Pilgtim's Inn, Page 3

  She had been a little late in starting out, finding at the last moment that she had forgotten to take the tacking threads out of the pleats of her skirt, and she arrived in Jan’s beautiful sea-green drawing room a little flushed, with her curls tossed by the spring wind. Jan’s husband was very nearly, but not quite, as good a portrait painter as John Adair, and the room was seething with the kind of people whom the drawing rooms of distinguished people do seeth with. Sally, not quite accustomed yet to the extraordinarily sustained noise which the well-bred make when eating and drinking together, felt suddenly scared. She had thought this party was going to be fun, but just for the moment it seemed as though she did not know anybody. . . . And no other woman in the room was wearing a homemade frock.

  Jan, ten years older than Sally, dark and lacquered and ten years smarter and more sophisticated, descended upon her.

  “Darling!” cried Jan passionately, though they scarcely knew each other. “Lovely to see you. What a sweet frock! Did you make it?”

  Sally was at a loss to understand the edge of her voice. She did not know that Roger Carruthers was not quite as distinguished as her father. “Yes,” she said truthfully, and did not seem able to find anything else to say.

  “Have a drink,” was Jan’s advice. “Though it’s none of it worth drinking these days. And if there’s anything left to eat, darling, you’ll have to look at it through a magnifying glass. Roger, get Sally a drink. Where is the man? Must have bolted to the studio. He’s hopeless. Charles! Get Sally a drink.”

  And her duty done by Sally, she was gone. Charles, however, an elegant young man of tender years but immense self-confidence, was immediately appreciative of Sally’s charm. He got her a cool amber drink, a sausage on a stick, half a cheese straw, and engaged her in deeply intellectual conversation. He found her, however, distressingly lacking in intellect, though upon this discovery he did not leave her, for looking at her from the front, from which position he could not observe how her nose turned up at the tip, he thought her pretty . . . and warm and glowing and somehow comforting. . . . Not that he exactly needed comfort, for being of tender years he hadn’t been in the war, and the world had treated him all right so far, but there was no harm in it when allied with copper-colored hair and tawny eyes. Gracefully adjusting himself to her lower mentality he observed that there were quite a number of Big Noises in the room. “Eliot’s here,” he added.

  Eliot? Sally had been interested before, even though she had not been quite able to follow her companion into the deep waters of surrealist art, because she was always interested, but now she was thrilled. Could he possibly be the father of her five children? Eliot was not an unusual name, but there was just a chance.

  “Who is he?” she asked eagerly.

  “Eliot? Why, David Eliot. You know. He’s back on the stage again after years as a bomber pilot.”

  “I don’t think I know about him,” said Sally humbly. “I don’t really know anything about anybody yet. You see, for the last three years I’ve been looking after sheep in the Cumberland hills.”

  “My God!” murmured Charles with horror, pity, and complete understanding. . . . No wonder the poor girl knew nothing whatever. . . . He cupped her elbow very gently in his hand. “I’ll show him to you,” he promised kindly. “I might even be able to introduce him to you. I know him. My brother understudied for him once.”

  He piloted her through the throng and planted her near the fireplace beside a small white magnolia tree growing in a purple pot. “There!” he said, as to a child set down before a Punch and Judy show. “Good view. Coming this way.”

  “Which?” asked Sally, her eyes passing from one middle-aged gentleman to another and rejecting them all as quite unworthy of the twins.

  “He’s seen me,” murmured Charles triumphantly.

  An impartial observer might have been a little doubtful as to whether the man edging towards them through the crowd had seen Charles, or the space on the mantelpiece beside Charles where he could put the empty glass that was getting in his way, but he came to them, put down his glass, and replied courteously, if a little vaguely, to Charles’s greeting.

