Friendly Young Ladies (26 page)

“I’ve been wondering about this,” he murmured, “but I was afraid you might mind.”

“You underrate your talents,” said Leo politely.

During the short exchange that followed, Peter revised several preconceptions. The implied compliment, however, was equally satisfactory. Presently he paused, by way of a few bars’ rest before changing the tempo; she was gazing up at him with level, half-open eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” he said, “as if you had a knife in your garter.”

This amused her, and she laughed.

“I don’t wear garters.”

“Nor you do. What lovely long stockings.”

“Do you know, Peter, I think I really like you.”

Peter scented more defence mechanism in this, to him, needlessly guarded statement. Pursuing his mission, he gathered her in compellingly and whispered. “Darling, I love you,” with all the expressiveness at his command, which was a good deal. It was true by his reckoning; his capacities for love were varied and extensive, a fact of which he was pleasantly aware.

Leo made some soft-sounding reply to which, since her reception of the accompaniments was so suitable, he paid little attention. It was, in fact, “Don’t be such a bloody liar.” He took it as a form of pleasantry, in so far as he took it in at all. In this he reckoned without his guest. Leo disliked verbal inaccuracies. Possibly this trait had been fostered by working with Joe, who, though not an elaborate stylist, had a fondness for the exact use of words, like that of a cabinet-maker for close dovetailing. Unlike Joe, however, she carried it to unreasonable lengths. Peter had, by her standards, cancelled the rules, and had received a formal notification of the fact. Happily and, on the whole, excusably unaware of this, Peter was following equally logical procedure on a different set of data.

There is something unmistakable about the movement, however slight, of one’s companion consulting a wrist-watch over the back of one’s neck. Peter noticed it, but thought, after all, that he must have been mistaken. He continued to follow logic. There was no particular sign of a fallacy until a much later stage of the discussion, at which Leo simply remarked, “No, really, thanks. I shall miss my train.”

Anyone hearing her voice alone would have supposed that he had offered her a cigarette. It shook, for a moment, even Peter’s equilibrium; during the interval, Leo sat up briskly, fished in her pocket for a comb, and began straightening her hair.

Good losers are of two sorts, the modest and the invincibly confident. Peter was a very good loser indeed. It would have taken, in fact, a good deal more than this to persuade him that he had lost at all. He had, besides, beautiful manners, even at exceptional times. Before she had proceeded from her hair to her face he had recovered his poise and had even handed her his shaving-mirror, with a slight flourish whose sarcasm was barely discernible. It had, after all, been extremely interesting, and would probably become even more so later on. Annoyance, he felt, would have ruined the effect, both outwardly and in inward retrospect. Meanwhile experience had been increased, some original notes added to the file, and an evening filled in without boredom; he was twenty-eight, there was plenty of life and any amount of time. All the same …

“Thanks for the drink,” said Leo, rising. (She had given the mirror a polish on her sleeve; she was particular about borrowed things.) “Well, we’ll be seeing you sometime. Don’t bother to come down with me. No, really, I remember the way quite well.”

Evidently she meant this, so he let her go. It was not till he was half-way through a cigarette that he remembered her train as having been his own also. The next one would probably be tiresomely late; but it would be too ridiculous if they were to meet on the platform. He ascertained that the Home Sister had not yet had the sheets removed from his bed. He could just as well go down to-morrow. It occurred to him that a telephone call now to Norah would catch her in plenty of time before she left her patient. It would be a little surprise for her to find him still in town; and an analysis of the case, in general terms, would probably interest her. He strolled down towards the telephone exchange.

“O
F COURSE IT’S ABSURD
,” said Leo, kicking off her slippers. “But for some reason that makes it all the worse.”

Helen, who was in bed already, looked up from polishing her almond-pink nails.

“If he had turned up she’d probably be far more miserable than she is now.”

“Tell me I’m an egoist. I know. The sort who’ll eat a chicken but won’t be the one to wring its neck.”

“Quite a lot of people are funny like that.”

“I just didn’t think, I suppose. He was so restful, you know.”

