Sir!' She Said (13 page)

She felt proud sitting at his side. There must be, she suspected, several well-known persons in the room. But Mander had not bothered to glance round the other tables, and she imagined those others to whom Mander was known personally or by sight, looking towards her as she sat listening to his conversation, wondering about her, asking each other who was the pretty girl in whom Mander seemed so interested: envying her, most of them.

During the beginning of the meal she was two people. There was the self who was listening to Druce Mander, following his talk, replying to it: and there was the other self, that was outside that self, that was conscious of the long narrow room, the balcony from which in the days when Boulestin was Sherry's a band had played; the rust-red hangings, the panelled mirrors, the pink carpet, the waiters and the crowded tables; a self that could stand apart; could say: “Look, isn't it marvellous, Melanie Terance is dining with Druce Mander. And all these
people are watching her and envying her, because Druce Mander is not thinking of anything but her!” That was how it was in the beginning. But as the minutes passed, as turtle soup was replaced by an omelette Boulestin, as the warmth of the wine moved along her veins, as the magnetising voice flowed on, gradually those two selves mingled: so that she became unconscious of the long narrow room, of the hurrying waiters, of the faces reflected in the mirrors: so that her ears were deaf to the buzz of talk, and the sound of plates: so that she was aware of nothing but those dark eyes and the low firm sentences.

He had begun by talking of that afternoon: of the race: and of her success.

“Gambling, when you're gambling for more than you can afford to lose: there's no thrill like it in the world,” he said. “I remember in Singapore when I was a kid, barely twenty-one. I was out there as agent for a Manchester cotton firm, and I'd got into a mess. It's easy to do that in the Malay States. You never pay for anything out there. You sign chits. At the end of the month the bills come in, and you don't know how to meet them. I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and I owed five hundred. There was only one way in which I could make up that four hundred deficit, and I didn't want to take it. It wasn't crooked exactly, but it wasn't straight. I was pretty scrupulous in those days. I decided to try and find another way of making that deficit good. I decided to gamble.

“So I went down to a Chinese opium den. No no, it wasn't the kind of place you think it was: it
wasn't squalid: the Chinese rarely are. And taking opium for the Chinese is as respectable as taking tea is for an Australian. It was a kind of club. It was like one of the smoking rooms in the Athenaeum, except that the Chinese lie down to smoke and the pipes are long and the bowls flattened. At one end of it there was a table with a cloth on it. I won't explain the game. It's simple enough, but an explanation would make it sound complicated. It wasn't fan-tan. There was a brass tube with a dice inside it that pointed to angles that you betted on. I went there with my hundred dollars.

“I won to begin with. Two hundred, two fifty, three hundred. Ordinarily I would have stopped there. My instinct told me that my luck would change. But three hundred dollars were no use to me; I wanted four. I went on and I began to lose. Right back I went; two fifty, two hundred, a hundred, fifty. I got down to twenty-five, and the sweat was streaming down my face. Then I began to win. A hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred. Then again my luck began to turn. For a whole evening it went on like that; see-sawing; one time going down into the fifties; at another time rising into the three hundreds, but never getting to the number that I wanted.

“For four hours it went on like that; four hours of solid play with the punkahs going above my head, and a crowd of poker-faced coolies standing round me losing and winning their ten and fifty cents. Their faces never showed a glimmer of emotion. But I could see that they were more interested in my game
than in their own. And it was exciting. It was so exciting that after a while I couldn't stand it any longer. I had two hundred dollars, and I put the lot of them on one line. If I lost I shouldn't have a penny in the world: if I won I shouldn't need to worry, I'ld have my four hundred dollars and to spare. I don't think I've ever been more excited than I was when I lifted up the cap of that metal tube.”

He paused, dramatically, but not ostentatiously.

“And it was all right?” she asked.

He smiled and shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, “I lost.”

