II
Two miles away from the little town was the big city with tramways, electric light, factories, canals, and tens of thousands of people, where a few nights later he met Ianthe. Walking around and away from the happy lighted streets they came out upon the bank of a canal where darkness and loneliness were intensified by the silent passage of black water whose current they could divine but could not see. As they stepped warily along the unguarded bank he embraced her. Even as he did so he cursed himself for a fool to be so fond of this wretched imp of a girl. In his heart he believed he disliked her, but he was not sure. She was childish, artful, luscious, stupid—this was no gesture for a man with any standards. Silently clutching each other they approached an iron bridge with lamps upon it and a lighted factory beyond it. The softly-moving water could now be seen—the lamps on the bridge let down thick rods of light into its quiet depths and beyond the arch the windows of the factory, inverted in the stream, bloomed like baskets of fire with flaming fringes among the eddies caused by the black pillars. A boy shuffled across the bridge whistling a tune; there was the rumble and trot of a cab. Then all sounds melted into a quiet without one wave of air. The unseen couple had kissed, Ianthe was replying to him:
“No, no, I like it, I like you.” She put her brow against his breast. “I like you, I like you.”
His embracing hand could feel the emotion streaming within the girl.
“Do you like me better than her?”
“Than whom?” he asked.
Ianthe was coy. “You know, you know.”
Masterman’s feelings were a mixture of perturbation and delight, delight at this manifestation of jealousy of her sister which was an agreeable thing, anyway, for it implied a real depth of regard for him; but he was perturbed for he did not know what Kate had told this sister of their last strange meeting. He saluted her again exclaiming: “Never mind her. This is our outing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like her,” Ianthe added naïvely, “she is so awfully fond of you.”
“O confound her,” he cried, and then, “you mustn’t mind me saying that so, so sharply, you don’t mind, do you?”
Ianthe’s lips were soft and sweet. Sisters were quite unscrupulous, Masterman had heard of such cases before, but he had tenderness and a reluctance to wound anybody’s susceptibility, let alone the feelings of a woman who loved. He was an artist not only in paint, but in sentiment, and it is possible that he excelled in the less tangible medium.
“It’s a little awkward,” he ventured. Ianthe didn’t understand, she didn’t understand that at all.
“The difficulty, you see,” he said with the air of one handling whimsically a question of perplexity that yet yielded its amusement, “is ... is Kate.”
“Kate?” said Ianthe.
“She is so—so gone, so absolutely gone.”
“Gone?”
“Well, she’s really really in love, deeply, deeply,” he said looking away anywhere but at her sister’s eyes.
“With Chris Halton, do you mean?”
“Ho, ho!” he laughed, “Halton! Lord, no, with me, with me, isn’t she?”
“With you!”
But Ianthe was quite positive even a little ironical about that. “She is not, she rather dislikes you, Mr. Prince Charming, so there. We speak of you sometimes at night in bed—we sleep together. She knows what I think of you but she’s quite, well she doesn’t like you at all—she acts the heavy sister.”
“O,” said Masterman, groping as it were for some light in his darkness.
“She—what do you think—she warns me against you,” Ianthe continued.
“Against me?”
“As if I care. Do you?”
“No, no. I don’t care.”
They left the dark bank where they had been standing and walked along to the bridge. Halfway up its steps to the road he paused and asked: “Then who is it that is so fond of me?”
“O you know, you know.” Ianthe nestled blissfully in his arm again.
“No, but who is it, I may be making another howler. I thought you meant Kate, what did she warn you of, I mean against me?”
They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre. The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people, there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.
“What did she warn you against?” he repeated.
“You,” chuckled Ianthe.
“But what about? What has she got against me?”
“Everything. You know, you know you do.” The archness of Ianthe was objectively baffling but under it all he read its significance, its invitation.
He waited beside her for a tram but when it came he pleaded a further engagement in the city. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone, to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then—Ianthe’s candour left him no room for doubt—and they were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn’t mind that, lies were a kind of protective colouring, he lied himself whenever it was necessary, or suited him. Not often, but truth was not always possible to sensitive minded men. Why, after all, should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society? “But it’s also the trick of thieves and seducers, David Masterman,” he muttered to himself. “I’m not a thief, no, I’m not a thief. As for the other thing, well, what is there against me—nothing, nothing at all.” But a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road, “Not as yet, not as yet.”
He walked on more rapidly.
Three women! There was no doubt about the third, Ianthe had thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an invincible prejudice against marriage not as an institution but because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions were deep but unprolonged. Love was love, but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell—a passing bell—earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine and ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his own capacity for love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern—and that had the strongest flavour of any emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how brief its term—even that was a deviating zigzag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman; she would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plunged so suddenly into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?
Masterman was a very pliant man, but as things shaped themselves for him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia at all that he made love.