LOVER’S LEAP

by

Martin Armstrong

Contents

Chapter 1 PHILIP

Chapter 2 ROSE

Chapter 3 PHILIP

Chapter 4 MERIEL

Chapter 5 PHILIP

Chapter 6 MERIEL

Chapter 7 PHILIP

Chapter 8 ROSE

Chapter 9 PHILIP

Chapter 10 MERIEL

Chapter 11 PHILIP

A Note on the Author

PHILIP

I have often thought of keeping a diary, but the significant moment for beginning has hitherto been denied me. Now, at last, it has arrived, though it is one o’clock a.m., high time to be in bed. Was it by mere chance that I decided after all to go to the Ethertons’ party to-night? I so nearly, so terribly nearly, stayed at home. Here on my desk lies the telegram I began to write six hours ago: ‘So sorry, can’t come this evening …’ and there I paused, trying to think of a polite and convincing excuse. It would have to be an illness, but what illness? Listless and depressed as I was, I couldn’t hit on the right illness or the right phrase to put it into, and I sat here scribbling on the blotting-paper, drawing with meticulous care a half-open window and feeling more and more miserable with every stroke of the pen. Here it is, and the mere sight of it recalls the empty misery with which I worked at it. What a terrible power there is, for a morbid mind, in trifles such as this. If I had come home just now in the mood in which I went out, the discovery of this miserable sketch would have horribly aggravated my soreness. But now I am immune, gloriously immune from the loathsome thing: I can stare it in the face and laugh at it. When I had finished drawing it I returned to the telegram and found the hopeless problem still unsolved. For another five minutes I sat before it, numb, helpless, and then, for no reason that I can discover, I threw aside my pen and went dismally to my bedroom to dress.

At the Ethertons’ gate in St. John’s Wood I paused again. Could I possibly bear it? Could I climb the steps, ring the bell, and face that crowd of happy, self-possessed people? I felt so horribly vulnerable. As a boy I used to keep caterpillars, and once, when one of them had spun a cocoon, I tore it open to see what was happening inside, and the creature fell out, livid and convulsively writhing. When it ceased to writhe and lay as if dormant I touched it with a leaf and again it writhed frantically as if the leaf had been red-hot, as if the slightest touch were an unendurable scald. That was how I felt as I stood at the Ethertons’ gate this evening. To healthy-minded people such a state is, I suppose, incomprehensible. Wouldn’t it be better to turn back and go home? Mrs. Etherton wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind, I recollected now, even if I were to tell her the truth, that I had no excuse, that I simply didn’t feel like a party. She rather likes her artistic friends to be freakish, to show occasional signs of the artistic temperament. But thank God I didn’t turn back. I stubbornly and desperately rang the bell and went in.

Can it have been by pure chance that I went in? I so nearly turned back at the gate and hurried home to take refuge in the solitude I hated. None of my friends suspects, I’m sure, the awful loneliness of my life during the last two years on this top floor in Brunswick Square. They all think me very snug in my pleasant sitting-room looking down into the garden with its plane trees, the small airy bedroom at the back and the third room that I use as a studio. I have many friends. I need never lunch alone or dine alone and in the evening I can always be sure of meeting people I know at the Café Royal. And not only this: I have enough money to enable me, with care, to get on with my painting whether I sell pictures or not. No, my loneliness did not consist in being alone. I had all the friends I wanted. It consisted in an aimlessness, a restlessness which haunted me and sapped my energies. I was seeking blindly for something I could not find; something I hoped to find but never completely found in my friends; that I found sometimes in my work, but only when I was at work and only intermittently, and if I had turned back at the Ethertons’ gate this evening I should still be seeking. But I went in and I found.

And yet the bare statement of what happened to me sounds ludicrously slight. I saw a young woman called Rose Bentley and later had a few words with her. That’s all. Yet it has been enough to change my life, to gather together and focus my aimless, restless desires, as a magnifying-glass gathers the pale, diffused sunlight into a burning core.

I have read somewhere that love is a terrible thing because it removes a man’s centre from within himself and sets it outside so that his life is at the mercy of another. But what of the man who has no centre? For such a man love is salvation, for it gives him the centre he lacked. Yet, for all that, it is dangerous, because the centre it gives him is outside his control. Yes, I recognize my danger and I tell myself too that she may never return my love, but these things mean nothing to me at present. I feel only complete happiness, complete confidence. I feel that I have been given something that can never be taken from me and that I am satisfied. Of course that is a delusion: I can prove it to myself by simply saying, as I said just now as I walked home: ‘Perhaps she is already in love with another man. Perhaps in a month she will be married and lost to me.’ That thought terrified me and terrifies me now, but only for a moment. To restore myself I have only to recall her as I saw her for the last time an hour ago. She had said good night and left the drawing-room, but in a minute or two the door opened again and she appeared in the doorway in her fur coat, ready to go, leaning against the doorpost, one hand on the door-handle, and trying half timidly to catch Mrs. Etherton’s eye for some last word; and at that vision of her my terror vanishes and a flood of confidence and happiness rushes back into my heart.

I return again and again to the brief glimpse of her which I shall never forget, and try to discover what it was in her that seemed to me at that moment so exquisitely lovely. Was it her pose as she leaned against the doorpost with a sort of intimate artlessness which made me feel that I had surprised her with her party manners forgotten, talking alone to a friend; or her half-eager, half-timid absorption in the attempt to attract Mrs. Etherton’s attention; or something in the curve of her parted lips and the momentary gleam of lamplight in her eye and on her teeth? How vividly and instantaneously one observes such moments. I noticed, and I see it still as I call up her face to my mind’s eye, that those two gleaming teeth in the upper jaw are slightly crossed and that her upper lip is a little fuller on one side of its centre than on the other; and those two small irregularities seem to me, the Lord knows why, to give an irresistible pathos and distinction to her beauty.

And yet how strange it is to think, now, that I did not notice her at all till after dinner. I arrived, it is true, a little late, as they were all drifting into the dining-room in the unceremonious way customary at the Ethertons’, and she sat on my side of the table, separated from me by two others and so out of sight. It was old Etherton, our host, who drew my attention to her afterwards in the drawing-room. He is often absent from his wife’s parties: he has none of her bounteous, indiscriminate interest in ‘artistic’ people. In fact, until they have proved to him that they can do something—which means, of course, do something that he approves of—or, alternatively, that they have a certain sharpness of intelligence, he regards them as rather a nuisance. I am an exception, because I was introduced into the Etherton circle not by her but by him. He is an old friend of my father’s and when I came to live in London he invited me to dine at his club, came and inspected my pictures and declared that there was something in them.

‘You may as well join my wife’s circus,’ he said to me, and soon afterwards a note from Mrs. Etherton invited me to one of her evenings. ‘My husband will be at home,’ she wrote, and whenever she invited me afterwards this information was added. This indicated that I belonged to him, not to her. Not that she disliked me. Hospitable, large-hearted old thing that she is, she dislikes nobody, I believe; and I’m sure nobody could dislike her. But she made no disguise, from the first moment of seeing it, of disliking my work. ‘Very good, no doubt,’ she said, ‘but too modern for me, my dear’; and my work became a friendly joke between us. ‘I must introduce you to Mr. Philip Marling,’ she would say in my hearing; ‘he paints the most atrocious modern pictures.’

She and her husband are equally open in their disagreement. ‘You won’t like her, William,’ she would say of a newly discovered violinist, ‘she plays with a great deal of temperament.’

‘The first task of the music teacher,’ Etherton declared, ‘is the eradication of temperament.’

Polite, cynical, and somewhat aloof in manner, with his aristocratic nose and closely cropped grey moustache, he acts as an acid corrective to the easy enthusiasms of these evenings. ‘Music,’ he remarked to me quietly one evening after a young Frenchman had given us a fluent rendering of a Chopin Étude, ‘is insufferable unless it is admirable’; and on another occasion, when I asked him about the work of a new poet recently added by Mrs. Etherton to her collection of geniuses, he answered: ‘O tolerable, quite tolerable. But as you doubtless know, there is nothing so easy to write as tolerable verse. That is why most of us refrain.’

This evening, as we entered the drawing-room after dinner, he took my arm and led me to a sofa near the window. ‘I have something to show you,’ he said.

He has a fine collection of drawings and he now carefully extracted from a vellum portfolio his latest acquisitions, two pencil drawings of nudes by Matisse. ‘My poor wife thinks them awful,’ he remarked with humorous distress when I had finished admiring them. ‘And yet her taste is often good. What, for instance, do you think of her new acquisition?’

He waved a hand that held a cigarette between first and second finger towards his wife who was standing near the piano talking to a tall, slim, golden-haired young woman dressed in dull blue. ‘Something quite unusual, don’t you think?’

‘What does she do?’ I asked. One always asks that of Mrs. Etherton’s new acquisitions.

‘I don’t know,’ said old Etherton. ‘Nothing, let us hope.’

At that moment Mrs. Etherton opened the piano and Rose Bentley sat down to play. ‘A pianist, alas!’ said Etherton. ‘But at least one has the opportunity of studying her profile.’

Rose glanced up at Mrs. Etherton and smiled, and instantly, as if an electric spark had shot between us, a tremulous excitement took hold of me, so that I forgot old Etherton on the sofa beside me, forgot the Ethertons’ drawing-room and the nine or ten guests that filled it, and became absorbed in her.

Is it merely a certain kind of physical beauty that, perhaps half a dozen times in a lifetime, produces that sudden, palpitating, breathless state which I can only describe as physical conversion? Or are there other and obscurer causes? In other words, is love at first sight really a profound and complex event or a thing no more significant than a sneeze? And why should I only, of all the people there, have been converted? Everyone would probably have agreed that Rose is beautiful, but none, I suppose, that she is, as she seems to me, so overwhelmingly enchanting. Is it just my imagination, then? Can it be that these strange, instantaneous conversions are subjective, that they are the final product of a gradual process in the convert, the slow compression of a spring that at the right moment is released by any mouse that happens to nibble? Was I, unknown to myself, all ready to fall in love, and if Rose Bentley had not been at the Ethertons’ to-night would any other personable young woman have set me off equally well when the psychological moment—nine-fifteen, or whenever it was—arrived? No, I can’t believe it. Body, mind, and soul revolt instantly against such a cheapening of my precious Rose. No, it was because my eyes were opened, because I alone of all in the Ethertons’ drawing-room saw her as she really is, that the dazzling revelation came to me only. It happened in a flash, before she had even raised her hands to the piano, and I had time to long passionately for her not to begin playing, not to break the spell with music I disliked or the murder of music I loved and so reveal imperfections in the perfection which was hers now in this brief, immortal moment of silence.

Surely I might have known that her playing would have been as beautiful as herself. She played a sonata by Mozart, making of it a warm and sparkling jewel of sound that seemed to be the audible expression of her beauty. There is a plant called the Rose of Jericho which, when kept away from earth and moisture, is a mere lump of dead fibre, like dried moss; but when put into water it slowly comes to life and unfolds and flowers into a living green rosette. That is the effect that Rose’s playing had upon me, and so it was her music, no doubt, that completed my conversion by laying me open to her beauty.

And yet, when she had finished, nobody else in the room showed more than ordinary appreciation—nobody except old Etherton. I felt him make a sudden movement on the sofa.

‘O but that’s the real thing,’ he said; ‘that’s delicious,’ and his voice and movement recalled me abruptly to myself.

‘Yes,’ I said; ‘and yet none of them seem to have noticed it!’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why should they?’ he said acidly.

How I longed to rush up to her, to … to what? Certainly not to chatter thanks and compliments. Indeed if Mrs. Etherton had taken me to her at that moment, I should have been tongue-tied. I was afraid of meeting her, afraid of the certainty of having nothing to say to express my overpowering feelings. But at the moment Mrs. Etherton was talking to Rose beside the piano from which she had just risen, and it was not until a few minutes later that they both crossed the room to where Etherton and I were sitting. We rose to our feet and old Etherton, in his courtly way, began to congratulate her.

‘You, Miss Bentley, are one of those who have discovered that there’s more music and more feeling in that Sonata than in all the Sturm und Drang of Tristan.’

She smiled. ‘O, I certainly think there is,’ she said.

‘Of course there is,’ said Etherton. ‘But in Mozart it’s concentrated into a crystal, while in Wagner it’s whipped into mounds of froth and foam.’

I stood by silent, while they talked. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Etherton remembered that I hadn’t been introduced to her.

‘But the froth and foam are sometimes very beautiful,’ Rose was saying.

‘O I agree,’ he said; ‘when one can forget the crystal. But it’s the crystal that lasts.’ He moved to one side. ‘But do sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit here and talk to my friend Philip Marling. He’s a Mozartian too; in fact, there’s a good deal of Mozart in his pictures, though he probably doesn’t know it.’

With that Etherton left us, left us, of course, completely at cross-purposes, for I was nothing to her, a complete stranger, whereas she was already infinitely precious to me, a vital part of my life.

If I had begun there and then to pour out my real feelings to her, she would certainly have thought me drunk or mad; but to me it seemed just as mad to play at being strangers, to assume a careful pretence of polite indifference and talk formally and intelligently of Mozart and Wagner and her playing and my painting. I dared not raise my eyes to her face. My desperate desire to attract her to me produced the very opposite effect, for I found it impossible to talk to her naturally as I would have done to another stranger, and felt that, in spite of myself, I was growing cold, harsh, aloof. I must certainly, I realized miserably, be giving her the impression that I disliked her. If only I could have been merely frivolous or cheerful; but I couldn’t. I was so involved in my wretched perplexity that I could hardly listen, hardly reply, to what she was saying. I don’t even remember what we talked about during our brief interview.

‘I should like to see your pictures. Perhaps you will show them to me some day.’ Her voice came to me through the turmoil of my emotions.

‘Yes,’ I said lamely, ‘yes, I shall be delighted.’

At that moment Mrs. Etherton came and took her from me and left me to realize my utter stupidity. What a fool I was. It would have been so simple to invite her to come and see my work: it was the natural reply to her request. And yet I had let that golden opportunity slip; I had thrown away the chance of ever seeing her again.

The thought of that brought me to some extent to my senses: I determined that I would force myself to speak to her again before the party broke up; ask her, as I ought to have asked her before, to come to my flat and see my work; and I spent the rest of the evening in watching anxiously for an opportunity.

But the opportunity never came. I couldn’t break into the group of laughing, chattering people to which Mrs. Etherton had carried her off, and fire a point-blank invitation at her; and soon Mrs. Etherton’s tiresome old dramatic critic came over and held me firmly tethered in interminable conversation. I shot a despairing glance across the room and saw Rose Bentley shaking hands with Mrs. Etherton. She was going. She glanced round the room and then came across to say good night to her host who was standing by the fireplace not far from me and the critic. I turned abruptly, cut the critic off in the middle of a sentence, in the hope of catching her eye. My heart was beating so fast that I felt almost stifled. Then, as she turned from old Etherton, thank God she saw me and held out her hand.

‘If … if you will … if you’d really like to see some of my work,’ I stammered, ‘won’t you come to my studio some afternoon, any afternoon that suits you?’

I felt as if I had done a deed of desperate courage: I could feel the blood beating in my temples: the muscles of my face twitched.Yes, she would come with pleasure: she would come next Thursday. What was my address? A moment later I had given her the address and she was gone.

The dramatic critic had drifted away and I dropped into the sofa beside me, trembling with relief and happiness. I sat there closed in upon myself, oblivious of my surroundings, and when at last I raised my eyes it was to have that final vision of her in the half-open doorway.

As soon as she was gone I left too and walked the whole way home. It is a long way, a long way at least to walk in London: it must have taken me quite an hour. But I was in a state of such supreme well-being that the idea of taking a bus or a tube was unthinkable. How could I have sat still with that fountain of happiness leaping inside me? It seemed to me as I strode along the empty streets under the cold, motionless lamplight, and it seems to me still as I sit here going over it all again, that my life is filled to the brim. The cold, empty life of yesterday and all the weeks and months before, has gone, vanished like a dead leaf, a puff of smoke. For that glimpse of her standing there in the doorway in her furs with that unforgettable look in her eyes, is securely and utterly mine and I am satisfied. It seems almost too much, a threatened interruption of my ecstasy, that she should be coming here on Thursday—yes, to-morrow; for it is now half past one of Wednesday morning. The thought of her coming brings a disturbance, a tinge of anxiety into the steady glow that burns in me now. Her coming will rouse new conflicts, new troubles in me. I both long for it and dread it. When I know her better, when we have become friends and this yawning gap between my feelings for her and our actual relationship has narrowed to a width that can be bridged, I shall feel more secure. But now, when I turn my eyes for a moment from the golden light of my happiness, it seems to me that my new life is full of dangers. Well, all the better. It’s been a damned sight too safe hitherto.

Next evening. She has been here. She went away twenty minutes ago and this sitting-room and the studio are still full of her. There is the chair she sat in, and I feel that I must leave it where it is, drawn up to the table from its usual place; leave the cushion just as she leaned against it, so as not to disturb her spirit which still lingers here and will linger till Mrs. Batten comes to-morrow morning and drives it away by setting everything to rights. I have just had another cup of tea, out of her cup, and I have sat, since she went, intently going over everything she said and did, everything I said and did while she was here. All this, I know, is the invariable behaviour of lovers: I am feeling and acting in strict accordance with the convention. If it were told me of anyone else or I read it in a novel, I should call it damned sentimental nonsense. But to the lover himself the sneers of the world outside mean nothing: strong in the reality of his feelings, he is impervious to them. Yet who would admit as much? Not I. I shall go on laughing derisively: I shall never admit that I know these things to be genuine, except perhaps some day to Rose, if ever I show her this diary. But that may never happen, for we may never be anything more than friends. Yes, I must face that possibility. And yet why should I, at present? May not the very belief that failure is possible bring it to pass? Love, it seems, carries with it a blind confidence in its own power. I don’t attract women; I discovered that long ago; but, for all that, I can’t believe that my feelings for Rose will awaken no response in her. It is certain, at least, that she likes me. We got on extraordinarily well this afternoon as soon as the first difficult moments were over. It was thanks to her, not to me, that they were over so soon; for she, of course, was quite self-possessed. Why should she not have been? She had none of my difficulties to fight against, no conflict to appease such as mine between the actual bodily Rose Bentley and that other Rose which belongs to me only. It is hard to keep a hold on reality when one is in the state I am in now, and when she arrived this afternoon and reality faced me, the bathos of our meeting chilled me to the heart. Not that she was less beautiful than I remembered: on the contrary her beauty came to me with the shock of a new and delicious discovery, as though the face in my memory had faded already in these two days from the brightness of the original. No, it was the screen of cold convention, dividing us as soon as we met, that chilled me, the cool friendliness of our actual footing, genuine, no doubt, for her but bewilderingly false for me. It is terrible to have to disguise my feelings all the time I am with her: it sucks all spontaneity out of my behaviour and leaves me a mere performing puppet. But as we become friendlier the necessity to disguise will become less crippling, because there will be at each meeting a little less to disguise, a few more feelings that may be revealed. In fact it is so already. I managed, on the whole, to behave fairly well. How I longed to give her the Still Life which she admired most of all the paintings I showed her—and rightly, too, because it’s certainly the best. But I didn’t. No, that would never have done. It would have embarrassed her and placed us, for her, in an uncomfortably false position; though for me it would have been the only impulse I betrayed while she was here. Yes, I must check my impulses, I must studiously keep our relationship false for me so that it may not become false for her. I must be crafty, diplomatic, calculating, until some unconscious sign from her shows me that I can venture on some small betrayal of myself.

And yet isn’t this rather a craven and disingenuous scheme? The romantic lover would have presented the picture, declared his love loudly and eloquently, and taken her by storm. It sounds gloriously simple, but I suspect it doesn’t actually work. The romantic lover I suspect, exists only in Romance. On the other hand it is possible, I suppose, to be too careful, too discreet. The fact is, I am so terribly afraid of losing her and sinking back into my old solitude. It is only the rich who can afford to gamble.

I have just read over what I have written, and, I must say, its querulousness, its sentimentality and its crawling humility disgust me. What a poor worm it makes me appear to myself, and how monstrously it misrepresents my state of mind, I mean my prevailing state of mind. For the sense of frustration, the necessity for disguise, is not continuous; on the contrary, it is a brief incident which occurs only when, as at the moment of meeting her or at some enchanting change in her face or movement of her body, my feelings burst suddenly into a flame that must instantly be quenched. At all other times, whether she is with me or not, I live in a warm glow of happiness that fills mind and soul and every vein and artery of my body. When I joined a group of friends at the Café Royal last night, Edward Dennis, as he shook my hand, stared at my face in amazement. ‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘what’s up? Have you sold a picture?’

‘Unfortunately not,’ I replied.

‘Then you’ve come into a fortune.’

‘Not that I’ve heard of.’

‘My Dear Philip,’ he said, ‘you’re lying. You’ve come into a fortune; it’s obvious from your face.’

Yes, he’s right, I thought to myself gleefully, I have come into a fortune. How secure I felt, how supremely independent of them all, as I drew up a chair and sat down among them; and throughout the evening, as we sat and talked, the lovely secret presence of Rose moved about in my mind as she had moved from piano to sofa, from sofa to door in the Ethertons’ drawing-room on the previous evening; and when closing-time came and they turned us out I left Ted Dennis and the rest without a shadow of regret, for now I was not returning home to face the old demon of loneliness. Rose, the bright vision of Rose was waiting for me there and I was hurrying back to enjoy my secret bliss unmolested.

And now that she has actually been here and will come again, this flat, two days ago a dismal prison, has become an Elysium wider and freer than infinite space.

We are to meet again at her flat next Monday. I should not have ventured to suggest another meeting: that, I felt, I must leave to her this time, and when she spoke of going home after she had had tea and seen my pictures the fear came to me that we were going to part without any appointment having been made, that a fortnight, perhaps a month, might pass before I saw her again. That would have been a terrible gap. Could I have lived as long as that, like a bee in winter, on my store of happiness? Then, as she shook hands with me, she set my mind at rest. ‘It’s your turn to come to tea with me next time,’ she said.

She shares a flat in Woburn Square with a cousin. Would I go next Monday?

Next Monday. That is four days hence. For four days I shall not see her, and during that time my visionary Rose and I will have grown so intimate, so close to one another, that the relapse into reality, when I meet the real one again, will be painful at first. But how lucky I am to have to wait only four days, how lucky that she should want to see me again so soon. But what about this cousin? Isn’t she going to be rather a nuisance? Perhaps not. Anyhow it might easily have been worse: one cousin is better, at least, than a whole family. If Rose lived in the bosom of a family she would be much more difficult to get at. Perhaps the cousin may even be of some help; she may act as a flux, a solder, to weld us more easily together. She may all unconsciously help to bridge the gulf between the real and the visionary Rose.

Four days. I shall annihilate them with work. Work has been difficult lately. Everything has gone wrong, as it sometimes does, and I have begun and spoilt drawing after drawing. But during the last two days I have felt the familiar signs, the excitement that means the vague stir of new ideas. I know that things will go well when I begin again to-morrow.

Four days later. In these four days I have almost finished a new picture, curiously different from my other work and, I believe, much better. I have never before used colour so boldly and so successfully. Only the fact that I was going to see her could have tempted me away from it this afternoon, and only the fact that I have just come from her could keep me away from it now, scribbling in my diary.

This diary has become very important to me. I began it … how long ago? Six days. Incredible that it is only six days since I met her, that only six days ago I was living that bleak, penurious existence that seems to me now a whole lifetime away. I began it without being conscious of any more reason for doing so than that it should be an outlet for my unexpressed happiness. Such happiness as mine demands the relief of expression: otherwise it would be too intense to bear. I have heard that if a diver comes to the surface too quickly he becomes insensible; the sudden relaxation of pressure is too great a shock; and to restore him the pressure has to be artificially re-imposed and then relaxed more gradually. So I, by means of the gradual release of writing, free myself painlessly from the press of emotion and slowly become mortal once more.

But I have another reason for writing, the desire to catch and preserve from extinction all those precious moments when her life touches mine, the inflections of her voice, her words and movements, the subtle changes in her adorable face, all those fugitive, ecstatic instants such as that fleeting and lovely one when she stood, on our first evening, in the doorway of the Ethertons’ drawing-room. I know that not even the greatest master of words could describe them completely, but perhaps by recording what I can of them and their times and circumstances, I shall help my memory to imprison and keep alive what the words themselves can never capture.

It was disappointing to have only ten minutes alone with her this afternoon, but the presence of Jennifer Barton, Rose’s cousin, by robbing the occasion of its quintessence for me and reducing it to the ordinary social level, certainly helped to widen the common ground of friendship for Rose and me. Do I like Jennifer? I don’t know. She’s one of those cold, matter-of-fact, unadorned women whom it is easy to talk to and difficult to make friends with. Rose seemed a rose indeed, a lovely, intricate, fragrant mystery beside the dried heather of her cousin. Judged by her features alone, Jennifer might be called handsome. She has fine brown eyes behind her spectacles; nose, chin, and lips are beautifully modelled; she has white, regular teeth. Her hair, straight and almost black, is parted in the middle, her face very pale. She is tall and slim; taller than Rose. Yes, as a mask her face would be beautiful, but as a face it is a mask, a mask with nothing behind it. Her expression is as hard as marble; even when she laughs, no warmth comes into it, and her voice too, is hard—hard, clear, direct. She is a surgeon and I am sure she carves open her patients with perfect calm and great efficiency. Obviously she has many good qualities. Certainly she has a quick, practical intelligence, a nice sense of humour, an easy, straight-forward gaiety of manner. She is a refreshing person to meet. She demands nothing of one and gives nothing in return. One almost forgets she is a woman. She’s a good, honest, jolly, vigorous fellow; that’s what she is. When she came into the room, quick and practical, and Rose introduced me to her, her keen brown eyes gave me a rapid, sharp, almost hostile scrutiny as she shook hands. It was as if she were suspicious of this interloper into the household. She has good manners: she never forgot that I was there and that the conversation must always include me.

‘You’re an artist, Rose tells me,’ she said as she handed me bread and butter. ‘I must tell you what I think of your pictures one of these days.’

‘You like pictures?’

‘Yes, I do,’ she replied; ‘but I don’t go for any special type. What I look for is a particular quality. Ancient, modern, Royal Academy, Cubist, I see pictures I like and dislike in all the camps.’

‘And what is the quality you go for?’ I asked.

‘Guts!’ she replied with great precision.

‘That’s only natural in a surgeon,’ I said, and she threw back her head and gave a loud laugh, showing semi-circles of fine white teeth. Yes, splendid teeth. I noted them with the dispassionate admiration one might give to the teeth of a yawning horse.

I glanced at Rose and with a thrill of delight I discovered a new Rose, for it was the first time I had seen her laugh. How strange that I should have left her laughter out of all my thoughts and imaginings of her. But I could never have guessed at the enchanting reality, the sudden flowering of her face, the delicious curl of her lips, the merriment sparkling in her dark blue eyes. As her eyes met mine, it seemed to me that the barriers of reticence and conventionality that separated us had been suddenly swept away: we were face to face in a new world, freed of this world’s suppressions. I longed to take her in my arms and cover her laughing face with kisses. She was surprised and delighted, I could see, to discover that I wasn’t, after all, always solemn and intense. In fact, that frivolous remark of mine had put us all three on an easy footing and thence-forward the talk bowled along freely and cheerfully.

They seem very snug in their pleasant flat. The room in which we were sitting had three long windows reaching to the floor, from which one sees the plane trees of Russell Square. Its colours are bright, cool and spring-like, greens, blues, pinks and pale yellow standing like flowers against a background of grey and black. I longed to ask who had chosen them. But did I need to ask? It was not Jennifer, I’m sure. They have an old servant, Martha, for many years head housemaid in Rose’s country home, a large woman with a noble, ugly face like an Uncle Toby jug. I’m certain that she, as well as Jennifer, is a person to be reckoned with. My feelings towards the pair of them are mixed. In a way I’m glad of their existence, I feel that Rose is very secure with these two watchdogs; but, on the other hand, watchdogs are apt to be unfriendly to strangers. They can be very troublesome if they don’t approve of one. I have begun well with Jennifer, I think. It remains to propitiate Martha. When that fine oblong, earthenware face creases into a smile at my arrival I shall feel safer.

Two days later. Old Etherton rang me up yesterday and asked me, as he sometimes does, to dine at his club. During dinner he took me by surprise by saying point-blank:

‘And so you’ve made friends with our beautiful young pianist, I hear.’

I could feel myself absurdly blushing. ‘And how did you learn that?’

‘On the best possible authority, that of the beautiful pianist herself. She had a lot to say about you. If one is to believe her, Philip, you are a most interesting person.’

‘She said so?’

‘She implied it. And I gather from your colour that you too feel somewhat strongly about her.’

‘I do,’ I replied; ‘terribly strongly.’

‘A case, it would appear, of love at first sight.’

‘Absolutely. But don’t mention it, even to Mrs. Etherton.’

‘I won’t. You may trust me; I am very discreet. But I can be very indiscreet too on occasion, as I will show you by asking you what you propose to do about it?’

‘About Rose?’

‘Just so. About Rose and this love at first sight.’

‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that love at first sight should be taken seriously?’

‘It depends on what you mean by seriously, my dear boy. In the sense that to be knocked head over heels is a serious matter, you can’t help taking it seriously. But if you mean, ought you to regard it as important, I should say for God’s sake don’t.’

‘That’s very chilling. You don’t think, then, that it implies that one has somehow recognized in a flash one’s … one’s …’

‘One’s soul-mate, one’s natural affinity? Not a bit of it, my dear fellow. It is merely, I believe, an unexplained but purely mechanical occurrence. Something, we don’t know what, has cocked your rifle. Something else, equally mysterious, causes a young woman accidentally to pull the trigger, and off you go.’

‘Well, I must say I think that a very cynical description of a very wonderful experience.’

‘Yes, wonderful, isn’t it?’ he said wistfully. ‘Very wonderful. Three times I fell in love at first sight and I remember each occasion to this day with a marvellous vividness. Each was like a revelation, but it was a revelation of nothing but a sudden outburst of emotion.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do I know?’ He considered the question. ‘Well, in two cases out of the three, I took the trouble to find out.’

‘You … you got to know them?’

‘Instantly. I was somewhat forthcoming in those days, Philip, and … well, in short, I explained my predicament to the ladies, neither proved obdurate, and after two or three delightful days I was only too glad to say good-bye to each of them. We were unbelievably incompatible.’

‘The third might have turned out differently.’

‘True, the third might have turned out differently, indeed I think she would, for she was surprisingly unapproachable. But by that time I had grown wiser. You remember the Blake poem: He who bends, or binds as the newly discovered and obviously correct reading has it,

He who binds to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy.

Love at first sight is the joy that flies and it should be kissed but not detained.’

‘But is there any reason why love at first sight should not develop into something permanent?’

‘O none whatever, but it is devoutly to be hoped that it won’t. It’s a bad beginning, you see, to a permanent relation. If you are determined to marry a stranger, Philip, it would be much safer to propose to the first woman you meet in the street.’

‘You recommend that?’

‘I do,’ said the old man. ‘Not, mind you, as an ideal method, but in preference to the other.’

‘But wouldn’t there, don’t you think, be a risk of getting someone less attractive than Rose?’

‘A very grave risk, my dear boy; almost a certainty. But at least you would start level with the lady you chanced on.’

‘And I’m not starting level with Rose?’

‘Level? You’re starting with a crippling handicap. She’s not in love with you yet, Philip: I saw that at once when she spoke of you. That means that she retains all her faculties; she can judge you coolly in accordance with your merits and failings. She likes you, but she’s independent of you. But you, my poor Philip, are bound hand and foot; your judgement, your faculties are in abeyance. You think her perfect, you’re blind to her faults, and when you discover them you’ll assert that they are virtues. Your only desire is to please her. That gives her an immense pull over you: it’s unfair not only to you but to her.’

‘In fact you advise me to avoid her?’

‘As you would Prussic acid. Ah, you may smile, but I’m quite serious. The only other advice I can give you is even more difficult. Fall out of love at first sight with her, then make a friend of her, and then, with your eyes open, fall in love with her seriously.’

‘That sounds like a somewhat emotional description of changing the gears.’

Etherton laughed. ‘And that’s precisely what it is,’ he said.

When I bade him good night he shook his head humorously and sadly. ‘And you won’t, of course, take my excellent advice about Rose Bentley?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I’m afraid I shan’t.’

‘No,’ he said seriously, ‘you can’t. There’s no such thing, unhappily, as second-hand wisdom: it has to be acquired by direct experience. If only there were, what misery we should escape. Well, don’t give quite all of yourself away. Keep a small balance in a separate account against a rainy day.’

Isn’t that like old Etherton? Careful, cynical, self-possessed. One can’t imagine him letting himself go. There’s nothing of the romantic about him. In fact he’s a classic. He has the Greek poise, the ‘Nothing in excess’ of the Greek philosopher. That’s why he’s such excellent company, so tonic, so astringent.

Three weeks later. For three weeks this diary has lain forgotten in a drawer in my desk. When I came upon it by chance this morning while searching for something else, I felt as if I were looking back three years instead of three weeks. One does not keep a diary unless one is lonely and turned in on oneself, and three weeks ago my life, though full of Rose, was lonely in the intervals when I was not with her, lonely in that I had not the means of unburdening myself of my intense happiness. Indeed I was lonely even when I was with her, because even then I had to close the door of my heart. A load of unexpressed happiness can be almost painful, and to ease myself of it I used this diary. Also I used it, so I find it recorded, as a means of rescuing from oblivion those dazzling moments of revelation when some new facet of her beauty flashed upon me and vanished, as the blue or the rose in a diamond flashes when a woman moves her hand.

