The Tower of Oblivion Part 69

"Why?"

"You two--and him. That interested me enormously."

"Well, now you've very nearly got it. That dance was our understanding, Jennie's and mine. We had it all out."

"You didn't appear to be talking much."

"I don't think we spoke three words, but we had it out for all that."

"That's the kind of thing I give up."

"Make an effort, George. You don't think I'd do anything unfair, do you?

As long as there was a fair way left, I mean?"

"I don't even know what you mean by fair."

"Well, you're on her side, whether you know it or not. It took me exactly one tenth of a second to see that yesterday. You want him to get going straight ahead again and marry her. Don't you?" she challenged me with a brilliant look.

"Never mind my answer for the present."

"Well, you want that, and I want--something quite different."

"Jennie doesn't even know that you know him."

"What? How do you know what he's told her about me? Anyway, even if he hasn't, she knows I didn't fetch that bicycle for nothing. She smelt something in the wind, and now she knows perfectly well what it is."

"From that dance? Wonderful dance!"

"It's your s.e.x that's wonderful. If you don't believe me, ask her."

"I don't think it will be necessary. There's just one thing you've forgotten."

"What's that?"

"Him."

"Oh, I've forgotten _him_!" she smiled, touching the reddened lips with her fingertips.

"Him and what he may do. I think you'll find you've left that out of the account. We shall see.... So I take it you dodged me all the afternoon because we hadn't all been properly introduced to the new situation, so to speak? Is that it?"

"Yes, that's quite good. There's no stealing advantages now.

Everything's on the square, and what sort of a vermouth do they give you here?"

With that I asked her a question that for the moment surprised even her.

I asked it perfectly seriously, seeking not only the unblinkered eye, but also the one within its deep ambush of white hat-brim.

"Julia, are you yourself in every respect the same woman to-day that you were before we had our talk yesterday?"

She turned her head to watch the tennis-players on the sands below, the swallow-divers from the tall stage. She turned it further, and her gaze pa.s.sed from the cl.u.s.tered villas across the bay to the awnings of the hotel, the sunny white of the bal.u.s.trade, the waiter who approached in answer to my summons. Then she looked at me.

"I know what you mean. Not just this hat and a touch of lipstick and these"--she showed her arms. "I'm the same, of course, but I suppose I'm different too. And I'm going to be different. Ask Jennie. She knows. Any woman would know--just by dancing with somebody and never saying a word, George. One keeps one's eyes open and--adapts oneself. Jennie knows all about it. Ask her."

And the flas.h.i.+ng, daring, confident smile, which had vanished for a moment, reappeared.

It was her request for a vermouth that had prompted my sudden question.

All at once I had found myself wondering who the man was, in Buckinghams.h.i.+re apparently, who shared with myself the privilege of having been refused by her. Not that I was interested in his ident.i.ty; but from him, or from the man who had been attentive to her on the boat, or from somebody else, or from a whole series of men for all I knew, she had--the slang is required--"picked up a thing or two." It was a far cry from that first c.o.c.ktail in the Piccadilly to this hat, this revelation of arms, these conscious coquetries with bathing-wraps and auction with Alec Aird. Mind you, I knew as surely as I sat opposite to her that not one of these fellow-unfortunates of mine had had a sc.r.a.p more from her than I had had myself. They had been dismissed without compunction the moment she had had what she required of them. On Derry and on Derry alone her dark eyes were unchangingly set. No trifling, no flirtation by the way, any more than to the rehearsal is given the unstinted kiss of the pa.s.sionate performance. Therefore in this she was single and unchanged.

But she had seen Derry that morning, and that excited bombardment of electrons that seemed to emanate from him and to alter the nature of everyone who came into contact with him had worked an alteration in her.

She might call it "adapting herself," but it was essentially more than that. For she had seen Jennie too, knew of their love, and had instantly re-a.s.sembled and re-marshalled all the forces at her disposal. Whatever might be her broadside of hat, arms and the rest, swiftly and craftily she had seen that there was one thing she could not ape--the simplicity of seventeen. Contest on that ground meant defeat in advance. In this, its vivid opposite, lay her desperate chance.

And, I thought with apprehension, no negligible chance either! For a man may be young and innocent and grave and be entirely at the mercy of this very simplicity and trust. It is the woman old enough to be his mother, but not too old to have this shot left in her locker, who bowls him over. Lucky for him if a more contemporaneous pa.s.sion already occupies his heart.

VI

"So," she said, her eyes far away, "there are those wonderful pictures."

Yes, she would not hesitate to make capital out of his pictures too.

"The mere handling, quite apart from anything else----"

There again she had Jennie on the hip. Jennie might love his pictures merely because they were his, but Julia painted, knew the technicalities, would make intimacies, opportunities, flattering occasions out of them----

"There's one, just a few bits of broken white ruins with her lying there--he wasn't going to show me that at first----"

But ah, her eyes had spied it out, and he had had to show it.

"You've seen them, George. Now I ask you, _could_ any boy of eighteen possibly have painted them?"

That too she had the audacity to claim--that he was eighteen when she wanted him to be eighteen and forty-five when she wanted him to be forty-five. Here again Jennie Aird was to be put in the wrong. It was to be an anachronism and monstrous that Jennie should love so widely out of her age.

"Could he, I ask you? Doesn't it show? You were perfectly right when you tried to stop that flirtation between those two, George, and you're absolutely wrong in wanting it to go on now. She's no right whatever, and neither has he. Leave it to me. He called me Miss Oliphant, but it can be Julia in five minutes, and anything else I like in ten----"

I did not choose to remind her again that she was leaving him out of the calculation. I had warned her once, and it comforted me to think that he was not quite so unarmed as she supposed against this sort of spiritual rape.... She went musingly on.

"'Miss Oliphant!' ... But wait a bit. It was myself and Daphne Wade for it before, and then it was all sentimental a.s.sociation and stained-gla.s.s and church-music and because he was wrapped in dreams. Sentiment's all very well in its way, George, but give me Get-up-and-get. That's the c.o.c.k to fight. Daphne euchred me once----"

"Where did you get these expressions?" I asked her calmly.

"----and she didn't get him either. He never knew the first thing about women. So here we are, with the situation an exact repet.i.tion of what it was before."

"With Jennie playing Daphne's part?"

"For him. Why not? If he's the same again he's the same again, isn't he?

But oh, when I saw him this morning!... It was exciting and terrific!

You've looked at a photograph-alb.u.m you haven't seen for years, I expect, but the things didn't move about and talk to you and ask you how you were and show you their pictures----"

I couldn't help a light s.h.i.+ver. Certainly this woman might claim that she had lived through an extraordinary cycle of experience.