“But it was a big moment,” he went on; “I don't suppose that anything as exciting as that has ever happened to me. I can understand how gambling can get into one's blood. It's like drink or love. There's not a single really huge fortune that has not been built on it. I should doubt if there was a single big millionaire who hasn't at some point or other of his career run an unjustifiable risk. That's how big fortunes start. Industry and talent will carry you a long way. But to get out of the rut, into the first ten, you must run risks; you haven't time otherwise. And it's so exciting that one has to go on running risks even when one's interests have ceased to need it. That's why you get these sudden inexplicable bankruptcies of people with experience, who know the market, whose prosperity is soundly based. A person who's once known the thrill of an unjustifiable gamble, can't do without it. He must try once again and in the end it downs him. It explains most things, that, you know; that desire in middle age to get back to
the thrills one had when one was young. It explains why men and women in the middle forties break up seemingly happy homes. They feel that they must know love again before they've passed the capacity for feeling it.”

To Melanie it seemed natural that he should speak to her of love. Usually she became nervous and uncomfortable when men did. For she knew that what began as an impersonal discussion of a theory became very soon talk of herself and them. But that would not happen with Mander she knew very well. Though every word he spoke might be a wooing of her, he would not speak of love till the moment for speaking of it came. Though he thrilled her, she felt safe with him, so that to him she could say simply as to the lad she could not have: “Then you don't think love ever lasts?” So that she could listen to his reply: “How could it, when there's not anything in the world that does; when the world itself sooner or later will have gone cold or been caught up into the sun; when we ourselves are not the same people from one summer to the next? How can we talk about love lasting? But it's no less lovely on that account.”

His voice was gentle but firm-toned; with a fuller rhythm, now that he spoke of love. How much deeper it would grow, how it would glow, when he spoke personally of love.

She looked curiously at him: at his strong, impassive face: dark and sallow, with the deep lines running from mouth to nostril and the light puckering lines about the eyes; the lines that were of time's etching there.

What had love stood for in his life, she wondered? What kind of love affairs had he had? Had they been light and many or few and deep? What kind of women had they been? With what kind of women was he comparing her? Was he remembering them now detachedly; thinking, “Yes, they were lovely, but she is lovelier”? Was she attractive enough to make him think like that?

Dreamily she listened as he talked; reassured and strengthened by his worldliness. There were some men who treated you like a child, who made you feel like a child; who patronised you and talked down to you. But Mander, though he was a long way the most significant man that she had ever met, talked as though he were comparing notes with a contemporary; as though he and she were on a level of experience and knowledge. He made her feel mature and self-possessed, a woman of the world.

He was still talking about love.

“It comes and goes,” he said. “As the months and the seasons do. There's no sense in being sad because it passes. It'll come again. One's got to make the most of it while one's got it.”

Then on a laugh he paused.

“We're getting solemn,” he said. “We must cheer ourselves up. Let's go on to Ciro's.”

Ciro's was crowded. It was after eleven. Theatres were emptying. In a few moments it would be more crowded still. Though Druce Mander had booked a table he stood irresolutely for a moment in the doorway. In that moment Melanie, glancing round the room, had her eye caught by a hand waved from a far corner.

“Oh, look!” she cried. “My mother. And there's a table vacant by her. If it isn't booked, let's take it.”

A moment later she was making profuse apologies to young Savile.

“I'm terribly sorry,” she was saying. “It was with my mother, you see, that you arranged things. It's so easy to forget the arrangements that other people make for one. And then when that horse came past the post to-day, well, I just forgot everything that had ever happened.”

Young Savile laughed. “Sure, of course,” he said. “I've known what it is to have everything that's in one's head go out of it in a second. It was too bad not having you for dinner, but a piece of luck like this is, well, I guess it's a surprise that makes the other thing worth while.”

Another moment and they were seated at the table next to his, and it was Savile, not Mander, who was ordering champagne and sandwiches, ordering them with an ease that made it hard for her to believe that he was in the middle twenties. And for the first time she was noticing the drawled American cadence of his voice and liking it; was noticing the broad grin that lit his face; was noticing his unlined, sun-tanned cheeks; the crinkled hair and the clear eyes; noticing and liking them.

