“If it’s thirty per cent. true it’s good enough for me. We just must get there somehow. Kiss me.”
From around the corner in the main road the rumbling of the trams and carts, and the rattling of their window-pane in the draughty dry easterly wind increased their feeling of escape into a gas-lit Paradise.
Chapter IX.
CONFUSION
Two hours behind Bicket, Michael wavered towards home. Old Danby was right as usual—if you couldn’t trust your packers, you might shut up shop! Away from Bicket’s eyes, he doubted. Perhaps the chap hadn’t a wife at all! Then Wilfrid’s manner usurped the place of Bicket’s morals. Old Wilfrid had been abrupt and queer the last three times of meeting. Was he boiling-up for verse?
He found Ting-a-ling at the foot of the stairs in a conservative attitude. “I am not going up,” he seemed saying, “until some one carries me—at the same time it is later than usual!”
“Where’s your mistress, you heraldic little beast?”
Ting-a-ling snuffled. “I could put up with it,” he implied, “if YOU carried me—these stairs are laborious!”
Michael took him up. “Let’s go and find her.”
Squeezed under an arm harder than his mistress’, Ting-a-ling stared as if with black-glass eyes; and the plume of his emergent tail quivered.
In the bedroom Michael dropped him so absent-mindedly that he went to his corner plume pendent, and couched there in dudgeon.
Nearly dinner time and Fleur not in! Michael went over his sketchy recollection of her plans. To-day she had been having Hubert Marsland and that Vertiginist—what was his name?—to lunch. There would have been fumes to clear off. Vertiginists—like milk—made carbonic acid gas in the lungs! Still! Half-past seven! What was happening to-night? Weren’t they going to that play of L.S.D.‘s? No—that was tomorrow! Was there conceivably nothing? If so, of course she would shorten her unoccupied time as much as possible. He made that reflection humbly. Michael had no illusions, he knew himself to be commonplace, with only a certain redeeming liveliness, and, of course, his affection for her. He even recognised that his affection was a weakness, tempting him to fussy anxieties, which on principle he restrained. To enquire, for instance, of Coaker or Philps—their man and their maid—when she had gone out, would be thoroughly against that principle. The condition of the world was such that Michael constantly wondered if his own affairs were worth paying attention to; but then the condition of the world was also such that sometimes one’s own affairs seemed all that were worth paying attention to. And yet his affairs were, practically speaking, Fleur; and if he paid too much attention to them, he was afraid of annoying her.
He went into his dressing-room and undid his waistcoat.
‘But no!’ he thought; ‘if she finds me “dressed” already, it’ll put too much point on it.’ So he did up his waistcoat and went downstairs again. Coaker was in the hall.
“Mr. Forsyte and Sir Lawrence looked in about six, sir. Mrs. Mont was out. What time shall I serve dinner?”
“Oh! about a quarter past eight. I don’t think we’re going out.”
He went into the drawing-room and passing down its Chinese emptiness, drew aside the curtain. The square looked cold and dark and draughty; and he thought: ‘Bicket—pneumonia—I hope she’s got her fur coat.’ He took out a cigarette and put it back. If she saw him at the window she would think him fussy; and he went up again to see if she had put on her fur!
Ting-a-ling, still couchant, greeted him plume dansetti arrested as at disappointment. Michael opened a wardrobe. She had! Good! He was taking a sniff round, when Ting-a-ling passed him trottant, and her voice said: “Well, my darling!” Wishing that he was, Michael emerged from behind the wardrobe door. Heaven! She looked pretty, coloured by the wind! He stood rather wistfully silent.
“Hallo, Michael! I’m rather late. Been to the Club and walked home.”
Michael had a quite unaccountable feeling that there was suppression in that statement. He also suppressed, and said: “I was just looking to see that you’d got your fur, it’s beastly cold. Your dad and Bart have been and went away fasting.”
Fleur shed her coat and dropped into a chair. “I’m tired. Your ears are sticking up so nicely to-night, Michael.”
Michael went on his knees and joined his hands behind her waist. Her eyes had a strange look, a scrutiny which held him in suspense, a little startled.
“If YOU got pneumonia,” he said, “I should go clean out of curl.”
“Why on earth should I?”
“You don’t know the connection—never mind, it wouldn’t interest you. We’re not going out, are we?”
