Lover's Leap (2 page)

Surely I might have known that her playing would have been as beautiful as herself. She played a sonata by Mozart, making of it a warm and sparkling jewel of sound that seemed to be the audible expression of her beauty. There is a plant called the Rose of Jericho which, when kept away from earth and moisture, is a mere lump of dead fibre, like dried moss; but when put into water it slowly comes to life and unfolds and flowers into a living green rosette. That is the effect that Rose's playing had upon me, and so it was her music, no doubt, that completed my conversion by laying me open to her beauty.

And yet, when she had finished, nobody else in the room showed more than ordinary appreciation—nobody except old Etherton. I felt him make a sudden movement on the sofa.

‘O but that's the real thing,' he said; ‘that's delicious,' and his voice and movement recalled me abruptly to myself.

‘Yes,' I said; ‘and yet none of them seem to have noticed it!'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why should they?' he said acidly.

How I longed to rush up to her, to … to what? Certainly not to chatter thanks and compliments. Indeed if
Mrs. Etherton had taken me to her at that moment, I should have been tongue-tied. I was afraid of meeting her, afraid of the certainty of having nothing to say to express my overpowering feelings. But at the moment Mrs. Etherton was talking to Rose beside the piano from which she had just risen, and it was not until a few minutes later that they both crossed the room to where Etherton and I were sitting. We rose to our feet and old Etherton, in his courtly way, began to congratulate her.

‘You, Miss Bentley, are one of those who have discovered that there's more music and more feeling in that Sonata than in all the Sturm und Drang of Tristan.'

She smiled. ‘O, I certainly think there is,' she said.

‘Of course there is,' said Etherton. ‘But in Mozart it's concentrated into a crystal, while in Wagner it's whipped into mounds of froth and foam.'

I stood by silent, while they talked. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Etherton remembered that I hadn't been introduced to her.

‘But the froth and foam are sometimes very beautiful,' Rose was saying.

‘O I agree,' he said; ‘when one can forget the crystal. But it's the crystal that lasts.' He moved to one side. ‘But do sit down,' he said. ‘Sit here and talk to my friend Philip Marling. He's a Mozartian too; in fact, there's a good deal of Mozart in his pictures, though he probably doesn't know it.'

With that Etherton left us, left us, of course, completely at cross-purposes, for I was nothing to her, a complete stranger, whereas she was already infinitely precious to me, a vital part of my life.

If I had begun there and then to pour out my real feelings to her, she would certainly have thought me drunk or mad; but to me it seemed just as mad to play at being strangers, to assume a careful pretence of polite indifference and talk formally and intelligently of Mozart and Wagner
and her playing and my painting. I dared not raise my eyes to her face. My desperate desire to attract her to me produced the very opposite effect, for I found it impossible to talk to her naturally as I would have done to another stranger, and felt that, in spite of myself, I was growing cold, harsh, aloof. I must certainly, I realized miserably, be giving her the impression that I disliked her. If only I could have been merely frivolous or cheerful; but I couldn't. I was so involved in my wretched perplexity that I could hardly listen, hardly reply, to what she was saying. I don't even remember what we talked about during our brief interview.

‘I should like to see your pictures. Perhaps you will show them to me some day.' Her voice came to me through the turmoil of my emotions.

‘Yes,' I said lamely, ‘yes, I shall be delighted.'

At that moment Mrs. Etherton came and took her from me and left me to realize my utter stupidity. What a fool I was. It would have been so simple to invite her to come and see my work: it was the natural reply to her request. And yet I had let that golden opportunity slip; I had thrown away the chance of ever seeing her again.

The thought of that brought me to some extent to my senses: I determined that I would force myself to speak to her again before the party broke up; ask her, as I ought to have asked her before, to come to my flat and see my work; and I spent the rest of the evening in watching anxiously for an opportunity.