  He was much too young to be the father of those children. Sally stood very straight and still, looking at the face that she had felt she had always known when she had seen it in her father’s drawing. Only this face was not quite like the face of the drawing. That had been an unmasked face. This was the same face, but masked. She didn’t feel anything very particular, only rather odd and tired. She wondered vaguely if this was falling in love. They said in books that one felt so wonderful when one fell in love. She wasn’t feeling wonderful at all, just odd and a bit sick. Books were very misleading. And Charles seemed to have forgotten about the introduction. Another girl would have recalled herself to his mind by moving forward a little. But not Sally. Why should Charles remember, she thought? She felt in the way and made a gentle movement of withdrawal.

  Something in the sweet humility of the movement caught David Eliot’s eye and he turned round. Charles remembered his manners. “This is Sally,” he said with kind patronage. “I don’t know her other name. . . . She used to keep sheep in Cumberland,” he added warningly, so that David should know that if it was intelligence he wanted it was no good applying here.

  David smiled charmingly at Sally and gave her a little half-mocking bow. “A shepherdess,” he said. “As far as I know the first shepherdess I’ve ever met,” and the pose of his graceful body, the bending of his fair shining head, were quite unconsciously those of a Dresden figure on a mantelpiece bowing to a maiden in Arcady. It was sweetly spoken, charmingly done, yet somehow it made Sally feel wretched. It didn’t mean anything. She knew that he said the right thing, performed the appropriate action, so unceasingly, day after day, night after night, that it had become simply automatic. She could not force a reply. She just stood there dumbly, the color draining from her face.

  Her silence, her stillness, tugged at David’s attention. A minute before she had been just another pretty girl at this confounded party who would ask him for his autograph, delaying yet again his effort to get away before his aching head split open. He couldn’t imagine what he’d come here for, except that Roger Carruthers (who had disappeared) was a friend of his, and somehow these days it really seemed easier just to keep on than to make the effort of wrenching oneself off the treadmill. But now her unexpected stillness did the wrenching for him. The noise, the crowd, the heat, melted into a sort of dark blur against which he saw with strange vividness the straight sturdy figure in the soft gray dress, the mop of rumpled curls, the tawny lion’s eyes with their straight clear glance, and a rosy face from which the color drained, leaving it white as the magnolia flowers.

  “Come this way,” he said quickly, and taking her arm he opened a door half hidden behind the magnolia tree. He knew his way about the house. Beyond was a dim cool passage with a window and a cushioned window seat. He shut the door behind them, and the noise and the heat and the fumes of smoke vanished with such suddenness that it seemed to Sally that a sword had come down, completely separating all that had been before in her life from all that was to come. He took her to the window seat and opened the window.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t feeling faint,” said Sally.

  “Weren’t you? You looked as though you were. Sorry. Like to go back?”

  “No,” said Sally, with her usual abrupt truthfulness.

  He laughed and sat down beside her. “Nor would I. Infernal din in there. Why must human beings always make such a noise? They’re at it from the very beginning. The first thing a baby does is yell. After that I suppose it’s just habit.”

  He went on talking nonsense in his clear, rapid, beautiful voice, charmingly, automatically, as though he were wound up. Sally, making quiet, appropriate answers, wished they could pay proper attention to each other. Talk like this was like a nebul
ous mist between them, like the spray that some insects fling out in self-preservation. Perhaps that was the reason why people did talk like this; they wanted to isolate themselves. . . . She remembered that it is always the sick animal who wants isolation. . . . And suddenly she did not blame her father that in his drawing he had torn the mask away. When her old sheep dog had been sick and hidden himself away in a dark corner, she had had to bring him out into the light and give him a dose.

  “You’re rather a silent shepherdess. What are you thinking of?”

  “My sheep dog,” said the accurate Sally.

  He laughed suddenly, delightedly, and the transformation of his face by natural laughter reminded her of someone.

  “Tell me about your life with the sheep,” he commanded her.

