Wild Geese Overhead (19 page)

“I admit—that is what has troubled me. But I must be honest and say that, though I might have acted differently, my judgement would not have been affected. And that's the cardinal matter. I do not want to be personal, heaven knows. But let me be done with it. I am sufficiently class conscious to feel that when you want to mess about with prostitutes, you should stick to your own part of the town. That you were in the habit of doing that sort of thing was new to me. Still——” He paused, for feeling had begun to creep into his voice.

“It was an odd night that night,” said Will, thinking back on it. “The experience of the night before had been strong enough to keep me from sleeping. Ettie would cry now and then:
I am very tired!
I tried to get hold of you. I felt rather disembodied. And the whisky kept up the illusion—that queer following night when I wandered about alone. Identity with the object they call it in philosophy. And all that's wrong with that is—the absence of life. Particularly when the object is alive itself.” He smiled reflectively and went on in the same reminiscent tone: “You see, I have never been with a professional prostitute in my life. That was the first time I ever even stood one a drink. Poor Ivy—she didn't know what to make of me. And she was prepared to comfort me, the dear girl, out of her warm instinctive woman's heart. All wrong, I suppose. But I felt at that moment, in some way I can never make clear, that it was natural and right. And—odder still—that I shall continue to think it was natural and right until I die. The only thing, possibly, that was wrong—though this is supposition or theory—was that I did not go home with her.” He moved his eyes and met Joe's. Joe held the look, then dropped his head.

Will saw the small knob of flesh gather above each eyebrow. A gentleness suffused his own mind. They understood each other now better than they had ever done.

F
elicity surprised him. Here was Paris all right with London thrown in! She had walked right out of her old self and did not yet seem to have got over the surprise of it. Her dress, of dull shimmering green and gold, with full skirt, threw up her bare shoulders with a positive suggestion of plumpness, and set her brown head with an air of challenge upon her rather thin neck. After he had watched her dancing with Sir Norman, “the iron magnet”, whose reputation as a roué moved gossip's head sideways, he asked her: “Do you think that was fair, exciting the old boy like that?”

“He loved it!”

“I know. Did you?”

“Well—it was a temptation to pull out all the stops.” She laughed, a gleam in her eyes. “All the same, I could do with one.”

The Mansons' home, at one time a country mansion house, was now within the city boundary. It was really too big for them, according to Philip's mother, too unnecessarily costly to run, but she had discovered in one of the depressions that it was unsaleable, because of its size and excessive feu-duty, not to mention rates and taxes. But it had the compensation, fully appreciated by all her guests, of being a splendid place for a party. One spacious public room led to another, and the party had the crowning virtue of being large enough to make it a matter of little consequence whether one was dancing, drinking, at ease on down cushions, or youthfully sitting on the stairs.

“I must admit they do it pretty well,” said Felicity who, having started on gin and French, declared she would stick to gin and French.

“And I must say I'm enjoying it more than I ever thought I should,” said Will, who, having started with cocktails, declared he would stick to whisky.

“I say, we
have
grown up!”

“Grown up? You've grown up and flown open.”

“Flown open?”

“Full flower.”

Her eyes grew wicked in enjoyment. “And to think how dumb you were! Clever always—but oh, so reticent!”

“And you so tentative—and coy.”

“Not coy! Oh,
not
coy!”

They went into their youthful past, into earnest and not so earnest college adventures, quoted Swinburne murmurously, and roared with laughter.

A young man came and asked her for a dance.

“Must I dance?” she begged him.

“You must,” he said. He was just turned twenty, with black, well-brushed, oiled hair, and was full of assurance and youthful party mannerisms. He had played for The Rest in the rugby trials last season and had nearly been picked as a reserve. So he now bowed exaggeratedly and crooked his arm, for he had a reputation to keep up before his fellows. Felicity came from Paris.

Will got hold of Philip's sister, Maisie. She was in her last year at the university and said she would like to go in for literature.

“You mean honours and specialize?”

“No. I just mean writing.”

The gravity of her face, her shy spirit, almost hurt him. Why did gravity in a girl's face always affect him?

“It's difficult for me to advise you,” he said simply. “You might have genius. I don't know. I'm just a working journalist.”

After the dance, he stood talking to Maisie's mother, who was so gracious a woman that her smile was more than most women's deepest comment. From her, very obviously, Philip had received his physical endowments and the grace to use them.

