Chapter VII

1

At the last moment only George Tarlyon, Mrs. Chester, and Hugo Cypress motored to Monte Carlo. Major Cypress, authority on Forestry as he was, was even more of an authority on all varieties of “dicing”--under which name, in this particular set, went every game of hazard--and could always be counted on to go towards a Casino. He was the author of an unwritten play called _Limejuice Nights_, an unwritten romance called _The Profligacy of a Pork Butcher_, and of that splendid marching song of the Grenadine Guards, which begins:--

“There’s no vice in
A bit of dicin’ ...”

but never ends. “For,” said Major Cypress, “it needs genius to finish a poem like that, and I’m frightfully afraid I’ve only got talent.” And then he would give that funny, gurgling little chuckle of his, a deep “cluck, cluck, cluck.” Hugo Cypress was a very useful man in a battle or a house-party; sometimes he would get drunk before a battle, “just to appal the enemy,” and sometimes at a house-party, “just to amuse your guests,” he would explain to his hostess, who generally adored Hugo, the last of the _beaux sabreurs_. He was an uncommonly agreeable companion for any man or woman--or for a man and woman.

Virginia and her three remaining guests dined very pleasantly; and Johnny remarked how glad he was that they hadn’t gone to that “beastly Monte Carlo, where they shoot pigeons all day and pluck them all night.”

“Give me home,” said Johnny, “a little conversation, and a nice-glass-of-wine....”

The conversation, however, was not very “little.” For Lois, his wife, had charge of it, and Lois had a reputation to keep up. Lois’s conversation--which, people and papers said, was witty--consisted in asking rather sharp questions about a given subject, listening impatiently to your replies, and then saying that that wasn’t what she had meant and asking another question, beginning: “But don’t you think, now....” To-night she was talking, or rather asking witty questions about, publishing. Mr. Worth Butterthorn, the publisher, had recently offered her five thousand pounds for her memoirs, and so Lois was rather interested in publishing; so had Mr. Worth Butterthorn been, when Lois had capped his offer by saying that she would be charmed to write her memoirs for him or any one else for seven thousand pounds; and Mr. Butterthorn was thinking about that, probably at that very moment. Lois was clever about money....

They discussed publishing. Ivor was naturally expected to know something about it, but didn’t. And as for Johnny, he of course never knew anything about anything, let alone publishing.

“Who pays who?” he asked. “And why?” (The silliest part of Johnny’s silly questions was that no one could ever answer them.)

“What I want to know is,” Lois dangerously put to the table, “if, say, 30,000 copies of my memoirs are sold at 18s. 6d. per memoir, and if my royalty is, say, 22 per cent. per cost price per memoir, will I make more or less than by selling my rights outright to Mr. Butterthorn for £7000?”

“What about,” Johnny suggested, “a nice little monograph instead, on Artists I Have Sat To, Off and On?”

Virginia was then delivered of an idea.

“My idea is,” she said briskly, “that Mr. Ivor Pelham Marlay should tell us a story on a given theme. We will give him the theme, and he will tell us the story.... Now won’t that be nice for you, Ivor?” she sweetly asked him.

“Charming,” he said viciously.

“I know!” cried Lois. “The theme must be the most fatuous theme ever put to a man. It must be a motto, a moral, or an Oscar Wilde epigram--but it must be fatuous!” She turned to her husband. “Johnny dear, you’ve said so many fatuous things in your life, can’t you think of one someone else has said--just for once, dear?”

“Familiarity Breeds Contempt,” said Johnny modestly.

“Well,” snapped Ivor, “without a little familiarity you can’t breed anything, can you?”

Johnny sighed, and tried again:--

“Every Good Action Brings Its Own Reward.”

“Oh, splendid, Johnny!” cried Virginia.

But Ivor shook his head helplessly.

“But you must, Ivor!” Virginia insisted seriously. “I shall count up to five, and if by then you can’t tell us a tale to prove that Every Good Action Brings Its Own Reward, your reputation will be for ever blasted--not only as an author, Ivor, but as an officer-and-a-gentleman.”

“Yes, rather,” Johnny agreed.

Virginia counted steadily: “One ... two ... three ... fo----”

“All right!” Ivor stopped her with a grin. He addressed them all: “Now this is a story about a comb----”

“Oh, you’ve cribbed O. Henry’s!” cried Lois.

“That’s done it,” sighed Ivor. “I won’t play any more. Let Johnny try.”

