CHAPTER II
"Seems almost a pity," said Mr. Carmichael.
His wife looked her grey-eyed agreement.
"The one post promises security for life, a fixed salary...."
"And is so eminently your line, Cyprian."
"At the moment," said Cyprian, "a secure haven and a tranquil time to brood upon my good fortune in it are the last attractions the world can offer me. I feel restless. I know I am probably being a fool but, since my mother died, there is nothing that need prevent me from being a fool if I so desire."
Mrs. Carmichael had a feeling that any young man who rounded off his sentence with, "if I so desire" at this stage of his career, was intended by Heaven for a University donship and not the vicissitudes of a miner's existence. She was quite right.
"The Company which has offered you the post of Secretarial Manager and What-Not of its—er—machinations," went on Mr. Carmichael, "will, in all likelihood, burst before the year's end and leave you stranded. The Burmese mines are overdone and I hardly believe in this new discovery and your avaricious expectations. What is promised? Rubies?"
"I got such a pretty aquamarine straight from the Mogok mines once," murmured his wife, "through a friend who ..."
"You won't find any rubies, ten to one," warned Robin.
"But I may find something else again which is of even more importance to me," said Cyprian.
Neither of his companions asked what that was. He went on slowly: "Some force outside myself seems to be urging me away from England for the present. I fear the facetious would describe me as a quitter, but, for certain natures, it is always safest to quit ... temptations. I have never dared to do anything else myself, and a superficial peace at Oxford just now would multiply mine unbelievably, though I am sensible of the honour done me by their offer of the appointment."
"You are only twenty-eight, are you not?"
"Yes. For a humble tutor and lecturer to get such a chance..."
"Free house and garden," chirped Mrs. Carmichael, seeing womanly visions and dreaming womanly dreams, "and with prospects of becoming a master in time. What a pity..."
She knew, alas, that Muriel would refuse to be dazzled.
"Well, since you seem to have made up your mind to throw up a good thing for a doubtful one"—Mr. Carmichael never wasted time on vain regrets—"I agree that your science and geological knowledge will be invaluable to your employers and I had better tell you what I have seen of the district."
The talk drifted into generalities, and Mrs. Carmichael began to price Ferlie's winter coat and remind herself to impress it upon the matron at Peter's school that Peter was really an Exceptional Boy. She believed in a private appeal to the only woman in an establishment full of unimaginative men. Pictured the red-roofed bungalow in Rangoon without the children's toys annoying her husband in the verandah. Remembered all the other Colonial mothers and wondered why that made the pain worse instead of better. Rejoiced that she had, at least, got the better of Robin in the matter of Ferlie's education. None of your hard modern schools, over-developing brain and body at the expense of femininity. Reaction must set in soon on this count, and Muriel Vane was nothing if not a warning. There could come a revival of the old-fashioned home-school, where it was so fortunate that the kind Miss Maynes had welcomed the thought of having Peter for the holidays.
They could not have agreed to take just any boy, they had told her—in fact none had, up to date, been offered them—but, in the circumstances, "Why, it is really our duty, dear Mrs. Carmichael."
Yes, Lady Vigor's daughter had always remained with them and, naturally, they had taken her to the seaside. How impossible, thought Ferlie's mother, to have entrusted Ferlie or Peter to Aunt Brillianna.
Brillianna Trefusis, a maternal aunt of Robin's, who was, nevertheless, not more than five years his senior, was an eccentric lady who travelled a great deal, spoke boldly and wore a disconcerting air suggesting that life amused her. And she did not go to church!
Mused Ferlie's mother, it was all very well for the men-folk to content themselves with prayer by proxy, reaping where their loyal wives had sown, but if the women were also to desert the old and tried paths to that Better Land, Far, Far Away, the chances were that the Judgment would fall due before anyone had reached those Eternal Bowers, and the travellers find themselves shooed into Outer Darkness to the tune of "Depart, ye Cursed!" And Ferlie was so responsive to her surroundings: Aunt B. could easily have raised doubts in her mind as to the authenticity of Lazarus and Jonah, and when once you began to pick and choose...