But the opportunity never came. I couldn't break into the group of laughing, chattering people to which Mrs. Etherton had carried her off, and fire a point-blank invitation at her; and soon Mrs. Etherton's tiresome old dramatic critic came over and held me firmly tethered in interminable conversation. I shot a despairing glance across the room and saw Rose Bentley shaking hands with Mrs. Etherton. She was going. She glanced round the
room and then came across to say good night to her host who was standing by the fireplace not far from me and the critic. I turned abruptly, cut the critic off in the middle of a sentence, in the hope of catching her eye. My heart was beating so fast that I felt almost stifled. Then, as she turned from old Etherton, thank God she saw me and held out her hand.

‘If … if you will … if you'd really like to see some of my work,' I stammered, ‘won't you come to my studio some afternoon, any afternoon that suits you?'

I felt as if I had done a deed of desperate courage: I could feel the blood beating in my temples: the muscles of my face twitched.Yes, she would come with pleasure: she would come next Thursday. What was my address? A moment later I had given her the address and she was gone.

The dramatic critic had drifted away and I dropped into the sofa beside me, trembling with relief and happiness. I sat there closed in upon myself, oblivious of my surroundings, and when at last I raised my eyes it was to have that final vision of her in the half-open doorway.

As soon as she was gone I left too and walked the whole way home. It is a long way, a long way at least to walk in London: it must have taken me quite an hour. But I was in a state of such supreme well-being that the idea of taking a bus or a tube was unthinkable. How could I have sat still with that fountain of happiness leaping inside me? It seemed to me as I strode along the empty streets under the cold, motionless lamplight, and it seems to me still as
I
sit here going over it all again, that my life is filled to the brim. The cold, empty life of yesterday and all the weeks and months before, has gone, vanished like a dead leaf, a puff of smoke. For that glimpse of her standing there in the doorway in her furs with that unforgettable look in her eyes, is securely and utterly mine and I am satisfied. It seems almost too much, a threatened interruption of my ecstasy, that she should be coming here on Thursday—yes,
to-morrow; for it is now half past one of Wednesday morning. The thought of her coming brings a disturbance, a tinge of anxiety into the steady glow that burns in me now. Her coming will rouse new conflicts, new troubles in me. I both long for it and dread it. When I know her better, when we have become friends and this yawning gap between my feelings for her and our actual relationship has narrowed to a width that can be bridged, I shall feel more secure. But now, when I turn my eyes for a moment from the golden light of my happiness, it seems to me that my new life is full of dangers. Well, all the better. It's been a damned sight too safe hitherto.

Next evening. She has been here. She went away twenty minutes ago and this sitting-room and the studio are still full of her. There is the chair she sat in, and I feel that I must leave it where it is, drawn up to the table from its usual place; leave the cushion just as she leaned against it, so as not to disturb her spirit which still lingers here and will linger till Mrs. Batten comes to-morrow morning and drives it away by setting everything to rights. I have just had another cup of tea, out of her cup, and I have sat, since she went, intently going over everything she said and did, everything I said and did while she was here. All this, I know, is the invariable behaviour of lovers: I am feeling and acting in strict accordance with the convention. If it were told me of anyone else or I read it in a novel, I should call it damned sentimental nonsense. But to the lover himself the sneers of the world outside mean nothing: strong in the reality of his feelings, he is impervious to them. Yet who would admit as much? Not I. I shall go on laughing derisively: I shall never admit that I know these things to be genuine, except perhaps some day to Rose, if ever I show her this diary. But that may never happen, for we may never be anything more than friends. Yes, I must face that possibility. And yet why should I, at
present? May not the very belief that failure is possible bring it to pass? Love, it seems, carries with it a blind confidence in its own power. I don't attract women; I discovered that long ago; but, for all that, I can't believe that my feelings for Rose will awaken no response in her. It is certain, at least, that she likes me. We got on extraordinarily well this afternoon as soon as the first difficult moments were over. It was thanks to her, not to me, that they were over so soon; for she, of course, was quite self-possessed. Why should she not have been? She had none of my difficulties to fight against, no conflict to appease such as mine between the actual bodily Rose Bentley and that other Rose which belongs to me only. It is hard to keep a hold on reality when one is in the state I am in now, and when she arrived this afternoon and reality faced me, the bathos of our meeting chilled me to the heart. Not that she was less beautiful than I remembered: on the contrary her beauty came to me with the shock of a new and delicious discovery, as though the face in my memory had faded already in these two days from the brightness of the original. No, it was the screen of cold convention, dividing us as soon as we met, that chilled me, the cool friendliness of our actual footing, genuine, no doubt, for her but bewilderingly false for me. It is terrible to have to disguise my feelings all the time I am with her: it sucks all spontaneity out of my behaviour and leaves me a mere performing puppet. But as we become friendlier the necessity to disguise will become less crippling, because there will be at each meeting a little less to disguise, a few more feelings that may be revealed. In fact it is so already. I managed, on the whole, to behave fairly well. How I longed to give her the Still Life which she admired most of all the paintings I showed her—and rightly, too, because it's certainly the best. But I didn't. No, that would never have done. It would have embarrassed her and placed us, for her, in an uncomfortably false position; though for
me it would have been the only impulse I betrayed while she was here. Yes, I must check my impulses, I must studiously keep our relationship false for me so that it may not become false for her. I must be crafty, diplomatic, calculating, until some unconscious sign from her shows me that I can venture on some small betrayal of myself.

