Chapter XLIII

There is no surer method of remembrance than to associate a man with a cause. Viola might have forgotten Jim if she had not absorbed herself in his aims. He had hardly left the house when she set herself to learn what he stood for. She subscribed to a Labour paper. She went to the London library and drew out of it Karl Marx, Jaurès, and Rolland. She heard Bernard Shaw lecture. She talked for hours to some one who knew Keir Hardie. She became conscious of Jim’s world in a new sense. She had always known of it dimly as she had known of the movements and habits of goldfish in a bowl. Jokes in _Punch_ illuminated it and funny books about the conversations of char-women brought it before her eyes. But she had not known that this world had its own system of thought as she had hers, and that Socialists were not people who only wanted to take away all that other people had. She learned with surprise that there were other ideas of government; Syndicalist, Guild Socialists, and Anarchists confronted her with drastic changes.

She tried to talk sometimes about her discoveries, but people either laughed at her or turned mysteriously and suddenly angry.

Even people she had always respected as leaders of thought couldn’t bear to be asked about ideas which they hadn’t entertained.

She learned that what would disagree with your ordinary life, if you believed it, was a crank. Christianity was a crank, but not if it was diluted and restrained. Anything which could affect law, food, clothes or pleasure was anathema. It must not be alluded to except as a joke.

Her own life had swung back into its accustomed grooves from the moment Viola had let Jim go. Nobody seemed to think love could survive a year of silence. They were all extraordinarily nice to Viola, it reminded her of the time when her tonsils had been removed and she had been presented with a doll’s house. Her father went to Norway to fish and she and her mother started on a round of summer visits.

The dock strike came to an end. The end that her father and Reggie had spoken of as the Ruin of England. The Government commission found for the dockers on the majority of their grievances, and let the employers down as easily as they could on the rest.

It looked as if it was the other way round in the papers. But the dockers went back to work, and England, relieved of an inconvenience, continued placidly on her path to ruin. Even Mr. Egerton and Reggie though they had been inconvenienced a great deal more than England, went on much the same as usual.

The Labour papers were triumphant, but as nobody that Viola knew ever read them, they merely gave her a peculiar sense of looking at things out of the Tower of Babel with the added disadvantage of being the only person to understand the difference of tongues.

The enormous unfairness of what her own people thought blinded her to the equal unfairness of what Jim’s people thought. She had been too cramped by the fetters of her own class not to imagine that the class she hadn’t tried had no fetters.

She longed to plunge into it and be free, but she changed her clothes three times a day and played golf and tennis; and in the evenings she danced the tango. She danced beautifully and seriously, and had, in the course of the dances, in spite of trying hard to avoid them, three more proposals.

In the late autumn they went abroad. Mrs. Egerton believed that railway trains and orange trees would cure Viola.

She gave Viola a great deal of freedom and encouraged her to flirt with a handsome and extremely fast young Frenchman.

Viola for the first and last time in her life really flirted. She felt curiously safe and very powerful. Nobody could have been more unlike Jim than Monsieur Gustave de René. Flirtation is a curious and thrilling game, and Monsieur de René played it extraordinarily well. It was a flat surprise to the young Frenchman when Viola suddenly and for no apparent reason snapped the flirtation off. He brooded over it for twenty-four hours, and then left the hotel, leaving his address behind him. But Viola did not miss him at all. She missed Jim suddenly a great deal more, and she missed him differently.

She was sure that she was wasting her life, and life had stopped being easy to waste.

She wanted to be alone so that she could think of Jim uninterruptedly. Meals and gay halls full of people and perpetual dance music tired and confused her.

She would escape by herself into distant olive gardens, and look through smoke-like puffs of olives, down into the sea. Its unshared beauty hurt her. She thought of what Gustave had said to her when she laughingly told him to love the flowers on her knee. ‘If you let me kiss you,’ he had said, ‘I shall love them—I shall love everything so much more, even the dead fishes on the beach.’ She had not let him kiss her, but she had realised that what he had said was true.

Without Jim’s kiss she could not love the sea.

They went home to London in March.

The tango had swept bridge aside. Harry was an adept at it. He thought of nothing else. The golden room at Ciro’s was his universe.