"No, I am afraid she is still out in the park, Cyprian. What's that? Crystallized apricots? Oh, but you really shouldn't. I could give them to her when she comes in.... Well, if you will ... she's sure to be near the pond. Thank you, Peter is quite well. So odd! He says his form master asked him where he had learnt the secret of perpetual motion. Such a silly sort of thing to say to a child."
Cyprian had never met the exiled Peter, on the occasion of whose swift banishment he had first recognized a kindred spirit in the Ferlie, white-faced and dumb, presented to him in the Carmichaels' drawing-room with the motherly rebuke, "And, Cyprian, this is the one I intended to ask you to be godfather to, only Robin put me off, insisting that you would not know what the term meant."
He visualized Peter, after winning his sister's confidence, as a wiry mortal of nine summers, permanently unlaced boots and an enquiring expression; this last suggesting a soul too perfectly in tune, if not with the Infinite, at least with the Infinitely Annoying, as connected with problems of Eternal Research, for the peace of mind of those in charge of him.
"Isn't it funny, when you come to think of it"—thus Mrs. Carmichael when Cyprian had gone—"that a woman's 'No' can alter the whole course of a man's life?"
"Not nearly so thoroughly as can a woman's 'Yes,' believe me. He is jolly well out of that one."
"The trouble is that you can't persuade him of it. Such an ideal situation for him, Robin. A free house and garden..."
"Nice Society," went on Robin, a little grimly, "church bells within ear-shot, so that one can imbibe atmospheric religion from an arm-chair, and the golf-links closed on Sunday. But you're right: it would have suited him—in the end. If ever I saw an Oxford don in embryo, it is Cyprian."
"He's so Nice," his wife lingered over the word. "One realizes at once how high-principled..."
"Oh, he's all that ... and he listens to the Abbey organ regularly."
"Simple and obtuse," Linda Carmichael continued. "And she's quite heartless. Do you know, Robin, sometimes she behaves almost as if she were not a lady."
Mrs. Carmichael couldn't understand why Robin sniggered at this superlative condemnation.
"She wants the Man-with-the-Stick," he briefly summed up Muriel.
Mrs. Carmichael did not pursue that idea. It was so bluntly lowering to the dignity of Womanhood as to make her feel mildly uncomfortable. There were wife-beaters in the slums—very sad—but she always closed fastidious eyes to the thought that among Us, also, the thing called Human Nature could betray itself in crude unmentionable ways.
Exploited as it might be in these days, Human Nature always seemed to her to have an undressed sound.
Her own marriage had been a reticent affair: separate dressing-rooms and so on.
There was something about Muriel, though her father's first cousin was an Earl, which reminded one of the pictures kept in the house because they were classical but which one did not look at very closely and hung in darkish corners of the landing. Necessary to Art but hardly to Life.
* * * * * *
While Cyprian was laying in stocks of quinine, dark glasses and thin pyjamas, and the Carmichaels were busily embracing relations whom they never set eyes on except at the "Ave atque Vale" occupying the two separate ends of their four-yearly "leaves," and while Peter was interesting himself in illicit Natural History during class hours, and Ferlie in members of her own sex as a regiment, in class and out, Muriel was brooding over her bones and finding them tasteless.
She came out of her bath one morning after washing her hair and, having given the damp cloud a desultory rub with a large fluffy towel, tossed that shield from her and paused before the long pier-glass.
"And God, who made that body for delight"—
She quoted under her breath—
"Should there have stayed and left a perfect thing,
Nor added to your loveliness a soul.
So had He spared you sharpest suffering;
Dark waves of night that o'er your spirit roll.
And sobs which shake you through the lonely night...."
Where had she read the words? Some literary magazine. Author? Hamilton Fyffe? Was it? Or Fyfe? Remembered she had thought that clever when, very young, she came across it. Someone had scrawled against the margin, "I fear me Fyffe is very inexperienced. No woman without a soul has held a man for long."
Did she want to hold any man for long? Did she ever want to "fall in love"? What bosh it all was—this thirst of milk-blooded girls for the soul-mate.
