I
To Ellingham’s entire satisfaction, Feo did not sit out the performance at the Adelphi. She left in the middle of the second act. It was not a piece demanding any sort of concentration. That was not its métier. It was one of those rather pleasant, loosely made things, bordering here and there on burlesque, in which several comedians have been allotted gaps to fill between songs which, repeated again and again, give a large chorus of pretty girls an opportunity of wearing no dress longer than five minutes or lower than the knees. But Feo’s mind was wandering. The last twenty-four hours had been filled with disappointment. She agreed with the adage that if you can’t make a mistake you can’t make anything. But this last one, which had taken the Macquarie person into her circle of light, proved to her that she was losing not only her sense of perspective but her sense of humor. It rankled; and it continued to rankle all through the jokes and songs and horseplay of the company behind the footlights that Saturday night.
Then, too, she found herself becoming more and more disappointed in Ellingham. He had aged. Still just on the right side of forty, he seemed to her to have had all the youth knocked out of him. His resilience had gone—sapped by the War—and with it his danger, which had been so attractive. He was now a quiet, repressed, responsible, dull—yes, dull,—man; in a sort of way the father of a family. When he talked it was about his regiment in India, his officers, his quartermaster sergeant, the health of his men, the ugly look of things in the East. All this made it seem to Feo that Beetle Ellingham had pulled away from her, left her behind. She was still fooling, while he, once as irresponsible as herself and almost as mad, had found his feet and was standing firmly upon them. Disappointment, disappointment.
“What to do?” she asked, as they got into a taxicab. She rather hoped that he would say “Nothing. I’ll see you home and say good night.”
But he didn’t. “I’ll drive you home and talk for an hour, if you can stand such a thing. I’m going to see my old people in Leicestershire to-morrow, and I don’t suppose I shall be back in town for a month or two.”
She told him to make it Dover Street, and he did so, and there was silence until the cab drew up at the door of the house in which the man—whom she had for the first time seriously considered as the new Messiah—burnt himself up in the endeavor to find some solution to all the troubles of his country, and, like a squirrel in a cage, ran round and round and round.
Feo let herself in and led the way to what she called her den,—a long, low-ceilinged room, self-consciously decorated in what purported to be a futuristic manner, the effect of which, as though it had been designed by an untrained artist striving to disguise his ignorance behind a chaos of the grotesque, made sanity stagger. And here, full stretch on an octagonal divan, she mounted a cigarette in her long green holder and commenced to inhale hungrily.
Hating the room and all its fake, Ellingham, who more than ever justified the nickname of Beetle which had been given to him at Eton because of his over-hanging black eyebrows, prowled up and down with his hands in his pockets. He, too, was disappointed. It seemed to him that Feo had remained the hoyden, the overgrown, long-legged girl with boy’s shoulders and the sort of sex illusiveness which had so greatly attracted him in the old days, and had set him to work to eliminate and replace. But now she was thirty something, and although he hated to use the expression about her of all women, he told himself that she was mutton playing lamb, and a futile lamb at that. Perhaps it was because he had been all the way through the War and had come out with a series of unforgettable pictures stamped upon his brain that he had expected to find some sort of emergement on the part of Feo, who, although she had been spared the blood and muck of Flanders, was the sister of a flying man, the relation of innumerable gallant fellows who had been made the gun fodder of that easily preventable orgy, and the friend of many a young soldier whose bones now lay under the shallow surface of French earth. So far as she was concerned, he could see that the War might never have happened at all. It made him rather sick. Nevertheless he had loved her violently and had never married because of his remembrance of her and he wanted to find out how she stood. He was entirely in the dark. He had not been alone with her once since the end of July, 1914,—a night on the terrace of a house overlooking the Thames at Cookham, when all the world already knew that slaughter was in the air and the wings of the angel of death rustled overhead.
He stopped in front of her, all stretched out among cushions, her short and pleated frock making her appear to be in a kilt. “Well, how about it?” he asked.
And she shrugged her shoulders and tossed the ash of her cigarette at a small marble pot. “I dunno,” she said. “Pretty badly, one way and another.”
“How’s that?”
“Oh, I dunno,” she said again. “One gets nowhere and does really nothing and spends one’s life looking for something that never turns up,—the glamour of the impossible. Disappointment, disappointment.”
“H’m,” said Beetle. “Is there no chance of your getting on better with Fallaray? He seems to be the only live creature in politics, the one honest man.” He had never imagined that he would ever have put that question to her.
“That’s true,” said Feo. “He is. I have nothing but admiration for Edmund,—except dislike. Profiles and tennis are no longer my hobbies and there is no more hope of our getting on, as you call it, than of my becoming an earnest worker among the slums. Once Feo, always Feo, y’know. That’s the sentence I labor under, Beetle. As a rule, I’m perfectly satisfied and have no grumbles. I rot about and play the giddy ox, wear absurd clothes, do my best to give a jar to what remains of British smugdom and put in a good-enough time. You mustn’t judge me as you find me to-night. I have the megrims. Ghosts are walking and I’m out of form. To put it truthfully, I’m rather ashamed of myself. I’ve become a little too careless. I must relearn the art of drawing the line. That’s all. But, for the Lord’s sake, don’t let me depress you,—that is, if I have any longer the power of doing so.”
She hadn’t, he found, and it hurt. In the old days he would have said so and in a sort of way got even with her for turning him down and marrying Fallaray. He would have taken a certain amount of joy in hitting her as hard as he could. But he had altered. He was not the old Beetle, the violent, hot-tempered, rather cruel individualist. Men had died at his side,—officers and Tommies. And so his days of hurting women were over. He was rather a gentle Beetle now. Curious how things shaped themselves. And so he prowled up and down with his hands in his pockets, inarticulate, out of touch,—like a doctor in a lunatic asylum, or an Oxford man revisiting the scenes of his giddy youth in his very old age.
And Feo continued to smoke,—smarting. Not because she cared for Beetle or had ever given him a thought. But because everything was edgeways, like a picture puzzle that had fallen in a heap. She would have given a great deal to have had this man take his hands out of his pockets and stop prowling and become the old violent Beetle once again. She would have liked to have heard him curse Fallaray and accuse her of being a rotter. She would have liked to have seen the old hot look in his eyes and been compelled to laugh him off, using her old flippant words. Anything,—anything but the thing that was.
But even as he prowled—up round the wispy table and down in front of that damn-fool altar, or whatever it was—he became more and more the ancient friend, distantly related, who had little to talk about and little that he cared to hear. Once more he went over all the old India stuff, the regiment, the officers and men, their health, the underlying unrest of the East. Then he jerked, as a sudden glorious new thought, to his people and the place they lived in, but all the same this unsatisfactory reunion lasted twenty minutes less than the given hour.
Suddenly Ellingham stopped walking and stood in front of Feo and said, “Good-by. I don’t suppose I shall see you again.” And wheeled off and went, quickly, with relief.
And when Feo heard the front door bang, she remained where she was lying until the hour was fulfilled, with the hand that he had shaken all stiff, and with two tears running slowly down her face.
Disappointment.—Disappointment.