“Of course we are. It’s Alison’s monthly.”
“Oh! Lord! If you’re tired we could cut that.”
“My dear! Impos.! She’s got all sorts of people coming.”
Stifling a disparagement, he sighed out: “Right-o! War-paint?”
“Yes, white waistcoat. I like you in white waistcoats.”
Cunning little wretch? He squeezed her waist and rose. Fleur laid a light stroke on his hand, and he went into his dressing-room comforted…
But Fleur sat still for at least five minutes—not precisely ‘a prey to conflicting emotions,’ but the victim of very considerable confusion. TWO men within the last hour had done this thing—knelt at her knees and joined their fingers behind her waist. Undoubtedly she had been rash to go to Wilfrid’s rooms. The moment she got there she had perceived how entirely unprepared she really was to commit herself to what was physical. True he had done no more than Michael. But—Goodness!—she had seen the fire she was playing with, realised what torment he was in. She had strictly forbidden him to say a word to Michael, but intuitively she knew that in his struggle between loyalties she could rely on nothing. Confused, startled, touched, she could not help a pleasant warmth in being so much loved by two men at once, nor an itch of curiosity about the upshot. And she sighed. She had added to her collection of experiences—but how to add further without breaking up the collection, and even perhaps the collector, she could not see.
After her words to Wilfrid before the Eve: “You will be a fool to go—wait!” she had known he would expect something before long. Often he had asked her to come and pass judgment on his ‘junk.’ A month, even a week, ago she would have gone without thinking more than twice about it, and discussed his ‘junk’ with Michael afterwards! But now she thought it over many times, and but for the fumes of lunch, and the feeling, engendered by the society of the ‘Vertiginist,’ of Amabel Nazing, of Linda Frewe, that scruples of any kind were ‘stuffy,’ sensations of all sorts ‘the thing,’ she would probably still have been thinking it over now. When they departed, she had taken a deep breath and her telephone receiver from the Chinese tea chest.
If Wilfrid were going to be in at half-past five, she would come and see his ‘junk.’
His answer: “My God! Will you?” almost gave her pause. But dismissing hesitation with the thought: ‘I WILL be Parisian—Proust!’ she had started for her Club. Three-quarters of an hour, with no more stimulant than three cups of China tea, three back numbers of the ‘Glass of Fashion,’ three back views of country members ‘dead in chairs,’ had sent her forth a careful quarter of an hour behind her time.
On the top floor Wilfrid was standing in his open doorway, pale as a soul in purgatory. He took her hand gently, and drew her in. Fleur thought with a little thrilclass="underline" ‘Is this what it’s like? Du cote de chez Swann!’ Freeing her hand, she began at once to flutter round the ‘junk,’ clinging to it piece by piece.
Old English ‘junk’ rather manorial, with here and there an eastern or First Empire bit, collected by some bygone Desert, nomadic, or attached to the French court. She was afraid to sit down, for fear that he might begin to follow the authorities; nor did she want to resume the intense talk of the Tate Gallery. ‘Junk’ was safe, and she only looked at him in those brief intervals when he was not looking at her. She knew she was not playing the game according to ‘La Garconne’ and Amabel Nazing; that, indeed, she was in danger of going away without having added to her sensations. And she couldn’t help being sorry for Wilfrid; his eyes yearned after her, his lips were bitter to look at. When at last from sheer exhaustion of ‘junk’ she sat down, he had flung himself at her feet. Half hypnotised, with her knees against his chest, as safe as she could hope for, she really felt the tragedy of it—his horror of himself, his passion for herself. It was painful, deep; it did not fit in with what she had been led to expect; it was not in the period, and how—how was she to get away without more pain to him and to herself? When she HAD got away, with one kiss received but not answered, she realised that she had passed through a quarter of an hour of real life, and was not at all sure that she liked it… But now, safe in her own room, undressing for Alison’s monthly, she felt curious as to what she would have been feeling if things had gone as far as was proper according to the authorities. Surely she had not experienced one-tenth of the thoughts or sensations that would have been assigned to her in any advanced piece of literature! It had been disillusioning, or else she was deficient, and Fleur, could not bear to feel deficient. And, lightly powdering her shoulders, she bent her thoughts towards Alison’s monthly.