"It's positively terrifying to see Truth naked," remarked Muriel to her own white reflection. Or was it not better to be free from mental corsets—as well as the ordinary sort? She raised herself on tiptoes, clasping her rounded arms above her head as the thought rippled into merriment across her face: "If Cyprian were my husband and came in now, accidentally, he would apologize and flee, and be too much of a gentleman even to mention it again on our meeting later. He's the type of man who would never forget that though its wife was its wife she was still a 'lady'."
Footsteps, and a knock at her door disturbed these cogitations. A known voice greeted her through it.
"May I come in, Muriel?"
"Oh, is that you, Twinkle? Yes, so far as I'm concerned you can come in. Better leave your gentleman-friend outside on the mat though—for his sake, not for mine."
A thickset, handsome girl entered languidly, took in the situation at a glance and sat down upon the unmade bed.
"You are a One!" Her voice drawled richly. "I suppose I can smoke while you dress?"
"Puff away! I'll have one too while I finish my air-bath. It fills me with optimism to take it in front of the glass."
Twinkle ran critical eyes over this unbashful nymph.
"You're all right," she said candidly. "A bit thin. Thinking of posing as an artist's model?"
"Glory! It never occurred to me."
"It's a possible treatment for your complaint, my dear."
"What do you mean?" A deepening of the carnation tint on Muriel's soft cheek.
Twinkle did not appear to notice.
"Enough eyes on your tout ensemble to satisfy even your thirst for admiration. The joy of seeing, say, thirty individuals all occupied in reproducing your beauty for general display in some gallery. After-results ... qui sait? The artist's model...."
"Meets artists," finished Muriel, recovering herself: "I am out after bigger game. I had thought of going into training on your lines."
"The stage is over-stocked with people seeking auditions who have not the slightest talent," warned Miss Ruth Levine, commonly known as Twinkle, probably because it was the most unsuitable nickname that could possibly be found for her. "You might prove a happy exception."
"I'd get a walking-on chorus part, at any time," Muriel confidently assured her, "with nothing to do but kick and use my eyes."
"M-m! You've been reading some reliable literature, wherein the pure-hearted Gladiola Trevelyan, who is only on this degrading beat in order to supply calves' foot jelly for little cripple sister Winnie at home, finds the young earl's card in her dressing-room. In real life you'll discover it is the son of the local butcher who leaves his in a Rolls Royce and that the marquises' cheques are to be mistrusted more often than honoured."
"Truly enough, gold paint can disguise a lead coronet. We've one in our family—my second cousin's. Anyone is welcome to him for me. Money I must have, Twinkle, or I may as well commit suicide."
"You are doing that by inches while you waste time emptying old pocket-books."
"My little weakness," admitted Muriel frankly. "I take what comes while keeping my eyes on the final goal."
"What the devil is your goal? One man or several?"
"You are an honest woman," laughed Muriel. "I don't mind confessing for your private ear, that I simply do not know." She flung herself face downwards on the tumbled satin quilt, cupping her face in her pink palms.
"To look it in the face: I have seen marriage at close quarters and found it distinctly uninspiring. Father and Mother! My God! How they bore one another! They try to go their separate ways and yet cling to a snarling respectability."
"Why don't they get a divorce?"
"Too expensive. Besides, there is no just cause or impediment. I could forgive them if either had risen to a guilty passion. But that would have smirched the family escutcheon, you see; merely being rude to one another doesn't. Then they have not got me off their hands yet. Dad would sell me to the highest bidder to-morrow. I am marketable stock for some degenerate duke with no age-limit, provided he is rich. Not so easy to find, eh? As for a love-match with an impecunious captain, whose inspiriting moustache bristles to touch one's holy hand before the ring adorns it and, a year later, remains quiescent against one's immovable lip-salve—well, I ask you! Every Sweet Young Thing thinks her matrimonial drama will be acted to muted violins in 'Just a little love, a little kiss,' and is perfectly prepared to 'Give him all her life for this.' Now, I'm not."
"The alternative is a profession. Mannequin?"
"Golly! Not enough men in it. And your Model idea would have to be carried out in dark secrecy. Mother would poison me!"
