The Bazaar and Other Stories (11 page)

 

“Of Flavia? Oh no, not
now
. I was at one time. At one time I got
rather carried away by her myself. She seemed to have everything in
her favour. You see, in those days I had no confidence. No one had
ever told me how nice I was myself,” said Caroline, dimpling. (He
remembered with fury how well he had spoken of her dimples to
Flavia.) “She had lovely clothes; she went to so many parties; she
knew so many men. She could remember all the clever stuff she had
read. She would have impressed the Dobsons. She could be certain
to marry, only she was too grand. She could make any interesting
friend she wanted. When I read that letter of yours in
The Athenaeum
about Turkish women, I thought to myself, ‘Now that is exactly the
sort of man Flavia would get to know’ – only I didn’t know at the
time her name was Flavia.”

 

“Oh, so
you
saw the letter of mine? I didn’t know you ever saw
The
Athenaeum
.”

 

“I don’t generally; someone had left it at my dentist’s. I was going
to the dentist’s a lot at that time, do you remember? I longed to
know you, Bernard . . . When you introduced yourself to me at the
Dobsons that day I said to myself, slowly, ‘
This
is Bernard McArthur.’
Then I said to myself that I expected
Flavia
, too, would be surprised
if
she
met you, too. Then when you seemed so pleased with me but
so sort of doubtful I expected you’d write to Flavia and say I was the
sort of girl one did meet, and smile a good deal about me in your
letter, then wish you hadn’t. I wondered if Flavia really was a nice
friend for you, then the more I could see how nice you were the
more I could see she wasn’t. I began to worry; I thought up to a
point she had been nice for you, but now she was doing you harm.
But by the time you told me about her in Switzerland she was simply
a joke. Then I wondered how anybody like Flavia would take it if
you were to marry. I thought it would be interesting to see – ”

 

“You’ve talked for some time,” said Bernard, “but I think this is
enough. Will you please leave Flavia alone? She’s not your type; you
can’t possibly understand her. She’s been magnificent – ”

 

“All the same, she did sulk, didn’t she? I mean, she stopped
writing.”

 

“If that’s all you’re generous enough to see – ”

 

“Oh, all right then; she stopped writing because she bored you.
She did, Bernard; she did bore you when we were engaged. And on
our honeymoon you didn’t like to think of her much; she made you
feel rather ordinary. All the same, I do think it was mean of you to
use up all her remarks. They were wasted on me – ”

 

“A good deal seems to be wasted on you,” said Bernard. Vague
phrases from a possible letter to Flavia swam through his head . . .
“We have reached the turning-point” . . . “Do you understand now
why my marriage has been a failure?” . . .

 

“If you really must know,” he continued, “Flavia warned me – ”

 

“I know she did. She did everything right. Oh, Bernard; oh,
darling, I was in despair; I thought you’d never propose to me. I had
just to make her tip you over the edge. But, oh, how I cursed her!
Oh, Bernard, are you going to divorce me, or anything? I wish I’d
never begun it.”

 

“Caroline, if you weep again I shall hit you. Begun what? – Pull
yourself together! – Never begun what?”

 

“
Flavia, you idiot!
” Caroline fumbled in her neat shirt-pocket for her
handkerchief, then up one cuff, then up the other. “Oh, Bernard,”
she sobbed, “it was such a sweat, I did think her out so, and directly
we met I saw it was all unnecessary. Oh, Bernard, if you won’t
forgive me I think I shall divorce you. I’ve got all your letters . . .”

 

And at last she brought out her handkerchief, which was blue
check in the middle today, with elephants round it. For this occasion
it was more than inadequate. Bernard was doubtful whether to lend
her his own or not.
She Gave Him
T
he look – upon which Henry’s eyelids had come down
almost at once so oddly, with such a disturbing suggestion of smug
finality – followed Magdalen for the next hour, and not too
pleasantly.
¹
She did not care for the look. Nobody, either before or
since she became a Woman,
²
had looked at her quite like
that
. It
had held worse than repudiation: a nasty kind of complicity. Her
reflections upon it, however, were jolted about, perhaps not
unkindly: in this next hour there was a good deal of that “business”
with which life, just as well as the stage, can fill in an emotional
standstill – more onlookers trailing up, gathering, somebody taking
command; Henry’s being removed to the cottage of young Henry’s
not at all grateful mother; the doctor’s arrival and rather too brisk
pronouncement; a general conviction of onlookers that they’d been
rather let down. Death was not likely and there was no visible
blood.