“Did you say restful, or wasn’t I listening?”

“Yes, of course. He never left one in the slightest doubt, for a single instant, that he didn’t give a damn. He was so kind and understanding and off the point. I’ve never felt so safe with anyone. I simply forgot. Till I got back here and found her all dolled up and waiting, poor little wretch. I felt as if I’d snatched a penny out of a blind man’s tin. It was horrible.”

“Except that the penny was never really there.”

“And Santa Claus was never really there, but you don’t tell them before they can take it.”

“Santa Claus will attend to that, if you don’t.”

“Oh yes. As soon as it occurs to him that any misunderstanding needs clearing up. The sooner the better, I suppose. It will be bad enough to be there when it happens, without being involved in it.”

“Well, I should think you’ve provided against that. If I’d been him I’d have blackened your eye; someone will, you know, one of these days.”

“Perhaps it’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for, who knows. A gentleman friend of mine did it when I was thirteen. But that was a decent scrap, and all in order. … I wish I understood more about young girls. It’s a handicap never to have been one. How do they feel, what do they really want? I wish I knew.”

“Bless you, I’ve been one. They feel what they’ve read in books, mostly, and they want what doesn’t exist. You can’t do anything about it. Why should you? It has its moments, you know.”

“Has it? You’re always so comforting. … Joe said something once, or wrote it, I forget. Something to the effect that it’s good for youth to be hurt once or twice, provided it’s done with a sharp instrument.” Her face had changed as she spoke; its restless vitality was quieted, she looked, for a moment, peaceful and grave. Helen looked away, feeling, while it lasted, the breath of loneliness that passes for jealousy in generous souls.

“Joe isn’t always very original, is he?” she said smiling.

“I suppose not. I never thought about it. I expect he doesn’t need to be.”

“It was about this time last year you went climbing with him. Do you think you’ll go again?”

“Not this season. He wouldn’t break off in the middle of a book.”

She fell silent, and absently put out her cigarette.

“It rained a good deal,” she added at length.

It had rained three days out of the seven, while they sat in horsehair chairs in the little climbers’ pub, spreading maps on the mahogany table, marking routes in pencil, eating, attending to their boots, reading, and saying nothing unless they had something to say. On the other four days they had climbed, scientifically, silently in the main, roped together once or twice when it was advisable, taking the legitimate risks. She had never had to ask him for any help beyond what is accepted from the leader to the second climber, and he had never had to offer it. He had taught her a good deal, as he would have taught a boy who was shaping well, and with as little patronage. In the evening they had drunk their pint and chewed over the day; when she went up to bed, and heard the two men in the room next door kicking off their boots side by side and talking about cracks and finger-holds till they fell asleep, it had seemed to her silly, but unimportant, that convention prevented Joe and herself from doing the same. She had been the only woman among the six or seven people there, but no one had been curious about their relationship. Everyone was there to climb, and took this and one another for granted, gathering together at the day’s end to compare routes and methods and gear with the impersonality of their kind, and keeping their secrets of exaltation, or fear, or fulfilment to themselves. She had been accepted among them precisely as Joe was accepted; she had worn, without attracting attention, almost precisely the same clothes. “Difference of sex no more we knew than our guardian angels do”: not an ecstasy, but three thousand feet of rock, taken steadily in nailed boots, remained Leo’s idea of the ascent to the state of the blessed. Once, striking rotten rock, they had both been in real danger, and had got out of it, and had sat on the ledge of their endeavour getting back their breath, with no comment beyond a raised eyebrow and a grin. Joe had not felt called upon to apologize because they had nearly died together. He had not asked her if she felt all right to go on. They had shared bread and cheese and chocolate with their feet in space, and it had tasted better than any food in the world. “It rained,” she would say to people afterwards, “three days out of seven.” She had said little more than this even to Helen. She kept it whole with silence; it had been the greatest happiness of her life.

“Lord, I’m sleepy,” she said. “Well, sufficient unto the day.”

