Dance of the Years (19 page)

“They,” their parents, the Enemy, were scarcely mentioned.

The matter which absorbed the two was the mighty phenomenon itself.

The boy was better educated than the girl, but he, too, had led something of the life of carefully fostered innocence which was coming into fashion. However, whereas she had only the Bible and certain
carefully selected contemporary authors for information, he had had the Classics, but even so he was astounded. In all the books, in all the teachings, there had been no indication that love was like this. Agony and exultation are only words until the heart has spoken them, and no mind in the world can discover alone what the harts and the roes on the hillside know without any minds at all.

The two went on whispering under the leaves, and presently the fatal words were said, as they are always said sooner or later, by the very young indeed.

“Perhaps we are different.” The phrase slipped in as it was bound to, and the ancient towers of fantasy rose up on the insane, too-human surmise.

After a little while they gave up talking. They were still desperately shy of one another, still in terror lest either should inadvertently offend; still appalled by the unexpected behaviour of their own bodies. Lizzie was fighting against a frightening weariness, and an overwhelming impulse to sit down; her waisted stays hurt her, and her legs ached, they were so heavy. Frank, on the other hand, felt himself possessed of superhuman strength, and a vast bounding energy which would not let him rest.

They stood for a moment under one of the beeches which rose intensely black against the moon, A single shaft of the enchanted light sliding through the leaves fell on Lizzie's face. Frank felt his heart move in him, so that he knew exactly where in his chest it hid. He thought her more beautiful than anything ever in the world. The discovery filled him with a sort of holy rapture, and he dropped on his knees in front of her, hiding his face against her hard little waist.

The argument which convinced them both, as it has convinced millions of very young people ever since God started making them, was that nothing which produced such a passionate desire to be kind could possibly be wrong.

After a while Lizzie bent over him and he, raising his head, found that her bodice was undone.

Very tenderly, very sweetly, and with his ears burning for shame, he kissed her breast. It was an innocent crisis, a moment of satiety.

Later, when they parted, he hugged her close to him protectingly and childishly. He would have liked to carry her in in triumph, and have rung all the bells and summoned all the lights. A rage against the Enemy, and the great compressing harness of civilized society, seized him.

“To-morrow,” he said fiercely. “You'll come again to-morrow?”

“Every to-morrow,” she said, unaware of futility. “Always. I love you.”

It was on the day after James had bought his new house, and before he had even thought of telling her about it, that Phœbe told him of the proposal of marriage from the elderly Sir Robin Carver. The old man had been ogling her from his box all through the autumn season. James had seen him.

Secretly James was rather full of the house. It was not the first he had bought by any means, for he liked to acquire property, and always put his money into it when he could; but this was the first purchase he had ever thought of living in himself. It was in Penton Place, off the Walworth Road, then in its youth and a highly select thoroughfare. It was not very big, eight or nine rooms at the most, but very elegant with double doors to throw the two parlours into one. It had two little gardens; a paved one in front with figures and dwarf shrubs, and a long one at the back, containing a pear tree, a mulberry tree, and a syringa with a seat round it.

James had felt the pride of personal ownership when he mounted the stairs, and had suddenly imagined the wall was covered with red velvet paper, and had seen long sweeping curtains of bright red plush, with cords and tassels and great pelmets against expensive cream paint.

The picture had suggested manageable elegance to his mind, and it had attracted him enormously.

Now Phœbe had produced her news and stood watching him. They were in the big upstairs sitting-room of her lodgings in Drury Lane, in the house next door to the doctor's shop. The room had a certain lazy grace, and was far older than the house in Penton Place. The window where they stood was big, and although it bulged out across the narrow road until one could almost lean out and shake hands with the bookbinder working in his shop opposite, yet there was plenty of yellow London light in the room, and the noise and the colour of the Lane ran along always, just below, like a pageant.

Although James and Phœbe had been lovers for fifteen years, living always near if not actually with each other, yet anywhere that she was still filled him with that mixture of exultation, curiosity and surprise which is romance.

By this time she had grown into a very distinctive-looking woman,
at times breathtakingly beautiful, at times positively ugly, but always, in any situation, and at any given moment, a personality. The years had put more drawing into her face and every muscle could obey her and shape itself anew to tell something she might care to say. She was a comedy actress, polished and acute, and worth every halfpenny of the munificent eight pounds a week which Mr. Macready had somewhat grudgingly agreed to pay her.

She was a little darker now than she had been as a child; her hair was a deeper straw, and was now brushed sleek like a satin hood, while her gold silk dress which matched it sat jauntily on her tall figure, and flounced out from the drawn-in waist in a cascade of nonsensical frills. Even now, even when he knew her so well that she was a part of him, James always felt young and clumsy when he was with Phœbe. It was one of the chief reasons why he loved her, and the reason that he never quite admitted to himself.

The fact that he did love her was confronting him now like an abyss opening at his feet, filling him with fear, actual physical fear; a dropping of the heart and a wave of blood passing over his face.

She was standing in one of her typical attitudes, a pose straight out of a Knowles comedy; one hand was on her hip and one slipper rested on a footstool, while she smiled down at him seated before her. She was looking at him under her lashes, but he knew her eyes, which were like blue stars, were not really laughing.

“I think I shall, James,” she said softly. “I think I shall, you know.” She was goading him into enquiry and he hung back as long as he could. Finally he gave way.

“For God's sake, why?”

“Because I want to be married.”

It was absurd to pretend surprise, heaven knew it was old ground. They had gone over it again and again, and he had known always that the crisis must come in time. Here it was.