“You ought to know that old Scots folk don't dance, except once or twice, ritually,” she said. “But wait—Nancy, do you know William Montgomery?” Nancy's father was the senior partner of a firm of stockbrokers. She danced close up and silently and very well. He caught sight of Felicity. Her eyes threw him a swift agonized request for a lifeline, while she revolved and side-stepped and chattered to her black-haired cavalier. Will was so amused that he inadvertently clasped his companion more firmly. She accepted the pressure. “I say, you are a lovely dancer,” he murmured. She gave him a languid gleam: “Don't chatter.” When the dance was over, he led her away. How could he, unless properly relieved, go to the assistance of Felicity?

But he reckoned without Felicity, who now appeared, crying: “Will, have you forgotten?”

“How could I?” he replied. Felicity guided the black cavalier to Nancy.

“It was bliss to know you wouldn't stare and say ‘What?',” remarked Felicity, as they went towards the music.

“What was I supposed to have forgotten? That this was Johann Strauss and we were booked to celebrate?”

She paused involuntarily. “That's uncanny!” Then she gave him a happy little tug forward. “Oooh! The agony of that knowing youth. He was being a man, you know. He was knowing all about it, what what. With the limping gait of a socially constipated young elephant. Not but that he dances”, she added, with the driest malice, “quite well.”

“I thought he had been to Paris?”

“He has. He went to the
Folies Bergères
. He told me.”

He laughed. “I don't know quite what that means,” he said, “but it sounds delicious.”

“You have never been to Paris?”

“No.”

“What a waste!” She looked at him. “Will, why don't you? You cannot possibly live here. This is money-making, this is success, this is—oh, this is death. Don't you see that they live for their—for their power and position—that they live to hold it—that they'll kill what opposes them? Don't you feel that it's—terrible?”

“I only feel that it's rather pleasant. I must be getting deeply infected.”

“You are, a bit. You hold me, for example, too close. At every turn round, when, you understand, it mightn't be noticed, that young sportsman squeezed me—like this. Snatching his sex on the sly.”

“Did he, the young rascal!”

“You are clever enough not even to be hurt in your vanity.”

“Not to show it, you mean. Tell me how I should dance.”

“Like this. A little apart. So.” Presently she added: “Isn't that—more subtle?”

“Ah,” he said with Swinburnian rhythm, “to remain thus exquisitely for ever poised in tension!”

“There's a time”, said Felicity, intoning clerically and with a fair mimicry of their old minister, “for all things, and the time for one thing is not the time for another thing, and the time for another thing is not the time for one thing. World without end.”

Will gave the response and, while they were negotiating the dead corner of the room, saluted her very lightly on the forehead, as his head turned apparently to find the way.

“Will, that
was
a risk!”

“How calmly you keep countenance—so that even the dowagers may see it didn't happen. Tell me this. See the covey of them we are now advancing towards. They seem to me to have been sitting there for hours. Just sitting and looking. What's passing in their minds?”

“They have no minds.”

“Come! That's too easy. For the one most certain thing about them is that they have minds of their own. They have sized you up pretty completely, I bet! And me—they'll have said: ‘Just a journalist. Not even an editor. And after eight years at it, too!' Then they'll go into that strange mystery of my father having put so much into America and, in the crash, lost the lot. Had he put it into gilt-edged in London—like so many of the others! Those fellows, you know, who sold out to the south, sold out the great businesses their fighting fathers had built up, for gilt-edged security and a public school. But no, he was hanged if he was going to do that and sit pretty. So he adventured into the American quicksands, and they opened, and swallowed him up. Nineteen shillings in the pound! If they're blaming me it is as my father's ghost. It would round off the story if I became an absolute down and out. It would be poetic justice softer than a sad sigh. I'll have to think it over.”

“Will, I'm sorry but I must brutally compliment you. I never really thought you would be like this. I could not see how you could outgrow—I mean all this repression—more than that. Even I would be vindictive against these dowagers.”

“I haven't started to compliment you yet, Felicity. But one thing at a time. What do you think is really passing deep down in the minds of these grey-haired, stout and thin, ladies, while their men are away having a few and discussing armament profits?”

“Will!” she exclaimed, with a chuckle, “are you being romantic? How deliciously provincial! For you are liberated enough to have the provincial upon you, but rather—don't you know—with a slight distinction; like a brilliant speaker with the charm of a slight, oh, a very slight, stutter!” The last word came out in a drawled staccato, while she arched her brows; her lips closed in a dismissive pout.

He embraced her, murmuring: “But still I wonder—if they wonder about life at last—and vaguely question and wonder why?”

