Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (314 page)

CHAPTER VI
.

ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them home from the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof, and the horse, checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the kerb. They were midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was about half-past twelve of a fine night.

“Were getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless Dudley Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”

It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful woman. He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He saw her bend forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of the cab, and the next moment she was on the pavement. He thought so slowly that he had no time to think anything at all before he found himself, too, on the kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and thankful driver.

“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us...”

She hooked herself on to his arm.

“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen at the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She moved herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop him in her black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her features appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very deep and full of chords.

“Whatever you can say against me...” she began and paused.

Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is at that hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses sounding in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.

“You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was conscious that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round to gaze upon them.

“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you can’t say I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.”

“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were alone in the car; it was not anyone else.”

They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung him round.

“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the back streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my shrieking, you can’t prove it. But I
can
prove that you called me a penguin in your last nice letter to me.”

In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night, her warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her subtle and comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were an invisible cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she, leaning her body forward, her face back to him, to draw him along, as in a picture a nymph might lead away a stripling into scented obscurities into leafy woods.

“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity, “that I couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly knew what a penguin was.”

“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are remembering them now.”.

She laughed again.

“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that day — the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop — we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary place in London — the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”

She shivered under her cloak.

“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”

“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses. Ill bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”

He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but she cried:

“Oh, you traitor! You
have
called her one of these names. Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”

The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.

“Go away,” she said—”go away.”

“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.

“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her. Suddenly she slackened her steps.

“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it now. You
feel
like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am now.”

She paused, and then she brought out:

“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me. Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”

Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite: Why should anyone want to down you?”

“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would their dinners be — where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me for an attraction?...

“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t you — about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley, it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”

Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black, deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass of windows, the sound of his footsteps — for her tread was soundless, as if she moved without stepping — the cold, the solitude, all these things and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long, early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not act at the bidding of duty.

No man, indeed, can serve two women — no man, at any rate, who is essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley Leicester.

“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.

“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you — you knew I shouldn’t betray you — it was because you were afraid of what the other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions, but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you,”

Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.

“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game — if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish — I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through....

“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....

“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you
did
call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”

He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home” — as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him.

For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times — after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always — always — just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value.

And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils!

He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home” again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found its vent in his saying:

“You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.”

“Then put it up for me,” she said saucily. Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He trembled — as he had been used to tremble — when his hands touched her warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly.

“Do you remember the riddle with the rude answer?” she asked suddenly, “about the hare. There was a hare in a pit, sixty feet deep, and there was no way out, and a greyhound was let into it. How did the hare escape? And the answer was: That’s the hare’s business.”

She had hooked herself on to his arm again.

“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked thinkingly.

“Oh,” she answered, “I was only thinking; it
is
the hare’s business, you know. That means that you can’t really get away from your past. It comes back again. Do you remember a French story called ‘Toutes les Amoureuses’ ?... about a man who had hundreds of adventures. And of each lady he kept a ribbon or a lock of hair, or a shoe- buckle — some trifle. And once a year he used to lock his door and take out these odds and ends — and remember — just remember! Well, Mr. Dudley Leicester, that’s a good thing to do. It’s an act of piety for one thing; it averts evil for another. It’s like touching for the evil chance. If you’d done that for me — for my sake, because you had a good slice of my life — if you had done it... well! you’d not have been so desperately unhappy now.”

“I’m not unhappy,” he said, and he spoke the truth.

“Aren’t you?” she mocked him. “Aren’t you?”

They were within a few steps of her door, almost opposite where, black and silent, his own house awaited him — as if, reproachfully, it gazed at him with darkened eyes. And suddenly she burst into a carol, and with quickened steps she danced him onwards:

“He called me a penguin, a penguin, a penguin; He called me a penguin a long time ago!”

She sang it to the triumphant lilt of “Voici le sabre!” And then they were on her doorstep. She had her key in the latch, the door went back into darkness.

“I’ll prove to you you called me that,” she said, and crouching forward, as she had bent to open the door, she caught the end of his sleeve and pulled him into the inner darkness. He could see nothing, and the heavy door was closed behind him.