CHAPTER XXII—SHE RECALLS HIM

Now that she had gone from him, he realized how mistaken he had been in his chivalry. From the first, instead of begging, he ought to have commanded. She was a girl with whom it paid to be rough. It was only on the precipice, when he had seized her savagely, that her passion had responded. In the light of what had happened, her last words seemed a taunt—an echo of her childish despising of King Arthurs: “And you said I hadn’t any passion I—You’re good, Meester Deek.” Had he been less honorable in her hour of weakness, he would still have had her.

“That ends it!” he told himself. Nevertheless he set out hot-footed for Arles. There he hunted up the cocher who had driven them to Les Baux, and learnt that she had taken train for Paris. In Paris he inquired at The Oxford and Cambridge. He searched the registers of a dozen hotels. Tramping the boulevards of the city of lovers, he revisited all the places where they had been together; he hoped that a whim of sentiment might lead her on the same errand.

A new thought struck him: she had written to Eden Row and his mother didn’t know his address. All the time that he had been wasting in this intolerable aloneness her explanation had been waiting for him. He returned posthaste, only to be met with her unconquerable silence. He hurried to Orchid Lodge; her father might know her whereabouts. There he was told that Hal had sailed for New York—with what motive he could guess. This lent the final derisive touch to his tragedy.

It was the end of July, nearly a year to the day since he had made his great discovery at Glastonbury. He had spent a month of torture. Since the key had turned in her lock at the H么tel de la Reine Jeanne, he had had no sign of her. He came down to breakfast one sunshiny morning; lying beside his plate was a letter in her hand. He slipped it into his pocket with feigned carelessness, till he should be alone; then he opened it and read:

Dearest Teddy:

I need you.

Savoy Hotel,

The Strand.

Come at once.

Your foolish Desire.

She needed him! It was the first time she had owned as much. From her that admission in three words was more eloquent than many pages. Had her slavery to freedom become irksome? Had it got her into trouble?

He reached the Savoy within the hour. As he passed his card across the desk he was a-tremble. It was a relief when the clerk gave him no bad news but, having phoned up, turned and said, “The lady will see you in her room, sir.”

The passage outside her door was piled with trunks; painted on them, like an advertisement, in conspicuous white letters, was Janice Audrey. He tapped. As he waited he heard laughter. In his high-wrought state of nerves the sound was an offense.

The handle turned. “Hulloa, Teddy! I’ve heard about you. I’m going to leave you two scatter-brains to yourselves.”

Fluffy was in her street-attire—young, eager and caparisoned for conquest. She seemed entirely unrelated to the shuddering Diana in the Tyrolese huntsman’s costume, whom he had last seen breaking her heart in the dressing-room of The Belshazzar. He stepped aside to let her pass; then he entered.

He found himself in a large sunlit room in a riot of disorder—whether with packing or unpacking it was difficult to tell. Evidently some one had gone through a storm of shopping. Frocks were strewn in every direction; opera-cloaks and evening-gowns lay on the floor, on the bed, on the backs of chairs. Hats were half out of milliners’ boxes. Shoes and slippers lay jumbled in a pile in a suit-case. It was fitting that he and Desire should meet again in a hired privacy, like transients.

She stood against a wide window, looking down on the Embankment She was wearing a soft green peignoir trimmed with daisies. It was almost transparent, so that in the strong sunlight her slight figure showed through it It was low-cut and clinging—a match in color to the Guinevere costume which she had been wearing when he had discovered her at Glastonbury. Had she intended that it should waken memories? As he watched he was certain that that had been her intention, for she was adorned with another reminder: a false curl had usurped the place of the old one she had given him. It danced against her neck, quivering with excitement, and seemed to beckon.

Her back was towards him. She must have heard Fluffy speaking to him. She must know that he was on the threshold. He closed the door quietly and halted.