“Oh!” said Virginia.

“That’s all right,” said Johnny. “I am not an author, I am a man of ideas. Watch me. Now this is a story about a comb----”

“You’ve cribbed Ivor’s!” cried Virginia.

“No, but he’ll crib mine,” snapped Johnny.

“Whistler said that,” remarked Ivor.

“This story,” snarled Johnny, “is not only about a comb but about a Mr. Jones and a Mrs. Jones as well. If you guess that they were man and wife you will not be wrong. And what’s more, Mr. Jones loved his wife very dearly, even though he hadn’t enough money to do it with from every angle. For of all the things Mrs. Jones passionately wanted, besides of course Mr. Jones, was a tortoise-shell comb; which, she thought, would become her very well, for her hair was of the colour of a landscape at sunset, streaked with ochre. So at last Mr. Jones secretly managed to scrape together as much money as he could find lying about in his employer’s offices, and bought her a very adequate tortoise-shell comb----”

“You _have_ cribbed O. Henry’s!” cried Lois.

“---- comb. Mrs. Jones adored it and adored him, and every one was happy. Now I ask you, how were they to know that the shopkeeper had seen Mr. Jones coming and had sold him a celluloid imitation comb instead of a tortoise-shell one? And so one evening, as Mrs. Jones was doing her hair for Mr. Jones’s arrival, celluloid being very inflammable, it caught fire, and the fire caught her hair, and Mrs. Jones was utterly burnt up when Mr. Jones arrived for dinner....”

“And a very good story, too,” said Ivor pleasantly. “I liked the sting at the end....”

“Johnny,” cried Lois. “Explain yourself.”

“Well, my dear,” said little Johnny humbly, “I’m frightfully sorry, but, don’t you see, Mr. Jones drew the insurance-money for his wife’s death....”

2

They had dined late, and it was nearly midnight when Ivor and Virginia were at last comfortably stretched on two of the wicker arm-chairs on the verandah: for, of course, it was perfectly clear from the moment of his arrival that they must in the next few hours be sitting together on that verandah. The air was chilly with the chill of a Riviera night in February, and Virginia, lying deep in her chair, had wrapped her moleskin coat well about her: for in the year 1919 the moleskin coat was at its ascendant, whence it has since been driven by barbarians, led by one Mr. Kolinsky....

There was no moon, only stars set brilliantly in the soft black onyx of the sky: a black night, and very silent on Cimiez; and a black and silent prospect from the verandah, intensified rather than broken by the distant reflection below of the lights of Nice on the velvet void which was a sea by day.

The hill of Cimiez is always of a silent habit at night, for its world is either in bed or the Casino, and the rattle of the tram-cars up and down the hill ceases by ten o’clock. Ivor and Virginia seemed to have borrowed something of the silence of the Cimiez midnight, for they sat silent for a long time, for what seemed a long time. And the light from the long windows opening out on the terrace fell brilliantly on them.

Lois’s voice suddenly called to them from the room behind:--

“I’m going to bed, Virginia. Shall I turn these lights out?”

“Yes, if you like. Good-night, dear.”

Now it was quite dark. Ivor could barely make out her face, a yard away from him: a dim, white thing above the soft darkness of her coat. It had not the remotest likeness to flesh, that face. It was made of some thin, white stuff....

Virginia said suddenly, into the night:--

“Let’s talk about beasts, Ivor.”

“Yes, why not?” he agreed out of his surprise.

“But I wonder if you will understand,” she murmured.

His chair creaked as he moved a leg.

“Have you ever had a beast in your life, Ivor?” And the dim, white thing grew bigger as she turned her face towards him. “A beast in your life, right _in_ it, Ivor?” she insisted. “Have you? Think, my dear, for it’s most important....”

“When I was much younger,” he seriously told her, “I had a beast. I’ve almost got over it now. The beast in my life was Other People. I resented them....”

She looked, in the darkness, like a figure made of furs and thought.

“I meant,” she said at last, “a personal beast. A beast, you know, with a face and arms and legs. A face that’s always there, in one’s life....”

“I suppose,” she said, “that you’ve loved sanely ... knowing more or less what and why you were loving. Or probably you haven’t loved, you’ve just liked people very much.”

He didn’t answer that. There was no special answer to make, except that he hadn’t loved or liked often; and then one would have to qualify that....