"You carry out a number of things in secrecy with complete success."
"Pff! Not what you think. I know my market value."
Twinkle's dark gaze became fixed and speculative. "Any of your folk ever died in an asylum?" she enquired suddenly.
"I suppose you are being funny. But, as a matter of fact, my grandmother's sister did, and there was an uncle, who gore-ily cut his throat, of unsound mind. Why? Do I look as if I meditated such a drastic solution of my problems?"
Twinkle decisively knocked out her cigarette and stood up.
"Never mind.... Curiosity, I guess."
Muriel became dimly interested in this dispassionate friend's disapproval of something.
"Do I fill you with disgust?"
"No—with pity," was the unexpected reply. "You don't understand what you are up against, Muriel. But I've seen types like you before; and they are born, not made."
They went out together, presently.
"I have only got till lunch-time," warned the actress. "Matinee at two. Performance again at 8.30. A dog's life!"
"You wouldn't change with me!"
"Holy snakes! I would not!" Her vehemence startled, for the moment, in one so remotely calm. She pulled herself together as quickly. "No, I am fitted for my job. Some day I shall be the Big Noise all right."
Muriel glanced at the sure, emotionless face. Not pretty; La Gioconda, refined and Semiticized—if one might use the word. Beautifully tinted eyes, heavy lidded and calculating, not for gain, but as if their owner were perpetually weighing up the world and did not, like Brillianna Trefusis, find it at all amusing.
That Twinkle's distrait attitude at Marshall's silk-stocking counter was due to Muriel's own looming future the latter never guessed.
"I've seen 'em"—so ran the thoughts of the Jewess—"always devoid of natural feeling at the start, but unable to live without a man's eye upon them. The market value of passion glibly at the tongue's end. Never sentimentally eroto-maniacal; better if they were. Then, suddenly, the day when the craving for admiration merges into sex-realization. No actual desire perhaps, for the love of an individual: no realization of Love in the abstract as a desirable thing. A sudden startled awakening and, with neither religion nor moral sense behind.... If one could warn ... but there is always the chance that I am misreading her and am utterly in the wrong. She's no 'modern' product anyhow."
"Musings without method," remarked Muriel, having lingered to reduce the youth at the ribbon-counter to a state of drivelling imbecility with her smile: "Are you meditating upon some subtle gesture for your great act that will bring the curtain down in a storm of sobs more soul-satisfying than applause?"
"I was simply letting my mind run wild on the subject of heredity as a factor in folks' lives. There are few things admitted heredity now except those which are sexual, and I was wondering how far the psycho-analysts had really got going on that subject, apart from the sex-chart. One has heard of hypnotism as a cure at early stages for ... some things."
"If I went to a hypnotist to be cured of anything," said Muriel, "what's the betting the gentleman in the chair would find the positions reversed and himself masquerading as victim?"
"I have no doubt you'd do your damnedest," said Ruth, dryly.
* * * * * *
It was not long before Cyprian sailed for the East.
Captain Wright, temporarily insane, though he was the only one who did not know it, began to drink at unusual hours. Muriel had taken three months to sicken of him and considered him exceedingly ungrateful. Weak.
Cyprian had shown himself much stronger. He went down to Ferlie's school to say good-bye to her.
"Like an uncle to the child, you know," her mother had told the Misses Mayne; who beamed over the avuncular visit, brooding on the Degrees and reflecting what a good thing it might be should he recommend the school while in the East.
"You will come back soon?"
"It will seem very soon, Ferlie."
"You promise, Cyprian?"
Nothing had ever succeeded in getting a respectful prefix out of Ferlie, though Mrs. Carmichael was uneasy lest the Misses Mayne should not feel quite happy over the familiar mode of address.
"Of course I promise. And I'll write if you will."
"I'll write," said Ferlie, "when I have things to say." A sensible resolution which might be more widely adhered to.
Cyprian carried away with him the memory of delicate hands, laughing eyes and a poignantly sweet voice ... a memory which left the same ache as does a solitary aloof star on a summer evening.
But always it was followed by the haunting comfort of Ferlie's clinging arms.