Lover's Leap (6 page)

Poor girl, the blood flamed suddenly in her cheeks and she threw a quick, bewildered glance at me. I felt as if I had taken a mean advantage of her: but I went desperately on.

‘Let me tell you everything, Rose. The first moment I saw you, sitting at the Ethertons' piano, I fell in love with you. Yes, head over ears, hopelessly. Don't say that love at first sight means nothing. I know better: it means everything. It means that I would do anything in the world to make you happy. It surprised you, it shocked you, I saw, to hear me break out like this, but I had to, Rose. It's a terrible thing to go on bottling up one's feelings. You'll forgive me, won't you? You don't mind my loving you? Tell me at least that you don't mind.'

She raised her eyes, her face still flaming. ‘Philip, I don't know what to say. I didn't know …'

‘You didn't know what I was feeling? Did you never suspect?'

‘Once or twice lately I have wondered …'

‘But you don't mind, Rose? Surely it's nice to be loved, to know that there's someone who adores every look of your face, every movement, everything you do or say, the very sound of your voice? Doesn't that make you happy?'

‘It frightens me, Philip.'

‘Frightens you?'

‘To be so … so responsible for you.'

What could she mean by that? ‘But you're not responsible,' I said. ‘If I give you a bunch of flowers, are you responsible to me?'

‘Yes,' she said; ‘and the more the present means to you, the more responsible I am.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I don't hold you responsible. How can you be? You fill me with happiness simply by … well, by being you.'

‘That means that I can make you unhappy too.'

Was she thinking of her desertion of me for her friends
the Bryans two days ago, realizing now how much more it had meant for me than she had then known? And could her fear of making me unhappy be a sign that she felt for me something of what I felt for her? ‘If I knew you loved me, Rose,' I said, ‘I should never be unhappy, whatever you did.'

She sat in silence, a silence of which I could not read the meaning in her face. I took her hand. ‘Rose, will you marry me?'

She shook her head.

‘Then you don't … you don't love me?'

‘I like you very much, Philip; I feel that we're very great friends.'

‘Then say you'll…'

She shook her head again. ‘Not yet, Philip. You see, you took me very much by surprise. I don't yet know my own mind.'

‘There's no hurry, Rose. Only say … Only let us be engaged. Please do, Rose. That will leave you free and set me free as well.'

‘Free? What do you mean, Philip? It will bind us.'

‘No, it won't. It will simply mean that you'll marry me some day if you feel you can. That's all I ask, Rose. That would set me free from all my doubts and worries. Do, Rose. Please, do. I wouldn't mind, then, even if you didn't walk home with me from the Ethertons'.'

She smiled. ‘My poor Philip; I never thought that would be such a tragedy. But what if I can't marry you in the end?'

‘That's very simple. You break it off: you chuck me.'

‘But I don't want to chuck you.'

‘Then marry me. That's simpler still.'

She laughed. There was an amused affection in her eyes that I had never seen before. ‘You're just like a charming schoolboy,' she said.

I took both her hands in mime. ‘Then you say Yes, Rose. It's all settled, isn't it?'

She tried very gently to draw her hands away. ‘Give me a day or two, Philip: I haven't had a moment to think.'

But I kept her hands fast. ‘Nonsense, where's the good of thinking? Thinking's the devil. Say Yes, Rose. Yes,' I prompted her.

‘Yes,' she said. And then she added quickly, seriously, and half timidly: ‘But don't expect too much of me.'

‘I won't,' I said. ‘I promise.' I bent and kissed her cheek, a single brief kiss. ‘Just one,' I said, ‘to be going on with.'

I keep asking myself, now that she is gone, whether in doing violence to myself, in forcing myself to grasp at what I desire, I have not done violence to her. Her face, the surprised, bewildered, blushing face with which she greeted my confession, haunts me; and I feel now that in ignoring its wordless appeal and in brushing aside her timid refusal I was overbearing and brutal. But Rose is no coward. She would not have allowed me to force her consent against her will. Didn't she smile at last—that indulgent, amused, affectionate smile which flowers in my memory now, effacing the first bewildered look—as if pleased to have her hesitation overridden? No, these doubts belong to my old dumb, timid self, the self from which I determined to break free two days ago. Besides, would she have asked me to see her to-morrow, to go to tea at her flat, if she had felt that I had compelled her against her will? Wouldn't her first impulse, in that case, have been to escape from me?