‘I must take Viola there,’ he said to his mother. ‘It’ll knock the nonsense out of her head.’

Viola listened to Harry’s offer with a peculiar look in her eyes. She said, ‘Are there a good many people there, and can you slip in and out easily if you’re bored?’

‘All London’s there,’ said Harry, ‘and unless you go all the time, like I do, you’d not miss even a peach of a girl, there’s so many—no one notices outsiders.’

Viola nodded, considering. ‘I don’t mind going with you to-morrow night,’ she said indifferently.

When Harry left her, she took out a strange, scrawled piece of paper some one unknown to her had slipped into her hand as she was going up the steps of her house the day before: it ran, ‘Can you be where I can speak to you alone, with no one knowing, to-morrow night. It is absolutely urgent.—Eliza.’

Eliza gave her a number of a box at a neighbouring post office for an answer.

It was not very easy in Viola’s usual life to arrange for secret hours. But Ciro’s sounded secret enough; and perhaps after all this was a last hour, an hour to break up once and for all her usual life.

She dressed with infinite care for her new adventure, she felt like a priestess about to become a sacrifice.

She wanted to be a sacrifice, but she wanted to be as fine a one as she could.

She wore a primrose-coloured dress with a purple cloak, and from her throat to her waist hung a chain of uncut amethysts.

Beauty flowered in her; her eyes had in them the dream which is its own fulfilment.

She held her grave, dark head high. There was a curious half-smile on her lips. She wanted to see to the end of the life she was part of to-night, for she might never see any of it again.

She wanted to look her best, to dance her lightest, and then to hear midnight strike like Cinderella and fly off without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind.

Harry had chosen a well-placed table where they could see the whole room. The light quivered on it like moonlight over a field of flowers.

Each table seemed shut off in a brilliant life of its own, melting suddenly into music.

Movement stirred behind the dancers like a magic wind pressing them into action.

They sprang up lightly from their seats as if shaken into the room, dizzy with pleasure and money. The most expensive passions in the world were there, and the souls through which the passions rode their incontinuous cheap way. The trivial, undermining music forced its excitement into the blood.

Harry caught her hand, and her feet moved of themselves.

She danced and danced, but her mind never swerved from Eliza’s letter.

Moment by moment the crisis that awaited her came nearer, and she belonged to it, to its compulsion, and its reality, not to these men whose hands in turn were on her shoulders, whom she moved with her eyes and swung from in her laughter.

These thing were as hollow to her as bubbles in wine, the intoxication lay beneath the bubbles.

Suddenly she saw Reggie and was shaken half out of her dream. He asked her to dance. She hesitated, and while she hesitated Harry said, ‘Of course she will, old chap,’ and left her.

All the most thrilling memories of their old relationship had been while they were dancing. Reggie was at his best dancing—pliant, skilful, beautiful as all young forceful creatures in motion are beautiful. Viola had felt nearest to surrender when she had been bound to him by music and rhythm. She shut her eyes and tried to feel it again. This was the old life on trial for the last time. If it could enchant her, let it enchant her! She would be safe then from the compulsion of the unknown which called to her.

Reggie’s eyes were on her face. He had summoned all his magnetism, and the strength and torment of his passion for her, to force her into sharing his emotion, and she could not even feel moved.

The lights and the mad, bad lilting tune, the swinging, self-created movements, half surrender and half power, had lost their meaning.

Something was dead in her. It had not died in a moment. She did not know what had killed it, but it was dead now. An excitement more real than itself had swept it aside.

She lifted her eyes to Reggie’s absorbed, pleading face, and infinitely gently, with half a smile and half a sigh, she shook her head.

It was all over—he would not ask her again. The life it meant, and that he had shared, had slipped out of her hands. Reggie knew it was over. He muttered something beneath his breath and stopped dancing. The music ran on interminably. Harry had disappeared.

She moved quickly away, slipped behind tables and between flying couples, into the cloak room, and through the hall. She was in the street now, and feeling the sane, cold, March air on her face.