“That’s why, maybe, you have never had a beast in your inner life, Ivor. You are lucky, I do think....”

Her voice was making no appeal; it was just her voice of daylight undressed by the virtue in the night. But the way of her words was intensely pathetic, and he intensely felt the pathos of her in that moment, a dark moment. That pitifulness again! He seemed to understand things about this Virginia.... And she went on softly:--

“I’d like to draw a beast for you, Ivor, so that you could understand. But it’s difficult, so entirely a thing of feelings. You know? It’s just hell in the fourth dimension, and how can one explain that?”

“I know,” he said.

“But one loved the beast, Ivor! Oh, _yes_, frightfully! That’s why he’s so real, so awfully there....” He saw the white of her hand as she made a sudden gesture. “He’s so fine, don’t you see? In a conventional way, if you like, but still.... The blond beast of devilish philosophies maybe, Ivor! And he entered one’s life and swept one up, so airily! If only Ouida had been alive to see his type! He came, you see, as something quite strange--a man among the weaklings of my life with Hector Sardon. Oh, I seem to have known so many weaklings! Poor, poor Hector! Ah, you never saw me all that time, Ivor. It was a terrible time, terrible--and so _rotten_! But you probably guess.... And the beast came during the worst of it, when I couldn’t hold out against it all any more, not alone.... A lovely man the beast was, Ivor, and not at all the fool he mockingly pretends to be. Oh, no, not a fool at all! And so fresh and weathered and solid.... With him I felt the earth under my feet again, good old English earth in all its immense and lovely solidity. I thought I felt that, anyway, for it was only an illusion that he gaily mocked into me....”

“They mock one,” Ivor said, “and then one hates oneself. It’s beastly....”

“Mockery!” There was a soft and remote meaning in the way it dropped from Virginia’s lips. “Mockery! that soft and sweet mockery of a man in first love--oh, Ivor, it’s the finest thing--at first.” Her wicker chair creaked loudly as she suddenly turned towards him, and his accustomed eyes could see hers through the darkness, wide eyes fashioned out of the mystery of the night, eyes sombre with query. “Have you ever felt that in a woman for you, Ivor?”

“Yes,” he said. And he nodded gravely: “but mine wasn’t only at first--it meant nice things all the time.”

There was a long silence. And then Virginia said:--

“I’d like to be dramatic in my speech just for once--please may I, Ivor? Though I’ve already been frightfully dramatic with you once, haven’t I? It’s most unusual in me, I assure you, Ivor.”

“I live alone,” Ivor said grimly, “so I do it quite a lot.”

“Well,” Virginia confessed sweetly, “I feel that there’s nothing so terrifyingly masculine and magnetic as the feline male. For that’s what he is, my beast! The perfect thing of his kind.... So very representative, Ivor, that he’s exceptional! In the dirt of cities, round about Shaftesbury Avenue maybe, it must be that kind of man, I suppose, that makes women do queer things for them, walk the streets and the like. They have a queer effect on women, my kind of beast. My particular one has made me put up with some odd things, I can tell you, Ivor! Standing aside and watching him make love. It was awful, awful, at first.... And then he sort of magnetises one by his perverse understanding of oneself, he forces one to treat him as he treats oneself. He judges people by his own beastliness, you see--and he’s so often right, Ivor! He’s so often been right about me....”

“And then,” she said, “he has queer, soft moments. He sometimes smiles at me from across a crowded room, in a most sweet and understanding way. And he seems to say: ‘Only you and I know what you and I are really like, and we’ll never tell any one--will we, Virginia’?”

“But I am telling someone now,” she said.

“I’m glad,” Ivor murmured.

And her wicker chair broke out in fantastic chorus as her whole body seemed to turn to him.

“_Are_ you?” she cried comically.

From behind them the noise of a piano suddenly burst on their silence. It lashed out into the darkness in a furious medley, then softened down to classical sobriety--then again a furious medley, then a jingling step, then to something very softly played.

“That’s little Johnny,” Virginia explained.

They listened. For Johnny had the art of seducing attention while he played; he played perversely, his touch had a delicate and impish genius, and he mixed up fugues and fox-trots with almost passionate cheek; he played like a tired genius, and they listened. He stopped soon....

“He always does that for five minutes before going to bed,” Virginia told him, “drunk or sober. So if you pass any house anywhere in the night and hear that noise, you will know that Johnny is about to go to bed. He says it’s his swan song, and that he likes to repeat his swan song every night so that he won’t feel it so much on his last on earth. Nice Johnny....”