But now that we have become friends and meet often and have a hundred points of contact, all is changed. I no longer feel that those visions are irrecoverable: they blossom again and again as she looks, listens, talks to me, turns her head or moves her hand. Twice again I have seen on her face that half-shy half-eager look which I saw first in the doorway of the Ethertons’ drawing-room; yes, twice that miracle has repeated itself, so that it has become a part of my knowledge of her. Why then should I try in vain to imprison it between the pages of a diary when I know that I may come upon it at any moment alive and blossoming in her face? Nor have I now that urgent need to unbosom myself when I am alone. My happiness can spend itself, now, when I am with her, if not in the spontaneous flow of love offered and accepted, at least in numbers of small channels that relieve the press of emotion. Soon, I suspect, this diary will peter out. After all, I am no longer the man who began it. I am changed. I no longer stare into my own eyes, probe and analyse my own heart. I have been lifted out of myself, or rather, I have been restored to myself, made single and simple. The man divided against himself, divided into two halves each of which teased and tormented the other, has been resolved into unity. I have never known such perfect well-being, such abounding energy, such certainty of myself. I feel like an athlete whose body is in perfect training, whose flesh and muscles tingle with life as after a cold bath; like a healthy animal, but an animal deliciously aware of its health.

I have worked hard during these last three weeks, harder and more successfully, in fact, than I have ever worked before. Sometimes I have put in as much as eight hours a day. It might have been thought that, having become at one with myself, I would have been content to spend all the time left over from my meetings with Rose and from my painting, alone with my happiness; but it is a curious fact that I have become more, not less sociable. It seems that since my friends have become less important to me I enjoy their company more. The truth is, I suppose, that in my lonely days, when I sought in them what they could not give, my hopeless search falsified my relations with them. Now I meet them on equal terms, a free man among free men.

But what of Rose? What does she feel about this sudden friendship of ours? I ask myself that often, but at present I am not deeply concerned with the answer. She likes me, she enjoys my company; that I can see. Why else should she be willing to meet me so often? But does she feel anything more than friendship? Sometimes a passing light in her eyes, a sudden flushing of her cheeks seem to tell me that she does; but other things deny it. Our partings, for her, are, I can see, simple matters: she meets me with pleasure and leaves me without regret. Whenever she bids me good-bye in that polite, slightly formal little way of hers, I feel suddenly chilled, as if our friendship had in a moment shrunk to mere acquaintanceship. Yes, she leaves me without a pang, almost without a thought, and watching her go, a slim, exquisite, perfectly self-possessed little figure, I feel that she leaves nothing of herself behind her and takes nothing of me away with her. Well, I can afford to leave my question unsolved for a while. When I have so much, wouldn’t it be madness not to pause and draw from our friendship all it will give, before asking, and perhaps asking in vain, for more? Besides, it is too soon to ask. After all, we have known each other only a month, have met only seven times. It is so difficult for me to realize that. But she, no doubt, realizes it, feels towards me no more than a month-old friendship implies. If I were to declare my love and ask her to marry me, I should probably drive her from me.

A week later. A delicious thing happened yesterday afternoon. I met her by accident in Bedford Square. I was walking along its north side when suddenly I saw her coming towards me, still about twenty yards away. How utterly different she is from any other woman. She came along with the neat, bright alertness of a bird. No doubt she was going home to tea after a music-lesson, for she has told me that she has a music-lesson on Thursday afternoons. Should I ask her to have tea with me somewhere? No. Suddenly I had conceived a much bolder plan. When we were only two yards apart she saw me and her face lit up adorably.

‘How surprising!’ she said.

‘You’re coming back from a music-lesson,’ said I.

‘Quite right. And where are you off to?’

‘I’m going to buy a sketch-book,’ I said. ‘If it’s fine tomorrow I’m going to have a day in the country.’

‘How delightful. Where are you going?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want downs and quarries and chalk-pits, so I think I shall go to Barrowhurst. Won’t you come too?’

My suggestion took her by surprise. I watched her face. Her first impulse, I saw, was to refuse. ‘Well…’ she began doubtfully. Then her face cleared. ‘After all, why shouldn’t I?’ she said.

I reassured her. ‘Whenever you get tired of me,’ I said, ‘you can go off and leave me to my sketching.’

Yes, she would come. We arranged to meet at the train, the nine-twenty from Victoria.

Next evening. This morning proved to be one of those doubtful April mornings which at one moment promise sunshine, at another a long day of misty rain. I was afraid she would not come.

It was sunny when I set off for Victoria, but not for long. Soon the sky became overcast and before I got to the station it had begun to drizzle. As I passed through the barrier and went on to the platform I told myself it was impossible that she would come. One’s thoughts at such times, and in fact at nearly all times, have little to do with reason. Reason might have suggested that as it was fine when I left home and the rain started only about ten minutes ago, she would most probably come. But that would have been a most dangerous thought, rash enough, presumptuous enough to defeat the hopes it represented. Yes, one’s feelings are controlled by a primitive, superstitious creature for whom reason and the passage of time mean nothing. The creature, this primitive I, obviously believed that such a thought at such a moment might provoke a certain malicious power, whose business it is to defeat expectations, to reverse accomplished fact and even now, in punishment of my presumption, prevent Rose from starting from home half an hour ago. And so, to fool this power, I made use of a potent spell, I proclaimed that Rose would not come. ‘No, she’s not here, she’s not coming. I shall get into the train, watch anxiously from the window till the last minute, hoping, still hoping: but the whistle will sound and I shall go alone.’

That is what I said, and I craftily refrained from looking to see if she was among the people standing beside the open doors of the train. In fact I was looking not for her but for an empty carriage when I saw her signing to me only five yards away and knew, with a sigh of profound relief, that the magic had worked. The demon had been defeated, I was out of his power now, and my cautiously closed mind opened wide to receive the nine hours of warmth and sunshine which were now secured to me.

How incredible that: I was getting into a train with her, that we were going off together alone, leaving behind us her friends, my friends, our separate homes, everything that represented our independence of one another; going into unfamiliar country where neither would find any root-hold except in each other. I sat down opposite her, feeling that we were setting out on our spiritual honeymoon. What was she feeling, I wondered? Had she foreseen that the journey, the walk, the picnic would bring us inevitably so much closer together, or was she realizing it only now and did the realization please or embarrass her? I saw that she had bought a paper and felt that I had been put in my place. Evidently she had thought it necessary to provide herself with a barrier. Well, I would reassure her, and going to the door I too bought a paper from a passing newsboy.

We had the carriage to ourselves so far and I cast baleful eyes on the figures that paused outside; but when we started no one had intruded. The train swam out from the glass cavern of the station and a flood of sunshine and spring air flowed into the carriage. I leaned back, feeling myself filled to the brim with contentment. How long would it be, I wondered, before we were setting off together alone on our real honeymoon. Would it ever happen? Wasn’t it too much to ask of life? I glanced at Rose. She was sitting with her hands idle on her lap, looking sedately out of the window. At that moment she turned her head.

‘I was afraid,’ I said, ‘that the weather might put you off.’

‘But it’s going to be lovely,’ she said; ‘sunshine and showers, a real April day. Perhaps we shall see a rainbow.’ ‘You won’t mind the showers?’

‘Not I. I’ve got a mackintosh and an extra pair of stockings’; she pointed to a satchel on the rack above her head; ‘and a book, and some knitting,’ she added, ‘in case we’re driven into a farm or an inn.’

Ah, wasn’t she well protected against the weather and me?

‘But what about you?’ she said. ‘What’s to become of your sketching if we’re driven indoors?’

‘I’ll probably make a drawing of the shelter we’re driven into,’ I said, ‘or, if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll make one of you.’

Rose laughed. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I shall make a poor substitute for a chalk-pit.’

We chatted for ten minutes or so, and then, with a neatly managed transition, she took up her newspaper. It was not till the train left the Brighton line and swung east along the weald under the northward slope of the downs that she laid it down and began to watch the bright, cloud-dappled country that swirled slowly past the windows. All this I noted over the top of my paper of which I had actually read almost nothing, but I remained diplomatically behind it until we entered Lewes, when it was Rose, and not I, who began to talk.

What did we talk about? I don’t remember. Things, no doubt, that would sound trivial set down in cold black and white, for talk, which is a true exchange and not a mere mercenary buying and selling, depends hardly at all upon the theme, just as the quality of the music is not affected, whether the keys are ivory or bone or the commonest wood.

When we reached Barrowhurst we bought food for our picnic, going from shop to shop and choosing and buying like a domesticated couple and bestowing the parcels in my knapsack. Then we set off towards the downs, alternately talking and silent. It is silence, silence of any sort, much more than talk that brings two people together; for an embarrassed silence troubles the emotions and melts the ice of conventionality so that every halting attempt to break it is full of a tremulous significance, while a silence that is unembarrassed is a confession of deep and secure intimacy. We climbed a steep grassy track in bright sunshine and every time we turned to look back new expanses of plain and sky and distant hills had opened behind us. I was making for an old chalk quarry that stands like a great pearly fan-shell leaned against the grassy slope of the down. I had thought I might find something to work at there and when we reached it I sat down and got out my materials.

‘And now I’d better go,’ said Rose, looking at me doubtfully.

‘Go? Where to?’

‘Anywhere, so long as I leave you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to be left? I thought artists and writers and composers had to be left severely alone when they set to work. I should feel frightened of you if I stayed: I should feel … well, rather as if I were knitting during the Communion Service. I’m sure one isn’t allowed to watch.’

‘Would you like to watch?’

‘If it won’t bother you.’

I told her she wouldn’t bother me in the least, but I didn’t add that anyone else but her would bother me extremely.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll watch a little, if I may; then I’ll have a little walk and then come back to see how you’re getting on.’

I did a quick charcoal drawing and when I had finished it and was starting another, Rose strolled away along the hillside, leaving her mackintosh and satchel. They lay beside me, a couple of sleeping creatures, living manifestations of Rose herself. I stared at them, learning them, resolving their strangeness into familiarity, as if by doing so I should help myself to a completer possession of their owner. When she was out of sight I stretched out my hand and touched them and was thrilled with the sense of her. Delicious sacrilege. Would she know by some mysterious intuition, when she returned, that I had touched them? Would she feel my touch on the coat when she put it on? I touched them again, stroked them, glancing warily like a thief along the hillside in case she should reappear and catch me at it.

Shall I ever again feel as content and secure as I did then, sitting there alone with the certainty that, though out of sight, she was there on that hillside and would infallibly return soon, in a few minutes, to her possessions and to me?

I had just finished my second drawing when a handful of hail, flung from the sky, pattered on my head and shoulders and drummed on my sketch-book. It slackened for a few seconds and then came on with a rush. I jumped up to put away the sketch-book and Rose came running, head down, along the hillside. I held her mackintosh ready for her and, breathlessly laughing, she ran straight into it. Wouldn’t it have been the most natural thing in the world to hold her, wrapped in it, in my arms and bend my face to hers? The hail turned into rain and we gathered up our things and ran down into the chalk quarry and huddled under its hollow shoulder.

The rain swept headlong in thickening veils down the slope of the downs and across it we saw a great floating island of sunlight swim rapidly across the plain below.

‘Look! Look!’ cried Rose. ‘The rainbow!’

It stood, each foot on the plain, complete and brilliant throughout its span. Its colours fumed and glowed as if exhaling fire. ‘Isn’t it marvellous,’ she said, ‘too marvellous to be real? No wonder they believed it was a message from God to man. Don’t you feel as if it were the prelude to a miracle? Don’t you feel that in a moment something incredible is going to happen?’

She was excited, enthralled: her eyes shone. Never had I seen her so beautiful,.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes’; feeling that all she said of the rainbow was true, for me, of her. But when would the miracle happen? How long should I have to wait?

The rain slackened, stopped; but the sky remained clouded as if threatening more. We ate our lunch in the quarry and before we had finished the rain began again. Soon after three o’clock it had driven us down to the shelter of the plain, and running and walking we reached Barrowhurst, the rain streaming from our waterproofs into our shoes, and took refuge in the inn.

They lit a fire for us in the parlour and brought us tea. The run in the rain had amused and stimulated Rose and she began to chatter about her childhood. The inn reminded her of a north-country inn, near the Cheviots, at which she used to stay as a child with her parents and small brother, and she recalled a day when they had climbed a great bare hill, taking lunch with them.

‘I must have been about ten then,’ she said, ‘and my brother seven; and after lunch he and I wandered away from our parents. My father shouted after me, telling me not to go out of sight, but I pretended not to hear him. My idea was to walk right round the hill, and I told jimmy that we were going round the world like Captain Cook. I knew that if we went on walking we were bound to get back to where we had started from. We walked and walked and a very long time seemed to pass and everything looked stranger and stranger. Jimmy was frightened and began to cry; and I believe I was really frightened too, though I don’t remember feeling frightened. But though I insisted that everything was all right, I do remember feeling that we ought to hurry, and as Jimmy went slower and slower and said he was tired I took his hand and pulled him along. At last we heard shouts and my father came running towards us. He was very breathless and very angry. He had been hunting for us for three quarters of an hour, he said, and it was lucky for us that he had found us. I told him that we weren’t lost, that I knew perfectly well where we were. I remember asserting this several times very positively and I was angry when he wouldn’t believe me. But as a matter of fact I believe now that this was all bluff and that I had known for some time we were lost and had been thoroughly frightened. But the truth was, I wasn’t going to admit it. I was annoyed with my father: I had two grievances, first that he had laid down the law in the tiresome way that grownups had and forbidden us to go out of sight, and then that he had been so insufferably justified by events. So I simply refused to admit, even to myself, that he was justified. And I was so determined to think that we had not been lost that in the end I succeeded, and even now I have only a very faint and doubtful recollection of having realized that things had gone wrong.’ She laughed. ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that all children are such appalling little liars?’

I said I believed that almost everyone remembered things as he wished them to have been, rather than as they had actually been.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘by degrees, perhaps, by a slow, almost unconscious process of self-deception, but not so suddenly or so deliberately as I did.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you made rather a smarter job of it than most of us. However, you’ve confessed now.’

‘Yes, I’ve confessed; but the dreadful thing is that I’m not sure whether what I’ve confessed is the truth or not.’

She looked at me with delightfully comic dismay.

I shook my head, ‘It’s a terrible mess, I’m afraid. What emerges, of course, is that you’re extremely independent. Independence at all costs.’

‘I wonder,’ she said. ‘I wonder if I am.’

I thought of the newspaper, the book, the knitting she had brought as a protection against me, but I said nothing. Instead I asked her more about her visits to the north, for these tales of her childhood, received from her own lips, enchanted me, and that she should be so willing to tell them to me seemed to be a mark of friendly confidence.

We talked till it was time to go to the station, and that was almost the end of our talking, for as soon as we were in the train she got out her book and did not stop reading, though I tried when we were nearing London to start a conversation, until we arrived at Victoria. My happiness withered as we entered the station, for now I no longer had her securely alone. Once more London roared round us and in a moment I would resign her to Jennifer, her home, her friends, all the barriers that stood between her and me. And in a moment she was gone; coldly and abruptly, it seemed, we had separated and I was alone, disenchanted, face to face with myself.

Later the same day. Why could I not have been content with such a day? Why, when I was returning home after an early dinner, should I have felt that craving for one more glimpse of her which urged me to walk three times past her flat, staring at the long windows on the first floor in the hope of seeing her or her shadow? It was, one would have thought, extremely unlikely that I should see anything; but Fate punishes those who ask too much, and so, as I passed her flat for the third time, the front door opened and two women in evening dress, one of them Rose, came out followed by a young man in an opera hat. The young man hailed a passing cab, the three got into it and drove away, and I was left to realize how small a corner I occupied in her life.

Yet what cause have I to be wounded, what right to feel that by telling me nothing of this engagement Rose was deliberately hiding it from me? None. But I do.

A month later. There has been another long interval since I opened this diary, an interval uneventful in its happiness. We have met several times, and twice after dining with the Ethertons we have walked home together. It seems that nowadays I have recourse to the diary only when something goes wrong, and something has gone wrong to-day. Rose and I were to meet at three o’clock this afternoon at the Leicester Gallery to see the Gauguin show; but she did not come, and I hung about in a state of horribly increasing anxiety for over an hour. I know that in all that concerns her I am utterly unreasonable: my craving to be as important to her as she is to me makes me think and act as if I were really so. That is why I assumed that only something very serious could have prevented her meeting me. I deceive myself as successfully as she deceived herself when in her childhood she and her brother were lost on the hill. And so I hung about the gallery, now staring stupidly at the pictures, now tormenting myself with images of disaster.

Some time after four o’clock someone touched my elbow and I turned with a start of incredulous relief. But it was not Rose: it was old Etherton.

‘Do I disturb a worshipper?’ he asked.

‘An admirer,’ I replied: ‘an admirer with reservations.’

‘Then come along to the club and have some tea.’

‘I can’t,’ I said; ‘I’m. meeting a friend here.’

He took my arm and led me in front of the picture of Jacob wrestling with the angel. ‘Philip,’ he said, ‘you’d never do for a business man. Your face is an open book. Shall I tell you what I read there? I read that you’re waiting for Rose Bentley, your colour betrayed that; and that you’ve been waiting for a very long time, that is betrayed by your expression. How long have you been waiting?’

For a moment I was annoyed by his inquisitiveness, but his friendly smile disarmed me and I told him: ‘An hour.’

‘Then take my advice, my dear boy, and don’t wait any longer. If she comes, which seems unlikely, she’ll despise you for your want of independence.’

At Etherton’s words Rose’s story of her childish adventure on the hill instantly flashed into my mind, and in the light of it his remark was startlingly illuminating. Its aptness made me angry and I replied: ‘But I’m not independent.’

‘The more’s the pity,’ he said. ‘Well, at least you owe it to yourself to pretend to be.’

‘Pretend?’ I said. ‘Why should I pretend? Is there any harm in being honest and natural?’

‘None at all,’ he said, ‘if you hadn’t from the beginning chosen the other course. Haven’t you disguised your feelings from the outset, haven’t you been scheming and pretending and suppressing all this time? Your only hope, since you started in as a diplomat, is to be a first-rate diplomat, not a bad one. Come along quickly, for fear she arrives and finds you here.’

I knew in my heart of hearts that he was right, but I couldn’t go, couldn’t run the risk of missing her if she came.

‘No,’ I said feebly, ‘I must wait just a little longer.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said half humorously, half seriously; ‘I don’t like it at all.’ He made a sign of farewell and left me. Then he returned. ‘I forgot,’ he said; ‘you’re both dining with us this evening, aren’t you?’

I nodded. After waiting another twenty minutes I too left the gallery.

Yes, Etherton is right about my diplomacy. As soon as I got into the street I found myself practising it. For weeks I have been diplomatic in the matter of the telephone, repressing my impulses to ring her up at odd moments and on slight pretexts, and now I repressed my impulse to ring her up and ask what had happened. But what if she were not at the Ethertons’ to-night? I should never be able to sit there the whole evening in ignorance of what had happened to her. Perhaps, if I spoke to old Etherton about it, he would take pity on me and ring up her flat.

But when I arrived at the Ethertons’, Rose was there already. She was talking to a man and woman, people of about her own age, whom I did not know, and for some time she did not notice me. At last, turning and catching sight of me, she came towards me.

‘Do forgive me for leaving you in the lurch this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Two old friends whom I hadn’t seen for nearly a year turned up unexpectedly just as I was starting and I couldn’t very well leave them on the doorstep. I felt sure you wouldn’t mind.’

I assured her that she had been right, but I knew, from the sudden quenching of her smile, that my face belied my words. I hoped she would stay and talk to me, but she was anxious to introduce me to my supplanters.

‘They’re the couple I was talking to just now,’ she said; ‘I’m sure you’ll like them. Edith Bryan and I were at school together and he, her brother, is a geologist. They’ve just come back from Peru’; and with that she led me off to be introduced.

They are really, I’m sure, quite nice people, but I hated them both at once and suspected him of being in love with Rose. Worse, I half believe Rose is in love with him. He took her in to dinner and it seemed as if she was talking to one or other of them the whole evening.

And worse, far worse, was to come. My last shred of comfort was denied me; for when the Bryans were making their adieus Rose came over to me and told me that they were driving her home. ‘They want to see Jennifer whom they missed this afternoon.’

There was the same innocent confidence in her eyes as when she had apologised for her defection this afternoon. Evidently she dealt me these blows without the least idea of their effect on me. If the position had been reversed, if it had been I who was excusing myself, she would, I’m sure, have accepted my desertion with perfect good humour. Ah, but wouldn’t that have been merely because it meant so little to her? But this time I did my best to hide my mortification, for fear I should again see that sudden quenching of her smile and feel that I had pained her.

Old Etherton is right. This policy of suppression and pretence and self-abasement is the worst I could have chosen. It would have been better, I’m sure now, if at our very first meeting I had blurted out my true feelings, tipped the whole cartload of ecstasy at her feet. She would have been astounded, embarrassed no doubt, but there’s no one, surely, who can help being pleased by adoration. It could hardly have failed to rouse her interest and sympathy, to make me, at least, a person who merited special treatment and special concessions. And doesn’t love call forth love? But, as it is, I don’t offer her love, I disguise it, and so I seem to ask nothing of her. It may be that she looks on me as no more than a friend merely because I seem to her to be, and to wish to be, no more. Certainly we have come to a standstill, drifted into a gently swirling backwater from which we shall never emerge unless I rouse myself and thrust us out into the main current. What a fool I am. I behave to Rose more like a woman, more like an early Victorian virgin, than a man. I still sit secretly eating my heart out and waiting for her to fall in love with me. What the devil is it that’s wrong with me? Is it cowardice, is it laziness, or is it some deeply rooted diffidence which I shall never fathom and never eradicate? If that is so, I am powerless and may as well submit; for surely there is nothing to be gained by fighting against one’s nature. Can a man change himself, his character and temperament, by taking thought? I suppose many people, at one time or another of their lives, have longed to do so, just as I now dream of throwing off this old careful, tentative, secretive self that hampers and disgusts me at every turn, and putting on a forthright, impulsive, garrulous, assertive self that would execute my desires. Can I not, by sheer self-compulsion, by taking myself as it were by the scruff of the neck, by doggedly disregarding all sense of shame, all fear of ridicule, express my feelings without restraint and immodestly demand what I desire?

Two days later. Rose rang me up this morning to ask me to take her to the picture show she missed two days ago. After we had seen it I brought her back to tea here. While we sat at tea I said to her:

‘You told me, that day we sheltered in the inn at Barrowhurst, how monstrously you lied to your father when you were lost on the hill.’

She laughed. ‘But at least,’ she said, ‘I confessed in the end. I confessed to you.’

‘Yes, Rose, you confessed. And now I’m going to confess to you. I’m going to confess that ever since we first met at the Ethertons’ I’ve been lying to you. I’ve been pretending I’m not in love with you.’

Poor girl, the blood flamed suddenly in her cheeks and she threw a quick, bewildered glance at me. I felt as if I had taken a mean advantage of her: but I went desperately on.

‘Let me tell you everything, Rose. The first moment I saw you, sitting at the Ethertons’ piano, I fell in love with you. Yes, head over ears, hopelessly. Don’t say that love at first sight means nothing. I know better: it means everything. It means that I would do anything in the world to make you happy. It surprised you, it shocked you, I saw, to hear me break out like this, but I had to, Rose. It’s a terrible thing to go on bottling up one’s feelings. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? You don’t mind my loving you? Tell me at least that you don’t mind.’

She raised her eyes, her face still flaming. ‘Philip, I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know …’

‘You didn’t know what I was feeling? Did you never suspect?’

‘Once or twice lately I have wondered …’

‘But you don’t mind, Rose? Surely it’s nice to be loved, to know that there’s someone who adores every look of your face, every movement, everything you do or say, the very sound of your voice? Doesn’t that make you happy?’

‘It frightens me, Philip.’

‘Frightens you?’

‘To be so … so responsible for you.’

What could she mean by that? ‘But you’re not responsible,’ I said. ‘If I give you a bunch of flowers, are you responsible to me?’

‘Yes,’ she said; ‘and the more the present means to you, the more responsible I am.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t hold you responsible. How can you be? You fill me with happiness simply by … well, by being you.’

‘That means that I can make you unhappy too.’

Was she thinking of her desertion of me for her friends the Bryans two days ago, realizing now how much more it had meant for me than she had then known? And could her fear of making me unhappy be a sign that she felt for me something of what I felt for her? ‘If I knew you loved me, Rose,’ I said, ‘I should never be unhappy, whatever you did.’

She sat in silence, a silence of which I could not read the meaning in her face. I took her hand. ‘Rose, will you marry me?’

She shook her head.

‘Then you don’t … you don’t love me?’

‘I like you very much, Philip; I feel that we’re very great friends.’

‘Then say you’ll…’

She shook her head again. ‘Not yet, Philip. You see, you took me very much by surprise. I don’t yet know my own mind.’

‘There’s no hurry, Rose. Only say … Only let us be engaged. Please do, Rose. That will leave you free and set me free as well.’

‘Free? What do you mean, Philip? It will bind us.’

‘No, it won’t. It will simply mean that you’ll marry me some day if you feel you can. That’s all I ask, Rose. That would set me free from all my doubts and worries. Do, Rose. Please, do. I wouldn’t mind, then, even if you didn’t walk home with me from the Ethertons’.’

She smiled. ‘My poor Philip; I never thought that would be such a tragedy. But what if I can’t marry you in the end?’

‘That’s very simple. You break it off: you chuck me.’

‘But I don’t want to chuck you.’

‘Then marry me. That’s simpler still.’

She laughed. There was an amused affection in her eyes that I had never seen before. ‘You’re just like a charming schoolboy,’ she said.

I took both her hands in mime. ‘Then you say Yes, Rose. It’s all settled, isn’t it?’

She tried very gently to draw her hands away. ‘Give me a day or two, Philip: I haven’t had a moment to think.’

But I kept her hands fast. ‘Nonsense, where’s the good of thinking? Thinking’s the devil. Say Yes, Rose. Yes,’ I prompted her.

‘Yes,’ she said. And then she added quickly, seriously, and half timidly: ‘But don’t expect too much of me.’

‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ I bent and kissed her cheek, a single brief kiss. ‘Just one,’ I said, ‘to be going on with.’

I keep asking myself, now that she is gone, whether in doing violence to myself, in forcing myself to grasp at what I desire, I have not done violence to her. Her face, the surprised, bewildered, blushing face with which she greeted my confession, haunts me; and I feel now that in ignoring its wordless appeal and in brushing aside her timid refusal I was overbearing and brutal. But Rose is no coward. She would not have allowed me to force her consent against her will. Didn’t she smile at last—that indulgent, amused, affectionate smile which flowers in my memory now, effacing the first bewildered look—as if pleased to have her hesitation overridden? No, these doubts belong to my old dumb, timid self, the self from which I determined to break free two days ago. Besides, would she have asked me to see her to-morrow, to go to tea at her flat, if she had felt that I had compelled her against her will? Wouldn’t her first impulse, in that case, have been to escape from me?

Next day. I arrived at her flat this afternoon five minutes before she got back from her music lesson. Jennifer was in the sitting-room: she greeted me in her usual off-hand way.

‘Hallo, Philip, you’ve arrived before your hostess.’

My policy with Jennifer is a rather heavy-handed levity. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to put up with you in the meantime. How is Rose?’

For a moment her thick black eyebrows drew together. ‘Why do you ask?’ she said after a pause, as if investigating a case.

‘Why do I ask? Why do you ask why I ask? Why shouldn’t I ask?’

‘Yes, why shouldn’t you? You have a right to be interested. Well, I’ll tell you, Philip. I heard her crying in her room last night.’

I could not hide from Jennifer nor from myself my immediate sense of guilt. ‘And you think,’ I said rather lamely, ‘that I’m to blame?’

‘In the light of the news Rose gave me this morning it seems possible.’

I felt a sudden dislike of Jennifer. Her hardness, her lack of warmth, her proprietary attitude towards Rose irritated me. I could feel the sourness of my smile when I spoke. ‘So we are not to receive your blessing yet, I gather.’

She nodded. ‘That’s it, Philip. Not yet.’

At that moment we heard the front door shut. Rose came in and instantly put an end to our acid encounter. The fears Jennifer’s information had roused in me were put to rest at the first glimpse of Rose. She was evidently in high spirits; her eyes met mine frankly, cheerfully; her coming seemed to fill the room with breeze and sunlight, and soon even Jennifer and I were talking to each other with perfect good humour.

A week later. Rose took me to her home at Down-church in Sussex last week-end, to see her parents, or rather to be seen by them. I was going, as she said, ‘on approval’.

‘And what if I’m not approved? Shall I be returned, carriage paid?’

‘O no,’ said Rose, ‘it won’t really make any difference,’

‘It’s a mere formality, then?’

‘Yes; or rather, a quaint old custom. But they will approve of you; especially my mother. In fact, Philip, you’re just the kind of son-in-law she hoped for but was rather afraid she wouldn’t get. As for my father, he’ll give you a lot of good advice.’

‘Well, I’ll take it.’

‘Will you? I’m not sure that I shall find you bearable if you do.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it, but I probably shan’t use it.’

She was less talkative than usual on the journey, and no wonder, for to bring together people with whom one is intimate, who are strangers to one another, is an embarrassing business. Rose must have been conscious not only that her parents and I were strangers, but also that their Rose was a stranger to me, a creature I had not yet seen, and mine a stranger to them. She would have to try to be the two Roses at once or to evolve a sort of compromise.

I couldn’t help resenting the fact that Rose had parents, and I already imagined myself standing by, while these two people, a man and a woman who owned her and were deeply involved in her life, treated her, by right, with a proprietary intimacy.

And so it was. When her father called her Rosie I felt, beneath a polite exterior, angry and jealous, angry with myself, too, for not having invented it before my adoption of it would seem an aping of him. It was Rose’s mother who put me at my ease. Her quiet and spontaneous friendliness seemed to include me in the affectionate relation between her and Rose. And Rose, too, drew me into their circle by showing me her sitting-room, her private possessions, her favourite haunts in the garden and the surrounding country, the tree she climbed and fell from when she broke her arm, the way she and her brother used to get on to the roof.

In ways such as these she let me more and more into her past life, the life that only her family shared, and so gave me more and more of herself.

I found her father more difficult than her mother. It was not that he was unfriendly: on the contrary, he treated me from the first with the friendly jocularity which seemed to me his habitual manner. In fact, he was a nice old stick. The difficulty, with him, lay in the problem of how he contrived to be Rose’s father. It took me some time to fit him in; in fact I never quite succeeded, and that, I think, was due to the fact that he doesn’t actually quite fit in. He stands, slightly aggrieved, slightly puzzled, with one foot outside the circle, and before the end of my visit I got the impression that he was appealing to me to help him into it.

Rose had been right: he gave me advice. It was mostly advice about Rose, and, I think, rather good advice.

‘You’ll find her a handful,’ he said; and then, inconsequently it seemed, he asked me if I liked horses.

I told him I used to ride as a boy.

‘Then you’ll know what I mean when I say she has a soft mouth. She wants a light hand but a firm one. Always ride her on the snaffle. One touch of the curb and she’s all over the place at once. You can’t force her. The only hope is to let her think she’s having her own way. She can turn her mother round her little finger. In the old days, of course,’ he went on, ‘I should have asked you what your prospects were and sent you packing if I didn’t like them. But times are changed now. You haven’t come to ask my permission to marry Rose. She’s brought you down just to let us have a look at the man she’s decided to marry. Even that we ought to take as a concession, I suppose.’

All this was said in a jocular and friendly tone.

‘If you’ll let me tell you what I already have and what my prospects are,’ I said, ‘then perhaps by to-morrow evening you’ll be able to tell me whether, if you had had the chance, you would have given your permission.’

‘Just as a matter of curiosity?’

‘Well, I should be glad to hear that I would have come up to the scratch.’

‘If there’d been one to come up to?’

‘Just so. I ought to warn you, of course, that I paint pictures which people tell me are rather modern.’

‘No, no; much better keep quiet about that. It might have wrecked your chances. As a matter of fact,’ he added, ‘Rose has confessed that much already. But other things being equal, we’ll overlook that, and if you make it pay, well, then, it justifies itself of course. Personally I like pictures that stick to the facts. My wife and I always run up to do the Academy. It’s a tiring job, but after all one’s got to keep in touch with things.’

On Monday morning, when the car was at the door, he and I stood on the doorstep waiting for Rose.

‘Women are always late,’ he said; ‘but you’ll have learnt that much already, of course. Now don’t forget what I told you. A light hand and no curb. One touch of the curb and…’ he laughed, ‘… I was going to say, she’ll bolt with you, but that’s just what she won’t do. She’ll throw you.’

Why is it that I feel so free and so secure? If I reason it out I see that my security is based on nothing. Rose has not promised to marry me: I released her from that promise before she made it by assuring her that she was free to throw me over when she wished to. None the less I feel secure. Is it because I am really convinced that I have tied her to me, that the pressure of public opinion will hold her bound, whether she wishes to be free or not? I hope not. That would almost amount to having swindled her out of her liberty. My unconscious self is not, I hope, as basely cunning as all that. I think rather that my security rests on the belief that my confession of love and her recognition of it by consenting to our engagement will steer her in my direction, set her mind and heart towards our marriage as a rudder sets the direction of a boat which would otherwise drift aimlessly. Besides, her consent is a warrant that she neither loves nor desires to love anyone else, that even if she doesn’t love me yet she thinks that she will come to do so.