As she stood for a moment looking up and down the road for her car, she was conscious that a slight, uncertain figure had slipped up to her and stood beside her. She turned her head sharply, half expecting to find that Reggie had followed her. But it was not Reggie.

It was a very small, white face with haunted eyes, a voice so small it hardly reached her ears, said, ‘If you don’t take me with you, I’m done in.’

In a flash Viola knew, and accepted this turning point of her life.

The car swept up to the kerb; Viola put her hand out dizzily.

‘Yes,’ she said under her breath, ‘yes—get in quickly——’

Eliza needed no second invitation. She was in the car as swiftly as a flame licks the side of a hole. Viola sank beside her stupefied. It was Eliza who put sixpence into the messenger boy’s hand, and said, ‘Home, please,’ with a perfect imitation of Viola’s accent to the footman.

The car moved off discreet and silent, and then Eliza sank into the corner, doubled up and panting, her bright, black eyes were darkened and wide with fear, she drew her breath unevenly as if she were running. Her face was white, with purple pockets under her eyes. Her hand and her lips moved without ceasing, as if they had a consciousness of their own.

It was terrible to see her eyes, for though they were afraid they were fierce. They were like the eyes of something cornered, determined to strike.

‘God,’ she whispered, ‘that was a year ago. If you hadn’t come out just then nothing could have saved me. I’d been waiting for you, I watched you go in. It was my only chance.’

‘Chance!’ whispered Viola. ‘Are—is anybody after you?’

‘After me?’ Eliza laughed; ‘the whole Yard’s after me! And who set them after me, d’you suppose?’ She leaned forward suddenly and from her white, quivering lips poured forth such a string of blistering and evil words that Viola sank back, sick and faint, shuddering away from her. It was Jim Eliza was cursing, Jim and another man she called Bert. Jim—for if he had not described her exact appearance no one would have known who to look for. But Bert had given her away. They’d copped Bert, and Bert had blabbed—the only man Eliza had ever worked with who’d let her down. ‘I’ll do for Bert,’ said Eliza with quiet intensity, ‘when he gets out.’

Bert had given away all her haunts and hiding-places. For twenty-four hours she had been hunted, slipping away from one to the other only to find fresh men out after her. She couldn’t stop to eat; she’d been going down to the river unless Viola stopped for her at Ciro’s.

‘The river’s a lot of use,’ she explained parenthetically, ‘if you know your way on to a barge.’ Then she pulled herself up abruptly. ‘How do I know you’ll help me to get off?’ she asked abruptly.

Eliza fixed her eyes on Viola. They seemed to strip her of the purple velvet cloak, and the primrose dress, to take away from her even her flesh and blood, and point straight at her heart.

Eliza had never taken human life, but if she had, she would have looked as she did at that moment. Viola had never seen any one look wicked or dangerous before—it surprised her very much, but it did not frighten her.

‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Well, I don’t know yet myself,’ agreed Eliza, ‘and that’s a fact. I must have some food before I can think. I’m nearly dead for food. I had plenty of money on me but I didn’t like to stop. Take me into your house, I’ll be safe there, and give me something to eat. Then I’ll see what to do next.’

Viola wondered afterwards why she should have acted so instinctively upon Eliza’s need. It never occurred to her to call John and send for the police, it never even occurred to her to wait till they reached her door and then let Eliza shift for herself. She acted automatically, as if she too were hunted.

Mr. and Mrs. Egerton were out. She took Eliza into the dining-room where there were sandwiches and soup waiting on a spirit lamp. Eliza cleared the entire plate of sandwiches while Viola was preparing the soup for her.

When she had finished drinking the soup, Eliza sat silent and huddled in an arm-chair. It was one o’clock and snow had begun to fall.

Eliza’s clothes looked as if she had slept in them all night, her hair hung loose about her face, she was tired and angry, but she still had her wits about her.

‘Can you drive a car?’ she asked sharply.

Viola nodded.

‘Can you get hold of one to-night?’

Viola thought for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if I go at once before the men shut up the garage. I could get Harry’s racer. But we must be quick, he’ll miss me at Ciro’s and come back here to look for me.’

‘Well, cut along,’ said Eliza. ‘I’ll hide in here if he comes, and meet you outside directly you hoot. I haven’t any more breath for running.’

