certainly
one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all the joys of women, of
knowing that all men looked at her with pleasure, that many men looked
at her with longing, that she was incessantly desired.
From the time when she was sixteen she lived perpetually in that
atmosphere which men throw round a daring and beautiful woman without
even conscious intention, creating it irresistibly merely by their
natural desire. And that atmosphere was the breath of life to her. Soon
she could not imagine finding any real value in life without it. She
often considered plain girls, dull girls, middle-aged women who had
never had any beauty, any saving grace but that of freshness, and
wondered how they managed to get along at all. What was the use of life
to them? Nobody bothered about them, except, perhaps, a few relations,
or what are called "old friends"--that is, people who, having always
been accustomed to you, put up with you comfortably, and wear their
carpet slippers in your presence without troubling whether you like
slippers or would prefer them in high-heeled shoes.
As to old women, those from whom almost the last vestiges of what they
once had been physically had fallen away, she was always charming to
them; but she always wondered why they still seemed to cling on to life.
They were done with. It was long ago all over for them. They did not
matter any more, even if once they had mattered. Why did they still keep
a hold on life with their skinny hands? Was it from fear of death, or
what? Once she expressed her wonder about this to a man.
"Of course," she said. "I know they can't go just because they want to.
But why do they _want_ to stay?"
"Oh," he said, "I think lots of old ladies enjoy themselves immensely in
their own way."
"Well, I can't understand it!" she said.
And she spoke the truth.
She flirted, of course. Her youthful years were complicated by a maze
of flirtations, through which she wandered with apparently the greatest
assurance, gaining knowledge of men.
Finally she married. She made what is called "a great match," the sort
of match in every way suitable to such an aristocratic, beautiful and
daring girl.
Then began her real reign.
Although such a keen sportswoman, she was also a woman who had a good
brain, a quick understanding, and a genuine love of the intellectual and
artistic side of life, for its own sake, not for any reason of fashion.
She was of the type that rather makes fashions than follows them. As a
married woman she was not only Diana in the open country, she was Egeria
elsewhere. She liked and she wanted all types of men; the hard-bitten,
keen-eyed, lean-flanked men who could give her a lead or take a lead
from her over difficult country, and the softer breed of men, whose more
rounded bodies were informed by sharp spirits, who, many of them,
could not have sat a horse over the easiest fence, or perhaps even have
brought down a stag at twenty paces, but who would dominate thousands
from their desks, or from the stages of opera houses, or from adjustable
seats in front of pianos, or from studios hung with embroideries and
strewn with carpets of the East.