“What does your old man do?” It was time he condescended.
Deliberately he used an expression he had always found repulsive. Now it had the right coarse sound, to show what he thought of this Dulcie, and Mrs Musto and her overcultivated garden.
“He has a music house,” she said.
“What,” he said, afraid to show his ignorance, “he doesn’t print it, does he?”
Now he would have liked to look at her. He had always longed to acquire an intimate intellectual friend, with whom to exchange books, and letters written in the kind of literary style which went with such relationships. If ever it began, he would write two, or perhaps three, letters a day, to express his deepest thoughts. Then would come a pause of several days. That was the way, according to collections of correspondence, he knew it to be done.
“I mean, he isn’t a publisher of music, is he?” Waldo asked, inhaling the moistening air of the garden.
“No,” she said. “He sells it.”
“What? Just music?”
“Instruments as well,” she replied with a candid reserve.
She might have been bored, or did not care fully to reveal her father’s unimportance and poverty.
“Do you like him?” he asked suddenly.
He really wanted to know.
“Yes,” she said, rather high, breathy with what sounded like sincerity.
At the same time she turned towards him and he noticed a dark shadow on her upper lip. It made him bite his own and contract his nostrils.
“Of course I do,” she insisted, though in a questioning tone of voice.
“I just wondered,” he mumbled.
He wished she would not continue looking at him. She had the eyes, he saw, of certain dogs, and he had never cared for dogs. They were something to be feared, for their treachery, or else despised for stupidity.
“I’d hate not to love my father,” Dulcie said. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like.”
“I don’t love mine. I’m fond of him, I suppose, because he’s there. And you feel sorry for them.”
He was getting some satisfaction out of telling, yes, he had never put much of it into words before, but it was — the truth. He looked at her to see whether she admired him for it.
“You’re a queer sort of boy,” she said.
At least that was better than being somebody nobody ever noticed. Dulcie was noticing him all right. Those silly, brown, watery eyes.
(Later on when Waldo got to know Dulcie he realized that her brimming eyes were not necessarily a prelude to tears.)
Now she said: “I don’t think I’d like to be you.”
Quickly, and surprising to himself, he jerked a branch off one of Mrs Musto’s shrubs. And threw it away.
“I wouldn’t want you to be,” he said, again surprisingly. “I don’t like myself all that much.”
But gave up because he was stranding himself somewhere he had never been before. And anyway, he was not saying it for this girl; it was only that she was there, and provoked him. He didn’t believe all he said, ever.
“You needn’t believe it if you don’t want to.”
“I like to believe what I’m told.”
“You’ll be caught, then. Sooner or later.”
It was the first time he had thought about that too. She had begun to exhilarate him.
“Don’t you think we ought to go back?” Dulcie suggested.
He turned, to please her, only taking an oblique path.
“Sometimes I think I’d like to become a great actor.” He had never thought it in his life. He had never seen a play, other than the one Arthur had acted on the front veranda. “Wouldn’t you like to act out great tragic parts?”
“I’d never be able to. I’d get stage-fright,” Dulcie said.
Either she was losing interest, or she didn’t believe in him.
He would have to try another direction.
“What I really want to do,” he said, “is write.”
He heard himself make it sound like a natural function. Perhaps it was because, until now, he had shied away from expressing anything so personal and complicated. It would not be possible even to try with Mother or Dad. But in this girl he might be addressing the kind of complicated human being his reading told him did exist.
“Oh,” she said, “I like to read. I’ve just finished The Mill on the Floss.”
She was looking at him again.
“Maggie Tulliver,” he said, to show.
“Yes!” she said, her eyes brimming once more, so it couldn’t be with tears.
“A very passionate girl, Maggie,” said Waldo Brown, making it sound particularly precise.
Dulcie blushed, and withdrew the expression which had been growing on her face.
“What you are going to write” she said, “do you think it will be novels?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said, “what,” he said, “what form it’ll take. Sometimes I think novels, sometimes plays. It might even be some kind of philosophical work.”
He was leading Dulcie back now towards the other members of the party. With things becoming so difficult, he had had to abandon a plan for luring her deeper into the garden by carefully chosen, oblique ways. The prospect of listening to a dialogue between the young grazier and would-be barrister seemed momentarily preferable to his own efforts at invention. It would have been so much easier if he had been able to tell her: I want to, and am going to, write about myself.
Some of those dressed in white were looking absently, though not all that absently, Waldo could see, in their direction. He suspected they were really wondering what he had been up to with a girl in pink alone in the garden.
Somehow they involved him with Dulcie more deeply than before.
“Don’t they make you want to vomit?”
“Oh!” She made a little unhappy sound. “Some of them are probably quite nice. If you get to know them.”
“I wouldn’t trust them.”
Dulcie was silent, and he would have liked to think he had won her over, but was afraid he had simply fallen flat.
“What’s your other name?” he asked.
“Feinstein.”
She pronounced it frankly, and in the foreign way, which made Dulcie Feinstein sound suddenly darker, exotic, though superficially there was nothing foreign about her. He put the tip of his tongue between his lips to stop the smile of pleasure coming to them. Not that his trend of thought wouldn’t have stopped it in due course.
“My name’s Brown,” he said.
“I know. I heard Mrs Musto when you came.”
That made it sound worse.
He said: “It’s the most horrible name anyone could ever have. Brown!” He drew it out as though blaming the person responsible.
“Probably most people hate the name they’ve got,” she said. “Take Dulcie.”
“It’s not bad,” he said slowly. “It’s sort of exotic.”
That was a word he had decided to adopt.
“No, it isn’t. It’s awful, really. It means ‘sweet’. And Dulcie’s a plump girl with fair hair and blue eyes. A complexion.”
She was so anxious to reveal the true state of affairs, get it over quickly, that she was licking the dark shadow on her upper lip between the rushed phrases.