He sat staring moodily in front of him. His great shoulders were hunched under his very dark green coat; his fancy waistcoat with the staggering embroidery was rumpled and his square head with the mat of black curls on it, lolled forward on his chest. He looked merely sulky, but it was not so. Inwardly he was despairing, a man cringing before the tyranny of his own obstinacy.

Phœbe let her eyes rest upon him, but there was no telling from her expression what she was thinking. Presently she moved closer to him, and he took her hand as she had known he would, drawing her down on to his knee so that she lay with her forehead tucked under his chin. He said nothing, but there was an aggressive possessiveness in the way he held her, and his arms closed round her with the irritable forcefulness of a man taking his own and be damned to everybody.

She put her hand round his neck and felt the line where the short hair grew.

“James,” she said, “I could have children.”

She felt the exasperated breath imprisoned for a moment in the barrel of the chest beneath her, and presently she tried again, whispering into his neck.

“James, is it that? Don't you want my children? Well then, why have any? After all, considering…?”

He put his hand over her mouth and held it there, but she wriggled free of him and got up and went across the room, looking her enchanting best. Her flounces rustled as she walked, and she moved with that typical swagger which was one of her greatest charms on the stage.

“You're right, my love. You're right. If we yearn for respectability we must conceive it apart. Together it seems somehow to escape us, doesn't it?”

He looked up at the note in her voice and saw her posing in the doorway, her arms extended and her eyes raised upwards. It was a very slight burlesque of one of the plaster nymphs in the new theatre. Last time he had seen her do it for himself alone, she had been correctly clad for the part with a silk scarf attached to her skin at salient points with spirit gum.

He laughed in spite of himself, and afterwards frowned at her angrily for it.

She went out then, and, he thought, she does not care. She never did. She is not capable of caring. And yet all the time he was only trying to convince himself of something which he did not want to be true.

James knew quite well, and always had known, that he would not marry Phœbe; would not, could not, should not, would not. Definitely, obstinately; against fate, inclination, desire itself; would not, never.

At that period the theory that love and marriage had very much to do with one another was not wholly in vogue. When it did come again it began as a polite fiction, another stone in the edifice of productive marriage which the middle-classes were building up to make themselves strong. Very few young people of the middle-classes at that time married for love, and very few realized they had not done so because they were expected to pretend that they had. James belonged to this period and was at a loss in it for, of course, he had no class of his own by rights, and there were times when he longed for the solid advantages of a definite background with a family and friends of the family to make a garden for him to walk about in. Had he been a man who by temperament rejected these things, he would have had no problem; but with the years he had grown very much a man of his
time. He had become a true early Victorian, a great believer in solid living, in breeding, in property, in respectability, in keeping up appearances, and in assuming virtue if one had it not.

Although among the stage folk, the wits, the country people, the the horse-dealing fraternity, and the hearty brethren of
The Oratorical Friends
he was at home and popular, they did not satisfy him. Always he was aware of the others, the great mass of the wealthier middle-classes, the people to whom old Galantry's first family belonged, and who were now fast coming into power.

James could not bear to be left behind.

He looked at the door through which Phœbe had vanished and thought, as he had thought long ago, that he was not strong enough in himself to marry her. Had he been sure of himself he would have done it and risked it, and bred and hoped for the best; but as it was, no. He knew quite well what kind of life they would lead together, and it would be delightful, slightly irresponsible, and certainly happy. He wanted it so much that his eyes smarted and an unbearable tightness grew in his chest, but he could not take it. It was simply that he could not. He was of his time and of his kind, and if he was to be himself he had no choice but to take the path which lay before him.

Shulie was strong in him, but not strong enough. It was as if she stood alone on one side of the fence, and on the other stood old Galantry, Galantry's elder sons, Dorothy, Edwin Castor, Mr. Philby, Jed, Jason, Larch, and one or two more who had given James little or much.

Samuel was there too; not the young Samuel who might have been at Shulie's side, but the latter day Samuel, married to a rich woman twice his age who kept him like an ageing puppy on a little, silk lead. He was on the greater side as well.

Between them all sat James himself; of them, composed of them, fashioned from them, and with only his little half-worked soul his own.

Phœbe had put her finger on the vital point. It was the children; the survivors in whom all this gang, of which James was the temporary part custodian, was interested. By far the greater half of them clamoured against Phœbe. “If it were not for
her
, James,” they said, pointing at Shulie, “then you might. But she'll always be there, and she's enough. If you give her an ally, James, she'll swamp us.”

This conversation was not clear to him, of course. There was nothing fanciful about him in these days. He was not a man to encourage inward voices at all, but they were there in him and their little shoutings made a single note of warning.

He sat where he was in the familiar chair which by this time was his own chair by right of custom, and faced the real tragedy of his life without recognizing it.

Phœbe was going out of his world and he knew he was not going to lift a finger to stop her. He was going to let love go, that was all. Now in middle age it seemed a little thing. But it was rather more than that for Phœbe was not his opposite, she was his complement, and always she had restored his balance. If he was careful she was prodigal; if he was cautious she was impulsive; if he was too solemn she was too gay. With her he was a completed man, but not, unfortunately, an early Victorian middle-class gentleman.

He got up and looked down into the Lane. No, it would not do.

The outstanding thing about real tragedy is that it is wrong; there is no life in it; it is loss. James found no green shoot in his anywhere.

It occurred to him to go after Phœbe into the bedroom, at least to kiss her good-bye. Shulie advised it earnestly, but all the rest of the many ingredients which made up James urged him to go quickly, to leave at once, on impulse; to take his hat and stick and be gone. If it was to be ended, and the end had been coming for a long time, it was better that it should come like this, almost casually.

He went out very quietly and did not hesitate outside her door or on the stair. He was very ashamed.