Whatever the reason, the fact of my sense of security is no more to be denied than the presence of the sun on a sunny August day. It encloses me, buoys me up: I live and move in the life-giving warmth of it as a swimmer in a southern sea. It is as though a beneficent storm had ripped off the roof of that dark, narrow inner self in which I have lived hitherto and had exposed me to life, health, reality.

Three months later. So I wrote three months ago. But recently a change has come over Rose. Something has gone wrong. Occasionally, and always in ways that I cannot foresee, I contrive to annoy her. Sometimes she has sudden bursts of anger: sometimes a kind of sulkiness takes hold of her which worries and pains me horribly. Do I intrude on her too much? Hardly, I think: for I often check an impulse to go and see her or ring her up in case I should give her an overdose of me. And I can hardly believe that she finds me difficult. I am always ready to do whatever she wishes, in fact it is understood that it is always she, not I, who must choose. Perhaps she has seen through the plots I make for meeting her as if by accident, on her way to or from her music lesson for instance. I must be more careful.

Two days later. Something happened yesterday that has pained and puzzled me very much. I had called at Rose’s flat to take her out to lunch. As we set out together I asked her which restaurant she would like to go to. Her reply was: ‘You’re to choose to-day, Philip.’

I said I would much rather leave the choice to her.

‘No,’ she persisted; ‘you choose.’

I actually felt myself quite unable to do so. We walked on in silence till at last I answered somewhat lamely: ‘Then I choose the one you prefer.’

Rose stopped,, Her lips were compressed with anger. ‘Philip,’ she said, ‘if you don’t name a restaurant now, instantly, I shall turn round and go home.’

Her unaccountable exasperation terrified me and I felt deeply wounded. Why should my wish that we should do what she liked best have made her so angry?

Four days later. Something of the same sort has happened to-day. Again for no reason, without any provocation from me, she turned on me. I was stung to protest.

‘What’s wrong, Rose? What on earth have I done? All I want is to please you.’

She sighed wearily, as though what I had said had only exasperated her the more. ‘The way to please me, Philip,’ she said, ‘is not to keep trying to.’

Could there have been a more stultifying reply? What does it mean? It tells me nothing except that we are hopelessly at loggerheads.

ROSE

It is now six months since I became engaged to Philip, and I must pause and take stock of our position. It can only harm both of us if I go on pretending to myself that all is well. For the truth is that we are drifting Heaven knows where. I’m not sure if Philip realizes it, though it seems impossible that such a terribly sensitive creature should not. It’s I, of course, who am to blame. I ought never to have become engaged to him. If only he had written instead of speaking I should never have thought twice about it. Even when he spoke, I was quite determined at first. It was that sudden, unexpected change in him that shook my resolve. For when I refused he suddenly broke out of his usual reserve. It was as if a lamp had been lighted in him. His eyes lost their veiled earnestness and became bright, lively, childlike, irresistibly appealing. It was the first time I had noticed their colour, an extraordinary and very beautiful brownish grey, like an agate. And it was not only his eyes: his voice and manner changed too. He had suddenly turned into a gay, impulsive, importunate schoolboy. He had all the bright confidence of a child, and I simply couldn’t find it in my heart to crush it. Besides, it all seemed so simple, so light-hearted. I was to say Yes, simply because if I did so he would be made perfectly happy: it was to bind me to nothing. Later on, if I found I wanted to say No, that would be just as simple and cheerful a business. And so on the spur of the moment and on an impulse of kindness and affection I said Yes. It was all the easier to say it because the sudden change in him had touched me deeply. It had, for the moment at least, tipped over the balance from liking to loving. Before that, I hadn’t thought of our being anything but good friends, and this, I’m sure, wasn’t owing to stupidity on my part, but to his extreme reserve. Men have fallen in love with me from time to time; if I stop to recollect I can count five of them, so willy-nilly I have acquired a certain eye for symptoms. But Philip never showed a sign except on two occasions, and those were so unaccountable in the light of his usual manner that I put them down to mere shyness, the sort of meaningless accident that sometimes occurs when, even between strangers, eye meets eye and a moment of confusion follows. And so I felt safe with him. I liked him immensely, much more than I have ever liked any other man, but I wasn’t in the least in love with him. And that, I believed, was exactly his attitude to me. Therefore I felt safe in seeing a great deal of him: I had no fear that I was giving him a false impression or leading him on to disappointment. But when the truth came out, suddenly, point-blank, everything was altered. I realized that I must, after all, quite unintentionally have been rousing all sorts of hopes in him by these meetings, and I felt horribly guilty. It was that, as well as his disarming insistence, that drew that irresponsible Yes from me. It wasn’t, of course, completely irresponsible. At the moment I thought it certain that I should fall in love with him. After all, what could be a better foundation for love than a friendship such as ours? And, in fact, hadn’t I already, in response to that surprising change in him, begun to feel more than friendship? Each time that I recalled, on my way home, his eyes and the words with which he overbore my refusal so charmingly, I felt again the thrill they had roused in me. It wasn’t till night that I fully realized what I had done. Then I saw that, though I had actually given no promise, I had none the less tied myself. The realization of that alarmed and horrified me, and I had a wild impulse to ring him up and break off at once. But that I couldn’t do. The mistake was mine and I must not make Philip suffer for it. For an hour I lay on my bed struggling against the inevitable. In fact I had a good cry, and that, after a while, seemed to clear my mind. Once more I saw the thing in the cheerful, simple light in which I had seen it at first: once more I saw Philip’s eyes, heard his bright, eager voice, and I determined to stick to my word.

That decision made me happy again, and for many weeks all went well. Yet how easy it would really have been, if my presence of mind had not deserted me, to refuse without hurting him. ‘Not yet,’ would have left him hope and happiness enough. And it seems to me now that, by the irony of fate, if only I had postponed it there would have been much more likelihood of my falling in love with him later. What defeats it now is the very fact of our being engaged. Because of course I’m not free, whatever Philip may have said about my being free to chuck him. There’s an obligation on me to stick to him which is all the more binding for being left to my discretion. It is as if we were both caught in a trap. By right of our engagement Philip, in spite of himself, expects all sorts of things of me, and I on my side feel myself obliged to give them whether he expects them or not. Though he said so charmingly and with perfectly honest intention that he wouldn’t mind if I didn’t walk home with him from the Ethertons’, I know very well that he would mind and, knowing that, I feel myself morally compelled to do so. That spoils everything: it robs the thing of all its spontaneity and turns it into a duty. O, but doesn’t that sense of duty give away the lamentable truth, for if I were in love with Philip the question of duty would never arise. When he said that to be engaged to me would set him free, I did not understand what he meant, nor, alas, did I understand that his liberation would be my imprisonment. But now I understand only too well. When a man and woman are in love their old freedom becomes a prison to them and to become engaged sets them free. But I was not tired of my freedom: in fact, I have realized only since I lost it how precious it was to me.

And yet, if I had refused Philip six months ago, how glad I might have been by this time to give up for him the freedom I now so much regret. What am I to do? I could never make him understand that our engagement is falsifying our attitude to each other. He asks so little of me in words that I could never convince him of the burden of unspoken demands and appeals which he lays upon me. And being unaware of this, he must put down my moments of weariness and resentment to mere bad temper. So the trouble grows, acting, re-acting, and again re-acting, first on one of us, then on the other. The more weary and impatient I become, the more he leans upon me, speechlessly appealing. His love for me, his longing to cling, makes him blind and deaf to the cause of my irritation, and he responds to it by redoubling the cause. The gay, impulsive child in him, which I first saw when he proposed to me and knew so often in the weeks of happiness that followed, has died out of him now. He has shrunk back into his old reserved earnestness under which smoulders a dumb, thwarted intensity which I find both pathetic and irritating. It’s an impossible situation. When one loves and the other doesn’t, the two are bound to be at cross-purposes.

And yet, I have asked myself more than once lately, is Philip really in love with me? Isn’t it rather that he wants me to be in love with him? It’s not that he’s ungenerous: he’s as generous as he can be, and he’s ready, far too ready, to do anything I wish. In fact he suppresses himself so completely when we’re together that sometimes he seems to me little more than a lay-figure that’s always getting in the way. At such times I feel, irritably, that his state is too negative, too spineless for love; and I have, besides, the curious feeling that he suppresses not only himself but me also. He wants to be loved, or else he’s in love with himself and wants someone else to commend his choice, or he’s in love with being in love, and each of these states needs a second person to complete it. And so, as he had to choose someone, he has chosen me. That’s where I come in. I am a mere instrument, chosen Heaven knows how or why.

But that’s unjust and ungrateful to poor Philip. One can’t analyse the tangle of human emotions quite as easily and brutally as that. And isn’t it quite possible that all these annoyances and grievances of mine are of my own making? Isn’t it perhaps that I have taken it for granted that I am no longer free and visit my irritation on an innocent Philip?

I have complained of the burden of Philip’s unspoken appeals, the silent pressure which, without a word said, he exerts on me. But though it is certainly better that I should admit to myself that it exists than pretend that all is well, still, general accusations of this kind cannot do much good, indeed they may be nothing more than the fancies of my own ill humour which I lay at Philip’s door instead of my own. It is most important, it seems to me now, that I should try to clear up in my own mind this complicated tangle which seems to have formed itself without my knowledge and against my conscious will. Let me try to be more definite. When is it that I feel most irritated?

An inner voice replies instantly to that question with the word music. Yes, music, my own piano-playing, has gradually become a centre of irritation. Philip loves music and from the beginning has often asked me to play to him. At first I loved doing so, but lately I have come to dislike it more and more. But although I have been aware of this I have never tried to discover the reason for it. Generally it is delightful to play to an understanding listener, and Philip is certainly that. Why then do I feel impelled to refuse whenever he asks me to play? The fact is, I think, that whenever he does so I have the feeling that he is getting at me. He is trying—and when I play to him, succeeding—to extort from me in music what I cannot give him directly. I refuse him love, so he persuades me, under cover of asking for pleasant entertainment, to bestow on him the emotional offering which music-making certainly is. And I resent this. I feel that he is extorting on false pretences something he knows I do not wish to give, and when I see, afterwards, how deeply my playing has affected him, I feel anger boil up in me. It is exactly as if he had laid hands on me and kissed me by force. Sometimes I actually find myself playing badly, as if to spoil the transmission as it were. But how do I know that Philip consciously or unconsciously goes through this process? Isn’t it much more probably my own imagination, a mere symbol of my chafing against our engagement? It seems as if, in spite of myself, I have a grudge against the poor boy. Nothing he can do is right. I seem to be resolved, just because 1 can’t give him what he so urgently needs, to deny him even the little kindnesses I can give. Why is it? What forces me to be so horribly unkind to him?

He himself does, the inner voice at once replies. He clings to me, leans on me; he won’t let me alone. And he is so fiendishly subtle in his methods. A week ago, when I went to see him, I found that he had bought a piano.

‘But what do you want with a piano?’ I said, for he doesn’t play at all.

‘O I got it merely so that you’ll be able to play when you feel like it,’ he answered casually. ‘Try it, Rose. Tell me if it suits you.’

I sat down at once to hide my face from him and to avoid the necessity of speaking. For I felt both touched and exasperated. His buying of the piano seemed to me at once irresistibly pathetic and hatefully cunning. It was another gentle, unspoken appeal for pity, but it was also a crafty and potent moral imposition. For the fact that he has bought it for me and that it will be incessantly waiting there for me to play on it imposes on me a solemn duty to come and do so and to be grateful to him for it. It’s another knot in the rope that is strangling me. I shall never be able, now, when Philip is there, to sit down to the piano casually, on the spur of the moment. Playing to him has been saddled with so much moral and emotional significance that it has become almost unbearable.

How cruel and spiteful I am growing. I never used to be like this, and even now I don’t want to be. It is something quite outside my will. I hate myself for it, and not only myself but Philip too. Yes, rightly or wrongly, I blame him for it.

Let me take another instance. I know that Philip … I will not say expects, but hopes that I will tell him of all my movements when I am out of his sight. I am bound to confess, when I look at it reasonably, that it is only natural in the circumstances that he should: he wants to share my life, and if I tell him of what I have done and where I have been and whom I have met since last we saw each other, that prevents him from feeling left out in the cold. Yes, it is reasonable and natural, but O how irritating. For it is not merely that it is a consolation to him: it is also, for him, a means of clinging to me. That is what I chafe against. It plays upon my compassion. If I don’t tell him, I feel a brute: if I do, I feel that I have been morally compelled to. I have been cajoled through my better nature into tightening my handcuffs. And so, at times, I cannot bring myself to confess, and I find myself, just to assert my freedom, making a secret of something that is no secret at all, something that I would tell him with perfect willingness if only I were under no obligation to do so. And when I do that, when I withhold information about where and with whom I had dinner last night for instance, Philip gently tries to draw me by asking me if I spent a pleasant evening, if I was at a concert or a theatre, and so makes it impossible for me not to tell him without giving him the impression that I have something to hide, an impression which, no doubt, he would develop into all sorts of miseries and tortures for himself.

What a tangle it all is. If only I could be more generous and more indulgent I should be able to regard all these things as the little, insignificant things they really are. But try as I will, there are times, only too frequent, when I can’t: the inequality of our relationship raises these molehills into mountains which tower above me like the mountains of a nightmare, portentous and insuperable.

Is it a good thing to be highly conscious, to peer into one’s own mind and those of one’s friends and theorize about their workings? If it is, then my engagement to Philip has done me at least that much good. Before, I took myself and my friends for granted: it never occurred to me to dig below the surface and question acts and motives or to assume that their face value was misleading and little more than a disguise. It seems that I have suddenly grown up, but grown up into rather a disagreeable person. I have become a creature of moods, which I never was before. And yet no one but Philip and I can be aware of this moodiness, for it concerns only him and me. In fact I feel sure that if Jennifer, the sharp-eyed Jennifer, were asked what effect my engagement had had on me, she would reply that it had made me more cheerful than ever. She cannot suspect that the cheerfulness is actually a symptom of loss of balance. For the truth is that Jennifer provides an instantaneous antidote to my fits of ill humour. She does not often see Philip and me together, but when she does, when we are all three together, my ill humour vanishes: in company my feelings and behaviour towards him are always friendly and cheerful. A third person acts as a solvent. And that: is not all. In proportion as I have been oppressed by Philip, I am exhilarated by Jennifer. When I leave him and come home irritated and coerced, the relief provided by Jennifer’s easy, sane, clearcut companionship lets loose all my pent-up spirits and I find myself breaking out into a perfect riot of gaiety. I can’t help it: it is not a matter of will: it just happens. Jennifer asks, or seems to ask, nothing of me and I give her everything. Philip asks more than I can give and I give him little or nothing. It is as if I were enacting that difficult saying of Christ’s: ‘Unto him that hath, to him shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.’

Is there any use in thinking out our problem if I do nothing about it? I believe I had a vague feeling, when I began, that if I could arrive at a clear view of its why and wherefore, the mere discovery would by itself relieve the tension. But it doesn’t. Perhaps that is because I haven’t really achieved a clear view. There are depths, both on my side and Philip’s, which I haven’t been able to plumb. But what can I do? I can imagine remedies or attempts at remedies, but how can I put them into practice? I believe, for instance, that if Philip would agree to our not being alone together for a while our discord might be resolved not merely for the moment but permanently and so we might be able to make a new start. We are like two discordant notes which, when another note is added, become harmonious. Jennifer is not our only solvent: almost any other person or persons will do as well. But how could I persuade Philip of that? I believe he is actually as much happier at such times as I am. His overcharged feelings, which weigh upon us both when we are alone together, are harmlessly dissipated in company. But he doesn’t know it and certainly wouldn’t admit it. And the fact remains that, for reasons I can’t define, I haven’t the courage to suggest such a plan.

A month later. Another month has passed and we are still drifting, but more rapidly than before. I have tried hard to suppress my black moods, but they are stronger than I am. At the least provocation they come down on me like a London fog. Philip has only to ask me to play to him for me to fume internally, and when I force myself to comply I play so badly that it must seem to him that I am doing so deliberately. Perhaps I am. When one is at cross-purposes with oneself it is difficult to recognize where accident stops and intention begins. Three times recently I have refused to play at all: I simply couldn’t force myself to it. If I had tried I should have burst into tears. The first time he did not remark upon it, but when I refused again, the very next time he asked me, I saw his face cloud. But it was not until my third refusal that he spoke. ‘O do, Rose,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

I said I was sick of playing.

His eyes searched my face. ‘Sick of playing, or sick of playing to me?’

I couldn’t insult him with the truth; so I lied, saying I supposed I had had an overdose of music lately. But he didn’t believe me and I saw him glance mournfully at his piano, as if for the first time realizing that he ought not to have bought it. Something in his attitude filled me with contrition and my ill humour was suddenly quenched. ‘I’ll try, if you want me to, Philip,’ I said, and I sat and played till I had made him happy again and stifled my remorse.

But I had escaped only from that one particular mood. I am still no less at the mercy of others. More and more I hate going to his flat. When he comes here it is not quite so bad, even if we are alone; and when we meet at concerts and picture galleries and other people’s houses it is better still.

I had promised to go to tea with him last Thursday and see a picture he has just finished. As the time drew on for me to start, my mood descended on me, grew, enveloped me. I sat, angry and numb, in this sitting-room, knowing that it was time to start but doing nothing. No, I couldn’t face it: not possibly. I determined, or rather the mood compelled me, to stay at home. But if I stayed at home Philip would be sure to ring me up. Yes, at about a quarter to five, inevitably, the telephone bell would ring. At least I would save myself from that, and almost without thinking what I was doing I went to the telephone and rang up Philip.

In a moment I heard his voice. ‘Yes, it’s me, Rose.’

And I heard myself saying with a horrible false gaiety: ‘Philip, I can’t come this afternoon. What? Yes, a subsequent engagement.’

‘Subsequent?’

‘Yes, absolutely subsequent.’

Did my frivolity sound as hideously hollow to him as it did to me? It seemed not, for he took it well and asked if I would go next day.

‘To-morrow? Yes, to-morrow by all means,’ I heard myself say, and hung up the receiver feeling baffled, entangled, humiliated. It was hateful to have lied to him, and by lying I had done neither him nor myself the slightest good. I had merely postponed till to-morrow what it would have been better to have done and been done with to-day. I felt miserable and horribly ashamed of myself.

I rang for Martha to bring me some tea, took up a book, and dismissed the whole wretched business from my mind.

A week later. A lamentable and ridiculous thing occurred this afternoon. Again I had promised to go to Philip’s flat. I can’t refuse repeatedly without giving a reason and I can’t again bring myself to tell him lies. But to give the true reason would open the whole subject of our situation and would produce endless complications, endless misunderstandings and arguments. Philip is so innocent in intention and so vulnerable that I can’t face hurting him deliberately. So again I had promised to go to tea with him, and when the time came to start, I started.

It is terrible to be in such a false position as I am in at present. It’s not simply that one’s better nature is fighting against one’s worse nature: that would be simple. In obeying the first, one would be helped by the knowledge that one was acting for the best. But when I give in to Philip I don’t feel at all sure that I am acting for the best. It cannot be for the best to do violence to one’s innermost feelings, to every nerve in one’s body. By the time I reached Brunswick Square I had reached the point at which I couldn’t face the visit. My heart was full of angry despair: I felt that at any moment I might burst into tears. I turned back and walked to the corner of Handel Street so as to give myself time to pull myself together, and then I turned and again walked to his door. I was already a quarter of an hour late: I must make up my mind quickly. Again I turned back in an agony of indecision, struggling with myself, arguing with myself. Wouldn’t it be even crueller to go to him in this state of hopeless irritability than to fail him? If I went in, I should sit there sulky, bitter, undisguisably resentful without any apparent provocation from him. What would he think? What would he feel? Better, much better to go home and shut myself up alone. I had again reached the corner of Handel Street and I gave up the struggle.

But before starting for home I glanced back, why I don’t know, and saw Philip standing on the steps of his house. He was gazing in my direction, looking for me no doubt, and though there were several people coming and going between us he must have seen me, for he ran down the steps. A wild desire to escape seized me and I turned the corner and hurried up Handel Street, at right angles to my way home. Almost at once I passed three men and, screened by them, I glanced back again just in time to see Philip, hatless, his hair streaming, run across the road and vanish down the street I should have taken. Thank God! Thank God! A feeling of immense relief came over me and I hurried on, northward, so as not to meet him if he turned back.

How on earth should I explain the miserable, ridiculous business to him? Only by more lies. I had had a headache, I would say. I had started, thinking that the fresh air would do it good, but it had become worse and so I had turned round on his doorstep, determined to go back home. No, I must not say that, in case Philip had run all the way there and failed to overtake me or find me there. I had determined, I must say, to go for a walk, in the hope of walking the headache away. What a wretched, ignominious tangle.

PHILIP

A fortnight later. What can have happened? It is now nine o’clock and after waiting and waiting I have come home. What can have prevented her from turning up? We were to dine at seven o’clock at Martini’s and go on to the Philharmonic concert at the Queen’s Hall. I waited till a quarter to eight and then rang up her flat from the restaurant. Martha answered the telephone. Rose was not in. What time had she gone out? Martha couldn’t say. I returned to our table and ordered something for myself because I hadn’t the face not to. I felt that the waiter was an interested spectator of my predicament. If she had left her flat she must arrive soon. And yet a terrible foreboding told me she wouldn’t come. I was quivering with anxiety and the thought of food was loathsome; but I forced myself to eat and at a quarter past eight I left the restaurant.

What was I to do now? There was nothing to do but ring up her flat again and I was ashamed to do that. Could an accident have happened to her? I imagined all sorts of horrors and turned away, shuddering, from my imaginings, trying to account for her absence by a variety of theories which my mind evolved with a feverish glibness. I believed none of them. When this torturing uncertainty was over, I kept assuring myself, there would turn out to be some perfectly simple and obvious explanation. I fingered the concert tickets in my pocket. Perhaps, finding she was going to be late, she had gone straight to the Queen’s Hall and was waiting for me there. I took a taxi and drove there. The concert would be starting in five minutes. A stream of people poured in through the various doors, and in the entrance-hall a few loiterers like myself scrutinized them, glancing anxiously at their watches. But there was no Rose.

The flow of arrivals thinned, ceased. The loiterers vanished: I was alone. I hung about in the empty hall. She wasn’t coming, I knew, and yet the faint chance that she might held me there. But after twenty minutes I gave it up and came away. I couldn’t go in. How could I sit and listen to music, distracted as I was?

And now here I am, at home, waiting in an agony of anxiety and misgiving. What time was it when I rang up her flat? A quarter to eight. Now it is after nine. I will ring up again.

I have rung up. It was Martha again who answered. No, Miss Bentley had not returned. Could anything have happened to her, I asked. Martha was reassuring.

‘O no, Sir. Were you expecting her, Sir?’

‘Yes, she was dining with me.’

‘Don’t you think perhaps she may have mistaken the day, Sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, that must be it. She must have mistaken the day.’

But I don’t really believe it. Rose doesn’t make mistakes of that sort. Besides, she had the programme of the concert with the date and time printed on it. O Lord, Lord! What shall I do? I can’t sit here idle and tortured. I’ll go out and walk.

But if I go out, some message may come in my absence. No, I must stay in and wait. I will get out my diary and read it. I shall find her there at least: the Rose that lives in the diary will perhaps help me to bear the absence of the real Rose.

I took the diary out of the drawer and had just begun to read when the door-bell rang. My heart stood still and I jumped from my chair, ran downstairs and opened the door. It was not her. It was a messenger boy with a letter: the address, in pencil, was in her writing. I tore it open: it was a brief note. ‘So sorry I couldn’t manage this evening. Good night. All well. Rose.’

I signed the boy’s form, shut the door and brought the note upstairs, and I sit here now staring at it, trying to see through its three dry little phrases into the real significance of it.

I seem to see a process in it, a change of mood. It is as if, having written ‘Sorry couldn’t manage this evening,’ she had felt that she was being too off-hand, too harsh, and had added the ‘good night’ to mitigate it. And then, knowing how anxious and upset I should be, had decided that she ought, after all, to reassure me. That ‘all well’ shows that she knew I should be suspecting that all was not well, else why should she add it? But the very fact that she decided to add it seems to warn me that all is not well. Perhaps, even, it was not added to reassure me but to forestall my tiresome solicitude.

Yes, something has happened. For weeks, though I have never dared to admit it to myself, she had been drifting away from me. I have seen it, felt it all the time. There have been mysteries, evasions that chilled me to the heart and this desertion of me to-night marks a new stage in her retreat. They have been setting her against me, that’s what it is. Jennifer and that old woman have been against me from the first. They are jealous of me. They both regard Rose as their property: both are in love with her, Martha with the selfish motherliness of the childless old woman, Jennifer with the desperate rapacity of the starved spinster who cannot love men. At the first moment I met Jennifer, at the first glance of her spectacled eye, I was aware of her hardly veiled hostility. Last Tuesday I passed her in Southampton Row and she cut me. At the time I supposed she hadn’t seen me; but she saw me right enough, I’m sure of it now.

Of course they haven’t attacked me openly, such women are too crafty for that. Even old Martha would know instinctively that this would only rouse Rose to my defence. But quietly, cunning, they have set her against me: by the faintest, slyest suggestions of disapproval and derision they have made her ashamed of me without knowing it. I hate the old woman with her square, dour, earthenware face. When she opens the door to me she stands there, filling the doorway, as if blocking my way and I can feel the reluctance with which she stands aside to let me pass. And I hate Jennifer’s white plaster face, her cold, hard efficiency, her intolerance and resentment of my presence which she disguises behind a veil of masculine familiarity.

Yes, it is they who are to blame. But if I said so to Rose, she wouldn’t believe it. She would laugh at me. What can I do? If I try to hold her it will only irritate her into breaking away more definitely. My best chance of keeping her, I know, would be to release her; but I daren’t. I am like the drowning man who, in spite of himself, struggles desperately and hampers his rescuer, though he knows that his only hope lies in ceasing to struggle. But perhaps I am wrong: perhaps this feeling that she is slipping from me is nothing but fancy, born of my devotion to her. If only it were? But what of that day, two months ago, when we were going to Barrowhurst again and she suddenly refused to go?

I must stop thinking. If I don’t control my mind it goes on spinning endless theories, arguments, deductions until I go half mad with bewilderment and misery. The difficulty is that not to think requires more of an effort than to think. I will take up a book, any book, and force myself to read, to tire myself out and so escape, if possible, the horrors of a sleepless night.

Next day. I hoped there might be a letter from her this morning, though it was hardly to be expected. But the post brought me nothing and I waited till midday, hoping she might ring me up. Then I gave in and rang her up. I had made up my mind not to ask for any explanation if she volunteered none, and I made a desperate attempt to sound cheerful. I believe I succeeded: fortunately she did not know that the hand that held the receiver trembled so violently that I almost dropped it. Her voice came to me, bored and indifferent:

‘O, is that you, Philip? Good morning.’

‘Good morning. I only rang up to know if you were all right.’

‘O perfectly, thanks.’

‘That’s good. I was afraid you might be unwell. When are we meeting again?’

‘Well … ! We shall meet at the Ethertons’ to-morrow night, shan’t we?’

‘You’re not free to-day? Won’t you come and have tea?’

‘I’ve rather a lot to do to-day, Philip.’

‘You couldn’t look in for a quick tea? Or, if you preferred, I could meet you somewhere.’

‘Why, is there something special …?’

‘Nothing whatever, my dear.’ I tried to sound light-hearted. ‘A pardonable desire to see you, that’s all. But if you really can’t manage it …’ I broke off. I couldn’t keep up the pretence of unconcern.

There was a long pause, a pause horribly filled, for me, by her reluctance. Then her voice, toneless, level, came to me again. ‘You’d better come here. Come for a late tea at five.’

Thank God! Thank God! ‘You’re sure you can fit it in? I don’t want to … to …’

‘It’s all right. I’ll manage it somehow.’ How cold her voice sounded. ‘Good-bye. Five o’clock.’ I found myself suddenly cut off.

What could it be? Had I offended her in some way? But I knew I hadn’t. How I wished now, in spite of the pain it would have caused me, that I had refrained from asking to see her. It would have been wiser. But the wisest thing, it seems, is always the most difficult, the most contrary to nature. Besides, if I imitate her and withdraw on my side, as she is doing on hers, won’t she accept my withdrawal and allow us to drift completely apart? Isn’t that the way estrangements always come about? One withdraws, and the other, his pride wounded, withdraws too, and so the gulf opens with double speed. The thought freezes me to the heart. Am I losing her, then? Is this the beginning of a complete separation? O God! O God! How shall I bear it? Surely when one loves as deeply as I do, his love cannot but evoke love or at least kindness in the beloved, I don’t mean in the form of conscious gratitude but inevitably as fire calls fire from what it touches? It must be so. But it is my heart that says so, not my reason. My reason tells me that it is not necessarily so; but I can’t, no I can’t believe my reason. The voice of reason is lost in the clamour of my overburdened heart. My heart, every impulse of body and mind, urges me against withdrawing myself, holding myself back from her. I have no pride, none at least in my feelings towards Rose. Shall I then obey my heart and abase myself, throw myself abjectly on her mercy? She is not cruel by nature. Surely when she sees what I am suffering she will pity me. I claim nothing more than that all should be as it was last summer when we were so happy together, before this indefinable difference came between us. It came imperceptibly, like a ghost whose presence was not at first seen but only felt as a vague unease, and then, one day, the day when she suddenly cancelled our second expedition to Barrowhurst, I saw it, a shadowy, threatening shape which as the weeks passed took on substance, materialized horribly into this shapeless power which is driving us apart.

But why should I torture myself? She will explain what happened last night when we meet this afternoon at her flat. It will all be perfectly simple, perfectly reasonable. This nightmare against which I fight helplessly is the product of nothing but my restless imagination. And yet …

When I arrived at her flat at five o’clock she was not in, nor, thank God, was Jennifer. It was a cold afternoon and the chill of her absence and my overwrought emotions made me feel colder still and I sat crouched over the fire, my longing for her arrival balanced by my dread of it. Mind and feelings had tired themselves out. I no longer thought and theorized, no longer felt anything but a flat, bleak misery. Would she fail to come, as she had failed last night, I asked myself. But the stimulus of that question roused no answer in my dumb and empty heart, as when in a deserted church a man pulls out stops and plays chords on an organ whose bellows are empty. I was so sunk in my apathy that I did not hear the front door open and shut, and it was only when she opened the sitting-room door that I knew she had arrived.

I turned my head. I felt suddenly guilty and ashamed, ashamed of having bothered her to let me see her when she had been obviously unwilling. I rose to my feet. Our eyes met: in hers was the same unfriendliness that I had heard in her voice on the telephone this morning.

‘I’m afraid I’m a little late,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ll just get rid of my hat and coat.’

She crossed the room to the door of her bedroom, her eyes turned from me, and vanished. I sank back into my chair. The other door opened and Martha came in with the tea-tray: her face was fixed and unresponsive as a face of baked clay, as if she had divined Rose’s mood and was acting in sympathy with it. To hide my misery I took up the poker and began to poke the fire. Martha set the tea-table with her usual leisurely efficiency and went out as Rose came in by the other door.

She came to the tea-table and without a word began to pour out tea. I took my cup in silence and handed her the bread and butter. I tried hard to think of something to say, some commonplace phrase that would not sound too obvious, too hollow; but the silence froze my lips. Rose too, I believe, was fighting against her mood, but it was too strong for her. She was angry with me, almost hated me, it seemed. Why? Probably because she felt me silently urging her to explain her defection of last night. Perhaps too she was angry with herself, divided against herself, one half of her assuring her that in common decency she must explain, the other half stubbornly refusing. I stirred my tea but did not taste it: I felt that I would choke if I tried to take a sip. When I raised my eyes I saw that she was looking at me. Her face had softened.

‘Phil, you’re eating nothing,’ she said.

Her voice and the change in her face affected me even more than her former coldness. I felt a sudden rush of tears sting my eyes. With an effort I swallowed them down.

‘I oughtn’t to have come, Rose,’ I said.

‘But I asked you to.’

‘Yes, but only because I worried you. But I was so …’

‘So what, Phil?’

‘So upset about last night.’

She turned away her eyes: she seemed to be struggling with herself. ‘I’m … I’m really very sorry,’ she said at last, ‘but I couldn’t possibly manage it. Something, something at the last minute stopped me.’

‘It was someone else?’ I whispered, shamefaced, stung by a sudden agonizing suspicion.

‘No, no one else. I simply …’

She made a sudden helpless gesture of the hands as if abandoning the attempt to explain. ‘I just couldn’t manage it. Don’t ask me why; I can’t explain.’

Silence fell between us again. I felt that we had reached a hopeless deadlock and with an effort I rose to my feet. I longed to throw myself on her mercy, but that, I felt, would be to force myself on her still more.

‘I think I’ll go home,’ I said, avoiding her eyes. I could not have borne to look at her.

She too rose. I knew she was looking at me, and next moment I felt her arms round me and her hair against my cheek. She was weeping.

‘Phil,’ she said, ‘Phil, I can’t help myself. I don’t want to make you suffer. You know that, don’t you?’

We stood there weeping and clinging together in the middle of the room. O the marvellous consolation of her arms about me, her body against mine. For a few blessed moments, moments which my mind, watching from its dark corner, knew to be delusion, I felt that all my pain was at an end. Then I took hold of her arms and gently released myself. I had remembered that Jennifer might come at any moment.

