The Merry-go-round

by W. Somerset Maugham

For a week, for a month even, feeling stronger and braver because this woman had given him her love, Basil enjoyed a very ecstasy of pride; he faced the world with greater assurance, and life possessed a spirit and a vigour which were quite new to him. But presently the romantic adventure gained the look of a somewhat vulgar intrigue, and when he recalled his ideal of an existence, spotless and pure, given over to noble pursuits, he was ashamed. This love of his was nothing more than a passing whim of which the knell sounded with its gratification, and he saw with dismay that Jenny had given herself to him body and soul: on her side it was a deathless passion compared with which his attachment was very cold. Each day fanned the flames in her heart, so that he became a necessity of her existence, and if by chance he was too busy to see her an anxious letter came, pitiful in its faulty spelling and clumsy expression, imploring him to visit her. Jenny was exacting, and he resigned himself to going every day to the Golden Crown, though that bar grew ever more distasteful. The girl was quite uneducated, and the evenings they spent together—for now, instead of going to a theatre, Jenny passed her leisure in Basil’s rooms—went rather heavily; he found it sometimes hard work to make conversation. He realised that he was manacled hand and foot with fetters that were only more intolerable because they consisted of nothing more substantial than the dread of causing pain. He was a man who bore uneasily an irregular attachment of this sort, and he asked himself what could be the end; a dozen times he made up his mind to break with Jenny, but coming to the point, when he saw how dependent she was upon his love, had not the courage. For six months, degraded to a habit, the connection went on.

But it was only by reminding himself constantly that he was not free that Basil abated his nascent love for Mrs. Murray, and he imagined that his feeling towards her was different from any he had known before. His desire now was overwhelming to break from the past that sullied him, and thenceforward to lead a fresher, more wholesome life: cost what it might, he must finish with Jenny. He knew that Mrs. Murray meant to winter abroad, and there was no reason why he, too, should not go to Italy; there he might see her occasionally, and at the end of six months, with a free conscience, ask her to be his wife.

Thinking he saw the way more clearly before him, Basil ceased his lonely promenade and walked slowly into Piccadilly. After the stir and restless movement of the day, the silence there, unnatural and almost ghostly, seemed barely credible; and the great street, solemn and empty and broad, descended in a majestic sweep with the tranquillity and ease of some placid river. The air was pure and limpid, but resonant, so that a solitary cab on a sudden sent the whole place ringing, and the emphatic trot of the horse clattered with long reverberations. The line of electric lights, impressive by their regularity, self-asserting and staid, flung their glare upon the houses with an indifferent violence, and lower down threw into distinctness the straight park railing and the nearer trees, outlining more sombrely the leafy darkness beyond. And between, outshone, like an uneven string of discoloured gems twinkled the yellow flicker of the gas-jets. Everywhere was silence, but the houses, white except for the gaping windows, had a different silence from the rest; for in their sleep, closed and bolted, they lined the pavement helplessly, disordered and undignified, as though without the busy hum of human voices and the hurrying of persons in and out they had lost all significance.

VII

On the following Sunday Basil Kent and Hurrell lunched with Miss Ley, and there met Mr. and Mrs. Castillyon, who came early in the afternoon. The husband of this lively lady was a weighty man, impressive by the obesity of his person and the commonplace of his conversation; his head was bald, his fleshy face clean-shaven, and his manner had the double pomposity of a landed proprietor and a member of Parliament. It seemed that Nature had taken a freakish revenge on his dulness when she mated him with such a sprightly person as his wife, who, notwithstanding his open adoration, treated him with impatient contempt. Mr. Castillyon might have been sufferable had he been as silent as he was tedious; but he had an interminable flow of conversation, and now, finding the company somewhat overwhelmed by his appearance, seized the opportunity to air opinions which should more properly have found utterance in that last refuge of dullards and bores, the House of Commons.

But in a little while, at the butler’s heels, Reggie, with the stealthiness of a sleek cat, slouched into the room. He was pale after Saturday’s amusement, but very handsome. Miss Ley, rising to welcome him, intercepted a glance at Mrs. Castillyon, and, seeing in that lady’s eye a malicious twinkle, was convinced that the pair had arranged this meeting. But though it amused the acute woman that an assignation should be made in her house, she would not have given Mrs. Castillyon further occasion to exercise her wiles if the member of Parliament had not bored her into a bad temper. And really Emily Bassett exaggerated the care she took of her son; it irritated Miss Ley that anyone should be so virtuous as Reggie was thought to be.

“Paul,” said Mrs. Castillyon, “Mr. Bassett has heard that you’re going to speak in the House to-morrow, and he would so much like to hear you. . . . My husband—Mr. Barlow-Bassett.”

“Really! How did you hear that?” asked Mr. Castillyon, delighted.

It was part of Reggie’s ingenuity that he never lied in haste to repent at leisure. For one moment he meditated, then fixed his eyes firmly on Frank to prevent a contradiction.

“Dr. Hurrell told me.”