Point Counter Point (56 page)

She turned the armchair so that it faced the window and sat there looking out, over the valley towards the bright hills with their background of storm. She remembered a day like this when they were living in their cottage in Berkshire. Sunshine the brighter for being so precarious in the midst of darkness; a shining and transfigured earth. Walter and she had sat together at the open window. He had loved her then. And yet she was happier now, much happier. She regretted nothing of what had happened in the interval. The suffering had been necessary. It was the cloud that enhanced the shining of her present felicity. A dark cloud, but how remote now, how curiously irrelevant! And that other happy brightness before the coming of the cloud—that too was tiny and far away, like an image in a curved mirror. Poor Walter! she thought, and remotely she was sorry for him. Pursuing happiness, he had made himself miserable. Happiness is a by-product, Mrs. Quarles had said. It was true. ‘Happiness, happiness.’ Marjorie repeated the word to herself. Against the black vapours the hills were like emerald and green gold. Happiness and beauty and goodness. ‘The peace of God,’ she whispered, ‘ the peace of God that passeth all understanding. Peace, peace, peace…’ She felt as though she were melting into that green and golden tranquillity, sinking and being absorbed into it, dissolving out of separateness into union. Stillness flowed into stillness, the silence without became one with the silence within her. The shaken and turbid liquor of existence grew gradually calm, and all that had made it opaque—all the noise and uproar of the world, all the personal anxieties and desires and feelings—began to settle like a sediment, fell slowly, slowly and noiselessly, out of sight. The turbid liquor became clearer and clearer, more and more translucent. Behind that gradually vanishing mist was reality, was God. It was a slow, progressive revelation. ‘Peace, peace,’ she whispered to herself; and the last faint ripples died away from the surface of life, the opacities churned up by the agitation of living dropped away through the utter calm. ‘Peace, peace.’ She had no desires, no more preoccupations. The liquor which had been turbid was now quite clear, clearer than crystal, more diaphanous than air; the mist had vanished and the unveiled reality was a wonderful emptiness, was nothing. Nothing—the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing. The gradual revelation was now complete.

Marjorie was roused by the click of the front-door latch and the sound of footsteps in the passage. Reluctantly and with a kind of pain she rose from the depths of divine vacancy; her soul swam up again to the surface of consciousness. The sunlight on the hills had deepened its colour, the clouds had lifted and the sky was a pale greenish blue, like water. It was almost evening. Her limbs felt stiff. She must have been sitting there for hours.

‘Walter?’ she called questioningly to the source of the noises in the passage.

The voice in which he answered was dead and flat. ‘Why is he so unhappy?’ she wondered at the sound of it, but wondered from a great distance and with a kind of far-away resentment. She resented his disturbing and interrupting presence, his very existence. He entered the room and she saw that his face was pale, his eyes darkly ringed.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, almost against her will. The nearer she came to Walter, the further she moved from the marvellous nothingness of God. ‘You don’t look at all well.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered. ‘Rather tired, that’s all.’ Coming down in the train he had read and re-read Lucy’s letter, till he almost knew it by heart. His imagination had supplemented the words. He knew that sordid little room in the
hotel meuble
; he had seen the Italian’s brown body and her whiteness, and the man’s clenched teeth and his face like the face of a tortured Marsyas, and Lucy’s own face with that expression he knew, that look of grave and attentive suffering, as though the agonizing pleasure were a profound and difficult truth only to be grasped by intense concentration.

Ah well, Marjorie was thinking; he had said it was nothing; that was all right; she needn’t worry any further. ‘Poor Walter!’ she said aloud and smiled at him with a pitying tenderness. He wasn’t going to make any demands on her attention or her feelings; she resented him no longer. ‘Poor Walter!’

Walter looked at her for a moment, then turned away. He didn’t want pity. Not that sort of superior angel’s pity, at any rate, and not from Marjorie. He had accepted pity from her once. The memory of the occasion made his whole flesh creep with shame. Never again. He walked away.

Marjorie heard his feet on the stairs and the banging of a door.

‘All the same,’ she thought, reluctantly solicitous, ‘there is something wrong. Something has made him specially miserable. Perhaps I ought to go up and see what he’s doing.’

But she didn’t go. She sat where she was, quite still, deliberately forgetting him. The little sediment that Walter’s coming had stirred up in her quickly settled again. Through the vacant lifelessness of trance her spirit sank slowly down once more into God, into the perfected absolute, into limitless and everlasting nothing. Time passed; the late afternoon turned into summer twilight; the twilight thickened slowly into darkness.

Daisy, the maid, came back at ten.

‘Sittin’ in the dark, mum?’ she asked, looking into the sittingroom. She turned on the light. Marjorie winced. The glare brought back to her dazzled eyes all the close immediate details of the material world. God had vanished like a pricked bubble. Daisy caught sight of the unlaid table. ‘What, ‘aven’t you ‘ad no supper?’ she exclaimed in horror.