‘There!’ I said. ‘There, I must go!’

I left her standing and went to the door, took hold of the door-handle and then paused. Her sudden outburst of tears and remorse had roused me from my absorption in my own miseries to the realization that she too was miserable.

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘would you rather be free?’

She still stood where I had left her, and now she raised her eyes and looked at me, forlorn and puzzled.

‘Free, Phil?’

‘Would you like to break off our engagement?’

She seemed to me at that moment, when I was perhaps losing her for ever, more lovely, more precious than ever before. She did not reply. It seemed that she was lost in a dream, and in that brief pause I felt my heart shrivel into a small, cold stone.

Then she smiled at me. ‘No, no, Phil,’ she said, and added with a sad little attempt at levity, ‘it isn’t quite as bad as that.’ She came towards me and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Yes, you’d better go now,’ she said.

I came straight home, and now I am sitting alone and idle in my room. The storm of the last twenty-four hours has spent itself: an empty calm has fallen upon my life. But it is the calm not of restored happiness but of exhaustion and desolation. I know now that the mysterious trouble which has grown up between us and set us at cross-purposes is not, as I have been trying to persuade myself, a figment of my imagination. It is real, horribly, devastatingly real, and I sit and survey the wreckage about me, the fallen trees, the dashed and broken flowers. But I no longer feel myself the victim of her cruelty. Her outburst of tenderness and grief when I left her just now has shown me that we are both victims, she as much as I. Hew glad I am that I had the strength to offer to set her free. That would show her at least that I am not wholly the selfish, whimpering child that I must often have seemed to her during these last weeks. But what is to become of us now? Will our love by degrees recover its former health, or are we to have only brief unions between long periods of division and bitterness, as this afternoon? That would be unendurable. Even our moments of reunion would be terrible then, an ever-renewed agony of parting. Better nothing than that tragic pittance of love. What am I to do? I can do nothing, it seems, but wait for I don’t know what. Perhaps I shall hear from her tomorrow; perhaps there will be a ring at the bell, I shall go down and open the door, and she will be there, eager, happy, her eyes ready for mine without a shadow between. Rapturous, insane, impossible dream. It is strange that the heart can find comfort in fancies that it knows to be incapable of realization.

Next day. Among the letters on my table this morning I found one from her and my heart stood still. I dared not open it and kept it to the last. This is what it said:

‘My dear Phil,—You were right. When you asked me yesterday if I would like to break off our engagement, I ought to have said Yes. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear at the moment to add to your pain, even though I knew that it would be better for us both to be free. But it was false kindness to try to disguise the truth from you. It was even worse; it was cowardly and selfish of me to shirk what was a duty to you and myself. You spoke of setting me free, but it is you even more than I who must be set free. Don’t say you don’t want to be free: you do want it in the more important sense that you need it. The fault is all mine: I ought never to have consented to our engagement. But at least I erred through ignorance, not thoughtlessness. I did not know that my inability to give you as much as you gave me would so falsify our relation, nor did I realize that I would find it impossible to accept, much less repay, all you had to give.

‘I would love you if I could, Philip: indeed, I do love you, but not as you love me. I love you as a friend, but this disproportion in our feelings for one another sours my friendship and drives me, in spite of myself, to treat you as no one should submit to be treated. I have become for you a kind of disease, a kind of vice from which you must shake yourself free; and you have innocently become for me the means of displaying my ill nature and behaving in a way untrue to myself.

‘Don’t try to see me again, Phil, I beg of you. Why should we meet only to give ourselves the pain of parting? Some day, perhaps, when you have regained possession of yourself, we may be able to take up our friendship again.’

That is Rose’s letter. I have read it over and over again, arguing, contradicting, refuting, torturing myself by trying to detect in every phrase the feeling that prompted it, and at every reading my interpretation has been different from the last, till in the end I remained utterly confused. During this last day and a half I have ceased to be a rational human being and have become the slave of my emotions. I have no settled convictions, no fixed attitude of mind; my thoughts and feelings and moods twist and turn and contradict themselves like weathercocks in a storm. I struggle frantically against my fate: I cannot accept the inevitable, cannot believe that it is inevitable. What a fool I was to offer yesterday to set her free and so give her the opportunity of which she has taken advantage. My heart is full of resentment against her. The phrases of her letter sting and infuriate me. It is a priggish letter. This idiotic theory that she is bad for me and that she—she, if you please—must take it upon herself to rescue me from her, is simply an attempt to shift her responsibility for our separation on to my shoulders and to pretend that she is being magnanimous in shaking me off. O God! O God! I hate her; hate her and love her at the same time, that is the torment of it. I sit here imprisoned in this treadmill of incoherent thoughts and feelings, plunging relentlessly on and yet never moving, never advancing, accomplishing nothing. Her letter still lies on my knee. Shall I crumple it up and throw it into the fire, and so make it impossible for me to read it again? No, I must keep it. I must see her and go over it with her, sentence by sentence, explaining away all her mad theories, all her misunderstandings. I will put it away in my desk and go out, escape from it and from the turmoil it has roused in me. If I sit still here the treadmill will never stop till it has driven me crazy. Yes, I will go out and walk till I am too tired to think or feel.

What a strange day it has been, more like a timeless, restless dream than the conventional day made up of morning, afternoon and evening. All morning, all afternoon I have prowled about, taking a brief rest only when walking demanded too painful an effort. When first I started out I was almost driven back indoors by the sudden sense, as I emerged into the square, of the publicity and hostility of the world. It seemed to me that I should be exhibiting my misery to every soul I met, and I shrank from human contact as from a harsh touch on an open wound. I actually turned to go indoors again, but instantly a vivid impression of the empty loneliness of my flat checked me and I turned away and hurried across the square.

The thought of Southampton Row, Kingsway, Oxford Street and all the wide, open spaces filled with people, where I might at any moment run across a friend or acquaintance, was too terrible to face, and I made for the by-streets and less frequented places.

In Gray’s Inn the leaves of the plane trees had turned yellow and it seemed in the bright autumn sunshine that the boughs had burst into tropical bloom, every leaf a great yellow flower. Their beauty gave a new stab to my heart, and when I had crossed Holborn I avoided Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where I should see more plane trees and green lawns, and turned down Chancery Lane. I was making instinctively for the river: for some obscure reason I must have felt that the river would soothe me.

I joined it near the Temple Station and from there I followed the Embankment to Westminster, skirted the Houses of Parliament and then followed the river again all the way to Battersea Bridge. Where I went after that I don’t remember, but I think I must have walked the same way back, because some time later in the morning, too tired to walk any further, I went into Westminster Abbey and sat down. I did not think. My mind was numbed into inertia and my feet were so tired that the business of resting was sufficient occupation. But by degrees I began to notice the things about me, or rather, as it seemed to me, the things about me began to notice me and impose themselves upon me for good or ill. The tall pointed arches, the triforium, the clerestory, the beautiful brown stone carved into mouldings and sober patterns soothed me, but the choir-stalls and windows and the crowd of monuments began to attack me, prey upon me until I could face them no longer and left the Abbey.

Again I joined the river, but this time I walked east, under Hungerford Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, past the Temple, to Blackfriars Bridge which I crossed. But why should I go over my miserable wanderings again? They are best forgotten, and parts of them are forgotten already.

After another gap in my memory I recall myself walking slowly down the nave of St. Paul’s, across the south transept and into the choir where I paused in front of the grim figure of John Donne in his winding-sheet. That figure shows death, as Donne loved to do in his sermons, in all its ghastly indignity. The shroud is gathered into a topknot over the dead face with an accidental coquetry that shocks one. But what does it matter what his effigy looks like? Donne is dead, safely dead with all his troubles over. I turned away, wishing that I too were dead, liberated from this vicious circle of thinking and feeling.

I returned to the nave and sat down to follow my thoughts about death. No, I didn’t really wish to die. What I really wished to do was to go to sleep and not wake up till all was well again. But to die, to leave the world while Rose was still in it—every sense, every feeling rebelled against that.

Everything will come right in the end: it must. Even now I feel that. Yes, I feel it, but if I dare to examine the foundation of my conviction, I see—God help me—that it is based not on reason but merely on desperate longing.

I returned home about four o’clock, tired and feeble. I had eaten nothing since I started out and so I put on the kettle and cut some bread. I must have walked a long way, for I had been out about six hours and nearly all that time I had spent on my feet. But what was I to do now? I thought of work but dismissed the idea instantly. To work, in the state I was in, would be an impossibility. No, there was nothing to do but sit still and suffer.

When I had had some tea I got out Rose’s letter and read it again, and it seemed to me now as clear as day that everything she said was based on a misunderstanding. If we could have a long, quiet talk with no arguments, no recriminations, everything could be mended. How should it not, when I am ready not merely to meet her half-way, but to go all the way, to accept any mode of life that she may desire? It is only a matter of our understanding one another. We have never so much as spoken together of this strange disunion that has come upon us. No wonder we have been more and more at cross-purposes lately. When nothing is explained on either side, the most monstrous assumptions may come to be accepted as facts. If only we had each been frank and spoken out at the first sign of trouble, the thing would have been nipped in the bud and we would never have reached this pitch of antagonism. I ought to have talked to her at tea yesterday, instead of sitting mute as a fish I ought to have had it out with her. But even now it is not too late. But it soon will be. Already I have wasted precious hours since her letter came, mooning about London instead of doing something. I must go to her at once, take her letter with me, and have a long talk. We must be completely frank, without reticence or shame. We must make a clean breast of everything.

I got out of my chair, took my hat and set off for her flat.

Old Martha, stern and expressionless, opened the door and, when I asked to see Rose, showed me without a word into the empty sitting-room. I stood there, too agitated to sit down, staring sightlessly at the picture over the mantelpiece, the picture I had painted for her. I had to clench my teeth to prevent their chattering. Round and round in my mind went the phrases I had prepared for the opening of our talk, phrases intended to show her that I was calm and reasonable, to show her at the outset that I was not going to make a scene or load her with reproaches. ‘Rose, you mustn’t mind my coming in spite of your asking me not to.’ ‘I have come to ask one last favour, Rose, that you will listen to me patiently.’ ‘Rose, if we have to part, I want to be quite certain—and so, I’m sure, do you—that there is no misunderstanding between us.’

But, now that I was here, all my confidence had vanished. What was the use of trying? Nothing, nothing would be of the slightest avail. How lame, how fatuous those carefully prepared phrases sounded to me now. ‘Rose, you mustn’t mind my coming …’ ‘Rose, if we have to part …’ I blushed with shame as I repeated them to myself. They sounded to me now like the meaningless chatter of an automatic puppet.

Out in the hall a door closed and every nerve in my body began dancing like a whole peal of bells jangling at once. Already I saw her face, the face that I should be looking into in a moment, empty of all its old warmth and kindness. Ah, the door-handle rattled, the door opened. But it was Jennifer who entered; Jennifer, hard, practical, cold, even colder than usual.

‘Hallo, Philip; I’m afraid Rose is away.’

‘Away?’ I faltered.

‘Yes, she went away this morning.’

The news came upon me as a fresh disaster for which I was totally unprepared.

‘But … but Martha didn’t …’ I stammered.

‘No, Martha didn’t tell you because I wanted to tell you myself. In fact, I wanted to have a few words with you.’

Jennifer’s calm voice instantly roused me to hostility and that restored the self-control which her news had almost shattered. ‘It’s something new that you should want to speak to me, Jennifer,’ I said bitterly.

She ignored my sarcasm and went on calmly: ‘Perhaps it is. But you can guess the reason.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I have no idea what your reason is, unless perhaps you have a message from Rose.’

‘No, Rose left no message,’ said Jennifer. ‘But it is about Rose that I want to speak to you. You must let her alone, Philip. You mustn’t bother her any more.’

‘Bother her?’ I said. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t bothered her.’

‘Yes, you have. She’s been worried and unhappy lately, and now that she is … now that she has gone away, you must leave her in peace.’

Jennifer’s extraordinary attitude stung me to the quick. ‘Are you talking like this,’ I asked, ‘as a result of things that Rose has said to you?’

Her eyes hardened. ‘Rose has said nothing to me except that your engagement is off. I am speaking on my own responsibility and simply and solely with an eye to Rose’s happiness.’

I felt hatred boil up in me. ‘No, you’re not,’ I said; ‘you’re speaking with an eye to your own happiness. You’ve been against me from the first. You guessed that I loved Rose and made up your mind I shouldn’t get her. And why? Because if I did, it would be inconvenient to you, it would break up your snug little household. And now that you’ve got your way and succeeded in setting her against me, you’re going to pose as the noble, self-sacrificing friend who thinks only of Rose’s happiness. Well, it’s very beautiful, Jennifer, but unfortunately it doesn’t work—anyhow, not on me.’

Jennifer’s face had become colder and harder as I spoke, but her voice did not lose its calmness. ‘If I wanted to pay you back in your own coin, Philip, I might say that you too were thinking only of yourself. You were in love with Rose and wanted to get her, that’s all.’

‘Yes, you could say it,’ I replied, ‘but it wouldn’t be true.’

‘I might have said the same to you, Philip, but you wouldn’t have believed me, and if we do nothing but contradict each other we shan’t get much further.’

‘How much further do you want to get?’

‘I see no hope now of getting any further. What I hoped to do, as I said at the start, was to persuade you not to try to get Rose back. If you really love her and want to do what’s best for her, leave her alone now that she’s free.’

‘I don’t know what you’re driving at, Jennifer. You seem to think that by asking Rose to marry me I have imprisoned her against her will.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m driving at, Philip. When Rose was first engaged to you (that is, after the first night), she seemed thoroughly happy; but lately she has changed completely. You must have noticed it yourself. She’s been worried and depressed and irritable. That’s all I know.’

‘And you blame me?’

‘Yes, I blame you.’

‘And what, if I may ask, am I supposed to have done?’ ‘O, nothing deliberately.’

‘Well, what, accidentally?’

She hesitated and then said: ‘Well, Philip, you’re a bit of a leaner, you know.’

‘A leaner? What do you mean?’

‘What’s the good of my telling you? You won’t believe me. But what I mean is that your kind of loving demands much more than it gives. You want to be loved rather than to love, and that must in the end become a great burden to … well, to whoever you happen to bestow your affections on. I’m not trying to be beastly: I’m simply telling you frankly and shamelessly what I think. I don’t expect you to agree, but if you thought it worth while looking into, you might find it helpful.’

I laughed grimly. ‘Suppose it proved so helpful, Jennifer, that Rose and I became engaged again?’

‘Then you would perhaps believe that I hadn’t been such a swine about you and Rose as you seem to think. But I’ve said enough. You look on what I’ve said as malicious bosh, don’t you?’

I turned to go. ‘The only snag is that, being what you tell me I am, I should have offered yesterday to set Rose free.’

Jennifer raised her thick, black brows in surprise. ‘You did? That was generous of you, Philip.’

‘You took it for granted that she made the first move?’

‘I certainly did. Good for you, Philip.’

Her praise made me still angrier and I repelled it with a sour smile. ‘Doesn’t this detail upset your neat little diagnosis?’ I asked.

That drove her back at once into her habitual hardness. ‘Not a bit,’ she said. ‘The diagnosis is based on observation, not on theory. But it’s a favourable symptom, Philip. I think you may pull through in the end.’

I paused at the door. ‘Where has Rose gone?’

‘Don’t ask me, Philip. Stick to your good resolution.’

Her moral tone irritated, me again. ‘But I do ask you.’

‘Then I shan’t tell you.’

‘You think you have the right …?’

‘I know I have. Rose asked me not to, if you must know.’

She turned away as if to dismiss me. On my way to the front door I saw a letter for Rose lying on the hall table. It had been readdressed and told me what I wanted to know. It was to her parents in the country that she had gone.

I came straight home. My long, desultory walk with all its mental suffering, the desperate visit to Rose, the shock of finding her gone, and lastly the bitter encounter with Jennifer had exhausted me, and I sat here, idle in my chair, smarting still at what Jennifer had said. Why had her words touched me so deeply? Had they roused a sense of guilt in me? No, on the contrary it was their monstrous injustice that had stung me. What right had she to say what she had said? After all, she had seen Rose and me together comparatively seldom, though recently more than in the past. Her notion that I demanded of Rose more than I gave is flagrantly untrue; in fact, my fault lies in exactly the opposite direction. I have given too much, I have given all, suppressed every wish that was not hers, thrown overboard all personal pride, sacrificed my very personality and lived so entirely for her that, now that she is gone, I have nothing left to live for. Is it any wonder that Jennifer’s grotesque perversion of the truth should sting me as it does? Well, I hope that what I told her about herself stings her just as keenly. But I don’t suppose it does. Jennifer is really rather stupid, I think, and certainly not capable of much feeling.

For half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half I sprawled in my chair with my eyes shut. After a while my fury against Jennifer exhausted itself: it ceased to matter what she said or thought. My mind had become empty: I had no capacity left for feeling. Then I opened my eyes and stared at the things about me. Everything I saw seemed changed. It was as if I were looking at these familiar things for the first time. Their old significance was gone: they had become more real, or less real, than before, and I scrutinized them with a detached curiosity. My mind turned idly to Rose and, at the thought of her, at once turned away: it was too tired to face the emotional complications which she represented. Then carefully, tentatively, with that kind of curiosity with which one touches a bruise to try over the pain once more, I approached the thought of her again, let her name into my mind, repeated it again and again until it ceased to have any meaning. Who was this Rose? Was there any such person? Rose! Rose? It was like striking the note of a broken piano which produced no sound, no answering vibration. Don’t think of her, don’t disturb her, in case she wakes and becomes real again. That would be unbearable. Mechanically I took up a book that lay within reach, opened it and turned the pages; and for twenty minutes, perhaps, I read without understanding a single word. Then I threw it aside: I had suddenly realized that I was very hungry.

It is a mistaken notion that severe emotional strain takes away the appetite. On the contrary it is so physically exhausting that at last the body cries out for food and drink.

What I couldn’t face was to go out and expose my quivering nerves to the attacks of the seething crowds of men and things. I got out of my chair and went to the window: three or four cabs were waiting in the square below. I took my hat: and stick and went downstairs. Enclosed in one of them, as if in a narrow, dim box, I should be able to reach my familiar restaurant without too much suffering.

Outside the restaurant I bought a paper. A paper or a book, as most people must have discovered at one time or another, is an effectual barrier against the outside world. The restaurant was nearly empty and, thank God, my favourite corner was unoccupied. I settled myself there, ran a greedy eye over the menu and ordered. I also ordered an anaesthetic, a bottle of Burgundy. Then I plunged into my paper, devouring everything, politics, finance, society gossip, racing news with the same indiscriminate and uncritical interest, like a child who has just learned to read and reads for the sake of reading, or a man who whiles away an hour at the cinema, mildly titillated by the changing scene, however futile. Then, when the food and drink came, I gave myself up to them with a single mind, aware only of the sensual pleasure and the gradual physical restoration. By degrees the wine spread a warm soothing numbness through mind and body. I had become proof against my miseries: it was as if I saw them but no longer felt them. They stood, it seemed, at arm’s length, watching me but no longer able to touch me.

The immunity was such a relief that I determined to make sure of it, and when I left the restaurant I bought a flask of brandy at a pub, drove home and finished it during the next hour. That turned out to be a mistake. I am not sufficiently adept in the ways of drunkenness, and I soon found that so far from fortifying my resistance the brandy destroyed it. I had soon crumbled into a state of maudlin prostration. I crept to my bed, lay down on it as I was, and dissolved into tears.

Next day. I awoke this morning to that horrible experience familiar to people in adversity, the recognition of the cold, relentless presence of affliction. But I was better able, now, to face it. The drink I had taken last night, though it had let me down at the time, had given me what I might otherwise not have had, a night’s sleep. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past seven, three quarters of an hour before my usual time for getting up. But I couldn’t lie in bed: I was filled, now, with an urgent desire to act. I would follow Rose to her home in the country and have it out with her. I was sure that if we talked, talked honestly enough, thoroughly enough, everything would come right. That conviction, I see now, was not based on common sense but on the fact that Rose had become so much a part of me that I could not imagine life without her. That Rose might live, and live more happily, without me was a possibility I couldn’t, and still cannot grasp. The mind cannot believe or even understand a fact that is vehemently denied by the feelings. One believes to be true what one wishes to be true, and I could not help believing still that, if only we could get to the bottom of our misunderstanding, we would escape from it at once and all would be well again. If only I could find the right words, I felt sure I could make her realize that she really loves me still. But if, in spite of that, she held stubbornly to her delusion, I would throw myself on her mercy, tell her that I couldn’t live without her: that at least would convince her.

I jumped out of bed, went into my sitting-room and got out a railway guide. There was a train at ten o’clock.

It was a bright October morning and, as the train ran out of London, even the jerry-built suburban terraces looked beautiful with their shining windows and newly washed pink roofs,, The suburban trees, the elms and poplars, marvellously alive and mobile, were fluttering their thousands of little yellow sequins like birds fluttering their feathers.

As the train emerged into the open country the scene grew more and more magnificent. The land was ablaze with autumn. I sat with The Times unopened on my knee and watched the gorgeous show glide past, and, as I watched, my heart was soothed and refreshed. I sat there without a thought, without a wish, drinking it in. Somewhere, in some remote corner of my mind, I knew I was hurrying towards Rose and towards the encounter on whose outcome hung all my happiness, but for some time I kept that knowledge out of focus and lived in the moment.

I changed at Beresford for the Downchurch line. Across the clean, breezy station, full of sunshine and shadow, I saw the Downchurch train waiting in its usual bay. A fluttering plume of steam jetted from its engine. I recalled sharply how Rose and I had paced those platforms on our way to or from her home. I chose a carriage, got in, shut the door and leaned out of the window, taking a long breath of the sweet, sharp air. ‘When I get back to this station this evening,’ I thought, ‘all will be happily settled.’ But no sooner had the thought occurred than something forced me to return to it and consider it seriously. Was it really so certain? A sudden fear shot through my mind. I ceased to lean from the window and sat down in my place.

And now that for the first time I brought my sense of reality to bear on this desperate expedition, I began to see how futile and how ignominious it was. As the train started I began to look back with disillusioned eyes on the five months of our engagement. I admitted to myself now that after the first blissful month, the happiest month of my life, Rose had begun to try to escape from me and I had begun to cling to her. Yes, I had used all sorts of secret ingenuities to bind her to me; and I knew now—I suppose I had always known but had not dared to recognize it—that the more I clung the more she rebelled. How badly I had treated the poor girl: I had grabbed at her like a greedy child grabbing at something that has taken its fancy. Ah, but hadn’t she started it? Hadn’t she first treated me badly? Yes, she had. Undeniably she had. What had I done that she should go back on me like that? If I had had any self-respect I would, of course, have let her go. But I loved her too deeply by that time to care about self-respect. My only desire was to keep her at all costs. I cringed and grovelled. I meekly swallowed all those rebuffs and snubs and scoldings which were provoked, it seemed, not by anything I had done but by her own bad temper. How much better it would have been if I had snarled back, turned on her and told her to pull herself together and control her temper. But I had no impulse to do so, and without the impulse, without the irrepressible urge of anger one can’t retaliate. Yet it seems that to turn the other cheek is not always the best policy.

The train rattled on towards the coast, but I was so deep in thought that I had forgotten where I was going. I recalled how I had determined to shake off my old nature, my carefulness, diffidence, inertness, and grasp at what I desired. And at the very first attempt I had succeeded. I had charged, as it were, and captured Rose. How was it that after that first success I immediately dropped back into my old self, dropped in fact even lower than before? Useless to try to understand. For the first time I felt ashamed of myself for my utter subjection to Rose. I had grovelled at her feet, and when she kicked me I had grovelled still more abjectly. And now what was I doing? After having received my severest thrashing I was hurrying to her to grovel and ask for another.

That thought woke me to reality. I glanced at the flying country. We were now only two stations from Downchurch. In twenty minutes I should arrive, in another twenty minutes I should reach her home, and then it would no longer be a matter of dreaming and wool-gathering but of cold fact. I imagined her disgust when I turned up, my vain attempts to pour out my wretched rigmarole of explanation, argument, abject supplication, and her refusal to listen to me. What a weary, hopeless business. What fatuity, what ignominy!

The train was slowing down. We were going to stop at Saltdyke, a small marshland village two miles from the sea. The train stopped; and automatically, without any struggle or hesitation, I rose from my seat, opened the door and got out.

I stood on the breezy platform feeling like a man newly arrived in a foreign country. A whistle sounded, the train drew slowly out of the station, and I stood watching it recede and diminish, its heavy plume of smoke sagging over its left shoulder. It seemed to me that it was taking with it the load of shame and misery from which I had escaped. Had I pulled myself together and acted boldly, or was this another example of my inertness and cowardice? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. All I knew was that I had reached a turning-point. As regards our problem, everything was changed henceforward. I had sickened at last of floundering in the emotional swamp, the loving and hating and hoping and fearing, in which I had struggled during all these weeks. As if by accident I had struck solid ground, pulled myself out, and now stood looking about me. The bond that had tied me to Rose had stretched and broken. It was as if, at the moment I rose to get out of the train, our cable had parted and I was no longer in tow. Yes, the train, the fast vanishing train was drawing away from me across the marsh, leaving me to myself. I turned away, left the station and walked out into my new world down the straight road that divided the marsh and joined the station to the village a mile away—the village that was the only feature in the flatness ahead of me which stretched to the low ridge of sand-dunes marking the coastline.

Its trees, mounded above the low red roofs and enclosing its square church tower in cushions of yellowing foliage, rose bright in sunshine, a solitary oasis upon the level marsh. But when I looked to the right and left and behind me, beyond the station, I saw that there were other oases, villages and farms, each sheltered by its grove of poplars and willows. It was an empty world. The cows and sheep stood motionless in the reclaimed meadows: not a movement, not a sound except for the small birds that uttered little sharp cries like the clinking of coins as they dived from tuft to tuft of the low growths that bordered the road. As I neared the village, roof detached itself from roof, tree from tree. A street opened to receive me. A woman crossed from house to house: two cows emerged slowly on to the road, followed by a boy. A wagon full of sacks stood by a storehouse whose crane overhung the road: as I passed it there was a rattle of chains and I looked up and saw, high up in the second story, an open door in which stood a man covered with white dust. The inn lay at the far end of the village, looking across two miles of marsh to the sand-dunes.

I went in. The stone floor of the passage and the bar parlour was scrubbed so clean that I hardly dared to step on it, and the table to which the landlord brought me bread and cheese and a pint of beer was scrubbed to the likeness of old ivory. One or two labourers with pint mugs on the bench beside them sat eating their lunches, cutting their cheese with their clasp knives. They and the landlord regarded me with a curiosity that was friendly and totally undisguised. They asked me where I came from, what I did, why I had come to Saltdyke, and received the information that I painted pictures as if they considered the job as respectable as their own. I found myself wondering why I had ever lived in London, and when I left the inn and started to walk to the sea I told myself that it was a place to which I would certainly return: it had already become necessary to me.

Indeed it was as if not only the inn, the village, but the whole of the little world into which I had dropped an hour ago, as if by accident, had come to me in answer to an inner necessity. Soon the marsh gave way to shingle beds. Once the sea had swept these flats, and, where the sea had been, small wiry plants had rooted themselves in the arid shingle, Stone Crop, Restharrow, Sea Poppies with long seed pods like rats’ tails, and Bugloss holding up on withered stalks flower-heads parched to dry husks by the salty winds of autumn. Here and there a holly-bush, a mere hump of close-packed prickly leaves, leaned away from the prevailing winds, its seaward side stripped and burnt by the brine to a grey hunched shoulder, all its growth streaming obliquely to leeward like dark green flame. Each sign of life showed life at its hardiest, its starkest, its most strenuous. The road died into the shingle before it reached the sand-dunes and I plunged through deep beds of pebbles, that rattled and shifted under my feet, into the deeper and looser sand of the dunes. I staggered up their sliding slopes. The sharp rushes that crowned their crests, like a growth of coarse hair, stabbed through my stockings, and soon I had gone sliding and plunging down to the narrow beach where the bright blue-grey sea was climbing towards high tide.

Under the shelter of the dunes it was as warm as summer and I lay full-length on the warm sand, staring up into blue sky. After a while I sat up. The waves came hurrying peacefully to shore, yawned up with an infinite leisure and burst with a soft crash to a ridge of seething snow that glided, wasting as it glided, up the glassy sand. To my right a wooden groyne ran out into the sea. The incoming waves boiled about its almost submerged end and, nosing along it, struck each of the great baulks that supported it and burst to a shower of crystals in the sun. The sunshine and the dancing water tempted me to bathe, though the bathing season was long since over. In the world I had left this morning only fanatics bathed in October. But it seemed to me, and the idea was something more than a frivolous fancy, that to bathe now would be to initiate myself into this newly discovered world.

I stood up and began to undress. After all, if when I had undressed it felt too cold, I could dress again. There was no one to see me, no one to laugh at my cowardice. But even when I had pulled off my shirt and stood stark naked, the air was not cold. Its touch was soft and fresh on my skin. I ran to the groyne, climbed on to it and began to walk, like a tight-rope walker, along its narrow edge, and when I had reached the end I climbed on to the great flat-topped baulk and stood looking down into the heaving water. The thought of the plunge sent a shiver through me, so I pulled myself together and dived at once.

Good God, how cold it was! It was as if a gigantic hand had caught me a stinging slap on the chest and belly and knocked all the breath out of my body. It was like jumping into a bed of stinging-nettles, a cauldron of boiling soda-water. I swam like fury for the shore, but before I was in my depth a desperate courage came to me and I turned and swam parallel with the beach, striking out for all I was worth. When I had no breath left I landed, landed into a warm summery air, and ran with leaden limbs along the beach to my clothes. But I was far too wet to dress, so I paused to strip the water off my body and legs and then ran to the groyne and back again to where I had landed, till the heavy numbness thawed out of my legs and arms. When I was almost dry I dressed and set off for a brisk walk along the sands. I felt as if I had put on clothes for the first time: I was aware of my tingling body inside the clothes as a thing apart from them. The dip into that icy water had been not only an initiation and a baptism; it had washed me clean of the past. I had become my own master: I could live without Rose.

But what depths of sadness that thought held. That it should be possible for me to go on my way without her, without Rose who had meant the whole of life to me! It stripped life of all its tenderness and beauty, leaving only the grim, indestructible skeleton. I thrust the thought behind me, closed my ears to her name, that single syllable whose sound raised echoes and vibrations in every nerve of my being. No, I must not think of Rose, though it seemed now that, even if I did, the thought of her could no longer drag me back into my old, wretched self. For that self had burnt itself out: it had exhausted all my capacity for loving and suffering and had died for lack of fuel. I had no longer either the desire or the power to feel deeply. And what a relief it was to be done with emotionalism. For that was what it had been: not healthy sensibility, but a morbid disease of the emotions. Yes, I was sick of it all; sick of my old self and sick of Rose. Was this, then, the result of love at first sight which old Etherton had warned me against? Was it inevitable that the ecstatic moment when I saw Rose, that lovely, unforgettable vision, in the doorway of the Ethertons’ drawing-room, should be the prelude to this utter emptiness? A sudden sigh caught my throat and lifted my chest, but it was a sigh not of despair but of resignation, a sigh for something ended. I had come to an end, but also to a new beginning. This clean, bare, briny world, the serenely heaving sea, the expanse of yellow sand stretching miles ahead, the bright, sparkling autumnal air were gradually filling my emptiness with a broad, quiet satisfaction. The tide was receding. Already a wide glassy ribbon of wet sand lay scrolled along the coast. I looked at my watch. I must be getting back to Saltdyke to catch the train.

For the first time since my arrival I was faced by the fact that I had to return to London. I had forgotten all about London. It seemed that I had left it years ago and the thought of returning to it filled me with horror. It seemed to me now a cruel, hostile town: to return to it would be exile, for every tie with London was snapped. This place, not London, was my home now; and as I made for the village I determined I would call at the inn and enquire if they could put me up. More and more my heart became set on the inn. I would return to London to-night, pack up my clothes and painting materials, shut up the flat and return here to-morrow. I was so anxious to be certain that this plan could be realized that I began to hurry furiously and, once I was on the solid road, I ran till I was within half a mile of the village.

The landlord was surprised at my request. They didn’t take visitors, he said; they had no rooms for them. I told him that if only he could make room for me I would stay for at least two months, and that seemed to appeal to him. He went to consult his wife and, as a result, they showed me a little bedroom which they used as a spare room for their own friends. It was too small to work in. Hadn’t they an empty attic or some place I could use as a studio? They glanced at each other. Well, there was the tea-room, a large room where they provided teas for people who came for the day in the summer. I could have that, of course. It wouldn’t be very comfortable, but I could always have a fire. There was a big fireplace. It was an upstairs room: one window looked across the village, the other over the marsh to the sea.

The moment I was shown into it I knew it was the room I had been hoping for. At the first glance I had taken possession of it and it of me. My one thought now was to go to London and get back as quickly as possible, and I started for the station, telling my hosts that I would return to-morrow afternoon.