Viola left her. Whatever Jim thought, she must get Eliza away. If Eliza wasn’t safe, Jim wasn’t. It was very terrible, and something—Viola didn’t quite know what—about Eliza was more terrible still. But she must do it. She flew round the corner to the garage—it was very cold and she only had satin slippers on, but she had never had compulsion at her heels before.

The men were putting away the big car. They were astonished at her wanting Mr. Harry’s racer at that hour of the night, but they took it out for her. She gave an explanation they couldn’t catch and turned it swiftly into the Square.

Eliza stood by the lamp-post waiting. She had found two fur coats which hung over her arm. She swung herself into the still moving car. A taxi was driving towards them. Viola leaned forward and caught a glimpse of Harry’s astonished face.

‘By Jove!’ he cried, ‘my car!’ But they were gone in a flash into the cross lights, and out into the darkness.

Eliza said nothing for a few moments, then she cried, ‘Do you know the Folkestone Road? We’ve got to get there to-night. That’s why I had to have a car. All the stations are watched. The boats, too, but they won’t trace me coming up in your car with proper clothes on. I bought my ticket. Lucky you could drive—I can’t.’

Viola drove on in silence. She needed all her wits for the night drive. They pulled out from the traffic at last, and she could let the car out over the empty roads. From time to time, between endless unwound ribbons of speed, she pulled up to make sure of her way. Eliza never spoke, she slept. All her will and her strength were lost in physical exhaustion, she flung her life into Viola’s hands and left it there. It struck Viola that there was something grand in this act of reckless confidence.

Risk was the essence of the life beside her. But as Viola thought, she realised that it was courage, not confidence. Eliza did not run risks because she had confidence. She had no confidence whatever. She ran risks because she had no alternative.

It was a curious drive. Viola had never in her life had to decide so many things before. Eliza was ignorant of motors and the road. Everything depended upon Viola. The darkness of the night was full of danger. There was the occasional night traffic; once Viola almost ran over a drunken man, and once she came up short against the mystery of a strayed cow, bulking enormous against a hedge of shadows.

The wind and snow hit her cheeks and whipped her searching eyes. Her head ached violently and felt empty. Once for miles she chased a hare between the head lights. It seemed incapable of getting out of the way. Again and again the car was all but on it. It ran like the wind, but could not seem able to swerve into safety. On all sides of it were safety, but it was bound to danger, just as the creature she was trying to save seemed bound to danger. At length with a queer, shrill scream it leapt at the opening of a gate and was gone, and when it had gone Viola found that the tears were running down her cheeks.

Once she went almost to sleep on a long, even stretch of road, and thought she was dancing at Ciro’s only that Ciro’s was a ship in a storm and all the tables rocked.

She was faint with fatigue when a breath from the sea met her. She felt her slack muscles tighten and breathed deep breaths. The lights of Folkestone were sprinkled up and down between Shorncliffe and the sea.

Eliza woke with a start.

‘We want the early boat,’ she said. ‘We can’t wait in the town. Haul up somewhere on the cliff. Hotels wouldn’t take us in this time of night.’

The darkness grew curiously vague. There was no light in the sky, but the night seemed like a fabric worn thin and penetrable.

Viola knew that the dawn was near. She pulled up by the side of the road and watched the retreat of night. The horizon moved back slowly. It grew colder and colder, as if the cold were a gray substance pushing away the vaguer kindliness of the dark. It was gray everywhere now, only the telegraph poles were black, and far away Viola saw the startling black shadows of the ships.

The sea came first, and then the sky over it, and at last the little, shivering, clumsy town.

‘Now we’ll push on,’ said Eliza. Eliza had been tidying up in a curiously complete and detached way. She wore one of Mrs. Egerton’s fur coats, and had bound a purple scarf of Viola’s carefully round her head with such skill that it looked like a motoring turban. ‘We’ll have to do now,’ said Eliza, covering Viola carefully with the rug, and pulling the second fur coat over all traces of her evening dress. ‘Drive straight to the gates.’

The town was just awake; milk carts and newsboys passed them.