Suddenly she stretched out a hand and touched Ivor’s arm, so unexpectedly that it startled him. There are women who appear incapable of touching one, and when they do, no matter how lightly, their touch seems to have a fabulous meaning. He had not looked at her for a long time, he had been staring into the darkness, but now she startled him into staring at her.

“You may be thinking,” she said wistfully, “that it’s rather indecent of me to speak so plainly to you about George. Please don’t think that, Ivor, for I’m not used to confiding in people; in fact, I’ve never done it before, and I shall be so easily frightened off.”

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “And that’s why I wired to you to come down here. I’m generally supposed to be a secret kind of person, you know. ‘She never tells,’ people say. But I wired to you because I felt I couldn’t bear the burden of things alone for another second. It seems silly....”

“And I thought,” she said shyly, “that telling you all this might explain a bit of that terrible last night in England....”

Her shyness disturbed him....

“You needn’t explain that,” he said quickly. “One’s always afraid, somehow....”

He nervously waited for her to speak; and he was puzzled, faintly irritated, by her silence, for he wanted her just to tell him that she didn’t now want him to believe that she was a “perfect little cad.” But, after a while, she only said, dimly:--

“Now that I’ve told you why I asked you to come, I’d like you to tell me why you did come, please. It’s a very leading question, isn’t it?”

“Well ...” he said, and he stirred in his chair.

“I was lonely,” he said. “And I thought that maybe you were lonely too. I just thought it. And, Virginia,” he earnestly leaned towards her a little, “I’m so glad you’ve told me about your personal beast, indeed I am! But are you quite, quite sure that it’s such a personal beast as all that--that it isn’t just your, well, distaste of your present life that you have somehow personified?”

“Oh, no!” It was a cry.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I thought we might help each other somehow.... One has these brilliant ideas....”

“Was it an impertinence to come in that spirit, I wonder?” he asked suddenly.

She stared at him; and faint memories stirred in her of those very young days round about Mont Agel and the Hallidays, when she had been so impatient of this man’s “rightness,” his bursts of defensive formality. She stared at him. And realised with a start that he was speaking.

“You’ve asked me a question, Virginia, and now I will ask you one--a baby question. What is it you most want in the world?”

“But, Ivor, remember that I’m thirty!”

“Well?”

“Then there’s only one answer, and that is in one word--understanding! Just that--understanding! The second childhood of a woman’s dreams lies in the word, Ivor....”

The night was so dark and still, yet somehow noisy with their personalities, that Ivor had a feeling that she and he were children....

“We’re like children playing in the dark, Virginia--I feel, do you know, that nothing we say this moment matters at all! It simply doesn’t matter, it just belongs to this childish moment....”

“Then I will ask you your question back,” she took him swiftly up. “What is it _you_ most want in the world, Ivor? Remember,” she added, “you have said this is a childish moment, so you can be sincere.”

His chair creaked passionately as he sat up to look closely at her.

“I want,” he said firmly, “the loveliness in people. No less. You’ll say that’s pretty arrogant, and I suppose it is. But I want it all the same....”

“I’ve had a bit,” he explained, “so I know it’s good--oh, wonderfully worth having, Virginia! But one can’t keep it--anyway, I couldn’t keep my little bit. Wasn’t worthy, I suppose. But if you’ve got to wait quietly until you _are_ worthy of a thing you might wait till the Last Trump and still not get it. Better to snatch than get left, I think.... One’s best moments draw that loveliness out of people, and then one loses it. Little demons of prejudice and resentment make one lose it--that shining loveliness in people, Virginia! And when that’s in them they have clean eyes--amazing, isn’t it?--but later on their eyes are not so clean, and one’s own are mirrored in theirs. People say that’s ‘life.’ Everything that gets dirty is called ‘life,’ Virginia. Everything that dies is called ‘life.’ ...”

He stared towards the sea, over it. The Mediterranean slept profoundly; and then it seemed to him that the Mediterranean was not asleep, only pretending; it was a prowling beast, ever prowling about the shores of Europe and Africa....

“I’d much rather go to Africa now than to bed,” she said suddenly.

A car stopped outside the gates; they saw its lights, and they heard voices.

“Good-night, Ivor,” Virginia said--rather severely--and was gone.

Thus it was on the first night.