Two months later. How little time has to do with the periods of one’s life. I knew Rose for six months, but into those six months is packed the significance of years. And these three months I have spent in this inn—these three austere, fruitful, patient months—have been a lifetime in themselves. The moment I arrived here the whole organization of my life was changed. When I was in London the pivot of my existence was Rose. I felt myself complete only when I was with her; and so my well-being hung upon her movements, was distracted by hopes and fears, anxieties and schemes. After the burst of energy produced by our first happy weeks, my work dropped into the background and became a thing of fits and starts. Before the end I had almost ceased to be able to work at all. My days were broken into small fragments, meetings and partings, comings and goings, the endless and desolating variety of a life clogged and dislocated, thrown out of gear. But as soon as I came here, all distraction and all variety vanished. My days dropped into the blessed monotony that governs all existence in these remote places where one day follows another with no more variety than that provided by the weather and the seasons. What an unspeakable relief it was to be freed from the weary responsibility of planning my days. For in this simple, inexorably appointed order of life I was free to turn all my energies to work, and work became the passionate centre of my existence. For as soon as I had yielded my outer life to this benign, monotonous routine, my inner life broke out into a marvellous activity. I have never before worked with such gusto. After meals or the walks I took over the marsh or along the coast, I hurried, impatient and excited, to the tea-room which is my studio. As I opened the door and saw again the room which has become so absolutely my own and my unfinished picture on the easel, I seemed to be returning to a dearly-loved friend, to an unchangeable Rose who was waiting for me with open arms.

I remember one day in particular when, having shut the door, I stood considering the picture as if it were some miraculous growth like a rare, half-opened flower, a thing with a life of its own, more beautiful than anything I myself could create. The problems and difficulties that had faced me at first had solved themselves, all but a lack of coherence in the top corner on the right, and, as I stood looking at it, I realized what was needed. Yes, I had managed to express the idea I had set out to express, that particular relation of intersecting planes and transparent colours which had seemed to me so exciting and so satisfying. The idea had been suggested by something seen in my bedroom looking-glass—a section of wall, wardrobe and half-open window. I took up my brush and palette and soon I was lost in my work. The picture and I became a single purpose, a process as natural and inevitable as the slow unfolding of a flower.

But it was not only my work and the undisturbed routine that kept me contented. It was also the pleasant company in which I lived. After the first fortnight I had ceased to be a stranger and had become part of the life of the inn. I no longer had my meals alone in my studio, but in the kitchen with the landlord and his wife; and in the evenings I sat in the tap-room with the small company that frequented it. One or two of them used to enquire about my pictures and would sometimes ask to see them. They had no preconceived ideas of what a picture ought or ought not to be. Ancient or modern meant nothing to them, and the qualities in my work that alarmed and shocked Mrs. Etherton and others of my friends, they accepted without surprise or prejudice. Before long I was as happy and at home among them as ever I had been with my friends at the Café Royal or at the Ethertons’.

How far away in time and space these London friends had become. They came and went in my mind like the people of a dream, and London too had faded to an unhappy dream-memory. After my first fortnight at Saltdyke the weather broke. Wind and rain drove in from the sea and swept the marsh. I was roused in the night by the rattling of my window and the spray of rain on my face. I leapt from bed to shut the window and then lay listening to the gusts of rain spattering the panes like a devil’s typewriter, and the wind bludgeoning the walls and roof till it seemed that the inn rocked like a ship at sea. Once the wind swept the sea clean over the sand-dunes and the marsh was bright for a week with standing lakes of salt water. But storms and floods did nothing to spoil the place for me: they merely brought to it that fiercer and more austere beauty which I had divined under its autumnal aspect. Now the crouching hollies and all the wiry little plants that held to the shingle were at grips with the briny storms over which in the end they would prevail.

It was nearing Christmas when I returned to London for a single night to take some finished pictures to my dealer and replenish my stock of materials. I knew that I was strong enough now to bear the pain that London with all its associations with Rose would cause me. For I was no longer defenceless: I had rebuilt my life into something wiser and sadder, and wisdom and sadness are powerful protectors. The journey and the visit would be a trial of strength from which, I knew, I should emerge intact.

The ghost of Rose was waiting for me, sure enough, in Beresford station, but there its power was slight, for later memories—the memories of my arrival there on the fateful morning and my two transits when I returned to London in the evening and again to Saltdyke next day—eclipsed it. It was only when I reached Victoria that her presence became potent. At that point I stepped into a dream-world. London was no longer real. I stared at streets, houses, shops, expecting them to grow real to my stare, but they eluded me, refused to develop into the solid reality I had once known. They were ghosts, fragments of a dream haunted by the ghost of Rose. At any moment they might tremble, grow blurred, and fade into the reality of Saltdyke; and I walked among them in a trance, possessed by a kind of numbness, an apathy across which shimmered a vague emotional agitation like the faint purl of a breeze on still water. Yes, I kept telling myself, my depths were safe: this ebb and flow of sensibility troubled only the surface. Unless I were to meet Rose! That would be terrible. The very thought frightened me. If I caught sight of her, I decided, I would turn away at once and shut out the vision. She had become for me so entirely a thing of the past that it was almost unbelievable that she was here, in this town, moving about in her usual orbit; even now at this moment, perhaps, opening the door of the house in Woburn Square and pausing for a moment before descending the steps.

I checked myself. I must not picture such things in case I should call her out of her ghostliness into reality. It was after five when I began to make my way towards my flat. The quickest way would have taken me through Russell Square within sight of her flat, so I avoided it, both for fear of meeting her and to keep clear of the too familiar scenes. I had not had much lunch and, seeing an A.B.C. shop a few yards ahead of me, I went in for a cup of tea.

Most of the tables were unoccupied. As I paused before choosing one, someone touched my arm. I turned and found myself standing beside Jennifer. She was sitting at a table alone.

‘Won’t you sit here, Philip?’ she said.

My first impulse was to refuse, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that and I stood hesitating.

‘Do!’ she said, and as I sat down she asked ‘How are you, Philip?’

‘Is this a professional enquiry after a broken heart?’ I asked. But my sourness did not provoke her to retaliation this time.

‘No,’ she said; ‘it’s pure unprofessional sympathy. How strange that we should meet here. I came in by the merest chance because I wanted a cup of tea. Martha’s away on holiday and I didn’t want the trouble of making it myself at home. You know, Philip, you’ve never been quite just to me. I nearly wrote to you after our last talk…. You remember our last talk?’

I nodded.

‘… to tell you that what you said of me was quite untrue. You said, you know, that I had been against you from the first and that I had set Rose against you. That wasn’t true, Philip. From first to last I never made the slightest attempt to interfere. I didn’t even want to. Why should I? As I told you, I was anxious about Rose’s happiness at first, but as soon as I saw all was well, I was ready and anxious to be friendly. You were the unfriendly one, not I. You didn’t like me, did you?’

‘Only because I thought you didn’t like me.’

‘Well, I hope you’ll try to believe what I’ve said.’

‘I do believe it,’ I said; ‘and I hope you’ll forget my beastly remarks. If I hadn’t been in such a stew I should never have spoken as I did.’

We were silent. I longed to ask after Rose but I couldn’t bear to mention her name. Even this meeting with Jennifer had shaken me so severely that I had to keep a firm hold on my muscles to prevent myself trembling. Perhaps Jennifer realized what I was feeling, for a moment later she asked:

‘How are things going?’

‘O, all right,’ I said.

‘You’re happy, Philip?’

‘I’ve … I’ve recovered, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I’m glad. She would be glad to know that. May I tell her?’

I hesitated. The thought that Rose should be told merely that bare fact was for a moment unbearable. A violent, obscure rebellion rose in me. That nest of blind snakes that Saltdyke had lulled to sleep, lifted their heads and writhed and hissed in my heart. But Jennifer was waiting for me to answer, and I mastered myself sufficiently to say: ‘Yes, tell her.’

‘Could I tell her, Philip,’ Jennifer went on with gentle persuasiveness, ‘… could I say that you have come to feel that it was better for you to part? It would be a consolation to her to know that.’

I forced myself to ignore the final protest of my vanity, but I could not speak. I nodded my head and got up to go. Jennifer held out her hand. I took it.

‘Remember, I’m your friend,’ she said.

I had told no one of my visit to London except Etherton. He had replied with an invitation to dine at his club, and I hurried to my flat now, determined not to leave it till it was time to join him. My one desire now was to get back to Saltdyke. To have come so near to Rose had been a severe trial of my strength: but I had learned from it that, though I was still vulnerable, I was at bottom my own master. The assurance of that enabled me to climb the stairs to my rooms, unlock my door and go in with a prepared callousness that protected me against all the assaults of that too familiar place. My feelings had grown calm and cold, tinged only with a passive and sober bitterness like the flavour of iron in water.

My eyes fell on the piano I had bought for Rose. I opened the top. The newness of the inside surprised me: it still smelt of the factory. Yet surely years of happiness and pain had passed since the day I bought it. ‘I may as well try to sell it,’ I thought coldly as I shut the lid and turned away.

Etherton received me with his usual friendliness. ‘Would it be tactful to remark on how well you look?’ he asked.

‘I am well,’ I said: ‘there’s no denying it, though it’s flying in the face of romantic convention,’

‘It’s the realists who come off best on these occasions, Philip, and you’re a realist at heart, I believe. But I’m glad you’ve recovered. These experiences are extremely painful.’

‘Well, you warned me, and you have every right now to tell me you told me so.’

‘But you notice I have refrained. After all, it was useless information. One can’t learn a poem by being given a résumé in prose of its contents.’

‘A poem? In the present case it was a poem that went to pieces rather badly at the end.’

‘Not a bit of it, my dear boy. At present you’re hardly in a position to appreciate the closing verses. But you’ll be surprised how it will improve later on. When one is able, at last, to contemplate one’s tragedies with detachment, they become, you’ll find, extraordinarily fascinating. One returns to them, as one does to Hamlet, again and again, studying them act by act and finding, at each new reading, new revelations.’

‘Revelations, in my case, that I’d rather not receive; revelations of my own absurdity.’

‘What does that matter? They’re all the more valuable.’

‘If you knew how much time I’ve wasted during the last few years in poking and prying into my mental and emotional machinery, you’d tell me, I’m sure, that it was time I turned my attention to other things.’

‘Not I. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom: it is the only way of approaching the knowledge of human nature. But your poking and prying must be relentless: there must be no favouritism, no sparing your vanities, no winking at your absurdities. That kind of inspection is mere morbid egotism. You can’t know yourself till you have seen through yourself. O I assure you, Philip, you’ll find your tragedy a gold-mine when you get to work on it. Meanwhile, take a holiday.’

‘O, I’m taking a holiday all right,’ I said. ‘I’m working like hell.’

‘At your paintings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, then you’re getting at the gold already.’

Three months later. It is now the middle of March and I have been to London again. I found it no longer formidable. My old affection for it had returned. At the thought of the friends I had there, of the pictures, concerts, theatres, old interests and excitements began to stir in me. I actually regretted that I was going back to Saltdyke next day and I ended by postponing my return for nearly a week. It was delightful to wake up in my flat once more and feel that London was swarming round me, waiting for me. I revisited my old haunts, feeling that I had returned home after travels that had made home a new and absorbing experience. In the Cafe Royal I found my old friends. They had met there, apparently, during all the huge lapse of time since I had left them. The revolution which had turned my world upside down had not altered their routine by a hair’s breadth. And what Etherton had foretold about my tragedy was already, it seemed, beginning to come true. It was beginning to take on the quality of a poem: I no longer fought shy of it. When memories of Rose waylaid me as I passed through our old haunts, I did not repel them, for now they shed on my daily existence and the London in which I moved a subtle and mysterious beauty as of those lilac-coloured evenings of late autumn in which London takes on the loveliness of a city of dreams.

When spring was beginning to show on the marshland I left Saltdyke and returned permanently to Brunswick Square.

MERIEL

Well, that’s over, anyhow. and I don’t repent; no, not for a minute. It had to be, as I told Geordie.

‘If it has to be, Meriel, you’d better get on with it,’ he said. ‘You’d better go to London and get it out of your system.’

Get it out of my system! That shows how little he understands me. He can’t understand that I should have ideals and ambitions of my own. He’s so wrapped up in his wretched business that he has no interest in other things. Art means nothing to him. From first to last he ridiculed the theatricals. Whenever I talked to him about my part or got him to act as prompter when I tried it over in the drawing-room, his face wore a tolerant, sarcastic smile that was simply maddening. He refused to take it seriously. One evening, for instance, I was trying over different ways of doing that entry in the third act when I have to come suddenly into the Desmonds’ drawing-room and say: ‘The will has been found, Arthur.’ It is the most dramatic moment in the play, and the actress— that was me, of course—has to express a terrific excitement. First I tried rushing on with my hair all untidy and almost shouting the phrase. Then I tried coming in slowly with a sort of pent-up intensity and saying the words in a hissing whisper. I showed Geordie the two methods and asked him which he thought most effective. At first he didn’t reply but just looked at me as if I were a child trying to get him to play some silly game. Then he said:

‘Why not try a couple of cartwheels, Meriel?’

I was so exasperated that I burst into tears, and then of course he was sorry. That was the end of it. I didn’t bother him any more. After all, Mr. Seaton-McPherson, our producer, had said I had the makings of a fine actress, and when the day came for our performance in St. George’s Parochial Hall I really had an immense success. The applause was quite deafening. I had to appear before the curtain—with the others, of course—again and again. Next day there was a notice in our local paper. It said: ‘Mrs. Filmer played the part for all it is worth.’

But even that didn’t convince Geordie. ‘Ah, but what is it worth? That’s the point, Meriel,’ he said with his dry, provoking smile.

I had always felt that acting was my true vocation and after the performance I consulted Mr. Seaton-McPherson about taking it up professionally. I asked him if I couldn’t go to London and get a part there. He said it was very uphill work; but at last, when he saw that I was determined, he said I might get a walking-on part, without pay, and I made him promise to give me letters to one or two London producers. I didn’t mention it to Geordie. What would have been the good? Besides, I hadn’t really come to any decision. Of course I knew it would make me miserable to leave Geordie. We are really devoted to each other, though on the whole we get on very badly. What he would do if I left him I simply couldn’t imagine, but whenever I had threatened to do so he just laughed. He didn’t believe I would really go. But why, I asked myself, should I go on sacrificing my career for someone who didn’t appreciate me?

Well, no doubt he appreciates me now, poor Geordie, now that it’s too late. He didn’t believe, till the last minute, that I was really going. ‘Geordie,’ I said on our last evening, ‘it has dawned upon me that for the last eight years I’ve been living here with a strange man.’ That comes out of Ibsen’s Doll’s House, you know. But even that Geordie wouldn’t take seriously. He smiled his sarcastic smile.

‘My dear Meriel,’ he said, ‘I have known for some years that I was married to a very strange woman.’

Of course it was an awful wrench, but as soon as I got started I knew how right I had been. It was wonderful to feel free, to be setting out, as it were, to seek my fortune. As good luck would have it my friend Hilda Chepstow was going abroad for a year or more, so I took her flat in Powis Square. I was armed with Mr. Seaton-McPherson’s letters of introduction.

How excited I felt as I got into the train. I had the feeling that all sorts of thrilling adventures were going to happen to me. ‘Even before I get to Victoria,’ I thought to myself, ‘something thrilling is going to happen.’ I felt so certain of it that, looking back on it now, I half believe I must have had second sight, that I really did know beforehand that Philip Marling—charming name!—was going to get into my carriage when the train stopped at Beresford. Anyhow, the moment I saw him I knew that something new and thrilling had come into my life. It was his eyes that told me so, those deep, quiet, brown eyes whose gaze seems to be at the same time absent-minded and terribly penetrating. At the very first glance my heart began to beat furiously; I almost felt I was going to faint and I turned away and looked through the window at the people on the opposite platform.

But isn’t it extraordinary to be so deeply affected at a first glance? It must mean something, something almost supernatural. I knew, without looking, that he had chosen the corner at the other end of the carriage, facing me but it wasn’t till long after we had left Beresford that 1 had the courage to bring my eyes back into the train. Even then I daren’t look at him, but I knew he was sitting quite still, so still that I was sure he must be reading, and when at last I ventured a quick glance at him I saw he was deep in a book. Till that moment I hadn’t noticed, though I had divined, how handsome he was; but now I allowed myself to take a good look at him. He had taken off his hat. His thick, wavy hair and his eyebrows were almost black; his face very brown, his mouth large, sensitive and sad. The strong brown hand with which he held his book set my heart beating again. He was like some beautiful, sad animal. I wondered if he was an actor. I am sure he too had been thrilled at our meeting: that was why he had buried himself in his book, for fear I should be offended by his too obvious interest. I turned away: it was too agitating to look at him for long. But though I pretended to be watching the view that slid past the window, I was really watching his faint, shadowy reflection that dawned and faded on the glass between me and the view. But he never so much as moved his head. All he did was now and then to flick over a page of his book. Every time he did so my heart jumped into my mouth. I began to feel dreadfully restless and at last I got up to open the window. But I couldn’t manage it.

Then with a leap of the heart I heard him move. He stood up. He was coming. ‘I’ll do it for you,’ he said.

My voice sounded ridiculously weak when I thanked him.

‘You’d like it wide open?’

‘Yes, wide, please,’ I said, ‘if you won’t mind the draught.’

‘O I like draughts. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘In fact I sometimes smoke myself.’

He took out a cigarette case and opened it. ‘May I offer you one?’

I never smoke in the train; in fact I don’t really approve of women smoking in trains, but with him standing there, looking down at me and offering me his cigarette case, I simply couldn’t refuse and I took a cigarette. He turned, as if he were going back to his place, then, remembering that he hadn’t lighted the cigarette for me, he hesitated, sat down opposite me and got out a box of matches. That was how we got into conversation, and soon we were quite on friendly terms.

The draught from the open window blew his hair about, giving him a wild, romantic look, like Shelley or perhaps Byron.

‘Are you by any chance an actor?’ I asked him.

The corners of his mouth turned up into an adorable smile. ‘Not I,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

I nodded.

He seemed surprised. ‘In London?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m going on to the London stage. In fact that’s why I’m on my way to London now. I have introductions from Mr. Seaton-McPherson. I expect you’ve heard of him. The well-known producer. When I get a part, will you come to the play and see me?’

He smiled again. ‘Most certainly I will, if you let me know.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘you must give me your address.’

He searched in his pocket, brought out some letters and gave me the envelope of one of them. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

I was disappointed that he hadn’t written it for me himself. Then I should have had a bit of his own hand-writing. It would have been a little keepsake. But even the strange envelope was better than nothing: it had been in his pocket.

A week later. Mr. Seaton-McPherson was right. Acting is very uphill work. I’ve been here a week now and have found no opening. Fortunately I have my four hundred a year or it might have been very inconvenient. Neither of the producers to whom Mr. Seaton-McPherson gave me introductions could offer me even the smallest part, although I told them I was ready to work for nothing for the sake of the experience. It is very disheartening, especially as I had relied on being in a play soon so as to be able to write to Philip Marling and send him a ticket.

But it was fated, as I felt sure it must be, that we should meet again, and this is how it happened. I was walking down Bond Street yesterday when I caught sight of his name on a poster. The poster was fastened to a board on which was painted in gold letters The something or other Gallery, I’ve forgotten what. The poster was headed: Exhibition of Modern English Paintings: under that came a list of names and the third was his. It was a wonder I saw it. But then, how could I have missed it, that name which has been in my mind so much ever since we met in the train? So he was an artist. I might have known. Of course I went straight into the gallery.

All the pictures were very peculiar. I wonder if these modern artists paint things wrong on purpose. There were some by Paul Nash, and three by John Armstrong. I made a note of the names so as to ask Philip Marling about them. But his, of course, were the first I looked at.They too seemed very strange at first. It was only after looking at them for some time that I saw how wonderful they really were. They were certainly much better than the others. By the time I had got back to my flat I was so thrilled about them that I determined to go and see them again several times, and I sat down at once and wrote to tell him how marvellous I thought they were.

It was wonderful to be writing to him: it was almost like talking to him again. My hand trembled so much that my writing was entirely different from what it generally is.

And now I have received this perfectly adorable reply, asking me to go to tea with him on Thursday. ‘I have several pictures here,’ he writes, ‘painted since the ones you saw at the show. I shall be delighted to show them to you if you would care to see them.’

But how ever am I going to wait till Thursday? I keep reading his letter over. What fascinating writing.

PHILIP

What a funny little creature she is, more like an eager, excitable child than a grown-up married woman. Actually, I suspect, she is several years older than me; yet beside her I feel middle-aged, a kind of amused and beneficent uncle. I never met such a curious mixture of primness and audacity, silliness and natural intelligence, romanticism and common sense. You never know where you have her, and that makes her even more amusing and attractive. She’s attractive to look at, too, with her dark hair, her earnest hazel eyes, the austere little aquiline nose and her healthy, weather-beaten colour. Her moods and feelings are as patent as sunshine and shadow flying over a field. She gives one the impression that she has just discovered life and is tremendously thrilled by it. What can have put it into her head to take up acting? She could never, I’m sure, be the slightest good at it, except in the one part that is herself; for from that one part she is obviously incapable of detaching herself. Besides, as far as I can gather, she has had no training. The one case of theatricals in the Parochial Hall, produced by the mysterious Mr. Seaton-McPherson, seems to be the beginning and ending of her dramatic experience.

‘Do tell me, Mr. Marling,’ she said when she came to see me to-day, ‘how one gets on to the London stage. It’s so difficult, it seems, to get in touch with the right people.’

Of course I couldn’t help her. I know nothing whatever about the stage except from the point of view of the spectator. But I suggested that one might improve one’s style by going to the play and carefully watching the actors.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s a splendid idea. Will you come with me sometimes?’

When she arrived this afternoon she was all breathless and confused and could hardly speak. I made her sit down and rest, saying that many people found the stairs to this top story rather severe.

‘Yes, yes, it must be the stairs,’ she said. And yet, if the stairs can affect her to that extent she must have rather a weak heart, poor little creature. But she had soon recovered and was chattering as she did when we met in the train and examining my room with delighted curiosity. She enquired about Paul Nash and John Armstrong whose work she had seen at the picture show, and asked me if they painted like that on purpose. I didn’t understand what she was driving at till she went on to explain that their pictures were ‘so unlike things in real life’.

‘And so are yours, of course,’ she added.

I apologized and pleaded that I hadn’t yet discovered what real life was. At that she looked at me very seriously.

‘That’s true,’ she said; ‘that’s very true. Neither have I.’ And as she said that, she seemed to me suddenly very pathetic, very defenceless. But in a moment her vivacity had returned. ‘But of course yours are much better than theirs. Yours are wonderful’; and when I brought out some of the pictures I had painted at Saltdyke, she stood before each in turn, gazing at it, entranced and mystified it seemed, and repeating with bated breath: ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’

She glanced several times at the piano and at last asked me if I played. ‘O but I think you do,’ she replied archly when I told her I didn’t; ‘otherwise why should you have a piano?’

‘I have friends who do.’

She gazed abstractedly in front of her. ‘I suppose you have lots and lots of friends.’

‘Not lots and lots, but a few.’

‘And they play on it?’

‘One or two of them.’ It wasn’t true. Nobody had played on it but Rose. That was why I hadn’t brought myself to sell it yet, I was going to ask Mrs. Filmer if she played, when Rose’s ghost stopped my mouth, urged me not to let another touch profane the keys. In vain, for Mrs. Filmer had opened the lid.

‘May I try it?’ she said.

I went over and raised the top. ‘Please do,’ I said, and, as I said it, it seemed that another of the threads that bound me to Rose snapped.

Mrs. Filmer played one or two of Chopin’s Preludes. Chopin would have been surprised to hear what she made of them, for she played with the earnest perseverance of a promising child.

‘Do you like Chopin?’ I said.

‘Yes, especially the sad ones,’ she replied. ‘And, in any case the cheerful ones are far too difficult.’

When she left she made me promise to go to tea at her flat next Wednesday.

Six days later. When I arrived at her flat in Powis Square this afternoon I thought at first, when I saw the spread of cakes and biscuits and bread and butter, and the vases of red roses on the table and mantelpiece, and Meriel herself (she has asked me to call her Meriel) rigged out in green silk, that it was to be a tea-party. Then I noticed that there were only two cups on the tray. After all, then, we were to be alone. I felt a little embarrassed by all this preparation. Meriel herself seemed a little self-conscious at first, but not for long. Soon she was chattering gaily and making tea with a kettle that was boiling on a gasring on the hearth.

‘You see, I do for myself here,’ she explained, ‘except when Mrs. Tappitt comes in the middle of the morning to wash up and do a little cleaning. I hope you’re feeling hungry.’

I generally eat nothing at tea, but it would have been cruel not to show appreciation of that royal spread and I asserted that I was ravenous and proceeded to gorge myself. I admired the roses and asked her if they came from her home in the country.

‘O no,’ she said, ‘I bought them this morning. I wish you would make a picture of them.’

I shook my head. ‘Flowers aren’t in my line.’

‘You don’t like them?’ her voice was almost tragic.

‘Rather. Especially roses, and especially red ones. I only mean as a subject for painting.’

‘What a good thing I chose red ones,’ she said seriously, as though a mistake might have been fatal. Then, after a moment’s thought, she asked: ‘Do you know that poem called “A White Rose”?’

‘No. How does it go?’

‘It begins

The red rose whispers of passion,

And the white rose breathes of love.’

‘That sounds rather like Ella Wheeler Wilcox,’ I said.

For a moment she looked abashed, so that I felt remorseful, but next minute she laughed. ‘What a thing to say when a lady quotes poetry to you.’

‘But isn’t it?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then who is it by?’

‘It’s by … er … I don’t know who it’s by, but it’s in the Oxford Book of Verse.’

I must have looked incredulous, because she jumped from her chair. ‘You don’t believe me? Very well, I’ll prove it to you.’

She went to a book-shelf, got a book and found the place. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘You see, I was quite right.’

I read the poem. It was by John Boyle O’Reilly. Who the devil was he? ‘I wonder how it sneaked into the Oxford Book,’ I said.

‘You don’t think it good?’

‘Not a bit. In fact I think it very bad, don’t you? It seems to me to be trying, and failing, to say something that isn’t worth saying.’

‘You’re too severe,’ she said. ‘You take a sledge-hammer to crack a … well, a hazel nut.’

‘A nut which turns out to have no kernel. Listen, and I’ll tell you exactly, line by line, what’s wrong with it. “The red rose whispers …”’

She snatched the book from me, laughing a little nervously. ‘No, no, no,’ she cried, ‘I won’t have it. You shan’t tear the poor thing to pieces’; and she put the book back on the shelf.

When I was leaving her she went to the table. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I want you to take these roses.’

‘Take them?’

‘Yes, take them to your flat.’ With both hands she lifted them dripping from the bowl. ‘I’ll wrap some paper round the stems.’

‘No, really no. You’re awfully kind, but I couldn’t.’

She turned dismayed eyes upon me. ‘Why not?’

‘They suit you and your room so well.’

‘Do,’ she said. ‘Please do.’

‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it. Besides,’ I said, searching for some excuse, ‘I should look like a bridesmaid, carrying them home.’

‘Ah,’ she said, offended, ‘that’s why you won’t have them.’

‘No,’ I replied quite truthfully, ‘that’s not why. I refuse them, with many thanks for such a beautiful present, because I would much rather they stayed with you.’

She looked at me suspiciously. ‘Then have one, at least,’ she said. ‘Here! Here’s a bud.’ Her hands were trembling. ‘Won’t you let me …? Won’t you wear it?’

I put it in my buttonhole and thanked her.

‘If you put it in water when you get home,’ she called after me, ‘perhaps it will come out.’

But when I got home, after strap-hanging in a crowded tube, there was nothing left in my buttonhole but a headless stalk. Now I see her standing with the wet roses in her hands and I feel a twinge of remorse for having refused them.

Next day. By this evening’s post I received the following note scrawled in pencil in Meriel’s schoolgirl hand. No date, no signature, only her address carefully printed in capitals at the top.

‘The red roses have all fallen, not a petal left on the stems. But is it to be wondered at, when a certain person had refused to accept them yesterday? So now they neither breathe nor whisper nor do any of the silly things mentioned in that extremely bad poem, and the donor, the would-be donor, whose gift was refused, is left in solitude.’

Good God, what an exhibition of cheap symbolism and romantic nonsense! Could anything be sillier? And the absurd mock-modesty of those references to the ‘certain person’ and the ‘would-be donor’ make it worse. I feel ashamed for her. What an astonishing little baggage she is. And to think that those blessed roses were on the table not as a decoration but so that they should ‘whisper of passion,’ and that dreadful poem was not quoted on the spur of the moment but dragged in deliberately with laborious childish diplomacy. W’hat ridiculous antics, to be sure.

And yet, if I am to be quite honest with myself, I must admit that I am titillated by the way she flings herself at my head. Mixed with my shame and disgust there is a secret excitement and gratification. How contemptible! For it’s nothing but gratified vanity, of course. I’m not in the least in love with her. How could I be? She’s attractive and disarming and really, in the end, a nice little creature; but compared with Rose she’s a mere performing doll.

But what the devil am I to do about her absurd letter? Wouldn’t it be better to ignore it altogether? She expects me, I suppose, to reply in similar style, tell her how the certain person reacts to the would-be donor’s audacious advances, to mop and mow in the high Early-Victorian manner. Lord! I could as soon turn somersaults down Piccadilly. And what, after all, is she after? Are we merely to have an endless romantic flirtation, or does she flatly propose to become my mistress? Impossible! If that’s what she means I’ll never trust Jane Austen again.

And yet, if it were, wouldn’t it be rather fun?

Next day. When I came in after lunch to-day I found a parcel waiting for me, a loosely-wrapped paper funnel, obviously containing flowers. It turned out to be a great bunch of pink roses. Tied to the wire that bound them was a note.

‘I couldn’t get red ones anywhere, so these will have to do. Please come to tea as soon as you can bear to.’

She must have brought them herself. In the large green glass vase on my mantelpiece they look superb and fill the room with their scent. And yet, ungrateful beast that I am, I can feel nothing more than a slight annoyance. After all, the woman, not the man, is the proper recipient of bouquets. To find oneself the serenaded instead of the serenader makes one feel rather an ass. On the other hand there’s nothing humiliating about a pressing invitation to tea. That, after all, is not romance but plain realism. I’ll ring her up and tell her I’ll go to-morrow. Why not?

Next evening. I ought, I suppose, to have taken her some flowers, in retaliation, when I went to tea with her to-day. But I didn’t. I should only have provoked her to retaliate in turn and we should soon have found ourselves involved in a battle of flowers, like the race of armaments, which would have had elements of the ridiculous.

I had thought she might be embarrassed, when I arrived, by the consciousness of her absurd letter. Not a bit of it. She received me with shameless enthusiasm.

‘How nice of you to come. Sit down. You see, your chair’s waiting for you.’

‘Is this my chair?’

‘Yes. No one else is allowed to sit in it now.’

‘But how do you stop them?’

She hesitated and then her eyes twinkled. ‘I tell them the springs are broken.’

‘And are they?’

‘Certainly not.’

During tea I found her regarding me with an earnest, inquisitorial gaze. “Tell me,’ she said at last, ‘why you said that poem about the red rose and white rose was bad.’

‘If you’ll give me the book,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you chapter and verse. Last time, you know, you wouldn’t let me.’

‘O I know. And I don’t want you to do that even now. What I mean is, what was your real reason for saying it was bad.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand. Haven’t I given my reason? I said it was bad because it is bad.’

She eyed me narrowly, ‘Was that the only reason?’

‘But what other possible reason could there be?’

‘O I don’t know. It occurred to me that perhaps you wanted to … to … That perhaps you had some other reason.’

‘Some ulterior motive?’

‘Yes.’

‘But wouldn’t that have been sheer dishonesty?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Would it?’ The point did not seem to interest her.

After a few moments she added: ‘I suppose you would call my poems bad.’

I felt that I was walking into a trap. Obviously she meant me to ask to see them. ‘If you asked my opinion,’ I said warily, ‘I would give it you honestly. Wouldn’t you expect me to?’

She smiled. ‘I think you’re a very formidable person.’

‘Shouldn’t I be much more formidable if you never knew whether I was speaking the truth or not?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think you would be more human.’

She jumped up and went to a drawer. ‘I’ll show you one.’

‘Don’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because if I say it’s bad you’ll be offended.’

‘I’ll risk it,’ she said.

‘But I won’t,’ said I.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t at all want to offend you.’

‘Ah, that’s human. If you don’t want to, you won’t.’

‘Not even if I say it’s very bad?’

‘Not even then.’

With horrible forebodings I took the sheet of paper she handed to me.

‘If this one’s bad the rest are hopeless,’ she said.

To The Unknown Beloved, I read:

Unknown beloved, hear my prayer

And gather from the empty air

Your garment of smooth flesh, your eyes

Dark shining with love’s mysteries,

Your smile whose warm and golden light

Shall wake me from my frozen night,

And those strong arms whose prisoning girth

Shall give me more than Heaven and Earth.

I looked up. She was watching me with breathless intensity. ‘Well, upon my word, I don’t call that bad at all,’ I said.

‘You don’t?’

‘Indeed I don’t.’

‘I’m very glad,’ she said humbly.

Suddenly her intensity was gone, her eyes sparkled and her lips curled humorously. ‘Might I ask you, would you go so far as to call it good?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would. I would call it a very creditable bit of work.’

She laughed. ‘You speak as though I were a plumber. What would you have said if I had told you that one of your pictures was a very fine bit of carpentry?’

‘I should have been delighted. Isn’t that, after all, a very satisfactory kind of criticism? When did you write it?’

‘About a year ago,’ she said.

‘Thank God,’ I thought to myself.

‘I don’t write them very often,’ she went on. ‘Just now and then when it’s simply got to be done.’