  She clasped her hands in her lap and tried to obey. She told him about the old farm where she had lived, about the loveliness of summer mornings on the fells that overlooked the enclosed, enchanted valleys below, about the gales and the snowstorms and how hard it had been sometimes to get up early in the pitch dark and bitter cold of winter mornings. She told him about the lambing season and the fight to save the lives of motherless lambs, about the heroism of fell shepherds and the wisdom of their dogs, and about the shaggy little pony she had been allowed to ride. She found it very hard to tell it to a bomber pilot; it all sounded so tame. She was hot with the old familiar shame, because she had suffered nothing at all in this war except cold and fatigue and the stiffness of chilblained fingers and toes.

  David Eliot meanwhile leaned back in the window seat, relieved for what felt like the first time in weeks from the sound of his own voice going on and on inanely and intolerably, and listened with the queerest sensation of relief. It was extraordinary how restful it was to be with someone who knew nothing whatever about war, who had not, it seemed, even heard a bomb exploding. Someone who was not nerve-racked or tired to death, who had taken no part in the torture and death of the innocent, who was not trying to forget, or alternatively taking a ghoulish or vainglorious delight in remembering. He was sick of the war, he never wanted to think of it again, he wanted to thrust the whole damnable business out of his mind forever; and yet he couldn’t, for in every face he looked into, except the face of the crass young like that fool Charles, he saw the memory of it as a tightness about the mouth and a shadow in the eyes . . . or he thought he did. . . . He knew he was in an idiotically morbid state. . . .

  But this girl’s mouth was like a happy child’s, and her steady eyes were full of light. And yet she was no crass young fool shut up within herself. Young though she was, there was that about her face that told him that somehow, through the loveliness of the hills or her love and care for sheep and dogs and ponies, she had been already set free.

  She had no more to say and so was silent, and to his horror he heard his voice running on again in the usual banalities.

  “That was a queer sort of life for a girl like you. What does it feel like to come back to civilization again?”

  She looked at him wonderingly, as though she questioned his apparent conception of civilization. Then she smiled. “I’m happy in London,” she said. “But I miss Cumberland. When I’m just waking up in the mornings, before I’m quite awake, I hear the sheep bells ringing in the hills and the sound of the streams. You know how they sound, coming down from the heights. And how one remembers it.”

  “All the water sounds are unforgettable,” he said gently. “The best sound of all, I think, is the sound of ripples slapping against the hull of a boat. I’ve got an old grandmother who lives down in the sea marshes in Hampshire. I go there sometimes and mess about in a boat.”

  “You go often?” she asked.

  “I used to, before the war. Not so often now. There isn’t time. Restarting the old job after the war takes a lot of doing.”

  “It can’t be easy,” she said. “It must be like going back to some place where you were very happy when you were a child, and you think it will be the same again but then it just isn’t. I suppose one would need to be reborn and be a child again to have it the same.”

  Her understanding delighted him. It had been hell to return to work he had loved and find that the savor had gone out. Reborn? That wasn’t so easy. “How can a man . . . enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” And the answer to that question seemed to him a signpost one could not read because of the scales over one’s eyes, a signpost pointing along a road through a dark wood that one could not follow anyway because one’s limbs had turned to lead. He believed firmly that the road existed and that it led somewhere, that at least was something, but there was no way that he knew of to recapture the vision and strength of a child.

  Sally suddenly remembered of whom David had reminded her when he had laughed. There was no likeness of feature between him and the young Chevalier, but in a moment of delight their faces came alive in just the same way. . . . And behind them both was that wood.

  “You’re the seventh Eliot I’ve met today,” she said. “No, the sixth—one was a dog.”

  “In our family the dogs are counted in,” said David. “Don’t tell me you’ve met my young cousins and their wretched little Pekinese?”

  She described the Chevalier, the Pirate and Kate Greenaway, the twins and Mary, and he laughed again. “They are my young cousins all right. Their father is my uncle. . . . Were they on their own?”

  There was a hunger in his question that Sally did not understand.

  “They’re always on their own,” she said. “I’ve never seen their mother, though I’ve made a sort of picture of her in my mind. I imagine her very lovely. Is she?”