During this interval Magdalen, shattered and not very notably
useful, kept darting this way and that way, or stood wringing
together her fingers with a distressful diligence. She had been given
the head of the cortège behind Henry’s limp and distinctly for
bidding body into the dark cottage lamplight, as though she had
been his widow. But of what should have been this most impressive
of moments the unfortunate Magdalen savoured little.

This fuss, with its grateful distraction, was too soon over. Henry
gave every sign of disliking the cottage: the doctor could find no
reason why he should not be moved. So removed Henry was, in the
farm car that had been rushed to the scene tooting, with jolting
headlights. He departed, propped in the back with his head just
in swooning-distance of Mrs. Linaker’s bosom – not Magdalen’s.
Magdalen, silent and lowering, got in beside the pink boy: bumping
wonderfully little they drove back to Linaker’s farm.

“Knocked silly, that’s what he was, the poor fellow,” said Mrs.

Linaker.

 

“He was,” agreed Magdalen with unusual eagerness. “Knocked

 

quite
silly.”

 

Mrs. Linaker’s manner with Henry remained rather ruefully

 

matter-of-fact, as though he were a damaged chicken: she put him

 

out on the parlour sofa (as though into a box with flannel) and said

 

he’d be better shortly. Magdalen’s view of Henry, hair all disordered

 

into a palish fluff, was as not unlike a chicken. Mrs. Linaker went to

 

heat milk, Magdalen slipped upstairs, lit those candles and snatched

 

from the mirror between them what was not much more than a

 

disconcerted glance at herself. She patted her hair into place with

 

unusual briskness and shut with rare violence – for she was not as a
rule unkind to inanimate objects – two or three boxes and drawers.
Puffing face-powder from the mirror she was unable to rid herself
of that unnerving sensation of having caught, for the moment,
not

 

Henry Mayburg’s or Maybird’s eye but her own.

 

“There’s no doubt,” she kept thinking angrily, “he’s been heroic.”
Smoothing her dress on her fine hips, drawing a strand of hair

 

clear of an earring and tightening her belt by one hole she went

 

down to meet the hero. A rather lugubrious silence pervaded the

 

parlour, in which a glazed cotton blind was pulled down decisively

 

over the night in the window and Henry, shading his eyes from the

 

lamplight, stared at his own small feet as though they did not belong

 

to him but were a pair of belongings of Mrs. Linaker’s, placed by her

 

on a newspaper at the far end of the tight red couch.

 

“Well . . . ” began Magdalen, sitting down.

 

Henry turned her way one weary glance, in reply.

 

“We all,” she continued, “feel very proud of you, Mr. Maybird.”

 

She could not help stressing the second syllable ever so little.
“Oh, well . . . ” said Henry, and watched his feet wriggle ruefully.
His embarrassment was quite likeable, even a shade affecting.

 

Even Magdalen – on whom any impact of anyone else’s feelings was

 

but as the bump of a moth, outside, on a tightly shut window – even

 

Magdalen realised that Henry was not himself. But what Henry’s self

 

could be she did not enquire. She sat down, beyond the round table,

 

sending into the lamplight between them a voluminous weighty

 

look that meant nothing in particular.

 

“I suppose,” she said anxiously, “this – I mean all
that
, is mostly a

 

blank to you now?”

 

“Well, more or less,” he agreed. He spoke slowly and leaned on

 

his words, as though his thought was on crutches. She was more

 

than half reassured. But his feet, at which Henry kept staring so hard

 

that she had to look at them too, cocked their toes up at the two of

 

them with an intelligence that was most disconcerting.
“It’s so odd,” she said, ploughing ahead, “how one little thing

 

changes everything.”