‘Will you make me a copy of it?’

Her eyes shone with pleasure. ‘You’d really like me to?’ ‘I would indeed.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that’s what I call a very satisfactory kind of criticism. Yes, you shall have a copy.’

When I left she handed me a small parcel. ‘Will you refuse this too,’ she said, ‘as you refused the roses?’

‘What is it?’

‘Never mind what it is; but it won’t make you look like a bridesmaid anyhow. It’ll go into your pocket. Look, I’ll put it in for you.’

When I took her hand to say good-bye she was trembling and her face was aflame.

Having climbed on to the top of my bus and lighted a cigarette, I took the parcel from my pocket and opened it. It was a little gilt-edged book bound in red morocco. I opened it at random and found blank pages: then, turning back, I came, after more blanks, on a neatly written poem, the one she had shown me. On the page before it were two little stanzas of four lines each. I turned back another page and another. These were her poems, then. There were about a dozen of them altogether. Each had its date carefully entered at the foot: the earliest of them dated from three years ago. On the front page in red ink the title was laboriously inscribed in Gothic capitals with careful, amateurish flourishes: ‘To The Unknown Beloved.’

And she had handed the whole lot over to me, actually given them to me. I began to read:

I lie in the numbness of death.

Phœbus, bright god,

Call me with quickening breath

Through the frozen sod;

That, roused from a winter of sleep

In the seed’s close tomb,

I may burst through its husk and upleap

To leaf and bloom.

Not so good as the other, but still not half bad, though it goes to pieces a bit in the last two lines. I turned to another:

For you, the still unfound,

I made this gift of rhyme,

That when the appointed time

Should come, and with a sound

Of music in mine ears

And sight of flowery springs

To weary eyes, should bring

You whom I sought with tears,

I might run forth to meet you

And take your proffered kiss

Not unprepared, with this

One gift at least to greet you.

I closed the book, wrapped it again in its paper and put it back in my pocket. Poor little creature! And I suppose that if some other fellow, not too repellent, had got into the train beside her, he, and not I, would have come in for it all.

MERIEL

It is all like a dream and I can hardly believe yet that he has come and the years of waiting are over. How little I thought, when I finally decided to leave Geordie and come to London to start my career, that all the time I was coming to him. I might have missed him so easily. If I hadn’t taken part in the theatricals, if Geordie hadn’t been more exasperating than usual or even if I had come to London by a different train, we should never have met. But doesn’t that prove that I was guided all the time, that our meeting was fated? And yet how different he is from what I expected. Not in looks: I always knew he would have dark hair and dark, dark eyes with that look that makes me feel as if my heart were melting away. It is his ways that are different. I had expected that he would be masterful, irresistible, that he would carry me off my feet as those Roman warriors did to the Sabine women, and afterwards that he would be conquered by his love of me and adore me as his goddess. But he does neither. His masterfulness is much more subtle. He treats me with a calm and. amused indulgence as though I were his favourite slave. When I lay my heart at his feet, show him the poem I wrote for him a year ago, all he says is: ‘A very creditable bit of work.’

I don’t know why, but that enchanted me. Yes, he is infinitely more adorable as he is. He took no more notice of my letter about the roses, which I wrote trembling with shame and anxiety, than if I had sent him an advertisement for unshrinkable socks; he brings me no flowers; makes rude replies when I quote poetry to him; would rather die than pay me the least little compliment, and I find it all simply captivating. I feel as if I were stroking and teasing a proud, gentle animal that doesn’t know its own strength and would rather be left alone.

And now, at this moment, he is probably looking over the poems I have made for him so carefully and patiently during the last three years, the poems into which I put my very heart and soul, turning the pages and calmly remarking: ‘Not bad! Might be worse! A bit too like Ella Wheeler Wilcox!’ And soon he will lay them aside and take up an evening paper. Well, I don’t care. They were written for him and now they’re his to do what he likes with. I’ve kept no copies. If I had done so I would have been keeping back a part of the gift, like Ananias and Sapphira. Besides, what are the poems to me, now that he’s come?

A Month Later. I wonder if he would ever make an effort to see me if I didn’t ask him. Probably not. It would be contrary to his dignity, and he knows that, without saying a word, he can compel me to ask him, so he gets his own way none the less. And when I do ask him: ‘When am I to see you again?’ he always replies: ‘Whenever you like,’ and we make an appointment then and there for him to come to me or me to go to him.

A week ago we went to the theatre together. That was wonderful, for I felt that I was much closer to him there than ever before. I had not expected that: I had felt that it was going to be almost a wasted evening if we were to spend it in a place full of people. But as soon as I got into the theatre, with that crowd of strangers all round us, I felt that we were alone together on an island, and I felt too that I had become much more his, now that he was willing to appear with me before the world. Then the lights went out, the audience vanished, and I found myself suddenly close, O so close to him, his shoulder and arm touching mine. I could smell the smell of his coat, I seemed to feel the warmth of his body, and I closed my eyes and was drowned in bliss.

For the first half-hour I saw nothing of the play and heard nothing but the rise and fall of voices on the stage saying things I didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.

It was hot in the theatre and in the interval we went and stood in the entrance to get cool. He took out his cigarette case and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I don’t smoke in public.’

‘O nonsense.’ He smiled, his eyes glowed down on me, and he still offered the cigarettes. I took one obediently. How happy it makes me when he forces me to do things against my principles.

When he spoke of the play I felt rather uncomfortable, because really I had taken hardly any notice of it. I remembered that he had given me a programme. What had I done with it? It wasn’t in my hand. He mentioned various names, Sybil Thorndyke, Ernest Thesiger. ‘What do you think of them?’ he asked. ‘Let me hear your professional opinion.’

‘Professional?’

‘As an actress, I mean. Aren’t you watching their technique?’

‘O of course. I ought to be doing that,’ I said. ‘I had forgotten.’

That seemed to amuse him, why I don’t know. As a matter of fact, I’ve rather given up the idea of going on the London stage: there seem to be so many difficulties in the way, and it’s so difficult to know how to set about it. After my failure with the letters of introduction I did consult one or two people who, I thought, might be in the know, but all to no purpose. They seemed never to have heard of Mr. Seaton-McPherson. So I’d rather let the matter drop, partly because of the difficulties and partly because I’ve really rather lost interest in it; in fact for the last few weeks it has never once entered my head. That was why, when Philip mentioned my being an actress, I didn’t at first know what he meant.

This morning came a letter from Geordie.

‘My dear Meriel,—I hope you are enjoying yourself. It occurs to me that your present balance at the bank may not go very far in London. Keep an eye on your passbook and be careful not to overdraw. If you will let me know when funds are getting low, I will transfer some money from my account to yours. If you have taken the dramatic world of London by storm, The Times is strangely reticent about it. However, the chief thing is that you should enjoy yourself. Miss Bredall, Mrs. Goring, Mrs. Nutall and old Colonel West have asked me at various times when you are coming back. Having no information on the subject myself I have made vague, ingenious, and I hope not contradictory replies. I have endowed you with an invalid cousin in London and I trust you will do your best not to forget her, should occasion arise. All goes on much as usual here. Mrs. Jackson admirably justifies her promotion from cook to cook-housekeeper.

‘Your affectionate

‘George.’

Dear Geordie! How like him his letters are. As I read this one I seemed to hear the very tone of his voice and see his dry smile, and for a few minutes I felt quite homesick. It is like him, too, to say nothing of how terribly he misses me. But he does ask, in that clever, roundabout way which he thinks will deceive me, when I am coming back.

When am I going back? How can I ever go back, now that I have met Philip? When I left home I was quite vague about all that. All I knew was that I was going away like Nora in ‘A Doll’s House’ and that perhaps some day, when I had made a career for myself and Geordie had become worthy of me, we should begin again. But Philip has changed everything. I could never leave Philip: if I did I should die. But what will Geordie do if I refuse ever to go back? Will he divorce me? That would be terrible: I could never face that. Besides, I can’t desert him for good and all, never go home again. That was never in my mind, because I really am devoted to Geordie, though we do get on so terribly badly. It’s more as if he were my father. Whatever will happen? It’s too complicated to think of; besides, it’s time I got ready to meet Philip.

A Fortnight Later. Last night Philip and I had dinner together in Soho. I forget the name of the restaurant. After dinner he asked me if I knew the Café Royal and suggested that we should go there. I had heard of it, of course, but I had always imagined that it was rather a wild place, like the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and I felt a little frightened at his suggestion.

‘Isn’t it a Bohemian place?’ I asked.

‘Bohemian?’ said Philip. ‘No, it’s French; at least it’s the nearest thing we have to a French café’

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said. ‘But could I go there?’

‘Certainly, if you’d like to. It’s a pleasant place for a lazy evening.’

‘But Philip, what does one do there?’

‘Do? Nothing. That’s the beauty of it. Just sit and talk and smoke and drink something.’

‘I always understood it was rather … well, wild, you know.’

He laughed. ‘It depends on what you call wild,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been to the Royal Academy?’

I told him I had been there once or twice with Geordie in past years.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s about as wild as the Royal Academy.’

I said I should like to go. After all, I knew I should be perfectly safe with Philip.

I must say, it seemed to me a strange, rather sinister-looking place, rather like a huge, old fashioned third-class railway carriage, with its worn red plush and all the tawdry mirrors and gilt and the whole place full of tobacco smoke. At first I thought Philip was joking when he asked me if I didn’t think it charming.

‘Well,’ he said as we sat down, ‘what are we going to drink? A pint of absinthe each?’

‘Is one … do they expect one to?’ I asked. I was beginning to wish we hadn’t come.

‘No, it’s not compulsory, and I’m told it’s extremely nasty. Let’s have a black or white coffee, or a lager, or some vermouth and soda—that’s very nice on a hot evening like this.’

I chose white coffee and Philip had a vermouth and soda, and when the first strangeness of the place had worn off I really began to find it very pleasant. Most of the tables were occupied and the place was so full of the hum of conversation that it was possible to talk without that uncomfortable feeling that people at the next tables are listening to what one says. Some of the people there looked very foreign; strange men with untidy hair and loose ties, hard-looking women with cold eyes like actresses, who made me feel shy and rather frightened. It made me miserable to think that perhaps Philip knew them. But he didn’t take any notice of them. Perhaps it was because I was with him. A few tables away, to our left, a youngman with a fair beard and a large hat like a cowboy’s was talking to a middle-aged woman with face and lips covered with paint like Jezebel. One could see how old she was under the paint. I asked Philip who they were.

‘O he writes poetry,’ he said; ‘his name’s Scholefield.’

‘And she?’

‘She’s the famous Mrs. Giles Ebbsworth.’

‘What’s she famous for?’

‘O just for being famous,’ said Philip. ‘She’s rather an intelligent old thing and she knows everybody.’

‘But isn’t she rather … well, rather fast?’

Philip laughed. ‘Not she. She doesn’t live down to her appearance any more than Scholefield lives up to his. He believes that to write poetry you’ve only got to leave out the verbs and the capital letters.’

‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that I’d better paint my face, buy a strange hat, and call myself a poetess.’

‘Leave out the paint and the hat,’ he said; ‘you’re nicer as you are.’

It wasn’t till we had been there about an hour that I saw Philip make a sign with his hand to two people, a man and a woman, who had just come in. They came towards us. My heart sank: I had hoped that we should be alone the whole evening. I felt afraid, at once, of the woman: she looked so cold and so terribly self-possessed. She was tall, with a hard, handsome face like marble, and she wore a wide-brimmed Spanish hat and a black cloak. Philip introduced me to her, Miss Rhoda Gaunt, and the man, Edward Dennis. They sat down at our table, Mr. Dennis opposite me and Miss Gaunt opposite Philip, and she began to talk to him at once. She seemed to be explaining something about a new gallery, but I couldn’t hear much of what they said because Mr. Dennis was talking to me in a slow, rather precise voice. I had hardly noticed him till he began to talk. He was dressed very unconventionally in a rough brown tweed coat and a blue flannel tennis shirt with a yellow silk tie held in a strange ivory ring. I guessed he was an artist, and yet his slow, precise, deep voice made me think of a clergyman rather than an artist. His face, too, was severe and priestlike, his hair black and carefully brushed.

I don’t quite know why I am always rather afraid of artistic people. I always feel, somehow, that they know so much more than I do and that they must think me very silly and commonplace. But I soon began to feel that Mr. Dennis was quite nice: he was so natural and friendly. If it hadn’t been that my attention was so fixed on Philip and Miss Gaunt I should have quite enjoyed talking to him. She was trying hard to persuade Philip to do something he didn’t want to do. They were laughing and arguing and chaffing each other. Philip seemed to be much more familiar and cheerful with her than he is with me. Her voice suddenly rose.

‘Now do, Phil dear,’ I heard her say. ‘Don’t be such a silly old chump.’

It was terrible to hear her talk to him as I had never dared to talk, to call him Phil and dear. I longed to take Philip away. I felt as if I were losing him, as if at any moment they might get up and leave me in that horrible place, among all those horrible people, with no one to get me out of it but Mr. Dennis. But to my immense relief Miss Gaunt suddenly got up.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I must go and talk to Fairweather. Come on, Ned.’

She nodded and smiled to me, then swung round and walked away, followed by Mr. Dennis. What a relief it was. But the evening was spoilt for me: all I wanted was to go home.

‘Did you like Dennis?’ Philip asked.

‘Yes, I thought him very nice,’ I said. ‘Is he a painter?’

‘A sculptor. Don’t you know his name, Edward Dennis? He’s the best sculptor we’ve got. Rhoda’s the painter.’

‘Is she good?’

‘Very good. I wish they hadn’t hurried away. I wanted you to talk to her.’

‘I don’t think,’ I said, ‘that I should have liked her.’

He glanced at me in surprise. ‘O but I’m sure you would. She’s a perfect dear.’

A week later. Yesterday afternoon I had tea with Philip in his flat. I asked him when we were to go to the theatre together again.

‘Soon,’ he said, ‘but not just yet, because to-morrow I’m going away for a fortnight.’

It was such a shock that I could hardly speak. ‘Going away?’ I said. I could hear my voice tremble. ‘Where to?’

‘Into the country, to a little place called Saltdyke. I go there from time to time to work.’

I thought at once of Rhoda Gaunt. Was he going with her?

‘Are you … are you going alone?’ I watched his face.

‘Yes, alone,’ he said; but I couldn’t tell, from his face, whether it was true or not.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I’ve only just decided to go. I often go there. It’s a wonderful place for working in; partly, I suppose, because there’s nothing else to do, nothing to distract one.’

‘Such as me, for instance?’

‘That’s it,’ he said, pretending that he thought I had been joking.

‘And you’re going for a fortnight?’

‘Yes, that’s all.’

‘All! It seems to me a very long time.’

He laughed. ‘Why, last autumn I went down and stayed there for nearly six months.’

I felt as if my life had suddenly fallen to pieces. ‘And I suppose,’ I said, ‘that at the end of the fortnight you’ll decide to stay another fortnight, and at the end of that, another.’

‘O no,’ he said; ‘I’ve got to be back a fortnight tomorrow.’

The thought of his going away was so terrible that I couldn’t talk and sat silent and miserable. I had the feeling that everything was over, that I should never see him again, and when I left him I asked, in desperation, if I might see him off at the train tomorrow.

His face clouded. I saw at once that he didn’t want me to. ‘I’m not sure what train I’m going by. Besides, in any case, it’s hardly worth it, is it? I might be late, and then it would be an awful scramble, in fact we might miss one another altogether.’

‘And you come back on Thursday, a fortnight to-morrow?’

‘Yes, and on Friday we’ll have dinner together and go to a theatre.’

‘Not Thursday?’

‘No, I’m booked for Thursday evening.’

‘Already?’

‘Yes. A meeting about a new gallery that Rhoda Gaunt’s interested in.’

Rhoda Gaunt! The name struck my heart like a stone. He was going to see her, then, the very evening he got back. But is he really going away alone, or is he going with her? Yes, I’m sure he’s going with her. That’s why he was so anxious to stop me going to see him off to-morrow.

Next day. Last night I was so tormented by fears about Philip and Rhoda Gaunt that I couldn’t sleep. Half awake and half asleep, I kept imagining myself in Victoria station, waiting to see Philip off. I was standing at the entrance to the platform; and then I would see Philip coming towards me and would try to hide myself, to see him without being seen. But when he was quite close to me I would discover that it wasn’t Philip but Rhoda Gaunt in her black cape and hat, and I rushed to the platform gate to stop her getting through. She tried to push past me, but I seized her cloak and held on. We struggled, and then the ticket-inspector caught my arm and Rhoda tore herself free and ran down the platform, and, far up it, I saw Philip laughing and beckoning to her. Then I tore my arm free from the inspector, but he seized me again and I battered his head and face with my fists and then suddenly woke up with my heart beating so frantically that I thought I was going to die.

Over and over again I was caught in that nightmare till I was nearly driven mad by the repetition.

It was as if I were trapped in some terrible treadmill from which I couldn’t escape. At last, to escape from it, I got up, went into the sitting-room, got out a railway guide and looked up Saltdyke. I had determined I would go to Victoria in the morning and watch Philip, without his knowing, to see for certain if he was really going with Rhoda.

Saltdyke, I found, was on a branch line from Beresford. Then Philip must have been coming from Saltdyke on the day of our first meeting. There were only four trains in the day; two in the morning and two in the afternoon. I would go to Victoria for the first and, if he didn’t go by that, wait for the next and, if necessary, the two afternoon ones as well. The clock on the mantelpiece said a quarter to four. I went to fill the kettle and make myself some tea. I was determined not to go back to bed for fear of getting caught again in that maddening wheel of nightmare.

I got to Victoria half an hour before the first train started, and when I had found out the platform I chose a place near a large glass show-case from which I could see both the platform gate and the arches that lead from the booking-hall into the station. There I could stroll to and fro safely, for Philip would not see me on his way from the booking-hall to the train. Three times during the half-hour a train came in and a hurrying crowd swept across the station, so that I had to move nearer to Philip’s platform for fear of missing him.

As train time drew near my anxiety became so intense that I hardly had the strength to stand up. Every other man that approached the gate and paused to have his ticket clipped seemed for a moment as if he might have been Philip. Sometimes I was almost sure that a man and woman walking together were Philip and Rhoda and my heart leapt to my mouth. I seemed to be losing the power of distinguishing one person from another. Now there were only three minutes and the people that went through the gate were hurrying, some of them running. Could I have missed him? The doors of the train were all shut. A terrifying whistle went off: the guard was waving his green flag. If he came running now I felt I should not be able to bear the strain.

But he didn’t come, and after waiting a moment or two longer I turned away, half relieved, half horrified at the prospect of going through it all again two hours later. How was I to fill in the time? I was too tired to walk. All I wanted was to sit down and rest. I would go and sit in the Ladies’ Waiting Room. But I couldn’t sit there doing nothing: I must have something to occupy me, and I went to the bookstall and, after glancing along a row of cheap books, bought the first whose writer’s name I knew: Some Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. I took it to the Waiting Room, sank into a chair and lost myself in reading.

I was quite surprised, when I paused to look at the time, to find that I had only three quarters of an hour left. Very soon I should have to be going to find out the platform and start watching again. But I did not give myself so long this time, for I felt sure that Philip was not the sort of person to arrive at a station half an hour before a train started. So I waited till twenty minutes to train time: then I went and discovered the platform, a different one this time, and found a safe position for myself.

The gate was not yet open and nobody was there, but I had not to wait long. In five minutes a ticket-inspector opened it and soon people began to dribble through. I stood some distance away watching them. The whole affair seemed unreal now. What was it all about? Why was I standing there watching? Did I really want so much to know if Philip was going away alone? It was a weary business. Hadn’t I better go home and not bother any more about it? Yes, I felt that I would really rather go, but I didn’t. I stood there, wrapped in my own thoughts, and when I glanced at the gate again I was just in time to see Philip, already inside, going down the platform carrying two bags. He was alone. At the sight of him my heart, which had been dully asleep all this time, seemed to burst into flame. I ran to the platform gate and stood there watching him. He didn’t go far, but chose a carriage near the back of the train. There was no sign of Rhoda Gaunt. I waited to see if he would come out on to the platform when he had got rid of his bags and chosen his place, but he didn’t.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I can go now.’ Then I remembered that Rhoda Gaunt might still be coming: I must wait till the train started. It would not be long; there were only five minutes now.

I waited out the five minutes and no Rhoda came. The porters began to shut the doors, shutting away Philip from me still further. Then the whistle blew, the guard waved his flag, and I stood watching as the train shrank away down the platform and drew my heart after it.

A week later. How dreadful it is to live only for the hours when the postman comes. For a whole week now I have listened for his step on the stairs and for the sound of a letter falling into my letter-box, followed by the smart double knock on my door. Sometimes he misses the house altogether, often he fails to pause on my landing and goes on upstairs, leaving my heart heavy with disappointment. When I hear his approaching steps pause, I know there is something for me and by the time the letter drops into the box I am there, ready. But for the whole of this week there has been nothing but disappointment on disappointment, till I began to feel that I could endure no more.

And then this morning, at last, his letter came; just a brief note in his charming writing, saying that he has been working hard and is still doing so, ‘and I can never write letters when I am working. Hence my impressive silence.’ ‘Remember,’ he says in a postscript, ‘to get tickets for to-morrow week, whatever play you like.’

How astonishing it is that a small piece of folded paper can transform one’s life from misery to happiness. I have carried his letter about with me all day, reading it over and over. While I ate my lunch it lay open beside me, and also while I had my tea. I have stayed indoors all day, reading my favourite poets, for there is nothing to tempt me out-of-doors; and each time I heard the postman’s step on the stairs I laughed to myself, knowing that I didn’t depend on him any longer, didn’t care tuppence whether he paused at my door or not. O Philip, if only you knew how easily you can lift me to the seventh heaven of happiness!

But this evening, as I was telling myself that his absence is already half over and that I shall see him to-morrow week, the shadow of Rhoda Gaunt in her black hat and cloak fell across my mind. She will see him before I do, a week to-night. Has he written to her too? O I hate her. How clearly I see her face now, much more clearly than I can see Philip’s, and hear her hard, laughing voice saying: ‘Now do, Phil dear!’ He can’t really like her with her cold, arrogant face. He only thinks he does, because she flatters him and runs after him. But she shan’t have him. I’ll get him away from her. After all, he’s mine. It was fated that we should meet: I knew that directly he got into the train at Beresford.

A Week Later. He must be back in London now, and yet I have to wait a whole day before I can see him. He’s with Rhoda Gaunt by now, no doubt. I hear her hateful voice: ‘Phil, dear, how delicious to have you back!’ and he smiles at her and takes her hand. It drives me almost frantic to think of it, and I’ve got to wait here, wait, wait, with nothing to fill the interminable hours till to-morrow evening. I wrote to him two days ago, saying I would rather not go to the theatre after all and asking him to come and have supper here in the flat instead; and I asked him to ring me up when he got back, to say if this was all right. That was a little plot, so that at least I should hear his voice, even though I wasn’t allowed to see him. But though I’ve waited in ever since this morning, he hasn’t rung up. He’s too busy with that hateful creature, I suppose. And here I’ve sat, waiting for the telephone bell, and it’s now a quarter to eleven. He won’t ring up till to-morrow now.

O Philip, Philip, you must know how I’m longing for you. Can’t you give me so much as a word, to send me to bed happy and at peace?

Next day. He has just rung up while I was having my breakfast. I was so breathless with joy at the sound of his voice that I could hardly answer him.

‘Have you got a cold?’ he asked.

‘No. Why?’

‘Your voice sounds very remote.’

‘You must expect that if you interrupt a person when she has her mouth full.’

‘Mouth full? You haven’t finished breakfast yet?’

‘Well, have you?’

‘Of course I have, long ago.’

‘And you’ll come to supper this evening?’

‘Rather; if it’s not too much bother.’

‘Bother? For you?’

‘For you.’

‘It’s the kind of bother I rather like.’

‘You like cooking?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘What time shall I come?’

‘As soon as you can. Supper will be ready at seven-thirty.’

‘Then I’ll probably turn up about seven. And, listen, I’ll bring some fruit and a bottle of wine.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘If you do, I shall probably be offended.’

‘Well, I’ll bring them, and if you refuse them I shall be offended too. Good-bye. Seven o’clock.’

Now I must plan the supper. I must get out my cookery book and a pencil and paper, and when that’s done I shall go and shop. It must be a small supper but a terribly good one. Although it is only nine o’clock and I have ten hours before me, I feel as if there wasn’t a moment to lose. Ten hours, and I shall hear his feet on the stairs and then a ring at the bell. I can hardly believe it’s true. How shall I ever dare to open the door?

Next day. Was it only yesterday he came? It seems a whole lifetime away. It is as if I had been swept through space into a new world and a new life and my brain was still dazed with the journey.

I managed to behave very well when he arrived: no unseemly display of emotion, nothing out of keeping with his calm, his dreadfully calm friendliness. But as soon as I had opened the door and we had said a few words, I sent him into the sitting-room, saying that I was busy for the moment in the kitchen, and I went into the kitchen to recover. It was a great achievement.

When I joined him in the sitting-room he was prowling about with his hands in his pockets as he always used to do. How much of him I had forgotten in the last fortnight. He had faded in my mind like an old photograph, and now, turning quickly as I went into the room, he seemed more, much more than real. I had forgotten how his dark hair curls forward on his temples to meet his eyes like the lower horn of a crescent moon. I had forgotten the clear, dark glow of his eyes.

‘You look very well,’ I said.

‘And so do you. You look as if you had been away too.’

‘No, my dear,’ I thought to myself, ‘I look as though you had come back.’

It was a lovely, warm evening and we opened wide both the long windows which give on a balcony and reach from floor to ceiling. In the fading twilight the yellow trees in the garden looked like beautiful pierced screens set up for some eastern festival. Here and there lighted windows in the opposite houses shone through them, their squares broken by the hanging leaves. I lit only the four candles on the supper-table so that the room should not be too bright for us to enjoy the view. Philip opened the bottle of wine he had brought and filled our glasses. We sat down.

He talked of the country, saying that it was absurd for people who weren’t compelled to, to live in London where every day was broken into a hundred fragments. In the country, he said, life is continuous: nothing happens but morning, afternoon, and night indicated by meals and the sun.

‘So you’re sorry to be back in London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t even this peaceful enough for you?’

‘O this is all right, but London isn’t all like this.’

I smiled to myself. ‘All right!’ That, from Philip, was, I felt, a dazzling compliment.

‘I hope you had a successful meeting last night.’

‘Yes, I suppose it might be called successful. Anyhow Rhoda got a couple of pictures out of me.’

‘For her gallery?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wasn’t that rather selfish of her, if you didn’t want to give them?’

‘Selfish? Not likely. She’s the most unselfish creature in the world. She knows I’m lazy and unenterprising, so she takes me in hand from time to time and gives me a push. It’s pure kindness on her part.’

I said nothing. I was wishing I had never started the subject of Rhoda; but Philip went on:

‘You know, Meriel, you’ve got quite the wrong idea about Rhoda. You must meet her. I shall ask you both to tea.’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because she’s not my sort.’

He smiled. ‘How funny women are. When one introduces two men one takes it for granted that they’ll hit it off, more or less. But when two women meet, the air fairly hums with danger. It’s like confronting one’s old cat with a new one: one stands by in terror, knowing that at any moment they may set to and maul each other beyond recognition.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And which of us, if I may ask, is the old cat?’

He laughed. ‘Neither, let’s hope. I merely put the hat— a new, still unbought hat—on the table. Don’t, please, buy it unless you’re quite sure it fits.’

‘I certainly shan’t. I wouldn’t dream of it. In fact, its trimming seems to me in the worst taste.’

‘But honestly, as man to man, don’t you think there’s something in what I say?’ His eyes were wrinkled at the corners with the most deliciously sly humour.

‘O, if we begin talking as man to man,’ I said ‘goodness knows what nonsense we shan’t descend to.’

We had finished supper, and leaving the four lighted candles on the table we pushed up two easy chairs to the open windows and sat looking out into the garden of the square, smoking. We talked of books. I asked him what he had read while he was away and he said he had taken nothing with him but Donne and Wordsworth and hadn’t read much even of them. I said I had never been able to make much of Donne: he was too difficult and crabbed for me. Philip said there was a certain kind of passion in Donne which no other poet had.

‘Passion?’ I said. ‘I should have thought you would have looked on passion as nothing but a tiresome disturber of your “sacred, everlasting calm”.’

‘And so it is.’ His voice was almost angry, but in a moment it was calm again. ‘But happily poetry renders it innocuous, so that it can be taken in. that form with impunity, even in fairly large doses.’

He likes to talk in that cool, slightly mocking way, but I never believe in it, not for a moment. It’s a screen behind which he hides from me. His eyes were gazing out into the deep, shadowy boughs in the square and, unknown to him, I watched his face, trying to guess what strange, wild creature lurked behind the screen. His hand, his slim brown hand with its delicate coating of silky black hairs, lay on the arm of his chair. Why does he always hide himself, I wondered. Is he like this with everyone, even with Rhoda Gaunt? I remembered with a pang how they had laughed and chaffed each other in the Café Royal. Does she know the real Philip? Has she seen his eyes like fire, felt the grip of those strong hands?

The thought was so unbearable that I made a sudden abrupt movement. He turned his calm eyes upon me. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

Then he glanced at his watch and said he ought to be going.

‘Not yet, Philip. Stay a little longer.’

‘But it’s late.’

‘Then just a little longer.’

‘Well, a quarter of an hour perhaps.’

But the spell had been broken. He was thinking of the time now, and I was feeling that my happiness and security were suddenly on the edge of a precipice. A cold fear crept over me at the thought that in a few minutes I should be alone again, cut off from him just when I had got him back. We sat, each in a kind of trance, trying in vain to talk, and soon he stood up.

I sat immovable, paralysed. I heard him cross the room and open the door, and then he came back carrying his hat and stick.

‘Good night,’ he said. ‘It’s been delightful.’

I rose feebly to my feet. ‘Need you go yet?’

‘Yes, really I must..’

He went to the open door: I followed him.

‘Have something, have an apple, before you go.’

‘No, there’s no time. I shall probably miss the last bus, as it is.’

I put my hand on his arm. ‘Then don’t go, Philip.’

He hesitated. A sudden flush spsread over his face. He stood doubtful, uncertain. Then his eyes, dark and questioning, looked down into mine.

‘Don’t go,’ I whispered, feeling all the strength ebb from my body. My hand was still on his sleeve: but for that I should have fallen. For another moment he did not move. Then he turned and hung up his hat and stick.

A Month Later. I suppose ordinary people, if they knew that Philip and I are lovers, would be horrified and would look upon me as utterly shameless, just like any other woman who leaves her husband and becomes another man’s mistress. But that would be only because they didn’t know the whole truth. They don’t know, of course, that we were destined for each other. I tell myself sometimes that I’m living in sin. I say it over and over, to make myself realize it; but its only effect is to give me a feeling of immense joy. Well, doesn’t that prove that I’m not living in sin? Because if I were, I should feel terribly unhappy and ashamed. When people love as we do they cannot sin. I am sure that in the eyes of God Philip and I are married. I have never for a moment repented that I gave in to him that night a month ago, for I know I was obeying my destiny and his.

Philip pretends not to believe that we were destined for each other. He laughs when I speak of it. But that is only his old way of withholding himself, for even now he does that, in speech at any rate. If he were to admit that he had realized the meaning of our meeting in the train, or that when he first invited me to tea it was anything more than the most casual politeness, he would be giving himself away. So he just laughs and teases me, and he’s so enchanting, when he does, that I can never hold out for long. And why should I try to? So long as I am with him I am content; more than content, blissfully, blessedly happy. Ah, if only we could always be together. It is so painful to part from him, even for only a short time. When he leaves me, I shut down my shell, like a limpet when the tide goes down, and lead a life of darkness and thirst till he returns.

A Fortnight Later. How terribly upsetting. I’ve just received a telegram, reply paid, from Geordie. ‘Coming to London on business to-morrow. Lunch with me one fifteen. Criterion.’

I can’t refuse. I can’t possibly wire back: ‘Sorry engaged.’ And yet Philip and I have arranged to lunch together and go to the Tate afterwards. He’s going to show me the modern French pictures, and I simply can’t bear to put him off. If I made some vague excuse he would think I didn’t mind whether I lunched with him or not, and if I told him the truth he would, of course, be furiously jealous. What can I do? I’m at my wits’ end. And here is Geordie’s telegram waiting to be answered. How I hate having to make decisions, especially when I shall feel dreadfully upset whichever I make.

I decided at last that the only thing to do was to go straight to Philip, tell him everything and ask him to decide what I ought to do. I reached his flat at about eleven o’clock this morning. It was the first time I had been to see him in the morning and unexpected. When he opened the door he had a paint-brush in his hand and was wearing an old blue jersey instead of a coat. Of course he was very surprised to see me.

‘Are you very busy?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘as a matter of fact I am.’ But he stood aside to let me in.

I felt very guilty and very agitated. ‘I’m so sorry, Phil, but it’s very important. It’s about to-morrow’; and I explained the whole thing to him. ‘Do tell me what I ought to do?’ I said. ‘I’ll do whatever you tell me.’

He frowned. ‘But, my dear Meriel, of course you must meet him. How on earth could you refuse? What a business you’re making of a perfectly simple thing. Why couldn’t you simply have rung me up?’

‘But what about our lunch? Can it be next day?’

‘The day after to-morrow, that’s Thursday. No, let us make it Friday.’