“Meester Deek, are you glad to see me?” She spoke without turning. \

Her question went unanswered. In the silence it seemed to repeat itself maddeningly. She drummed with her fingers on the pane, as though insisting that until he had answered he should not see her face.

At last her patience gave out She glanced across her shoulder. Something in his expression warned her. Running to him, she caught his hands and pressed against him, laughing into his eyes. She waited submissively for his arms to enfold her. When he remained unmoved, she whispered luringly, “I’m as amiable as I ever shall be.”

“Are you?”

She pouted. “Once if I’d told you that——

“Are you!”

“Is that all after a whole month?”

“A whole month!” His face seemed set in a mask. “To me it has seemed a century.”

For the first time she dimly realized what he had suffered. She drew her fingers across his cheek. Her hands ran over him like white mice. The weariness in his way of talking frightened her. “I’m—I’m sorry that I’m not always nice. It wasn’t quite nice of me to leave you, was it?”

His lips grew crooked at her understatement “From my point of view it wasn’t.”

She thought for a moment; she was determined not to acknowledge that he was altered. Slipping her arm into his comfortably, she led him across the room. “Let’s sit down. I’ve so much to tell you.”

He helped her to push a couch to the window that they might shut out the sight of the room’s disorder. When she had seated herself in a corner, she patted the place beside her. He sat himself at the other end and gazed out at the gray-gold stretch of river, where steamers churned back and forth between Greenwich and Westminster.

“Fluffy’s going to America; we ran over from Paris to get some clothes. It’s all rubbish to get one’s clothes in Paris; London’s just as good and not one-half as expensive. She has to return to Paris in a day or two to see a play. Simon Freelevy thinks it will suit her. After that she sails from Cherbourg.—Meester Deek, are you interested in Fluffy’s doings?”

“I was looking at the river. I scarcely heard what you were saying.”

“Well, then, perhaps this will interest you. She says that, if I like, she’ll see that I get a place in her company at The Belshassar.—Still admiring the view?—I wish you’d answer me sometimes, Teddy.”

“So you’re going to become another Fluffy?”

Her tone sank to a honeyed sweetness. “You’re most awfully far away. If you don’t come nearer, we might just as well——”

“As I came along the passage,” he said, “I heard you laughing. I haven’t done much laughing lately.”

A frown crept into her eyes. “That was because I was going to see you.”

He wished he could believe her.

In a desperate effort to win him to pleasantness, she closed up the space that separated them. His coldness piqued her. Through her filmy garment her body touched him; it was burning. “And I—I haven’t done much laughing lately, either; but one can’t be always tragic.” Her voice was tremulous and sultry. She brushed against him and peered into his face reproachfully. “You aren’t very sympathetic.”

“Not very.”

She tried the effect of irritation. “I wish you wouldn’t keep on catching at what I say.” Then, with a return to her sweetness: “Do be kind, Meester Deck. You don’t know how badly I need you.”

Something deep and emotional stirred within him. Perhaps it was memory—perhaps habit All his life he had been waiting for just that—for her to need him; it had begun years ago when Hal had told him of the price that she would have to pay. Perhaps it was love struggling in the prison that her indifference had created for it It might be merely the sex response to her closeness.

“I came because you wrote that you needed me. But your laughing and the way you met me——”

“I was nervous and—and you don’t know why.”

He shook his head. “After all that’s happened, after all the loneliness and all the silence—— My dear, I don’t know what’s the matter with me; I think you’ve killed something. I’m not trying to be unkind.”

She crouched her face in her hands. At last she became earnest “And just when I need you!”

“Tell me,” he urged gravely; “I’ll do anything.”

“You promise—really anything?”

“Anything.”

She smiled mysteriously, making bars of her fingers before her eyes. She knew that, however he might deny it, he was again surrendering to her power. “Even if I were to ask you to marry me?”

“Anything,” he repeated, without fervor.

“Then I’ll ask a little thing first.” She hesitated. “It would help if you put your arm about me.”