‘Why, no,’ said Marjorie. ‘I quite forgot about supper.’

‘Not Mr. Bidlake neither?’ Daisy went on reproachfully. ‘Why, pore man, ‘e must be perished.’

She hurried away towards the kitchen in search of cold beef and pickles.

Upstairs in his room Walter was lying on the bed, his face buried in the pillows.

A crossword problem had brought Mr. Quarles to the seventeenth volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Idle curiosity detained him. The Lord Chamberlain, he learned, carries a white staff and wears a golden or jewelled key. The word lottery has no very definite signification; but Nero gave such prizes as a house or a slave, while Heliogabalus introduced an element of absurdity—one ticket for a golden vase, another for six flies. Pinckney B. S. Pinchback was the acting Republican governor of Louisiana in 1873. To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar. In one of the northern ravines of Madeira some masses of a coarsely crystalline Essexite are exposed to view. But there is also a negative side to magic. And terrestrial magnetism has a long history. He had just started to read about Sir John Blundell Maple, Bart. (1845-1903), whose father, John Maple (d. 1900) had a small furniture shop in the Tottenham Court Road, when the parlourmaid appeared at the door and announced that there was a young lady to see him.

‘A young ladah?’ he repeated with some surprise, taking off his pince-nez.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said a familiar voice and Gladys pushed past the maid and advanced into the middle of the room.

At the sight of her, Mr. Quarles felt a sudden spasm of apprehension. He got up. ‘You can go,’ he said with dignity to the maid. She went. ‘My dyah child!’ He took Gladys’s hand; she disengaged it. ‘But what a surprise!’

‘Ow, a pleasant surprise!’ she answered sarcastically. Emotion always resuscitated the cockney in her. She sat down, planting herself with force and determination in the chair. ‘Here I am,’ that determined down-sitting seemed to imply, ‘and here I stay’—perhaps even, ‘here I bloody well stay.’

‘Pleasant indeed,’ said Mr. Quarles mellifluously, for the sake of saying something. This was terrible, he was thinking. What could she want? And how should he get her out of the house again? But if necessary, he could say he’d sent for her to do some specially urgent typing for him. ‘But very unexpected,’ he added.

‘Very.’ She shut her mouth firmly and looked at him—with eyes that Mr. Quarles didn’t at all like the expression of—as if in expectation. Of what?

‘I’m delighted to see you, of course,’ he went on.

‘Ow, are you?’ She laughed dangerously.

Mr. Quarles looked at her and was afraid. He really hated the girl. He began to wonder why he had ever desired her. ‘Very glad,’ he repeated, with dignified emphasis. The great thing was to remain dignified, firmly superior. ‘But…’

‘_But_,’ she echoed.

‘Well, ryahlly, I think it was rather rash to come here.’

‘He thinks it rather rash,’ said Gladys, as though passing on the information to an invisible third party.

‘Not to say unnecessarah.’

‘Well, I’m the judge of
that
.’

‘After all, you know quite well that if you’d wanted to see me, you’d only got to write and I’d have come at once. So why run the risk of coming hyah?’ He waited. But Gladys did not answer, only looked at him with those hard green eyes of hers and that close-lipped smile that seemed to shut in enigmatically heaven only knew what dangerous thoughts and feelings. ‘I’m ryahlly annoyed with you.’ The manner of Mr. Quarles’s rebuke was dignified and impressive, but kind—always kind. ‘Yes, ryahily annoyed.’

Gladys threw back her head and uttered a shrill, short, hyena-like laugh.

Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. But he preserved his dignity. ‘You may laugh,’ he said. ‘But I speak syahriously. You had no right to come. You knew quite well how important it is that nothing should be suspected. Especially hyah—hyah, in my own house. You knew it.’

‘Yes, I knew it,’ Gladys repeated, nodding her head truculently. ‘And that’s exactly why I came.’ She was silent for a moment. But the pressure of her feelings made silence no longer bearable. ‘Because I knew you were frightened,’ she went on, ‘frightened that people might find out what you were reelly like. You dirty old swine!’ And suddenly losing all control of her fury, she sprang to her feet and advanced on Mr. Quarles so menacingly, that he recoiled a step. But her attack was only verbal. ‘Giving yourself such airs, as though you was the Prince of Wales. And then taking a girl to dinner at the Corner House. And blaming everybody else, worse than a parson, when you’re no better than a dirty old pig yourself. Yes, a dirty old pig, that’s what you are. Saying you loved me, indeed! I know what that sort of love is. Why, a girl isn’t safe with you in a taxi. No, she isn’t. You filthy old beast! And then…’

‘Ryahlly, ryahily!’ Mr. Quarles had sufficiently recovered from his first shock of horrified surprise to be able to protest. This was terrible, unheard of. He felt himself being devastated, laid waste to, ravaged.

