III
“And now I shall never see him again.”
A week later came a formal invitation from Mrs. Phillips bidding Deb to dinner.
Nightmare ... and really nightmare, this. One lops off a head and it promptly grows again; or hits out ever so many times at a malignant beast-face and hits ... past it. And it pushes itself nearer.... What was the good of refusing Samson, if something in his temperament was blank to refusals? And she could not stay away, with the knowledge that in Sussex Gardens the Phillips’ illusion was still large and benign and unmutilated ... illusion that she and Samson were to be married. A smooth, shiny illusion, like a forehead bared of its tumble of fringe....
Something drastic had to be done to it. She would have to accept the invitation to dinner, and sit at that seat at that table in that room ... and watch the teeth flashing and gleaming ... hear again the joke about Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah ... be approved as one of the family by Mrs. Phillips ... and feel Samson’s eyes of fanatic proprietorship fixed upon her while she gulped down her favourite pudding. She would have to go, because the worse alternative was to remain in ignorance of just how much she was still engaged to Samson. And perhaps after dinner she would find another way of beating in her cry of freedom upon his unreceptiveness. But she was not very hopeful of this.... She was frightened.... The Phillips were altogether too much for her.
However, the nightmare did not precisely repeat itself. There was no flash and gleam of white teeth round the table; but instead long sombre faces; Samson the centre of commiserating solicitude. An oppressive atmosphere of reproach directed towards Deb; the second refusal could not be thrown off as lightly as the first. Ultimate results, no doubt, would be the same ... inconceivable that the eldest son of the tribe should not have the maiden of his choice. But meanwhile the maiden was giving trouble ... how dared she? Mrs Phillips had much ado to keep the hatred from her eyes every time she brooded down the table at Deb. What better match could she want than Samson? Samson, with his splendid looks, and his grandmother’s fortune, and his loyal unwavering affection. The affection of a good Jew who would give her a comfortable home.... Obviously the girl was coquetting—testing her power—and making Samson suffer. She deserved to be whipped ... making Samson suffer. And a mother in such a crisis must control her primitive longings to use force upon stubborn opposition—to take Deb and throw her under Samson’s feet—“There—to do what you like with.... And now, sleep again and eat again and smile again ... my son ... my son ....”
Deb understood all this, understood and was passionately sorry for the irritable disappointed heart that craved for Samson’s babies to worship as none of the grandchildren had ever yet been worshipped, and cursed her for her perverseness in refusing birth to this small dark-skinned Samson. She wished she did not understand quite so well. Had she been wholly an outsider, she could have dealt her wound, and jigged away. Or had she been wholly in spirit one of these people, then what romance in the prospect of just such a home and babies! But betwixt and between ... a laughing vagabond soul who could ache in every fibre for the sorrows of a Jewish mother; light flying heels that yet lingered for their owner to look back regretfully on anchorage—a very unsatisfactory blend ... and, oh, what was going to happen after the interminable dinner?
After dinner, a series of weighty manœuvres left Deb alone with Samson in the small boudoir.
“What I want to know—what I feel you ought to tell me—is why won’t you marry me?” The question lifted itself from his glucose despondency.
Could he be made to see?—“Because—because—oh, Samson, we’re so utterly different.”