Was liking, too, the friendly, intimate way he talked to her.

“It's a pity you didn't come here a little earlier,” he was saying. “There was a first-class cabaret turn, acrobatic dancers, about the best thing of its kind
I've seen. They're sure to be coming on again, though. You're not in a hurry to be going away, are you?”

She shook her head. No, no. She was not in any hurry to be away. She was much too happy here. With Mander and this young American whom she could not understand why she had not noticed that first time he had come to Brompton Square; with the bright colours round her and the lights above, and the band playing keenly, hauntingly :

When that man Joe
Makes that banjo
Play that old tune I adore,
San Francisco, dear old'Frisco
Calls me cross the Prairie once more.

Softly young Savile hummed the words. “San Francisco! Don't you long for it sometimes?” he said to Mrs. Terance.

She smiled: a slow, long, reminiscent smile.

“Long for it; ‘the cool grey city of love'! There's no place like it, no place with quite its glamour. Sometimes I think I'll die of home-sickness for it.”

Savile had recognised and smiled at her quotation.

“Do you remember that other thing he wrote?

“‘At the ends of your streets are spars
  At the ends of your streets are stars'.”

She nodded her head. “I knew George Sterling,” she said. “A sweet, weak person.”

And they began to talk of California: of its pine trees and rugged rocks and soft March skies: talked of it as it had been and as it had become.

“I knew Monterey,” she said, “when the cowboys used to ride in and rope their horses up outside the saloons.”

“You'ld scarcely find room to park your car in that main street now.”

They talked of Point Lobus and how the sea broke round it. “There's not much of the calm Pacific there.”

They talked so eagerly, so intently, that it was a full five minutes before young Savile turned back with a little laugh to Melanie.

“You must forgive me,” he said. “That's the way Americans talk when they get together. It sounds silly, I suppose, but. . . oh, well, there's something about America, it's not easy to explain. You've got to go there to understand. You see photographs of it, and it looks new and shoddy and ostentatious. But it's so big: when you go right across it from the west coast to the east; when you see its breadth and guess what it's going to be. . . well, it's like a great wind blowing through you. Whereas here,” he paused, looking at Melanie beneath his eyebrows as though he were considering at the same time his words and her, “you don't get that feeling here,” he said. “You're surrounded by old buildings and old traditions. At every street corner you're having the past suggested to you. You're brought up with the idea of being worthy of them, and it's fine, that. We'ld give our souls for it. But living up to things is less exciting than making things. We've everything to do; everything's ahead.”

His voice grew deeper as he spoke. His eyes
glowed and his cheeks were flushed. As she looked and listened Melanie caught her breath. This was something new to her. Here was courage and strength and faith. Mander's worldliness and experience and detachment had made her feel experienced and worldly-wise, it had made her feel a mature woman. And it had thrilled her. But this young American with his clear eyes and eager voice appealed to the youth in her, to the potentialities of her youth, to the future that stretched boundlessly at her feet. He was like the great wind that he had spoken of. “Go on,” she said to him. “Please go on.”

There are no boundaries to the continent over which the quarrels of married people range. Any spark is sufficient to start a conflagration. There is no such thing as a safe subject.

Tears have been shed over a politician's speech: the treasures of a mantelpiece swept into the grate over an undelivered message. Front doors have been slammed because chablis has been preferred to claret. A discussion of the weather, of a golf championship, of a minority report will have become within six sentences an acrimonious altercation hovering upon personal assault, so that the marvelling celibate will ask himself what venom there is intrinsic to the state of matrimony that reasonable and agreeable persons can be transmuted, once they become partners to this pact, into the vindictive, self-centred, ill-mannered disputants of whose belligerence their acquaintances are forced periodically to be the uncomfortable unwilling witnesses. “Marriage,” the celibate tells himself, “is a state of warfare, mercilessly and unscrupulously waged, relieved by intermittent truce, lit by such an occasional happiness as the good hours of an ague might provide.”