‘“Ryahlly, ryably,”’ she mimicked derisively. ‘And then not even taking a girl to a decent seat at the theatre. But w hen it was a question of your having a bit of fun in your way—oh, lord! Nasty fat old swine! And carrying on all the time like Rudolph Valentino, with your chatter about all the women that had been in love with you. With
you
! You just look at yourself in the glass. Like a red egg, that’s what you are.’

‘Too unseemlah!’

‘Talking about love with a face like that!’ she went on, more shrilly than ever. ‘An old swine like you! And then you only give a girl a rotten old watch and a pair of earrings, and the stones in them aren’t even good ones, because I asked a jeweller and he said they weren’t. And now, on top of everything I’m going to have a baby.’

‘A babah?’ repeated Mr. Quarles incredulously, but with a deeper and more dreadful sinking of apprehension. ‘Surely not a babah.’

‘Yes, a baby!’ Gladys shouted, stamping her foot. ‘Can’t you hear what I say, you old idiot? A baby. That’s what I’ve come here about. And I won’t go away till…’

It was at this moment that Mrs. Quarles walked in through the French window from the garden. She had been having a talk with Marjorie at the cottage and had come to tell Sidney that she had asked the two young people to dinner that evening.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, halting on the threshold.

There was a moment’s silence. Then, addressing herself this time to Mrs. Quarles, Gladys began again with uncontrollable fury. Five minutes later she was no less uncontrollably sobbing and Mrs. Quarles was trying to console her. Sidney took the opportunity to sneak out of the room. When the gong sounded for lunch, he sent down word to say that he was feeling very ill and would they please send up two lightly boiled eggs, some toast and butter, and a little stewed fruit.

Meanwhile in the study Mrs. Quarles had hung solicitously over Gladys’s chair. ‘It’s all right,’ she kept repeating, patting the girl’s shoulder, ‘It’s all right. You mustn’t cry.’ Poor girl! she was thinking. And what a dreadful scent! And how could Sidney? And again, poor girl, poor girl! ‘Don’t cry. Try to be brave. It’ll be all right.’

Gladys’s sobbing gradually subsided. Mrs. Quarles’s calm voice talked on consolingly. The girl listened. Then suddenly she jumped up. The face that confronted Mrs. Quarles was savagely derisive through the tear stains.

‘Ow, shut it!’ she said sarcastically, ‘shut it! What do you take me for? A baby? Talking like that! You think you can talk me quiet, do you? Talk me out of my rights. Talky talky; baby’s going to be good, isn’t she? But you’re mistaken, I tell you. You’re damned well mistaken. And you’ll know it soon enough, I can tell you.’

And with that she bounced out of the room into the garden and was gone.

In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone. Faint rumblings of far-away traffic caressed the warm silence. A bowl of her mother’s potpourri peopled the air for her with countless potential memories of childhood. She was arranging roses in a vase; huge white roses with petals of malleable porcelain, orange roses like whorls of congealed and perfumed flame. The chiming clock on the mantelpiece made a sudden and startling comment of eight notes and left the accorded vibrations to tingle mournfully away into nothingness, like music on a departing ship. Halfpast three. And at six she was expecting Everard. Expecting Everard for a cocktail, she was at pains to explain to herself, before he took her out to dinner and the play. Just an evening’s entertainment, like any other evening’s entertainment. She kept telling herself so, because she knew, underneath, she was prophetically certain, that the evening wouldn’t be in the least like other evenings, but cardinal, decisive. She would have to make up her mind, she would have to choose. But she didn’t want to choose; that was why she tried to make herself believe that the evening was to be merely trivial and amusing. It was like covering a corpse with flowers. Mountains of flowers. But the corpse was always there, in spite of the concealing lilies. And a choice would have to be made, in spite of dinner at Kettner’s and the theatre. Sighing, she picked up the heavy vase in both hands and was just lifting it on to the mantelpiece, when there was a loud knock at the door. Elinor started so violently, that she almost dropped her burden. And the terror persisted, even when she had recovered from the first shock of surprise. A knock at the door, when she was alone in the lonely house, always set her heart uncomfortably beating. The idea that there was somebody there, waiting, listening, a stranger, an enemy perhaps (for Elinor’s fancy was pregnant with horrible hairy faces peering round corners, with menacing hands, with knives and clubs and pistols) or perhaps a madman, listening intently for any sound of life within the house, waiting, waiting like a spider for her to open—this was a nightmare to her, a terror. The knock was repeated. Setting down the vase, she tiptoed with infinite precautions to the window and peeped between the curtains. On days when she was feeling particularly nervous she lacked the courage even to do this, but sat motionless, hoping that the noise of her heart might not be audible in the street, until the knocker at last wore out his patience and walked away. Next day the man from Selfridge’s would heap coals of fire upon her by apologizing for the retarded delivery. ‘Called yesterday evening, madam, but there was nobody at home.’ And Elinor would feel ashamed of herself and a fool. But the next time she was alone and nervous, she would do exactly the same thing.