He carried out her request perfunctorily.

“Ask me questions,” she whispered; “it will be easier to begin like that.”

“Where did you go when you left me?”

“To Paris.”

“I know. I followed you.”

She started. “But you didn’t see me?”

He kept her in suspense, while he groped after the reason for her excitement. “No. I didn’t see you. Whom were you with?”

“Fluffy.”

“Any one else?”

“Yes.” She caught at his hands, as though already he had made a sign to leave her. “I didn’t know he was to be there.”

“Ah!” He knew whom she meant: the man with whom she had flirted in California and whom a strange chance had led to her hotel in Paris. He would have withdrawn his arm if she had not held it.

“But none of this explains your leaving me and then not writing.”

A hardness had crept into his tones. His jealousy had sprung into a flame. He remembered those photographs of Tom in her bedroom. There had always been other men at the back of her life. How did he know whom she met or what she did, when he was away from her?

“Meester Deek,” she clutched at him, “don’t You—you frighten me. I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t I’ve spent every moment with Fluffy.”

“That didn’t keep you from writing.”

“No.” She laid her face against his pleadingly. “That didn’t prevent It was—— Oh, Meester Deek, won’t you understand—you’ve always been so unjudging? At Les Baux that night you wakened something—something that I’d never felt. I didn’t dare to trust myself. It wasn’t you that I distrusted. I wanted to go somewhere alone—somewhere where I could think and come to myself. If I’d written to you, or received letters from you——”

“Desire, let’s speak the truth. We promised always to be honest You say you went with Fluffy to be alone; you know you didn’t. Fluffy’s never alone—she’s a queen bee with the drones always buzzing round her. You went away to get rid of me, and for the fun of seeing whether you could recall me.”

“Not that. Truly not that” She paused and drew a long breath, like a diver getting ready for a deep plunge. “It was because I was afraid that, if I stopped longer, we might have to marry. A girl may be cold—she mayn’t even love a man, but if she trifles too long with his affections, she herself sometimes catches fire. That was how my mother—with my father.”

“Then why did you send for me?” His tone was stern and puzzled.

For a time she was silent. It seemed to him that she was searching for a plausible motive. Then, “I think because I wanted to see a good man.”

He tried to smile cynically. She had fooled him too many times for him to allow himself to be caught so easily as that. The scales had fallen from his eyes. She had always made whatever uprightness he possessed a reproach to him.

“You don’t believe me?” She scanned his face wistfully. “You never did understand me or—or any girls.”

The new argument which her accusation suggested was tempting; no man, however inexperienced, likes to be told that he is ignorant of women. That he refused to allow himself to be diverted was proof to her of her loss of power.

“I believe you in a sense,” he said. “I don’t doubt that at this moment you imagine that you want to see a good man—not that I’m especially good; I’m just decent and ordinary. But you’re not really interested in good men; you don’t find them exciting. Long ago, as children, you told me that. Don’t you remember—I like Sir Launcelot best?”

She twisted her hands. Her face had gone white. When she spoke her voice was earnest and tired. “You force me to tell you.—I did want to see a good man—a good man who loved me. You’ll never guess why. It was to get back my self-respect That man—that man whom I led on in California, he saw us together in Paris. He misunderstood. He thought vile things. After I’d left you and joined Fluffy, I met him again and he asked me to be—— I can’t say it; but when a man like that misunderstands things about a girl——” Self-scorn consumed her. “It wasn’t only because he’d seen us together—it wasn’t only that.” Her voice sank to a bitter whisper. “I’m the daughter of a woman who was never married—he found that out; so he asked me to become his——”

“My God! Don’t say it.”

He tried to draw her to him. Tears blinded his eyes. She scoffed at herself rebelliously. “It’s true. I deserved it That’s the way I act—like a man’s mistress. I don’t act like other girls. That’s why you never mentioned me in your letters from New York to your mother. You made excuses for me in your own mind, and you tried not to be ashamed of me and, because you were chivalrous, you were sorry for me. I hated you for being sorry. But men, like that man in Paris—all they see in me is an opportunity——”

“The swine!” He clenched his hands and sat staring at the carpet.