The car climbed the hill and slipped down it into the narrow streets, and out on to the open space before the Pavilion Hotel.

‘Slow up and leave the car here,’ said Eliza. ‘Have you any money on you! I’d be glad of all you got.’ But Viola had no money.

Eliza thought covetously of the amethysts, but something at the bottom of her indurated conscience struck at asking for Viola’s amethysts.

‘I’ve got enough to see me to Paris,’ she said grudgingly. She looked at Viola curiously for a moment.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why, I’m sure; but you’ve done me a good turn.’

Viola felt her lips trembling and the tears coming into her eyes. Eliza did not offer to shake hands with her. She walked towards the boat with decision and confidence. Viola watched her with her heart in her throat. It seemed all right. It must be all right.

At the gangway there was one sailor and two men who appeared to be just stepping on to the gang-plank, but they had stopped to speak to each other. There was no one else about. Every one was on board; they had only driven up at the last moment. The two men went on speaking. Eliza came up to them and then stopped dead. She stood quite still like something that will never move again. One of the men stepped forward. He fastened something on Eliza’s hands that clicked and flashed, and the other man turned abruptly away from the boat, and Viola saw that he was Jim.

She hadn’t saved him, she hadn’t saved Eliza.

The sailor stepped aside and the gang-plank was pulled up.

It had begun to rain, the light scurry of a passing squall. The waves ran high and danced with white tops playfully.

The sun caught the sea beyond and made purple and silver stripes on it. The cliffs stood hard and very white, with raw edges, leaning away from the sky.

All the three figures fifty yards away from Viola looked small and stiff. They did not seem to be ever going to move. Jim was explaining something to the other man, and the other man nodded soothingly. At last they approached Viola.

‘Yes, yes,’ the other man said, ‘I’ll get her a taxi.’ He turned to Eliza. ‘You stay quiet, my girl,’ he said very much less soothingly. Eliza stayed extremely quiet. The steamer moved off with a shrill shriek of departure.

Eliza wet her lips and looked at Jim with a long, furtive look. ‘I’ll do you in for this, my lad,’ she said. ‘You dirty hound; why couldn’t you have kept quiet and let me be! It’ll be as bad for you as for me, thank God! I’ll break you and your reputation till you won’t know the difference between the Lord’s Prayer and a cat o’ nine tails!’

‘Steady, miss,’ said the detective, coming back with a taxi. ‘The less you talk your head off the better it’ll be for you. As a matter of fact this gentleman didn’t help us to cop you. He came down here because we’d had you followed, and he wanted to make things pleasant all round, see! He’s paying for your taxi.’

Eliza lifted her white lids and said something which turned the inspector a dull purple. Jim put out his hand to touch her; he had looked at her all the time, but he could not speak. He did not know what to say.

He had half betrayed her, and that he loved and pitied her made nothing any better for either of them. You couldn’t give people away and preach at them afterwards. Jim wondered dumbly if Eliza could feel through his silence, his passionate desire to help her. But Eliza did not feel emotions of this kind unless they could be of a practical use to her. She moved out of reach of his hand and said to Viola,—

‘I want to speak to you alone without these two men.’

‘You can’t,’ said the Inspector quickly; ‘you’ve got this young lady into trouble enough already.’

‘You hop into the taxi,’ he said to Eliza. Eliza obeyed him, and Viola moved quickly after her. Eliza saw that Jim and the detective were out of earshot before she spoke. Then she said,—

‘Put your hand in my pocket, beneath my skirt, and you’ll find your pearls. It’ll keep you out of the case if you take them now. They’re a couple short, but you can spare two.’

‘Oh—I’m so sorry——’ said Viola. Her voice broke. Eliza stared indifferently out of the window. She had nothing more to say.

Viola slipped the pearls into her bag. As she stepped back the Inspector tapped her on the shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, Miss,’ she said, ‘but I must take over what she gave you.’

‘Oh, but not my own pearls!’ protested Viola. The inspector looked into the bag, picked out the string of pearls, and laughed.