  “Yes,” said David. “She is very lovely.”

  And again she did not understand the tone of his voice, though it chilled her to the bone. She got up feeling desolate. “I think I ought to be going now,” she said childishly.

  They went back to the smoke-filled room, and there was such a noise going on that they could say good-by only wordlessly. David’s gesture of farewell, in the brief moment before the crowd absorbed him, was memorable for its grace, but so mechanical that Sally felt he had pushed her straight away out of his mind and slammed the door. She went away at once, and all the way home, though the sun was shining, she hugged herself in her fur coat because she still felt cold. She made no plans for seeing David Eliot again, though with such a famous father that would have been easy. She did not ever mean to question her father about him, or about the portrait in the studio. Sally had too much pride to batter against a door that had been shut.

  CHAPTER

  2

  — 1 —

  The woman who sat in the corner of the railway carriage with her eyes shut was attracting a good deal of attention. She was vaguely aware of it, even as she was vaguely aware of the sun on her face, but she was as used to the one as to the other, for she had attracted attention in the cradle. She was that kind of woman. And the man who was sitting opposite to her liked that kind of woman. Settling himself more comfortably into his corner he yielded luxuriously to the attraction.

  He had been studying her for not more than a bare twenty minutes, since he had got into her train at Winchester, and yet the picture of her outward seeming was stamped so deeply upon his memory that he knew he could never forget it. Were she to get out at the next station (which heaven forbid) he believed he would yet be able, should he desire, to paint her with complete accuracy. And he believed he would so desire. He’d add her portrait to the ones he kept in his old portfolio, those he drew as studies for his commissioned portraits or simply because he wanted to draw them, because a face interested him, as this woman’s face interested him, as David Eliot’s face had interested him when all unknown to the victim he had dropped in at rehearsal, watched him at work, and set down what he had seen.

  Yes, she was highly paintable. Most people, regarding beauty as the perquisite of youth, would ha
ve said, “How lovely she must have been,” but to his eye she had not yet attained to the beauty of which she was capable. And she never would unless she stopped stewing in her own juice and made up her mind one way or the other, for her mouth in repose was the strained bitter mouth of a self-pitying woman with divided allegiance, and was a great imperfection.

  But otherwise the pure oval of her face was flawless, and to his artist’s eye the clear ivory pallor of her skin was unmarred by the fine network of lines traced about eyes and mouth or by the shadows upon the eyelids and beneath the closed eyes, for the delicacy of the lines was a thing to marvel at, and those shadows—they were the color of the underneath of a wild violet petal—a color most exquisitely lovely, but abominably hard to paint. The thin bow of the lips was vividly reddened, and though the color accentuated their hardness it did not irritate him, as women’s make-up so frequently did, by too strong an emphasis, for the contrast between the ivory of the skin and the darkness of the hair was already so striking that the red lips could not provide a stronger. Her features were clear-cut, her neck long and slender, her figure slim and boyish, yet he guessed that when she moved it would be with the most excellent feminine grace.

  He admired her clothes: the absurd little black hat adroitly poised like a bird in flight upon the shining dark hair, faintly streaked with gray at the temples; the worn, yet perfectly cut black dress and coat; the beautiful silver-fox fur; the immaculate black gloves and shoes; the string of pearls. He wondered if she was a widow, for the only touches of color about her were her lipstick and the bunch of violets she wore on her coat. If she was, he decided, she would not be one for long, for she was wholly desirable, and if and when she condescended to open her eyes he expected to find them the eyes of a woman who desired to be desired.

  Ten minutes later the train jolted to a standstill; she opened her eyes and their glances met. As he expected, they were dark and full of ardor, and they did not fall before the interest in his. For a long moment he held her eyes with his own, for he, too, for most of his life had been accustomed to attract to himself whom he would, and could do it still when he cared to take the trouble. Silently, with his look, he paid respectful tribute to her beauty. Silently, with her answering look, she accepted the tribute as her right, yet thanked him for it.