And yet isn't this rather a craven and disingenuous scheme? The romantic lover would have presented the picture, declared his love loudly and eloquently, and taken her by storm. It sounds gloriously simple, but I suspect it doesn't actually work. The romantic lover I suspect, exists only in Romance. On the other hand it is possible, I suppose, to be too careful, too discreet. The fact is, I am so terribly afraid of losing her and sinking back into my old solitude. It is only the rich who can afford to gamble.

I have just read over what I have written, and, I must say, its querulousness, its sentimentality and its crawling humility disgust me. What a poor worm it makes me appear to myself, and how monstrously it misrepresents my state of mind, I mean my prevailing state of mind. For the sense of frustration, the necessity for disguise, is not continuous; on the contrary, it is a brief incident which occurs only when, as at the moment of meeting her or at some enchanting change in her face or movement of her body, my feelings burst suddenly into a flame that must instantly be quenched. At all other times, whether she is with me or not, I live in a warm glow of happiness that fills mind and soul and every vein and artery of my body. When I joined a group of friends at the Café Royal last night, Edward Dennis, as he shook my hand, stared at my face in amazement. ‘Hallo,' he said, ‘what's up? Have you sold a picture?'

‘Unfortunately not,' I replied.

‘Then you've come into a fortune.'

‘Not that I've heard of.'

‘My Dear Philip,' he said, ‘you're lying. You've come into a fortune; it's obvious from your face.'

Yes, he's right, I thought to myself gleefully, I
have
come into a fortune. How secure I felt, how supremely independent of them all, as I drew up a chair and sat down among them; and throughout the evening, as we sat and talked, the lovely secret presence of Rose moved about in my mind as she had moved from piano to sofa, from sofa to door in the Ethertons' drawing-room on the previous evening; and when closing-time came and they turned us out I left Ted Dennis and the rest without a shadow of regret, for now I was not returning home to face the old demon of loneliness. Rose, the bright vision of Rose was waiting for me there and I was hurrying back to enjoy my secret bliss unmolested.

And now that she has actually been here and will come again, this flat, two days ago a dismal prison, has become an Elysium wider and freer than infinite space.

We are to meet again at her flat next Monday. I should not have ventured to suggest another meeting: that, I felt, I must leave to her this time, and when she spoke of going home after she had had tea and seen my pictures the fear came to me that we were going to part without any appointment having been made, that a fortnight, perhaps a month, might pass before I saw her again. That would have been a terrible gap. Could I have lived as long as that, like a bee in winter, on my store of happiness? Then, as she shook hands with me, she set my mind at rest. ‘It's your turn to come to tea with me next time,' she said.