I felt the tears rush to my eyes: I couldn’t speak and I turned to go.

But Philip patted me on the shoulder. ‘Very well, very well, you little goose, we’ll make it Thursday.’

‘But are you sure, Phil …?’

‘Be off with you at once, or perhaps I’ll change my mind’; and he pushed me to the door.

Next day. I dreaded meeting Geordie. I was afraid of his questions—when was I coming home? What was I doing?—all the questions I couldn’t answer; and I was afraid, too, of being torn between him and Philip. Not that I have any doubt which I would choose; but it is dreadful to be torn, and I hoped that he would be at his most irritating so that I should feel how much better it is for us to remain apart.

But Geordie was at his very best. He didn’t ask any of the questions I had feared and he was as affectionate and amusing as he used to be years ago. He annoyed me a little once or twice by not answering properly the questions I put to him about Mrs. Jackson and the housekeeping and by brushing aside some hints I wanted to give him which I knew would be useful.

‘Don’t you worry your little head,’ he replied. ‘Everything’s running like clockwork.’

Except for that, we got on beautifully. He is really a dear old thing—that is, when he chooses to be. He told me he was going home by the four-twenty, so I went with him to Victoria to see him off.

‘Well, au revoir, Chicken,’ he said, as he leaned from the carriage window. Chicken is one of his names for me. ‘It was a jolly lunch, wasn’t it? I don’t often lunch with ladies nowadays.’

‘Don’t sit in a draught,’ I shouted to him as the train started. But what’s the use of telling him? He always does, and he always gets a cold afterwards.

Poor old Geordie. I could see, of course, that he misses me dreadfully, in spite of his pretending that everything is all right at home. For a few minutes after leaving the station I felt quite sad. Then I remembered that I was lunching with Philip to-morrow and all was well again.

PHILIP

‘A love affair,’ said old etherton as we sat talking after dinner in the smoking-room of his club, ‘is a highly skilled business. Above all, it must never be allowed to become too serious. It should always be regarded as a charming diversion, a respite after the heat and burden of the day. Try always, my dear Philip, to retain something of the charm, of improvisation about it: beware of falling into a routine.’

‘Or it may degenerate into mere marriage?’ I suggested.

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘For an affair to become wedlock would not be a matter of degeneration but of complete transformation. You might as well speak of a Capriccio or an Étude or a Rhapsody or any other of those free, indefinite types of music degenerating into a Sonata or Fugue. Or a wild rose, let us say, degenerating into a wistaria. The thing’s an absurdity.’

‘You’re implying now that an affair is a simple thing; but you began by saying it is a highly skilled business.’

‘And so it is. Its very simplicity makes it difficult. That’s not so paradoxical as it sounds. Your wild rose is by nature very transitory. The difficulty in a love affair is to preserve its freshness and fragrance beyond the brief normal limit: that can be done only by a good deal of art and artificiality on both sides. Routine and convention are its enemies, whereas they are all on the side of marriage. Marriage is a permanent edifice which takes a good deal of demolishing. A love affair is one of those charming and romantic pavilions which one sees at an Earl’s Court Exhibition: unless you treat it rather gingerly you’ll bring it about your ears, and as a ruin it’s a very sordid and unsightly object, a wreckage of plaster and scrap-iron. Whereas a marriage that has fallen into disrepair can present an appearance of some dignity. So remember, Philip, to break off the moment your affair shows signs of going to pieces. Agree to part while you can each retain some charming memories. Meanwhile, it’s a delicious state, isn’t it?’

‘It is indeed. I’m sorry to learn it’s so short-lived.’

He chuckled. ‘O, come. With a little philosophy, Hedonism for choice, on both sides it will last some years. Is the lady inclined to philosophy?’

‘I’m afraid not. She’s a child, though she’s older than I am.’

‘A pity!’ he said. ‘A grown-up child is a very unaccountable and formidable animal.’

Perhaps so. But a part of Meriel’s childishness is her delightful gaiety. She has a great capacity for innocent enjoyment, for turning the most simple occasion into a festival, and she has a saving sense of humour which, by its unexpected incursions, frequently rescues her, and me too, from conflicts and complications. I have never before felt so contented, never spent such idyllic, light-hearted weeks as these last autumn weeks since the evening when I failed to try to catch the last bus. It seems, after all, that to be in love is a gay and simple affair; that is, if I am in love with Meriel. But am I? If I had been asked on the afternoon of that fateful evening I should unhesitatingly have said not. But on the following morning and every day since—well, what other term could I have used? After all, there are, I suppose, many ways of being in love. I am certainly not in love with her as I was with Rose. If she were to vanish, go suddenly back to her home leaving a polite note of apology, I should be sorry, horribly sorry, horribly disappointed and put out, but I should not be inconsolable. My attitude towards her is what I used to think Rose’s was, in a lesser degree, towards me in the first weeks of our friendship. When we meet I am delighted to see her, I enjoy being with her, and I leave her without regret.

But isn’t that really the ideal state? It combines the freshness and simplicity of the animal with the bland sagacity of the philosopher. It has nothing of the torturing intensity, the deep, disturbing hunger of my love for Rose.

Three months later. ‘Whatever we do,’ I said to Meriel to-day, ‘don’t let us become intense.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Love each other intensely?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I do love you intensely, Phil.’

‘Then you mustn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if you do, we shall end by coming to grief.’

‘Then you don’t love me intensely?’

‘Certainly not.’

She eyed me resentfully. ‘All you feel about me, I sometimes think, is that I do very well to play with.’

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘So you do. And I hope you feel the same about me.’

She ignored my levity. ‘And when I’ve served your purpose …’

‘My vile purpose,’ I prompted.

‘… you’ll just fling me aside …’

‘Yes, how does it go on? A poor, broken little …?’

‘Phil,’ she burst in, ‘are you never serious?’

‘Not on these occasions,’ I said, and at that point her gaiety came to the rescue.

At such times we skate on very thin ice, but fortunately the water under it is not very deep. Yet it might very easily become so, for I have discovered already that there are two Meriels, one the gay, charming, pleasure-loving child, the other a dark, romantic, almost melodramatic person. I see now why she dreamed of being an actress. She is always dramatizing herself. It appears that we were destined for one another from the beginning of time; and when the times were ripe, God, Fate, the stars, or whoever or whatever it is that supervises these matters, tore her from her home and husband and flung us into each other’s arms, ‘in a third-class smoker on the Southern Railway,’ I added, as she explained these matters to me. But my facetiousness never checks her for long. She is determined that the whole thing shall be regarded in a highly romantic light, and in order that this should be possible I must be the masterful pursuer and she the shrinking pursued. Over and over again she has tried to make me confess that at the first glance in the third-class smoker I recognized her as my predestined mate and resolved to make her mine. She is quite serious about it, and although she ends by laughing when I explode it, I find, a day or two later, that the whole fantastic edifice has been re-erected.

‘But Meriel,’ I say, ‘if I had recognized you as my predestined mate, wouldn’t it have been superfluous for me to resolve, as you say I did, to make you mine, when Fate had already fixed that up, willy-nilly? You can’t have it both ways.’

‘Then which way was it?’ she asks eagerly.

‘Neither,’ I promptly reply. ‘I hadn’t a ghost of a notion, when I got into the train, that my Fate was seated in the opposite corner in a Saxe-blue serge.’

‘Saxe-blue serge?’ There was a note of amazement in her voice. ‘But I wasn’t wearing Saxe-blue serge.’

‘There now!’ I said. ‘Doesn’t that convince you of how little I was aware of the occasion? And as for resolving to make you mine, I shouldn’t dream of such behaviour in a railway carriage.’

She frowned: she was not at all amused. ‘I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Philip.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because they’re … well, they’re improper.’

‘On the contrary, they’re a declaration of propriety. You might as well say that the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” is dishonest. But consider, Meriel; isn’t our whole existence, yours and mine, improper?’

She looked at me with a beautiful and disarming gravity that put an end to my teasing. ‘Not for me,’ she said.

It is not out of mere frivolity that I tease Meriel. It’s the only way that occurs to me of replying to her romantic attitude, and the only way of being honest with her and bringing her back to reality. I feel responsible for her, though God knows it was she who collared me, not I who collared her. But, after all, I allowed myself very willingly to be collared, and that, I suppose, might be taken by a romantically minded person to imply much; more, indeed, than I myself intended. That’s what makes me feel responsible. Old Etherton in his neat little disquisition on the love affair described very accurately the spirit in which I entered into this relationship with Meriel, and so it alarms me when I find her taking it too … what shall I say? … too zealously. If only she had some absorbing work, as I have, to keep her independent and prevent her from focusing herself too exclusively on us. She seems to have given up all idea of the stage. I have raised the subject several times recently and last time I did so she frowned and fixed suspicious eyes on me.

‘Why are you so anxious now,’ she asked, ‘for me to do something about my acting? At first you didn’t seem a bit interested and when I asked you how I was to get on the stage you refused to help me.’

‘I certainly didn’t, Meriel. I merely said, what was true, that I didn’t know.’

‘Well, that comes to the same thing. And now you keep bothering me to go to classes and read plays and study parts.’

‘Well, my dear child, you came to London with the object of taking up the stage, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, or at least I believed I did; but now I’ve lost interest in it.’

‘And yet you go on staying in London.’

‘O, so you want me to go, do you?’

‘What I want isn’t the point, Meriel. But what does your husband think of it?’

‘O Geordie doesn’t mind.’

‘Didn’t he ask you, during your lunch together, when you were going home?’

‘No, he didn’t say a word about it. He said that the only thing that mattered was that I should enjoy myself.’

‘And you explained, of course, exactly how you were enjoying yourself?’

She took no notice of this. She never does, when I venture on sarcasm.

‘Well, my opinion is that you owe it to him to do what you set out to do. Besides, you ought to have a job. After all, you must have something to occupy you. You don’t even go to see people, and when I offer to introduce you to friends of mine, Rhoda Gaunt for instance, you refuse.’

‘I don’t want friends, thank you.’

‘All the more reason why you should have a job.’

‘I have a job.’

‘Might I ask what it is?’

‘You,’ she said. ‘So now you know.’

‘Well, in any case,’ I replied, ‘I’m not a whole-time job.’

She laughed grimly. ‘That’s not my fault.’

A week later. As we sat at breakfast this morning in her flat, Meriel announced to me that she had a plan.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said; ‘a plan for a job.’

‘No, not a plan for a job. Just a plan, and a very good one too. Listen, Phil,’ she began eagerly; ‘I’ve found a flat, a delightful one, in Chelsea, overlooking the river.’

‘But do you want to leave this one?’

‘Don’t interrupt. It’s a larger flat than this one; two floors, the top floor and the one below it. There are two rooms, one large, one smaller, a kitchen and a bathroom, and on the top floor two more large rooms, one with a huge window looking across the river, a perfect room for a studio.’

Ah, now I saw what she was driving at. She was so eager and excited that I dreaded the moment when I should have to wreck the plan. I said nothing and she went on.

‘It’s a marvellous opportunity; just the place, of all others, to suit us.’

‘You mean …?’

‘I mean that we must take it at once and move in. O, and—I forgot—there are gas fires and a geyser.’

‘I shook my head. No, my dear. It sounds charming, but it would never do.’

Her face fell. ‘But you haven’t seen it.’

‘I don’t mean the flat, Meriel. What I mean is, we would fight like cats.’

‘Fight? I wouldn’t.’

‘But I would,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how bad-tempered I am sometimes.’

She laughed. ‘You bad-tempered? You’re an angel, Phil.’

‘Only for a small portion of each day. For the rest of the time I’m a devil.’

She got up and put her arm round my shoulders. ‘Well, I’ll cheerfully put up with a devil if it’s this devil.’

‘No, Meriel, it’s impossible.’

She laid her cheek on my head. ‘Darling devil, please do. Think how lovely it would be.’

‘Think how nicely we get along as it is.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, don’t we? So it stands to reason that it would be nicer still.’

‘On the contrary, it would spoil everything.’

She left me and went to the window. ‘You’re not very polite,’ she said resentfully.

‘One can’t afford to be polite when important decisions have to be made. One has to be truthful and face facts.’

‘And the fact is that you would hate to share a flat with me.’

‘The fact is I know it would be a mistake.’

‘For you, perhaps; not for me.’

‘My dear Meriel, if it was a mistake for one of us it would be a mistake for both of us.’

For a long time she stood with her back to me, gazing out of the window without speaking. She was sulking. I went to her and slid my arm through hers.

‘Think how nice it is now, Meriel. When we meet we’re all fresh and full of chatter and delighted to see each other, and in the intervals we have something to look forward to. If we were always together, we couldn’t keep it up. We should be bound to get dull and silent, as bad as a humdrum old married couple. Then you’d have to skip off to some third party, and so it would go on till the whole country was thick with your discarded lovers lying about like fallen ninepins.’

That aspect of the case, as I had foreseen, made an irresistible appeal to Meriel the self-dramatizer and she burst out laughing.

‘You do say dreadful things to me,’ she replied gleefully. ‘But listen to this, Phil. If you won’t agree to my plan you must promise me one thing.’

‘And that is?’

‘Promise first.’

‘Not likely.’

‘Well, you must let me come in the mornings and sit in your studio while you’re working.’

‘Not for anything, my dear.’

‘Why not?’

‘How do you imagine I could work if I had you chattering there?’

‘I won’t chatter. I’ll sit perfectly still. You needn’t take the least notice of me.’

‘Then you might just as well not be there. What good would it be to either of us?’

‘I should feel I had some share in your work.’

‘But, my dear child, I can’t work when other people are there.’

‘Not even me?’

‘Not even you. It puts me off completely.’

‘But Phil, I hate to be shut out of all that side of your life. I want to … to enter into it, to be an inspiration to you, to be your … what is she called? … your Egeria.’

‘Inspiration, Meriel, works just as well, better if anything, at long range. If you want to inspire me, do so from Powis Square.’

Her face clouded again and she turned away. I still held her arm. ‘Forgive me, Meriel; but when you say that kind of thing I can never believe you’re serious. It seems to me quite unreal. We don’t go in for inspiration nowadays, do we? That’s why I make silly, facetious replies. I simply can’t help myself.’

But Meriel’s face remained sullen. ‘I think you’re very unkind,’ she said petulantly.

‘And I,’ I said, trying to undo my offence, ‘think you’re very kind, and if you want to be kinder still you’ll leave me to get on with my work in solitude, since that’s the only way I can work.’

She sighed. ‘I sometimes wonder how you manage to be a painter at all. You don’t seem to have a scrap of romance in you.’

Six months later. How terribly right old Etherton was when he remarked that a grown-up child is an unaccountable and formidable animal, and how wise was his advice to break off as soon as a love affair showed the first signs of going to pieces. For the truth is that Meriel and I are reaching a dead-end from which I see no escape. Is it my fault? I would have been glad enough to continue as we began, meeting twice or thrice a week in that cheerful, irresponsible, idyllic fashion; and if only Meriel had had something to occupy her in the intervals, we might have gone happily on like that for goodness knows how long. The trouble is that, as Etherton would put it, ‘the lady is not inclined to philosophy.’ Moderation is anathema to her, for moderation is unromantic. The lover must abandon himself neck and crop. She was content at first that we should meet two or three times a week, because that was more than we had met previously. But now she demands more still and is aggrieved when I refuse. She complains that it is a sign that I don’t love her. I can’t very well explain to her that I love her only on condition of not seeing her too often, that fundamentally we haven’t much in common, that if we saw more of each other we should certainly like each other less. But I do tell her, what is also true, that my work demands that I shall have a good deal of time to myself. But that, she maintains, is a sign (and I’m not sure she isn’t right) that I prefer my work to her. Also, when I plead engagements with other friends, even when I occasionally dine with old Etherton, she takes it as a slight on her. Isn’t she ready to devote all her time to me? Hasn’t she kept herself free of friends and acquaintances for my sake? Yes, alas, that is only too lamentably true. She has insisted on doing what I have tried so hard to prevent; she has cut herself off from everybody and everything but me.

‘I know now why you keep urging me to study acting,’ she said to me the other day. ‘It’s not because you think I’d be any good or would care tuppence if I were. It’s to keep me out of your way, to stop me bothering you.’

I have never succeeded in fathoming what exactly is the position as regards her husband. Meriel looks at things so much from her own point of view—or rather, from her own points of view, for her point of view alters with every mood—that it is impossible to place much reliance on what she says. A month ago she went home for a fortnight and, I gather, confessed to her husband. She has assured me that he didn’t mind at all, that he said she must do exactly as she liked, that she was to consider herself perfectly free. If he really said that, it means that he is an unusually long-suffering husband, or a very long-sighted one, or very proud, or that Meriel has led him such a dance in the past that he is only too glad to resign and let some other poor devil shoulder the burden. Bitter experience makes me suspect that the last explanation is the true one, for Meriel is certainly a terrible handful. She demands so much of one. She resents my having any life at all, independent of her: it is, for her, mere selfishness on my part that I should want to call my soul my own; and these grievances have gradually during the last few months undermined the charming gaiety that made her in the past such delightful company. Our meetings are becoming less and less the happy feasts they used to be, more and more occasions for argument and recrimination. When she is in these moods, facts and history have no meaning for her. She complains, for instance, that she deserted home and Geordie for me, while I have deserted nothing for her. I remind her that she deserted home and Geordie for the stage, not for me, but she refuses to accept this view, indeed she has ceased to believe in it. A more romantic view has supplanted it. She even accused me, one day, of preventing her from going on the stage and of ruining her career.

‘Why not let us agree, Meriel,’ I said, when she presented me with this astonishing fiction, ‘that I broke into your home by night and tore you screaming from the arms of your husband?’

I begin to doubt if she’s really in love with me at all, and in spite of her periodical parrot-cries that she and Geordie are ‘devoted to each other’, it is clear enough that she isn’t in love with him either. What she really desires, I think, is that he and I should both be desperately in love with her, furiously jealous of each other, and engaged in a romantic struggle to claim her.

Poor Meriel. The actual behaviour of each of us must be exasperating to her. Moreover, the truth is that, though she doesn’t really care two straws about either of us, she’s terribly entangled in both of us. Her conscience, I can see, is continually tormenting her about her home and Geordie, and yet she cannot bear to lose hold of the free, romantic side of life represented, alas how inadequately, by me. She is torn between the two of us and cannot make up her mind to do without either. If it weren’t for that, I would solve the problem for her at once by leaving her. But, as it is, I daren’t, for if I did, Heaven knows what she would do. I believe she’s capable of jumping out of a window simply to punish me. She’s one of those unfortunate people who love to torture themselves and those near to them, and so will not and cannot escape from the hopeless position in which they land themselves.

I hoped at first, after she had confessed to Geordie and they had agreed (if indeed they really did agree) to be free, that her mind would have been set at rest and she would recover her old gaiety and happiness. But nothing of the kind. It is so intolerably unromantic of Geordie not to cherish a hopeless longing for her that she won’t countenance the idea and so the dilemma survives intact. She both has her cake and eats it. What a weary business it all is. I shall think twice next time before I allow myself to be seduced.

And yet from time to time we have happy meetings still. This spring we have begun going into the country occasionally for week-ends. I suggested it in the hope of seeming less parsimonious, and for a while it seemed to give us a new lease of life. On the first occasion Meriel was as excited and gleeful as a child, and when we got into the train she flung herself back in her corner and said with a happy sigh:

‘Well, now I’ve got you all to yourself till Monday.’

Poor little thing! Seeing her so completely happy I was overcome with remorse for my treatment of her, my refusal to share a flat with her, to let her spend whole mornings in my studio, my stern limitations of our meetings. And yet what else could I do? I must have time to work and think and see my other friends. If I hadn’t, I should go stark mad, and then I should be even less use to her than I am at present.

When we were starting on our second week-end expedition a disturbing thing happened. We were in the Refreshment Room at Waterloo station, having some sandwiches before catching our train, when, turning to look at the clock, I found myself face to face with Rose and Jennifer. They must have caught sight of me before I turned, because they were both looking at me and so there was no chance of escaping their notice. At the first shock I felt as if a wave had burst over my head and engulfed me. I stood staring helplessly, and they, seeing my embarrassment, simultaneously prepared to let me escape. But in a moment I had pulled myself together and held out my hand and they came up and were introduced to Meriel. They had only just come in and had not yet ordered anything, so we all stood together for a few minutes while Jennifer came nobly to the rescue with glib conversation. Rose and I, too, timidly exchanged a few pallid words, gazing questioningly at each other across a gulf. Meriel asked Jennifer if she was an artist.

‘I always expect all Philip’s friends to be painters,’ she said.

Jennifer denied the accusation. ‘All the painting I do,’ she said, ‘is painting people’s throats. I’m a doctor.’

Meriel and I had finished and it was time to go for our train. I forced myself to say good-bye and not even to look back as I paused at the door for Meriel to pass out.

Meriel, it appeared, had liked them. If it had been Rhoda Gaunt that we had met she would have been full of dark suspicions and conjectures: she would probably have believed that we had met there by secret arrangement. But now she was care-free. Perhaps she felt that there was safety in numbers, two women instead of one; perhaps the fact that she was going away with me for the week-end made the others seem mere shadows by comparison. How little she guessed that all she had of me, there in the railway carriage with her, was the mere outward husk. My heart, my thoughts were clinging to Rose, the sense of her was tingling through me like electricity. My mind was seething with agitation and self-reproach. What would she think, seeing me going away with another woman? Would she think I had forgotten her, was free and happy without her, that I was unfaithful to our … to my love for her? What a tragic, agonizing joy it had been to see her again, a joy as painful as despair. All the feeling that I had thought to be long since dead had awoken at the mere sight of her to a ferment of rapture and misery. My eyes, my thoughts were blind to the carriage in which we sat, to the station which was now slowly sliding past the windows, to Meriel herself, lively and contented in her corner, until she recalled me by a volley of questions and statements.

Who were they? Had I known them long? Was the one that was a doctor a good doctor? She seemed very nice. I had known her longer than the other, she supposed, because the other hardly spoke. But she too seemed nice and was very pretty, in fact quite beautiful. Was she a doctor too? A pianist! Had she ever played on my piano?

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘once or twice some time ago,’ but recently I had rather lost touch with them both, in fact I hadn’t seen them for over a year.

What a pity. Couldn’t I ask them to tea so that the beautiful one—what was her name? Bentley? What else? Rose? Rose Bentley, what a lovely name!—so that Rose Bentley should play to us?

What a strange creature Meriel is. They say women have strong intuitions, and yet Meriel suspects me of a secret passion for Rhoda and urges me to renew my friendship with Rose,

Four days later. I thought at first that, after that brief, disturbing glimpse of Rose, I should not be able to help making the week-end miserable for Meriel, but the reverse happened. I think the deep, hidden feelings stirred in me by that meeting must have made me kinder, more forbearing, more compassionate to Meriel, for she was as happy as a lark all the time.

But now, two days after our return, a ridiculous accident has spoilt everything. I was to go to her flat this afternoon. I had been very busy all day and was late in starting, and just as I was going to set out Rhoda turned up. She and I had been commissioned to do a series of coloured drawings for a line edition of Byron’s Don Fuan and she had brought the proofs. The publisher had sent them to her with an urgent note asking us to return them as quickly as possible, and she had brought them along at once to me so that we might go over them together.

Knowing Meriel, I ought perhaps to have rung her up and warned her that I should be late, but I thought it would be enough if I explained my lateness when I arrived, and Rhoda and I got to work at once.

It turned out to be a longer business than I had expected; but we hadn’t been at it more than ten minutes when the telephone bell rang. ‘Meriel, confound it!’ I thought to myself as I went out into the hall to answer. And Meriel it was.

‘Is that you, Phil? Aren’t you coming?’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid I shall be late. Have tea: don’t wait for me. I’m horribly busy but I’ll come as soon as I can.’

I hung up the receiver for fear of argument and went back to work.

‘Sorry if I’ve interrupted an engagement,’ said Rhoda.

‘All right. We must get these things done’; and we settled down to work again.

It seemed as if we hadn’t been at it more than five minutes, though no doubt it was really much longer, when the bell rang again. ‘O damn!’ I said as I hurried into the hall again. ‘Yes, yes, it’s me.’

‘Haven’t you started yet?’

‘Yes. I’ve started. I’m nearly half-way there.’

‘Phil,’ Rhoda shouted from the sitting-room, ‘if you like to leave the rest to me …’

‘If you keep on interrupting,’ I said to Meriel, ‘I shall never get finished at all. Sit tight and don’t worry. Good-bye. Starting soon.’

Rhoda smiled dryly when I rejoined her. ‘You seem to be very much in request, Phil.’

‘Request?’ I said hotly. ‘Demand, you mean.’

In another quarter of an hour we had finished and I took a taxi to Powis Square.

I saw at once from Meriel’s face when she let me in that all was for the worst. ‘So you’ve come?’ she said in lofty displeasure.

‘I have indeed,’ I said, ‘and in a taxi, Meriel, at enormous expense. Isn’t that a sufficient testimony…?’

‘Why do you tell me lies?’

‘If you’ll mention what lies I tell I’ll do my best to explain why I tell them.’

‘Then you confess,’ she said sternly, ‘that you do tell me lies?’

‘Not for a moment, Meriel.’

‘You forget, Philip,’ she said, like a detective calmly unveiling a criminal, ‘that one can sometimes hear a good deal through a telephone.’

‘You’d better ring up the Postmaster General and tell him so, Meriel,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be grateful for the testimonial.’

In our earlier days a frivolous reply of that sort would usually puncture Meriel’s solemnity, but this time it infuriated her. ‘There!’ she said. ‘I always know you’re lying when you say idiotic things like that.’

‘But honestly, Meriel, I don’t understand what you’re driving at.’

‘What I’m driving at, as you know perfectly well, is that you told me you were working when you really had someone with you, someone who shouted to you, didn’t she, when …’

So that was it. I understood now. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was Rhoda Gaunt.’

Her eyes glared at me. ‘You actually admit it.’

‘Certainly I do. Wouldn’t it be much worse if I didn’t? If you had given me time I would have told you that Rhoda and I were correcting proofs. I’ve told you already of the Don Fuan illustrations.’

‘And you choose this afternoon, when you’d promised to come to me, to correct proofs with Rhoda Gaunt.’

‘No, I didn’t choose. We neither of us had any choice.’

‘You must think me a great fool, Philip, if you expect me to believe all your stupid little fibs.’

My patience was at an end. ‘If you believe nothing I say, Meriel, there’s not the least use my telling you anything. You’ll have to muddle it out for yourself. In fact I’ll leave you to it.’

I turned my back on her and, before she could stop me, went to the front door, let myself out, and shut it smartly behind me. As I ran down the stairs I heard it open again and Meriel’s voice: ‘Phil! Phil!’

But I didn’t stop. And now as usual, now that my anger has cooled down, I feel ashamed, remorseful, utterly soured. Damnation! How painful and degrading these quarrels are. Yet it seems impossible to avoid them: she never gives me a chance.

Four months later. How strange it is that I should have lived all these months so near to Rose and never once have met her from the time of our separation until that unlikely encounter in Waterloo station. And now seven months have passed since then and I have seen nothing of her until yesterday.

Meanwhile Meriel and I have drifted towards our inevitable destination. Our week-end expeditions did not satisfy her for long. Soon the old complaints and accusations began again. I never knew, when I met her, what mood I was going to find her in: all I could be sure of was that it would not for long be a pleasant one. We were getting along so badly last September that I decided to go to Saltdyke for some weeks and work in peace, and when she was being particularly querulous one evening I told her of my decision.

‘To Saltdyke, where you went last year?’ she said, looking at me suspiciously.

‘Yes, to work.’

Her face became sullen. ‘You’re going to get away from me.’

‘That too,’ I replied.

‘Thank you for being truthful at least.’

‘Why should I try to hide the truth? It’s obvious, isn’t it, that we get on very badly nowadays? When we meet you spend all the time in explaining to me what an unsatisfactory person I am, so I think the best I can do is to relieve you of the unsatisfactory person’s presence for a while.’

She smiled bitterly. ‘That will make you more unsatisfactory still.’

‘Well, anyhow I shan’t be here to bear the brunt of it.’

‘No, Phil; but I shall. It’s all very well for you: you don’t care tuppence whether you see me or not.’

‘If I don’t, it’s your fault, not mine, Meriel. If you spend all the times we’re together in whining and complaining and pointing out my shortcomings, is it any wonder that I don’t find our meetings particularly pleasant nowadays? What we want, it seems to me, is to see less, not more of each other.’

‘If we saw more of each other I should have nothing to complain of.’

‘O yes you would. You would complain that we didn’t see more still. Nothing short of twenty-four hours per diem would satisfy you.’

‘While you think twenty-four hours a week too much. And yet it doesn’t seem much in return for a whole life devoted to you.’

‘O nonsense, Meriel. You may think you devote your life to me, but you don’t. What you do is to try to force me to devote my life and work and friends and body and soul to you and your whims, and I’m not going to. You’d better make up your mind to that once and for all.’

‘Well,’ she said, darkly threatening, ‘I won’t be responsible for what happens when you’ve gone.’

I laughed. ‘Won’t you? Then who will? Certainly not I. You’re responsible for driving me to take refuge from you, so I’m afraid you compel yourself, willy-nilly, to be responsible for the result.’

Perhaps my resolve to go away and my refusal to be impressed by mysterious threats convinced Meriel that by ill temper she had defeated her own ends. Whatever the cause, her mood changed, and by the end of the evening she was at her best. Then, just before I left her, she nestled up to me and laid her head against my arm.

‘Don’t go, Phil,’ she murmured. ‘Go where?’

‘To Saltdyke. I’ll promise to be very good.’

‘But you can’t promise to paint my pictures, my child. I must go and get through some solid work.’

‘Then you’re not running away from me?’

‘Not if you’re nice. If you’re nice, I’m going away to work; but if you aren’t, I’m going to escape from you and taking the opportunity to do some work at the same time.’

She became querulous again. ‘But Phil, I have a foreboding that something terrible will happen if you go away.’

‘And I, my dear, have a foreboding that something even more terrible will happen if I don’t.’

She looked at me sharply. ‘And what is that?’

‘That I shan’t get my pictures done in time for the show,’ I said mendaciously.

Meriel hovered between laughter and querulousness, I maintained an attitude of light banter, but we were each of us really in deadly earnest, determined at all costs to have our own way. When she realized that she couldn’t stop me going she assumed a mood of lofty resentment, and when at last I left her flat she clung to me silently and stubbornly, so that I had to unfasten her fingers and tear myself from her. She fell back tragically into a chair, skilfully pretending I had pushed her and, bowing herself over the arm, burst into sobs. But I was angry and determined not to be drawn, and banging to the door behind me I hurried downstairs, sick with remorse and exasperation.

But the picture of Meriel—poor bewildered, frustrated, incorrigible child—sobbing in her chair as though her heart would break, haunted me; and even though I knew that at least half of it was a fake, a put-up job, it finally broke down my resistance, so that next day I rang her up and told her I wasn’t going to Saltdyke after all.

‘Why not?’ Her voice sounded sharply inquisitive.

‘Because you don’t want me to.’

‘Is that the real, true, and only reason, Phil?’

‘Absolutely. Honour bright.’

‘Thank you, my dear, a thousand times. It’s very, very sweet of you.’

Well, I had made her happy for a while and salved my conscience, or rather, I had laid the tiresome ghost that roused my remorse; but involuntarily I exacted my price for submission, for in my heart I bore her a grudge for wantonly trading on my feelings and obstructing my work. I realized wearily that it was the worst policy to give in. I hadn’t really done anything to help either of us, in fact all I had done was to encourage Meriel to be more exacting and more unscrupulous than before.

Next time we met I seemed to see a secret triumph behind her gratitude. I resented it and very likely I was short-tempered and unkind in consequence and so helped her to spoil our evening once again. Anyhow, before long we were once more on the worst of terms.

Was it simply cowardice that prevented me from insisting that we should part? Was it a secret aversion from dropping back into celibacy? Or was it that I couldn’t bring myself to inflict such cruelty on her, even though I felt certain that in the end it would be kind? Probably it was a mixture of all three that held me in check and prolonged our miserable intimacy. My visits to her had by now become a mere drudgery and when I spent the night at her flat I came away feeling ashamed and disgusted, like a drunkard who has relapsed once more into the vicious habit from which he struggles in vain to free himself. Now, when it was time for me to start from my flat to hers I delayed and dawdled in my studio; I hated every yard of the journey, the sickeningly familiar streets and houses, the turnings that brought me nearer and nearer to my destination; and as I approached her door my steps grew involuntarily slower and slower. More than once I turned away when I reached it and wandered in a wide circle through the hateful streets and squares, unable to bring myself to ring the bell. And when I did at last go in, I found Meriel all on edge with waiting.

The day came at last, after I had wandered in a wider circle than ever, when I couldn’t bring myself to return to her door and, almost without being conscious of the decision, made my way instead to where the bus stopped that took me home.

The sun was shining and, as I sat on the top of the bus, a sweet, cool air blew refreshingly on my face. I took off my hat and gave myself up to watching the houses stream past me. My mind was empty of everything but a dull, gnawing resentment and a growing sense of relief that Meriel’s flat was behind me and receding and diminishing at every moment. And there was one thing besides, something that lurked darkly behind those other feelings, the small, disturbing menace of the unknown result of what I had done. For I was afraid of Meriel, afraid of the grown-up child which Etherton had said was such an unaccountable and formidable animal. What would she do? To what mad retaliation would this provoke her? I had no plan when I turned away from her door and came home, no determination never to return, to break with her for good and all. I had turned away simply because I was too sick and tired to face another visit at that particular moment.