Elsie too was awake. Curled up in bed, with the amber-shaded lamp beside her, she was reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare, Earlier in the day she had noticed the book on one of Leo’s shelves, and had secreted it away; for she had never read them all, only, at school, the ones quoted in the standard anthologies. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” and “When in disgrace with Fortune”—she had had no difficulty with these, they were clear and absolute, like something in the Bible; she knew them, of course, by heart. The others, after their metrical and rhythmic virtues had been explained to her, she still found a little confusing; not, somehow, complete in themselves, but like part of a story whose plot one did not know. Half-way through the long evening—for quite early she had been sure that Peter would not come—she had decided that tonight she would read them all. She had experienced so much in the meantime; she would, she thought, understand them now.

As she undressed, she had been a little surprised to find herself less miserable tonight than the night before. Sorrow, this second day of disappointment, ought surely to have accumulated, not softened into this dreamlike melancholy, a purple twilight lit with sad stars. It was, she thought, because her love was of the spirit, a marriage of true minds, not needing the material communication of words and eyes. It did not occur to her—indeed, if anyone had told her she would indignantly have denied it—that real contact with Peter entailed prodigious strain, of several kinds; the effort to appear grown up, to understand everything he said, to make answers that would not sound silly; the effort to assimilate an actual personality into a mind full of cherished, fixed ideas, an effort full of subconscious fear; the effort to tidy up afterwards, to take stock, to accept, to suppress, to rearrange. Tonight there were no new impressions, and those which were already there were settled in, homely, tinged with the kindly colours of the imagination. She had coped with and contained them; there they were, like a bit of wedding-cake in its white and silver box, ready to put under the pillow and dream on. Love alters not (she thought) with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. She sighed happily, and opened the book.

Knowing it to be Great Poetry, she was slow to admit to herself that she found it disappointing. The long series, all so much alike, containing apparently proposals of marriage, but urging nothing in support of it except that the girl should pass the inheritance of her beauty on, so that it was quite difficult to decide whether it were even the poet she should marry, or somebody else. It seemed very cold and artificial. And then a plunge into complete irrelevance, addressed to a man, to the effect that Nature had intended him for a woman; an odd sort of compliment, she thought, though it was obviously intended to sound polite. Elsie began to skip. Some more to the woman, quite different, disillusioned and rather coarse; or perhaps it was another one, for surely the first had had golden hair. Her opinion of Shakespeare began, in spite of herself, to descend. He didn’t seem even to like her, very much, or to think her beautiful, so what was it all about? She struggled on, however. “Like an imperfect actor on the stage—” ah, here was something comprehensible. She read the sonnet twice, consoled and cheered to think that even Shakespeare, fresh perhaps from writing
Romeo and Juliet
, had been tongue-tied in the presence of the beloved object, even as herself. Perhaps that was what had made him write; perhaps she too would become a great poet, and Peter, wondering what had inspired her, would never know. (This would be to the fair lady, she supposed.)

She wandered about, skimming the parts that defeated her with word-play and conceits, lingering over the poems whose meaning was clear and in tune with her mood, those chiefly of unworthiness and the anticipation of death. But gradually she became bewildered and oppressed by the gathering darkness of a misery whose sources she did not understand, and turned the pages more rapidly, choosing at random here and there. From between two leaves a torn scrap of paper fell out, scribbled all over on one side with Leo’s writing. She saw at once that it was not part of a letter, but a slip of old manuscript folded to mark a place, so gazed at it without qualms. There was something about Hank, about a bunk-house, about a Mexican saddle. She turned it over, chiefly to postpone the effort of turning to Shakespeare again. On the back was a pencil-scrawl, of the sort people write while thinking of something else:

Yet this I ne’er shall know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Suddenly she felt as she had felt sometimes in the caves at home; that she did not want to go further on into the dark, that she must turn back now, while a glimmer of daylight still showed round the corner of the bend. As soon as one saw the sunlight, the feeling was gone, and one forgot what had made one turn. It was so now. She read “When in disgrace with Fortune” over again, surrendering to its age-long alchemy of iron into gold. Then she put out the light, and, thinking of cypresses, of fountains, of moonlight and viols and nightingales, fell asleep.