Looking up at him, she shook her head. “They are just watching the coming generation, the fruit of their loins, anxious that the right marriages be made and that they themselves accordingly be justified and pass with sad honour to the grave.”

“Felicity, you are cleverer than I thought you would be and profounder by half.”

“Is that a relief?”

“And a joy.”

“Will, I should like to kiss you.”

“Well?”

Her lids lowered, and her eyes gleamed wickedly. The dance became more exciting. “Ah, Johann Strauss!” she murmured slowly, pronouncing the name like a Viennese girl, for Felicity had always been brilliant at modern languages.

More than anything she had said, this brought the Continent before him.

“You really like Paris?”

“I love it. Ah, the excitement of that time of the crisis!” The gleam in her eyes grew soft. “I could not tell you. You would not understand. It was—terrific.”

“Standing on the barricades?”

“And the nights—the nights—what a time! I could not tell you; quite hopeless to try.” She sighed.

“Perhaps your escort helped?”

“That, dear Will,” said Felicity, “is the provincial coming out in you. I don't mind. Really, I don't. I still want to kiss you, but don't—don't—destroy it too much. One escort didn't matter. A hundred escorts didn't matter. I had my escort, as you call him and as it happens, he was an Embassy youth; English, with the intense emotion of that time coming through his Sassenach self-restraint. The English are far more sentimental than the Scots, once they break through. But they have manners and can behave, and they are—ah, he was very ver-y charming. But, that apart, if I may say so”——she paused to smile at him—“it was something quite beyond, a feeling that you were living intensely in an atmosphere like quicksilver. It was
living
, all the time; living on the edge of—I don't know what.”

“I'm glad you didn't say the edge of a volcano.”

She gave a soft chuckle, then looked at him shrewdly. “On what edge then?”

“Wasn't an edge at all. Not even a brink. You know how civilization stood on the brink of the precipice, I hope?”

“Will, you ravish me! Tell me, where did I stand?”

“Alas, Felicity, it's not that you really want to know where you stood, because you think you know that better than any one could ever tell you. As indeed you do. But you're curious, you wicked woman, to know where I think you stood, so that, in the process of telling, my innocent provincial self may be exposed to the merciless lens of your rather lovely dark blue eye. And why should I play?”

She gave him a little shake. “How true! So you have to tell me now, or I shall pass away in your arms. Quick! Where did I stand?”

“It was really a dance——”

“Oh, that's good!”

“——and your partner held you, at a little distance. So. And he is quite the most impressive of all partners. We use the word sensational loosely. But he is, in the magnificent sense, sensational. And you never knew when he was going to lean forward, to bridge the gap between you. No wonder you were thrilled.”

“And his name?”

“Death.”

She took a moment. “That's splendid, but—not—quite true.” She was looking at him. “It was
living
: not death.”

“When the girl jumps on the barricade and waves the boys on, that's living, that's not death; it's not death until the next moment.”

“But I wasn't on a barricade.”

“No. But your experience was heightened in the same intense way; only it was not heightened by fighting: it was heightened by—by I don't know what.”

“Why did you hesitate? By what?”

“By sex,” said Will, and looked at her.

For one moment her whole face seemed to shrink in dismay. She stared at him penetratingly, about to protest, but was held back by something she couldn't be dishonest about.

His smile broke into a soft teasing laugh. “Surely you are not grudging me one thrust of green jealousy at the Embassy man?”

But she could not respond and danced silently, gazing over his shoulder. He rallied her. The music stopped with a final rumble.

“This has been a frightful shock to me. For heaven's sake protect me from that young crew. The doctors I don't mind so much, but——”

“But how can I protect you, if one of them comes and asks?”

“Very well. I'll protect myself. Put me there—and fetch some drinks. No, I'll stick to you—and we'll take the drinks across.”

“I'm sorry, Felicity,” he began, as they sat down, “but really I didn't mean to suggest seriously——”

“Please do shut up,” she said. “Will you never learn to understand when the perfect effect has been created? I know men who would give half their fortune for your gift—or, at least, for what your gift could be. It's been a frightful shock.”

She suddenly met his puzzled look and smiled maliciously. “I've got you guessing, haven't I? And such innocence! You're like something come out of a wood. Yes, a squirrel! You have eyes like hazelnuts. And your hair is exactly the colour of a bat's. Only your teeth don't look as if they were made to nibble. Though they are a trifle shy behind so intriguing a mouth. And your smile dawns on your face! Positively like wind coming on a pool. You really would be too good to spoil. If you could be in Paris—and do everything—and still be yourself, ah!”