I left the bus at Oxford Circus and began to walk home along Oxford Street; then turned north up Tottenham Court Road, then east into Bedford Square. When I reached its north-east corner I crossed the road.

Was it a sudden memory that made me glance back before continuing on my way to Russell Square? I was not conscious of the memory until the moment when it became reality, the moment when I saw Rose coming towards me with her music-case in her hand as she had done that afternoon over two years ago at the beginning of our friendship. And just as she had done then, so now she raised her head, saw me and smiled.

‘You’re coming back from your music lesson,’ I said.

‘Quite right, and going home to tea.’

‘Might I … would you mind if I walked with you?’

‘Do, Philip,’ she said, and we walked together towards her home.

‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ I said to her, ‘that you’ve gone on living where you live and I’ve gone on living where I live and we’ve only met twice in more than two years?’

But as we walked along together it seemed to me that those years had fallen out of time and we were back again at the first stage of our friendship. Only too soon we reached her door. But as I prepared to leave her she said: ‘Won’t you come in and have tea, Philip? It’s so nice to see you again.’

I followed her up the stairs in a dream and once again stood in the familiar hall, entered the bright, familiar sitting-room. I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t grasp its reality; it was too miraculous. The tea-table was waiting in its usual place; the blue cups and saucers, the silver teapot were there, miraculously preserved from the destruction of the world in which I had once known them. There was only one cup on the tray: Jennifer, Rose explained, was nowadays busy till dinner-time. And then the door opened and Martha, risen from the tomb, large, grim and formidable as usual, came in with the tea. I was immensely flattered when the stern mask of clay creased into a smile at the sight of me.

Rose asked me about my work and we sat talking as we used to talk, opposite the picture I had painted for her. I had almost forgotten what it was like, and it seemed to me now, as I examined it, that it had a certain free, lyrical quality which, whatever I had gained since, I had lost nowadays. Then I let my eyes wander about that room whose charming colours had always seemed to me a reflexion of Rose herself. How comforting and healing it was, after all the worry and exasperation of the last hour and all these last months, to sit there with Rose, to see her again not with the dull, frustrated vision of the mind’s eye, but in her living and moving beauty; to hear the living tones of her voice which, except for those brief, thwarted moments in Waterloo station, had been silent for me for over two years. How little I thought, when I set out for Meriel’s flat, that I should soon be sitting not with Meriel, but, as if by a miracle, with Rose in Rose’s flat.

The thought of Meriel again pricked my mind with a little sting of vague menace, and with that came the desire to tell Rose the whole story. It was not that I wanted her advice or help: it was simply that I wanted her to know, so that I should have kept nothing from her. And so I told her that Meriel Filmer, the woman with whom she and Jennifer had met me at Waterloo station, was my mistress and I described the deadlock to which we had come and what had happened this afternoon.

‘It’s a wretched business, Rose,’ I said. ‘It seems that as soon as love enters into the bond between two people, it begins at once to set them at cross-purposes. Meriel, by dint of trying to make me love her more and more, has brought me to the point of … well, if I were honest I should say, of hating her.’

‘But how do you mean,’ said Rose, ‘that she tried to make you love her more? Is there any way of making people love you? Love is a matter of giving, not of claiming.’ She spoke as if she were stating an obvious fact.

‘That’s perfectly true, Rose,’ I said; ‘and I have only recently come to realize it. Meriel has taught me that. In fact the truth is, I believe, that she doesn’t really love me any more than I love her. But something makes her hold on to me, a sort of obsession for which, unfortunately for me, she has selected me as the object. I sometimes think that if I hadn’t turned up at the particular moment when we first met, almost anyone else would have answered her purpose as well.’

‘But you loved her at first, Philip?’

‘No, not at first; though afterwards I came to love her in a fashion. At first I was merely flattered by her infatuation, and being in an idle and reckless mood at the time I gave in to it. I don’t mean I didn’t like her: on the contrary, I found her very attractive and amusing. And so she is, at her best.’

‘I’m sure she is,’ said Rose.

‘Of course I’m the one who is to blame,’ I went on. ‘I ought never to have given in to her. I thought, you see, that it was possible for two people, with a certain amount of care—by treating the thing, I mean, almost as a work of art; by exercising all sorts of discretion and consideration and co-operation and intelligence; in fact, by being highly conscious and philosophical about it—to have a very happy and successful love affair. Do you think that very cold-blooded, Rose?’

‘Not in the least. On the contrary, I think that is necessary in every kind of love; in marriage too, I mean.’

‘The trouble was, you see, that I never, even after we …’

‘After you began living together?’ said Rose.

‘Just so. Even after we began living together, I never loved her as … what shall I say? … as furiously as she loved me. If I had, I suppose I should have been ready to hand myself over, body and soul; and that, no doubt, would have satisfied her. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t sacrifice my independence. I was determined still to call my soul my own. That was where I fell short.’

‘Fell short? Why do you call it falling short, Philip? It was just the opposite. It seems to me a horrible thing that anyone should try to surrender his individuality, give himself away, body and soul. Besides, it can’t be done. All that happens, if one tries, is that one empties oneself and becomes a mere wax doll with nothing, not even sawdust, inside. There’s nothing left, after that, for the other to love. After all, what you love in anyone is his individuality, his personality, and if he surrenders that, he actually changes; he ceases to be the person you loved.’

‘That’s perfectly true,’ I said. ‘Meriel has changed. She’s no longer, for me, the same charming, cheerful person she used to be.’

‘It seems to me,’ Rose went on, ‘that, so far from surrendering his individuality, what a lover ought to do is to keep it bright and keen and at its best, to make it …’

‘A temple worthy of the Holy Ghost.’

Her face lit up with a sudden smile. ‘Yes, Philip,’ she said.

‘All the same, the lover must surely give, in a sense?’

‘O certainly. Love is a continual giving, isn’t it; a free gift without thought of return.’

‘Then what about the recipient? Must she not give too?’

‘Surely if she can give, she does give?’

‘And if she can’t, she mustn’t pretend to.’

‘Yes, Philip, that’s the point. It’s pretending, even when it’s done from the kindest motives, that sets everything at cross-purposes.’

‘And in the end there comes a point, the point I have reached with Meriel, when pretence ceases to be possible any longer. What a wise person you are, Rose. Where did you get all your wisdom?’

She glanced at me with raised eyebrows, as if surprised. Then a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. ‘From books, perhaps,’ she said.

When I left her I asked her if she would sometimes come to see me. She agreed willingly, but just as I was going to add a specific invitation I checked myself. I must not be too importunate. I must send her a note, give her a chance to refuse if she wanted to refuse.

‘I’m going home, to Downchurch, to-morrow for a month,’ she said; ‘but when I get back I’ll ring you up.’

I was so steeped in my new-found happiness that the news of her going away hardly disturbed it.

ROSE

Philip has just gone. how delightful and how painful it is to have found him again, delightful to be friends once more and painful to know that we can never be more, because he no longer needs me. At first, as we sat and talked over tea just now, he seemed to me quite unchanged, the same, I mean as he was in the first happy months of our friendship. But he isn’t, as I soon discovered. He has matured, gained possession of himself as he would never have done if we hadn’t parted. I saw it in a hundred ways. No, he has no need of me now, nor, for the present, of any other woman. In fact he has had an overdose of us, poor boy. But in a year or two he will meet a third, and with her, thanks to Meriel and me, he will be happy.

How astonishing it was to hear him pouring out, in his account of himself and Meriel, an exact account of himself and me. Every phrase he uttered about Meriel I have said to myself about him during the last two years. Write Rose for Philip and Philip for Meriel, and the story could be applied to us, him and me, without altering a single word. And yet, though he has come to know so much, I don’t think he yet sees the connection. Ought I to point it out to him, turn over the switch, so to speak, and flood his mind with sudden illumination? Might not that be of enormous help to him? I don’t know. It may be that connections such as that, provided from outside, are dangerous, that it is better for each of us to achieve his own illumination.

Two and a half years ago we were both ignorant and hopelessly bewildered. To part was the only thing to do, yet how often have I repented, when the thought of what I inflicted on him has become too painful to face. I did it, in my ignorance, so clumsily, like a bad surgeon making a barbarous muddle of an operation. The memory of his misery during those last days has haunted me all this time, filling me with remorse. Over and over again his face and his attitude, as he stood beside the door there and offered, poor boy, to set me free, returned to me so vividly that I wept again as bitterly as I did that evening after he had gone. At the moment I hadn’t the courage, seeing him standing there so forlorn, to accept the freedom he offered, and so I cruelly raised his hopes by refusing it, and then, realizing the fatal mistake I had made, wrecked them next day by the letter I wrote. How inhumanly I treated him. But I didn’t know what to do. One has to be very wise to be able to control such a painful and complicated situation, and I wasn’t wise; I was ignorant and bewildered almost as much as he was, and so, unintentionally, I made the ordeal worse for both of us.

In the months after we had parted I gradually forgot the change in him that had so quickly undermined our happiness, and remembered only the real Philip, with his charming, affectionate, schoolboyish earnestness, his bright intelligence, his gaiety; and recalling that, I felt more and more that my behaviour to him was unforgivable.

But now, much more than ever, I realize how fortunate it was for both of us that we parted. If we had married then we should have bound each other inescapably to our immaturity. Each of us would have been hopelessly and permanently maimed. For myself, I feel that in this year or two of retrospection in which I have pondered over and over again every detail of our little disaster, I have gathered a whole lifetime of wisdom. And it has been the same with Philip: he too has gathered wisdom from the lamentable cross-purposes in which he became involved with me and that poor little woman. In our different ways we both made him suffer; we opened his eyes through suffering, and now he has recovered, recovered from both of us. He is free from us both and from his old self, ready for our successor.

Was it offended pride that gave me that sharp pang of jealousy at our meeting in Waterloo station? I don’t know: but I do know that the jealousy was not personal; I felt no hostility against her or against Philip either. Philip and I hardly spoke. It was like ghost facing ghost with an impassable barrier between us.

My heart ached. Afterwards I thought of writing to him, not to suggest another meeting but just to assure him of my goodwill, but I decided in the end that it was better not to. I had no business, I realized, to intrude. A letter from me could do little else but disturb dead passions, unsettle him and perhaps injure her. How glad I am now that I didn’t write. If I had done so, I might now be haunted by the belief that I was in part responsible for breaking up their friendship. And yet what a consolation it would have been to me to put to rest the sense of frustration and estrangement which that meeting had served to increase. But all that is ended now. We are friends again, though it is too late, with him, for more than friendship. I realize that.

PHILIP

The same evening. I walked home from Rose’s flat warmed and comforted, recalling, as I walked, the changing beauty of her face and those tones and inflections of her voice which never fail to stir me as a glass bowl is stirred to music at the sound of its key-note. How sane, reliable and human she seemed after the changeful, unpredictable, formidable Meriel. Meriel, the Meriel of nowadays, leaves me dry and barren after every meeting; but after this short hour with Rose I felt as if my heart had broken into blossom. Her face stirred in me that same rapture which I had first felt when I saw her standing for that moment in the doorway of the Ethertons’ drawing-room, leaning forward, her hand on the doorpost, with the half-shy, half-eager look in her eyes. Was I then in love with her again?

Ah, I realized now that, except for a brief interval of bitterness after our parting, I had never ceased to be in love with her; and I climbed the stairs to my flat in a dream, opened my door, and confronted Meriel. She stood there as if waiting to catch me the moment I entered.

‘Hallo, Meriel,’ I said, trying lamely and guiltily to sound cordial.

She stared at me with a kind of sullen fear, and I thought I saw her body sway slightly. Was she ill or insane? The sight of her alarmed me.

‘Come in here,’ I said, turning towards the door of the studio.

She seized my arm. ‘No, not there, Phil!’ she said. ‘The sitting-room.’

‘But why?’

‘I hate the studio.’

‘As you like,’ I said and stood aside to let her pass.

I followed her into the sitting-room and there she turned and faced me. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked with fierce breathlessness. ‘Why didn’t you come?’

‘Sit down, Meriel,’ I said. ‘Don’t get so excited.’

She ignored my suggestion and remained standing, fixing me with angry, sullen eyes.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘How long? How do I know? Hours! Ages!’

‘Have you had tea?’

‘Tea? Of course I haven’t. The tea’s still waiting for you at home.’

‘Then you must have some. I’ll make you some at once.’

‘I don’t want tea,’ she said angrily. ‘What I want is to know why you didn’t come.’

‘I didn’t come, Meriel, because I couldn’t. I found at the last minute that I couldn’t.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t,’ she said with such conviction that I could almost have believed she knew the truth.

‘Well, if I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, I suppose; and if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t.’

Her lip trembled and I felt ashamed of my silly quibbling.

‘Where have you been?’ she repeated, and a note of tears in her anger alarmed me. The prospect of her breaking down horrified me. If only she kept up her anger it would be less unbearable for both of us.

‘What does it matter where I’ve been,’ I said, determined not to evade the issue any longer. ‘The point is that I didn’t come because I felt I couldn’t come. I got as far as your door and then my courage failed me and I turned back.’

‘Your courage?’

‘Yes, courage for another of our querulous, acrimonious meetings. Surely you too felt relieved when I didn’t turn up, because you can’t enjoy them any more than I do.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ she asked resentfully.

‘Yours, Meriel, and yours only. Even you, I hope, won’t go to the length of saying that I start these wretched bickerings?’

Her face had grown more and more lowering as I spoke. ‘Yes I will. It’s you that make me start, anyhow. You drive me to it in your calm, horribly reasonable way, and then you turn round and pretend it’s all my fault.’

‘Well, if I drive you to it—and God knows I don’t try to—the best thing I can do is to keep away from you, isn’t it? That stands to reason.’

Poor little creature, she made a gesture of hopeless despair that cut me to the heart. I felt as if I had been tormenting a defenceless child.

‘Meriel, try to believe that, in intention at least, I’m innocent. We’re both the victims of circumstances, that’s what it is. We’ve got ourselves somehow into such a muddle, to such a pitch of cross-purposes that it’s hopeless.’

For a moment or two she looked at me dully. I don’t think she had taken in a word of what I had said. Then with a quick movement she turned and, after glancing slowly round the room as if for the last time, went towards the door. A moment later I heard the front door open and shut. She had gone.

How silent and empty the house had suddenly become. I stood where she had left me. My hands were trembling: I felt tired out. Then with a deep sigh, as if clearing my chest of a load of depression and bewilderment, I went over to the window and looked out.

Down below, no bigger than a small, agitated doll, she was hurrying blindly across the roadway of the square, looking neither to right nor left. A car shot towards her. It looked, from where I watched, as if by some inevitable mechanism they were bound to crash together. God, couldn’t the fellow see her? My arm shot out with a sudden spasmodic movement. The car swerved violently and missed her, but she never even noticed it. As I watched her she reached the pavement. There she paused for a moment and glanced back at my windows. Then, as if escaping from a burning house, she hurried on and vanished round the corner.

Cars flowed through the square, stream mixing for a moment with stream and then resolving itself into its own channel. People on the pavements, small ant-like shapes, converged slowly into clots, disentangled themselves, thinned into scattered units. All seemed parts of a great meaningless machine endlessly labouring to produce nothing. But for me, after the conflicting emotions of the last few hours it seemed that life had run down to a standstill. Rose had come back and vanished again for a while: Meriel and I had reached a crisis, like a storm that has burst at last after burdening the nights and days with growing menace, and were now becalmed for a moment in a lull of doubtful import. I was left, standing there in my empty flat, as if in a solitary limbo.

With the automatic bias of the worker to his work I drifted from the sitting-room to the studio. I did not expect to be able to work. My idea, I think, was to ponder vaguely, as one does in idle moments, over the half-finished picture on the easel. The studio door was shut. I opened it and then stood paralysed in the doorway. For a moment I could not understand what I saw. Then I realized. Meriel, of course, had done it. The canvas on the easel was ripped across from corner to corner.

It is a terrible thing to have a thing one has created after weeks of ardent thought and labour suddenly destroyed: it is almost as if a part of oneself had been killed. I stood in the doorway staring at the gaping canvas in cold anguish, and then, as I turned away, I saw my palette-knife lying on the floor near the foot of the easel. I went back to the sitting-room and sat down. I remembered how Meriel had stopped me when I tried to go into the studio; I remembered how, as she hurried away across the square, she had glanced back and then hurried on again as if escaping from something. My wretched picture had stood, in her eyes, for my work, my friends, all that part of my life which was independent of her, the part she had tried in vain to annihilate, and she had taken her revenge on it.

Yet, when I had recovered from the first shock, I began to feel in a way glad at what she had done. Some secret part of me has felt, all this time, that I have wronged Meriel and often I have been seized with remorse for cruelty towards her, even though it was cruelty into which she had goaded me. But now, by this furious act, Meriel had got her own back and I was glad. I was glad, too, I believe, to have a definite, tangible grievance against her. This at least she could never claim was my fault and not hers. And yet might she not? For it was not the normal Meriel, the happy child, who had done this thing. It was a Meriel driven frantic, if not wholly by me, nor wholly by her own nature, at least by our miserable connection, the friction of two hopelessly incompatible creatures. Yes, we are both to blame, yet both powerless to avert our inevitable fate.

Next day. To-day has been an empty day. I went out in the morning and did not return till bedtime, for fear Meriel should ring me up or even call to see me. It was not merely that I dreaded another meeting, whatever its nature. It was, even more, that I felt it would be madness to meet again. We ought to have broken free months ago, when, as old Etherton said in his little lecture on love affairs, we could still retain pleasant memories of our days and nights together; but though I had lacked the courage and determination to do so then, I must do so now at all costs.

When I got home just now there was no sign from Meriel. I hope against hope that she too has realized our bankruptcy at last and determined to make an end, to abandon me and save me from abandoning her.

Next morning. It was too much to expect. This morning’s post has just brought a letter.

‘What can I say? How can I begin, my dear, dear Phil? If only I had arrived a moment later I should have found your door locked and been unable to get in. But Mrs. Batten was coming out as I reached the top of the stairs and she let me in. I did it in a moment of madness. I looked into the sitting-room and then into your studio and found you were not there, and then I saw the picture on the easel and the knife on the table, waiting. O, if only you had been there, Phil! It seems as if Fate had set a trap for me—Mrs. Batten ready to let me in, you away, the knife ready on the table. As soon as I had done it I was horrified, terrified, and ran into the sitting-room to get away from it. O Phil, why weren’t you there to save me from myself? No, not from myself, but from the madness that came over me at that dreadful moment. When I got home I flung myself on my bed and lay there weeping and trembling till it was quite dark. It seemed like a horrible, horrible dream from which I couldn’t wake. Each time I came to myself I hoped to find it was a nightmare, but there it was still, real and true, staring at me. How can I make you believe that it is only my love for you that makes me so frantic sometimes? If only you will forgive me I promise always, always to be good, to do whatever you want. Only let me be your slave: that will be enough, more than enough for me. I have been trying all day to write to you, but I was so exhausted, my mind was in such a fever, that I didn’t know how to begin. The words wouldn’t come. Come and see me, Phil dear, or let me come and see you, and all shall be as it was in the early days. I will never be jealous or sulky or reproachful again, I promise. I will believe everything you tell me. Please, please let us begin again.’

Begin again! The very thought is a nightmare. Poor Meriel, we have nothing left to begin with. If only she had kept her anger, how much easier it would have been. What am I to do? I no longer feel the faintest spark of resentment against her for destroying my wretched picture and I would willingly tell her so. Poor little creature! What I long to do is to write and tell her what I truly feel, that there’s nothing for me to forgive either about the picture or anything else. But if I were to do so she would never understand that we can’t begin again. How can I convince her that all’s finished? If only she weren’t such a child, such an impulsive, unreasoning creature, we could talk it over quietly and amicably and then say good-bye. But that, with Meriel, is inconceivable. In five minutes, calm, reason, and self-control would be scattered to the four winds and she would be imploring, reproaching, sulking, flying into a fury, and we would find ourselves plunged again into a thousand antagonisms. No, we mustn’t talk; we mustn’t meet.

The same evening. I shall not answer her letter. It’s the only way. And to-morrow I shall go away, to Saltdyke. Is that cowardly? No, it’s the only way that isn’t cowardly. If I did what I would like to do I would let her know that the picture is forgiven and forgotten. But that would be a disastrous mistake: it would merely raise hopes of a reconciliation. I hate the idea that she will think me implacable and mean; but, as things are, isn’t it better for her that she should? The worse she thinks of me, the better, the easier for her. If only she could bring herself to despise me, it would help her more than anything else, I believe, to free herself from me.

A fortnight later. When I arrived here a fortnight ago I found Saltdyke as I found it on that day two years ago when I first saw it. The marshland bent was dried to a pale gold, the pale gold of the sands: sea and sky were fathomless blue. My friends at the inn had again transformed the tea-room into a studio for me and my old bedroom was ready.

But for some days I did no work, but spent the time in long walks across the marsh and up and down the coast, renewing my love of the place after all these months of absence. Once again I dived off the wooden groyne into the stinging October sea and swam till breath and muscle failed me. But after a few days, though I did not completely give up my walks, I got to work and have worked steadily ever since.

No word has come from Meriel. What, I wonder, is she doing, poor little thing? What is she thinking? Day by day, in the stillness that wraps this place, I have waited with a vague anxiety lest the silence should be broken, like a man far from rumours and newspapers listening for the faint, dreaded sound of guns on the frontier. But no sound has come, and that is a reassuring sign, for it means that she has bowed to the inevitable, as I myself had done when I came here two years ago. How well I remember what I suffered then: the memory of it makes me feel the more keenly for Meriel who is even now going through the same ordeal. Will the time come, I wonder, when all the bitterness has been forgotten and we can meet again as friends, as Rose and I have met?

In the quiet, busy life I lead here the thought of Rose and of our coming meeting a fortnight hence warms my heart. But I am not impatient. I shall work on soberly here till time brings the day. What do I hope for? What more can I hope for than her friendship, happy meetings week by week perhaps? I dare not look more closely into the future.

So the days pass, days filled by working and walking, evenings spent in the bar with a mug of beer, smoking and talking in the leisurely, comfortable manner known only to the frequenters of country inns. And my thoughts move from my work to the changing scenes about me, from Rose and me to Meriel and me. In this pause in my relations with both of them I have ample time to ponder on all that has passed in these two years and a half, and I have come to see how curiously parallel the two cases are, the case of Rose and me with the case of me and Meriel, for in the first I played the part which Meriel played in the second. Yes, I who during the last year have been wearily lamenting the reckless impulsiveness, the lack of self-control and self-knowledge, the grasping importunity of Meriel, the grown-up child, must have been, during my brief, unfortunate engagement to Rose, just such another grown-up child myself. Rose must very soon have discovered that and was driven to the only possible solution. What a light that discovery throws on everything. Old Etherton knew it, or suspected it, and in his wise, dry, cynical way tried to set me on guard against myself. But I hardly listened to him. It is Meriel and not Etherton who, unconsciously and at what cost to herself, has achieved my education and converted me from childhood to something like responsible manhood.

Eleven days later. To-morrow I shall go back to London. It will be four weeks, all but two days, since Rose went away and I must be back before her so that I shall be there, ready, when she rings me up.

MERIEL

Next day. He has come back. I SAW HIM THIS evening, but I shall never go to his flat again. How many times during the last month have I walked past it, always to see the windows shut and know that he was still away. Twice I have actually climbed the stairs and, after pausing to summon up my courage, knocked at the door. The first time was two days after I had written to him and received no reply. I have never written again. What would have been the use? But I thought that if I could have seen him I might make him understand, and so, when no reply came, I went to Brunswick Square and knocked at his door. I could hear, at the first knock, that the flat was empty and when I got back into the square I saw that the windows were closed. He had gone, then. He was determined not to see me. And yet it was only one half-finished picture that I had destroyed. It was a terrible thing to do, but surely not unforgivable, considering how he had provoked me? But the truth is, he was only too glad to have a grievance against me. I might have known it. If I had thought for a minute before I did it, I would have seen that in injuring him I should be much more deeply injuring myself. But how can one think at such times? To be able to do so one would have to be as cold and sensible and heartless as Philip himself. Yes, he is cold and heartless. I believe I could hate him if only I could rid my mind of his presence, his eyes, the curve of his lips, the touch of his hair and slim brown hands. If his mind and will could be destroyed and I could have him as a mere doll, deaf, speechless, obedient, I believe I should be perfectly content. There would be nothing to fight against then; everything to love.

This afternoon at last, when I again passed his flat, I saw with a leap of the heart that the windows were open and went trembling upstairs. On the landing I paused and listened. Yes, someone was there; somebody was moving about inside. I tapped at the door and waited in terror. There was a deathly pause: then footsteps came to the door. But I could hear at once that they weren’t Philip’s.

It was Mrs. Batten who opened the door. She said that Philip was coming back this evening.

‘From Saltdyke?’

‘Yes, from Saltdyke. He said he would be back about a quarter to seven.’

Ah, then I should know, if I looked at a Railway Guide, what time his train reached Victoria.

How strange it felt to be anxiously watching for Philip again in Victoria, as I had watched—how long ago? It seems years and years—for him and Rhoda Gaunt. It was as if the nightmare which tormented me on the night before that earlier watching had got me in its clutches again. But life, it seems, is like that; a dream now happy, now horrible, that repeats itself over and over again, always a little different, always really the same, till one gets tired out by its miseries and hopeless struggles and longs to be done with it.

The train was late, and as I stood there, tired, wretched, devoured by anxiety, my resistance suddenly and gently gave way. I would struggle no more. Why should I go on torturing myself? I turned to go. As I did so I saw that the train had come in and the people were streaming along the platform.

O why didn’t I hurry away as I had determined to do? What was it that made me pause at a safe distance for one last glimpse of him? And there he came, among the others, but for me so utterly, so agonizingly apart from all the others. He came through the gate and then I saw that someone was with him., a woman. No, it was not Rhoda Gaunt. It was the beautiful girl we had met, he and I, in Waterloo station when we were going away together for the week-end. And as they came along together he turned his face to her with just that same earnest attentiveness with which he used to turn to me.

You have dealt me your last blow, Phil. I will leave you free now.

PHILIP

The same day. I am almost tempted to believe in that flattering, romantic: Fate in which poor Meriel had so much confidence, for unexpected happiness makes the most cynical of us romantic and then Coincidence becomes too cold and mechanical a name for the happy accident that visits us only once or twice in a lifetime.

I left Saltdyke this afternoon, as I had intended, so as to be back in London when Rose arrived sometime during the next few days. I had to change, of course, at Beresford, and as I stood inspecting the bookstall on the main platform and waiting for the London train, a voice, Rose’s voice, spoke my name. Flow could the blind hand of Chance have fashioned so blissful a surprise? But wasn’t I, too, blind and insensitive not to have known, the moment I got into the train at Saltdyke, that she was in it?

‘How did you discover Saltdyke?’ she asked when we had taken our seats in the London train. ‘I never took you there when you stayed with us at Downchurch, did I?’

After a moment’s hesitation I told her how I had discovered Saltdyke, how I had started from London to follow her to Downchurch and then, pulling myself together at the last minute, had left the train at Saltdyke and given up the pursuit. ‘But this time,’ I said, ‘I’ve been escaping from Meriel, not failing to follow you.’

I told her of what had occurred since I had seen her and of how, after thinking often of what had happened during the last: few years, I had discovered the strange resemblance between my behaviour to her and Meriel’s to me.

She smiled. ‘So you’ve discovered that?’ she said.

‘And you’ve discovered it too?’

‘Yes, when you were telling me, a month ago, about Meriel, every single thing you said of your troubles might have been said of mine.’

‘Yours with me?’

‘With you. That’s why you thought me so wise, Philip. When you asked me where I got my wisdom, the true answer would have been: “From you.” It was you who taught me.’

‘Poor Rose, didn’t I just? And Meriel has taught me. It seems that lessons, even when one is grown-up, are just as disagreeable as they used to be when we were children. If I had known as much two years ago as I know now….’

But Rose interrupted me. ‘Do you remember, Philip, when I failed you that evening when we were to dine and go to the Queen’s Hall?’

‘I do, indeed.’

‘And that afternoon when I was coming to tea and turned back?’

‘And I ran after you, but you dodged me. How did you manage it, Rose?’

Rose laughed. ‘Never you mind,’ she said. ‘But do you know why I behaved like that?’

‘Yes. For the same reason that I cut my engagement with Meriel a month ago; because you simply couldn’t face it. Was I so insufferable, then, by that time?’

‘You were no longer the Philip I had first met. You had ceased to be yourself.’

‘And had become, what?’

‘What you told me Meriel had become.’

‘Yes, a large open mouth, like a helpless, unfledged bird, clamouring for food.’

‘For more food,’ said Rose, ‘than there was in the larder, than there ever could be in even the most richly stocked larder.’

For some moments we were silent, each watching the woods and fields that wheeled past the carriage window. ‘The truth is,’ I said at last, ‘that love is a very complicated business.’

‘It’s we that are complicated, not love,’ said Rose. ‘Love, like goodness, is too simple for us. We can’t cope with it till we have learned to be simple ourselves.’

When we reached Victoria I saw her into a taxi and left her to go home alone.

Six months later. Yes, I have grown up: I am my own master. It is not from mere diplomacy nor because I now know the inevitable consequences, that I no longer try, as I vainly used to try, to devour Rose like a hungry shark; it is from human understanding. I am no longer the exorbitant child that howls for the unattainable: I have found the happiness that comes of temperance and acquiescence in our human nature. What a stupid, voracious animal I was before. I spent my time, it seems, in trying to swallow Rose whole, and I don’t believe it ever occurred to me to ask myself whether, perhaps, she might prefer not to be swallowed. Like all animals I was an egoist: I simply obeyed my hunger. Why was I like that? Was it because of my motherless childhood, and because my Aunt Lucy, warm-hearted though she really was, was such a perfect English lady that she could never bring herself to express more than merely elegant feelings?

But when the tables were turned, when Meriel tried to swallow me whole, that was a very different matter. Then I was up in arms at once. Is it, then, simply because Meriel tried to swallow me that I have arrived at years of discretion? No: that, by itself, would have done nothing to awaken me. That is only half the reason. The other half is that Meriel, besides trying to swallow me, enabled me, by learning to understand her, unconsciously to understand myself, so that when at last I realized the connection between her and myself of two years ago, the discovery came as a revelation, a revelation for which I was ready.

That is why Rose is no longer driven to fight shy of me. I no longer think only of myself. And that isn’t a virtue in me, it is an automatic impulse. The only conscious virtue I practise is the crafty one of not even seeking her company as much as, I believe, she is ready to give it. That I do deliberately, artfully, and with the greatest difficulty. And so—miraculous change—it is she, now, who seeks me out, not I her. Is she beginning to feel for me a little of what I feel for her? I daren’t guess. I know only that she is happy when we’re together, and we have been together a great deal during the last six months.

Next day. Last night I dreamed of Meriel, a strange, tragic dream which has haunted me ever since. I was in Beresford station, waiting, it seemed, for the Saltdyke train. I was surprised that it wasn’t standing at its platform, as it always is when the train from London gets in, and I walked up and down waiting for it. Then I realized that I was waiting on the wrong platform, number three instead of number four, and I tried to hurry across to number four with the heavy-footed helplessness that: sometimes assails one in dreams. When I got to number four the train was still there, but at the sight of it I discovered that I had made a mistake. I really wanted to get to London, not to Saltdyke. At that moment the train started and I stood watching it move down the platform. Then I noticed that Meriel was leaning out of one of the windows. She was trying to attract my attention. She was smiling and holding out to me a large bunch of red roses. I ran to take them from her, but I couldn’t catch up, the train was going too fast. It carried her and her roses away and I stopped running and found to my amazement that the station was no longer Beresford but Victoria.

The dream was so vivid that it has clung to me all day. Surely, I thought, I might write to her now and make my peace, explain to her why I never answered her letter, tell her that the picture and all our differences were long since forgotten, and ask her to forgive all the pain I caused her. But where is she? She must by this time have returned to her home. Surely she can’t have stayed on in Powis Square.

I wrote to her this evening. I couldn’t remember her home address, so I directed the letter to Powis Square. No doubt it will be forwarded.

A fortnight later. A fortnight, and Meriel has not replied. Did I write too soon? Does she still feel too bitter?

This afternoon Rose came to tea and afterwards played to me—Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, and last of all that Mozart Sonata she played at the Ethertons’ the very first time I saw her. Did she end with that on purpose? No, she could hardly remember—what reason would she have to remember?—that she had played it on that evening three years ago.

She was still sitting at the piano, with her hands on the music-stand, when I asked her point-blank:

‘If I asked you to marry me, Rose, what would you say?’

She did not move, she did not even take her hands from the music-stand, but she turned her adorable face to me. ‘The same as last time, Phil,’ she said, and she rose from the piano and came to me.

Next day. I received a letter this morning in an unknown hand. This is what it said:

‘Dear Sir,—I write to inform you that my wife died of pneumonia three days before the arrival of your letter to her, which I have therefore opened. Please forgive my delay in writing.

‘Yours very truly,

‘George Filmer.’

The End

A Note on the Author

Martin Armstrong (1882 – 1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artists’ Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.

In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken’s Ushant.

Discover books by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at

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Adrian Glynde

Sir Pompey and Madame Juno

The Bird Catcher

The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

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The Sleeping Fury

The Stepson

Venus Over Lannery

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First published in Great Britain in 1960 by Collins

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