“No.” She shook her head sadly. “I’m fair game. I see it all now. I used to think I was only modern, and used to laugh at you for being old-fashioned. You were always trying to tell me. I’m taking back everything unkind that I ever did or said. D’you hear me, Teddy? It’s the way I’ve been brought up. I’m what Horace calls ‘a Slave of freedom.’ I fascinate and I don’t play fair. I’m rotten and I’m virtuous. I accept and accept with my greedy little hands. I lead men on to expect, and I give nothing.”

She waited for him to say something—something healing and generous—perhaps that he would marry her. He was filled with pity and with doubt—and with another emotion. What she had told him had roused his passion. In memory he could feel the warmth of her body. Why had she dressed like this to meet him? Why did she touch him so frequently? Passion wasn’t love; it would burn itself out He knew that, if he stayed, he would shatter the idol she had created of him. He would become like that man whom he had been despising.

His silence disappointed her. She ceased from caressing him. She had come to an end of all her arts and blandishments. In trying to be sincere, she had made her very sincerity sound like coquetry. She realized that this man, who had been absolutely hers at a time when she had not valued him, had grown reserved and cautious at this crisis when she needed him more than anything in the world. A desperate longing came into her eyes. Struggling with her pride, in one last effort to win him back, she stretched out her arms timidly, resting her hands on his shoulders with a tugging pressure. “I guess,” her voice came brokenly, “I guess you’re the only living man who would ever have dreamt of marrying me.”

Jumping up, he seized his hat

“You’re going?”

He faced her furiously. It seemed to him that he was gazing into a furnace. “If I stay, you’ll have me kissing you.”

She scarcely knew whether she loved or hated him, yet she held out her arms to him languorously. For a moment he hesitated. Then he hurried past her. As his hand was on the door, he heard a thud. She had fallen to her knees beside the couch in the sunlight Her face was buried in her hands.

Slowly he came back. Stooping over her, he brushed his lips against her hair.

She lifted her sad eyes. “I tried to be fair to you; I warned you. You should have stuck to your dream of me. You were never in love with the reality.”

“I was.” He denied her vehemently.

She smiled wearily. “The past tense! Will you ever be kind to me again, I wonder? I—I never had a father, Teddy.”

The old excuse—the truest of all her excuses! It struck the chord of memory. He picked her up gently, holding her so closely that he could feel the shuddering of her breath.

“In spite of everything,” she whispered, “would you still marry me?”

He faltered. “Yes, I’d still marry you. But, Desire, we’ve forgotten: you haven’t told me truly why you sent for me.”

She slipped from his arms and put the couch between them. “I sent for you to tell you that—that I’m that, though I’ve tried, I can’t live without you.”

He leant out to touch her. She avoided him. “First tell me that you love me.”

“I do.”

Her gray eyes brimmed over. “You don’t. You’re lying. I’ve never lied to you—with all my faults I’ve never done that.”

His arms fell to his side. When confronted by her truth his passion went from him. “But I shall. I shall love you, Desire. It’ll all come back.”

She shook her head. “It might never. And without it—— You told me that I’d killed something. I believe I have.”

“If you would only let me kiss you,” he pleaded.

She darted across the room and flinging wide the door, waited for him in the passage.

She took his hands in hers. They gazed at each other inarticulately.

“I can’t tell you—can’t tell you,” he panted. “All the time I may be loving you.”

“And just when I needed you, Meester Deek,” she whispered, “just when I want to be good so badly!”

She broke from him. Again, as at Les Baux, he heard the key in her lock turning.