 

“Do you refer,” Henry said, “to my accident?”

 

“Oh dear no – I didn’t mean
that
. I should have said really, some -

 

thing,
not
little, that happens all in a flash.”

 

“Yes,” he agreed, “in a flash.”

 

“But changing everything.
Before
, we’d been talking so trivially

 

. . . Hadn’t we?”

 

“I don’t,” he said primly, “remember.”

 

Oh, didn’t he? Could one be certain? “We were,” she said firmly.

 

“Because I remember thinking how trivially we were talking in this

 

mysterious night.”

 

“Then there,” said Henry, “you have the advantage of me.”
She opened her mouth, but his manner inspired mistrust, so she

 

said nothing more. For this one relief, Henry thanked her. He was,

 

naturally, very much taken up with himself. He had recently nodded

 

at death, and still had a sense of importance as though he had met

 

royalty. And here
she
sat, persistently chatting about herself and her

 

thoughts. Meanwhile he looked at his hands and felt over, mentally,

 

his restored body, thinking: “
So
nearly finished; so nearly not any

 

more!” He would be a hero tomorrow: he kept this fact tucked in

 

beside him like an unopened letter too full of promise to read.
Nothing, however, would keep her silent for long. Too soon she

 

came out with: “Night always seems to me very mysterious. So full

 

of echoes. So full of echoes of other nights. Has that occurred to

 

you?”

 

“Well, yes, it did once,” said Henry. “But I don’t think it will

 

again.”

 

In fact, he had graduated in experience: his air was decidedly

 

lordly as he leaned back further and clasped his hands carefully

 

under his head. Her presence was like being wrapped to the chin in

 

an eiderdown he was too weak to throw off: he felt a vindictive and

 

ingrowing wish to offend Magdalen mortally. As from thoughts of

 

the mayonnaise and the trifles of which he partook too heartily
coming back in their eggy stickiness to afflict the bilious sufferer,
Henry was in revolt, with a violent queasiness, from much that he
and Magdalen had in common. Swinburne, for instance, dripped
thickly over his nerves like an upset custard. It seemed hopeless to
try to escape from Magdalen in this new attitude of the woman
ministrant, with her white cuffs and her hands crossed in the lamp
light: a touch of the nursing nun chastened her manner but did not
disinfect it of what he most disliked. If his sick head yearned for a
bosom, it was not Magdalen’s. He examined – but with a surprising
dryness – his lack of his mother, but could think of his mother not
as an inclined bosom but as someone tearing arpeggios from the
pianoforte in powerful Kilburn gaslight,
³
against yellow curtains.
The very thought was arduous – with a qualm, as though he had
questioned his mother’s honour, Henry did ask for a moment if
women were all alike. Though he shut his eyes, and kept his eyes
shut firmly, Magdalen’s presence came at him like a continuous

 

pressure of hot air.

 

“She’s very possessive,” he thought. “It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t

 

in at the death. You’d think she thought she’d a right here” – Then:

 

“Oh, my God,
was I making love to her
?”

 

He had only her own assurance – and that put forward with a

 

provoking arch air, as though to invite contradiction – that their talk

 

had really been trivial. His oblivion became full of pitfalls, and

 

frayed at the edges with horrid tremors.
What
had one been saying

 

the moment before little Henry ran under the car? And what had she

 

been replying as he, Henry major, lay prostrate? He found a bruise

 

on his memory, as though during numbness he had sustained some

 

violent collision: at one or another moment this woman
had
had a

 

tight hold on him.

 

With a sinking sense of fatality, with an immeasurable appre

 

hension Henry eyed Magdalen, as though he had been delivered

 

over to her and his future were in her hands. She sat looking down

 

at her cuffs: her fine, full, too mobile mouth was in threatening

 

repose.

 

“Yes?” she said, lifting her eyes, for his horrified look had been

 

urgent.

 

“Do you know,” he said, shading his eyes from the lamplight