‘That was very neat of her,’ he said. ‘It’ll give her less time, and they’re six short. However, if you wish to overlook it, there are plenty of other accounts to settle. You’d better let me take her alone. The gentleman here’ll look after you, Miss. You’ve got yourself into a pretty pickle, but we can look into all that later.’

Jim crossed over and spoke to Eliza. Viola could not hear what he said, but whatever it was, her white, shut face never changed under it.

Eliza drove off relentlessly without looking at either of them.

‘Oh, Jim,’ said Viola. He slipped his arm around her and led her back, without speaking, to Harry’s little racing car.

She leaned against the side of it and began to cry. Jim seemed struck dumb. Eliza had always had the power of drying up in him the springs of spiritual adventure. She forced him back into the acid silences of fact.

He took Viola to a hotel and ordered coffee.

‘I didn’t give her away,’ he said, half to himself. ‘They rang me up and said they were watching her outside Ciro’s, and then that she’d gone off in a private car on to the Folkestone Road. They said she’d be sure to try to catch the early boat, and if I went by train with Mulet we could get here before the boat started. I didn’t dream it was you. They’d shadowed her for days. I didn’t know, and if I’d known I couldn’t have helped—I couldn’t have tried to get her off.’

‘Oughtn’t I to have tried?’ asked Viola.

Jim sank his head in his hands.

‘How do I know?’ he said at last. ‘I’ve always been all wrong about Eliza—long ago I might have helped her—but I couldn’t help her. She never cared. You can’t help people who don’t care. They never get away from anything.’

‘Oh, Jim,’ she said, ‘but you couldn’t _want_ her to be caught!’

Jim shook his head. ‘I couldn’t have got her away,’ he said dully. ‘You don’t know what harm she does. You don’t know what harm is. I hate prisons, but Eliza’s safe there. She does less mischief there than she could do outside. It’s what she’s done that’s crueller than being caught.’

Viola’s heart was still shaken with pity and tears, but she was happier. She could not but be happier—the great ache of separation was over.

She made Jim drink some coffee, and drank it eagerly herself. Then she said,—

‘Jim, I’m never going to leave you again!’

‘Leave me!’ he muttered. ‘What do you mean by “leave me”? You can’t stay. This is only the beginning of the business. It’s bad enough to have you mixed up like this in the start, but the inspector thinks he can keep you out of it.’

‘But I’m not going to be kept out of it,’ Viola said quietly. ‘It isn’t any use putting me away. I’m not away any more. I couldn’t go back. It was possible, perhaps, before I’d seen what I’ve seen to-night, but now it will never be possible again.

‘I was afraid at first—terribly afraid of Eliza herself, and that feeling in her that she wouldn’t mind being cruel to save herself; and then I tried to help her and forgot all about being afraid. I forgot everything but getting her away. Ah! I know I couldn’t!

‘But you try all your life, don’t you, to save people, and sometimes you do get them away?’

‘Sometimes they do get away,’ Jim admitted. ‘I’ve been thinking all these months that have seemed like years, while I couldn’t speak to you, that I was all wrong. Sharing my life—why, I haven’t a life to share! I’m pushed here and there into other people’s lives, into causes and committees and sometimes into crimes. I’ve got just as much life to offer you as if it was a scattered seed a bird carries away and drops anywhere among strange islands.

‘Don’t think I’m grumbling—I’ve chosen my life. But you can’t choose one thing and take another. And that’s what I was trying to do—wanting you.’

‘But you do want me?’ Viola asked in a low voice.

Jim gave a queer little laugh. ‘I want you as much as a hungry man wants bread,’ he said, ‘but I can do without you better!’

‘Well,’ said Viola, ‘I’m sorry if you can dispense with me so easily—I sacrificed myself once to your pride—I went away to learn—all sorts of different things—and every one of them pulled me back to you.

‘I’ll never go away again. I’ll share your committees and your causes. Where you’re blamed I’ll be blamed, but I’ll not stay any more by myself.

‘You say you don’t want me to share your life—but look at me, Jim—I am your life.’

An iron bar in Jim’s heart gave way suddenly. His shame and his pride gave way, and all his loneliness.

Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash of jewelled wings, a Kingfisher fly home.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of _The Kingfisher_ by Phyllis Bottome]