Next day. I arrived at her flat this afternoon five minutes before she got back from her music lesson. Jennifer was in the sitting-room: she greeted me in her usual off-hand way.

‘Hallo, Philip, you've arrived before your hostess.'

My policy with Jennifer is a rather heavy-handed levity. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to put up with you in the meantime. How is Rose?'

For a moment her thick black eyebrows drew together. ‘Why do you ask?' she said after a pause, as if investigating a
case
.

‘Why do I ask? Why do you ask why I ask? Why shouldn't I ask?'

‘Yes, why shouldn't you? You have a right to be interested. Well, I'll tell you, Philip. I heard her crying in her room last night.'

I could not hide from Jennifer nor from myself my immediate sense of guilt. ‘And you think,' I said rather lamely, ‘that I'm to blame?'

‘In the light of the news Rose gave me this morning it seems possible.'

I felt a sudden dislike of Jennifer. Her hardness, her lack of warmth, her proprietary attitude towards Rose irritated me. I could feel the sourness of my smile when I spoke. ‘So we are not to receive your blessing yet, I gather.'

She nodded. ‘That's it, Philip. Not yet.'

At that moment we heard the front door shut. Rose came in and instantly put an end to our acid encounter. The fears Jennifer's information had roused in me were put to rest at the first glimpse of Rose. She was evidently in high spirits; her eyes met mine frankly, cheerfully; her coming seemed to fill the room with breeze and sunlight, and soon even Jennifer and I were talking to each other with perfect good humour.

A week later. Rose took me to her home at Down-church in Sussex last week-end, to see her parents, or rather to be seen by them. I was going, as she said, ‘on approval'.

‘And what if I'm not approved? Shall I be returned, carriage paid?'

‘O no,' said Rose, ‘it won't really make any difference,'

‘It's a mere formality, then?'

‘Yes; or rather, a quaint old custom. But they will approve of you; especially my mother. In fact, Philip, you're just the kind of son-in-law she hoped for but was rather afraid she wouldn't get. As for my father, he'll give you a lot of good advice.'

‘Well, I'll take it.'

‘Will you? I'm not sure that I shall find you bearable if you do.'

‘Don't worry,' I said. ‘I'll take it, but I probably shan't use it.'

She was less talkative than usual on the journey, and no wonder, for to bring together people with whom one is intimate, who are strangers to one another, is an embarrassing business. Rose must have been conscious not only that her parents and I were strangers, but also that their Rose was a stranger to me, a creature I had not yet seen, and mine a stranger to them. She would have to try to be the two Roses at once or to evolve a sort of compromise.

I couldn't help resenting the fact that Rose had parents, and I already imagined myself standing by, while these two people, a man and a woman who owned her and were deeply involved in her life, treated her, by right, with a proprietary intimacy.

And so it was. When her father called her Rosie I felt, beneath a polite exterior, angry and jealous, angry with myself, too, for not having invented it before my adoption of it would seem an aping of him. It was Rose's mother who put me at my ease. Her quiet and spontaneous friendliness seemed to include me in the affectionate relation between her and Rose. And Rose, too, drew me into their circle by showing me her sitting-room, her private possessions, her favourite haunts in the garden and the surrounding country, the tree she climbed and
fell from when she broke her arm, the way she and her brother used to get on to the roof.

In ways such as these she let me more and more into her past life, the life that only her family shared, and so gave me more and more of herself.

I found her father more difficult than her mother. It was not that he was unfriendly: on the contrary, he treated me from the first with the friendly jocularity which seemed to me his habitual manner. In fact, he was a nice old stick. The difficulty, with him, lay in the problem of how he contrived to be Rose's father. It took me some time to fit him in; in fact I never quite succeeded, and that, I think, was due to the fact that he doesn't actually quite fit in. He stands, slightly aggrieved, slightly puzzled, with one foot outside the circle, and before the end of my visit I got the impression that he was appealing to me to help him into it.