No sooner was he without her than the change commenced. During his month of intolerable waiting, when he had thought that he had lost her forever, he had tried to heal the affront to his pride with a dozen hostile arguments. He had persuaded himself that the break with her was for the best. He had told himself that carelessness towards men was in her blood—a taint of sexlessness inherited from her mother. He had assured himself repeatedly that he could live without her. He had fixed in his mind as a goal to be envied his old pursuits, with their unfevered touch of bachelor austerity. This had been his mood till he had received her message: “I need you. Come at once.”

Having seen her, his yearning had returned like a lean wolf the more famished by reason of its respite. Was it love? If he lied to her, she would detect him. Until he could convince her that he loved her, he was exiled by her honesty. He knew now that throughout the weeks of waiting his suffering had been dulled by its own intensity. His false self-poise had been a symptom of the malady.

All day he tramped the streets of London in the scorching heat of midsummer. He went up the Strand and back by the Embankment, round and round, taking no time for food or rest. He felt throughout his body a continual vibration, an eager trembling. He dared not go far from her.

In spirit she was never absent She rose up crouching her chin against her shoulder and barricading her lips with her hand. He relived their many partings—the ecstasies, kisses, wavings down the stairs—those prolonged poignant moments when her tenderness had atoned for hours of coldness. She had become a habit with him—a part of him. His physical self cried out for her. It was knit with hers.

A year almost to the day since she had said so lightly, “Come to America”! And now she was so near, and he could not go to her.

Evening. He sat wearily on the Embankment, gazing up at the back of her hotel, trying to guess which window was hers. In the coolness of the golden twilight he had arrived at the first stage in his exact self-knowledge: that waiting for her had become his mission—without her his future would be purposeless. If he made her his wife, he might live to regret it Her faults went too deep for even love to cure. Any emotion of shame which she had owned to was only for the moment. Whether he lost her or won her, he was bound to suffer. Marriage with her might spell intellectual ruin; but to shirk the risk because of that would be to shatter his idealism forever. To save her from herself and to shelter her in so far as she would allow, had become his religion and the inspiration of his work. And wasn’t that the highest sort of love?

He determined to set himself a test He walked to Charing Cross Station, entered a telephone-booth and called up the Savoy.

“Miss Jodrell, please. No, I don’t know the number of the room.”

The trepidation with which he waited brought all his New York memories back.

Her voice. “Hulloa! Yes. This is Miss Jodrell.”

He was at a loss for words. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her across the wire. While he hesitated, he heard her receiver hung up.

He was certain of himself now. He was shaking like a leaf. If her voice could thrill and unnerve him when her body was absent, this must be more than passion.

He sat down till he had grown quiet, then jumping into a taxi he told the man to drive quickly. He could have walked the distance in little over five minutes; but after so much delay, every second saved was an atonement. As he whirled out of the Strand into the courtyard of the Savoy, Big Ben was booming for nine.

For the second time that day he passed his card across the desk. “I want Miss Jodrell.”

The clerk handed him back his card. “She’s left.”

“But she can’t have. I’ve had her on the phone within half an hour.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I wonder she didn’t tell you. You must have spokes with her the last minute before she left. She caught the nine o’clock boat-train from Charing Cross to Dover.”

He went faint and reached out to steady himself. “From Charing Cross! Why, I’ve just come from there. We must have passed. We——”

The man saw that something serious was the matter. He dropped his perfunctory manner. “She’s sure to have left an address for the forwarding of her letters. I’ll look it up if you’ll wait a moment.” He returned. “Her letters were to be addressed Poste Restante to the General Post-office, Paris. I don’t know whether that will help you.”

Before leaving the hotel he sat down and wrote her. Then he went out and sent her a telegram:

“Yours exclusively. Telegraph your address. Will come at once and fetch you.”

He hurried home to Eden Row and packed his bag. He was up early next morning, waiting for her reply. In the evening he sent her a more urgent telegram and another letter. No answer. He thought that she must have received his messages, for he had marked his letters to be returned within a day if not called for. He cursed himself for his ill-timed coldness.