Rose had been right: he gave me advice. It was mostly advice about Rose, and, I think, rather good advice.

‘You'll find her a handful,' he said; and then, inconsequently it seemed, he asked me if I liked horses.

I told him I used to ride as a boy.

‘Then you'll know what I mean when I say she has a soft mouth. She wants a light hand but a firm one. Always ride her on the snaffle. One touch of the curb and she's all over the place at once. You can't force her. The only hope is to let her think she's having her own way. She can turn her mother round her little finger. In the old days, of course,' he went on, ‘I should have asked you what your prospects were and sent you packing if I didn't like them. But times are changed now. You haven't come to ask my permission to marry Rose. She's brought you down just to let us have a look at the man she's decided to marry. Even that we ought to take as a concession, I suppose.'

All this was said in a jocular and friendly tone.

‘If you'll let me tell you what I already have and what my prospects are,' I said, ‘then perhaps by to-morrow evening you'll be able to tell me whether, if you had had the chance, you would have given your permission.'

‘Just as a matter of curiosity?'

‘Well, I should be glad to hear that I would have come up to the scratch.'

‘If there'd been one to come up to?'

‘Just so. I ought to warn you, of course, that I paint pictures which people tell me are rather modern.'

‘No, no; much better keep quiet about that. It might have wrecked your chances. As a matter of fact,' he added, ‘Rose has confessed that much already. But other things being equal, we'll overlook that, and if you make it pay, well, then, it justifies itself of course. Personally I like pictures that stick to the facts. My wife and I always run up to do the Academy. It's a tiring job, but after all one's got to keep in touch with things.'

On Monday morning, when the car was at the door, he and I stood on the doorstep waiting for Rose.

‘Women are always late,' he said; ‘but you'll have learnt that much already, of course. Now don't forget what I told you. A light hand and no curb. One touch of the curb and…' he laughed, ‘… I was going to say, she'll bolt with you, but that's just what she won't do. She'll throw you.'

Why is it that I feel so free and so secure? If I reason it out I see that my security is based on nothing. Rose has not promised to marry me: I released her from that promise before she made it by assuring her that she was free to throw me over when she wished to. None the less I feel secure. Is it because I am really convinced that I have tied her to me, that the pressure of public opinion will hold her bound, whether she wishes to be free or not? I hope not. That would almost amount to having swindled
her out of her liberty. My unconscious self is not, I hope, as basely cunning as all that. I think rather that my security rests on the belief that my confession of love and her recognition of it by consenting to our engagement will steer her in my direction, set her mind and heart towards our marriage as a rudder sets the direction of a boat which would otherwise drift aimlessly. Besides, her consent is a warrant that she neither loves nor desires to love anyone else, that even if she doesn't love me yet she thinks that she will come to do so.

Whatever the reason, the fact of my sense of security is no more to be denied than the presence of the sun on a sunny August day. It encloses me, buoys me up: I live and move in the life-giving warmth of it as a swimmer in a southern sea. It is as though a beneficent storm had ripped off the roof of that dark, narrow inner self in which I have lived hitherto and had exposed me to life, health, reality.

Three months later. So I wrote three months ago. But recently a change has come over Rose. Something has gone wrong. Occasionally, and always in ways that I cannot foresee, I contrive to annoy her. Sometimes she has sudden bursts of anger: sometimes a kind of sulkiness takes hold of her which worries and pains me horribly. Do I intrude on her too much? Hardly, I think: for I often check an impulse to go and see her or ring her up in case I should give her an overdose of me. And I can hardly believe that she finds me difficult. I am always ready to do whatever she wishes, in fact it is understood that it is always she, not I, who must choose. Perhaps she has seen through the plots I make for meeting her as if by accident, on her way to or from her music lesson for instance. I must be more careful.