‘We should have been all right together, Scylla and I, and now the sight of her scares me stiff. Lovely and witty, and decent and passionate and kind. There’s a figure that stands sentinel before her. I can’t see its face. Not a chap you’d care to meet. If I looked at him, he’d go.’
‘These things matter a devil of a lot, and they don’t matter at all.’
‘Scylla’s a darling. Want my Scylla.’
‘Mother, why can’t I have Scylla?’
The angel went on holding the urn. He kicked the turf till a sod tore off. A glow-worm turned its back on him. By infinite degrees the green gem moved off.
‘And for half a minute I thought that cup had come to light us up a bit.’ He whistled Waiting for the moon to rise.
‘And it was the old man after all!’
‘And Carston shan’t have Scylla if he does call the old man’s bluff.’
He had the usual difficulty in extracting the glow-worm from the grass.
‘Go and light up mummy’s tomb.’ He stuck it round the knob of the urn, where it fell off. He kicked the muffled earth that squelched, the tears pouring down, till he found a cache of pebbles under his heel and pelted the marble female in the thick dark, and then he had another idea, and with a handful in his pocket went across, round and over the graves, to a low, unlighted house, and tossed them up against a window. A head poked out:
“What’s that?”
“Me.”
“Come in, my dear boy, come in.” An old man in a nightshirt opened his front-door and let him in.
WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG
While Felix was whirling down from Montmartre in a taxi with the boy friend and the Russian, all of them drunk. Different drunks. The boy friend roaring gay, the world forgiven because of midsummer Paris, crossed with his original irish love of a spree. He beamed, an arm round Felix, an arm round the Russian whom he usually detested.
“I’ve got a new crab.”
“Let’s go and christen it.”
“What shall we call it?”
“Aloysius.”
“Où allons-nous pour le baptême?” Felix suddenly pitched sideways, his forehead on the Russian’s knees.
“I speak it a bit, Boris,” he said. It was true. The American felt too jolly to be angry even at the unknown tongue. And Felix knew that he had found what he had come for, this slip out of Russia, a burning black pillar of congenial romance. Birth and ruin and exile, and a name not like green hills, but a wild, snow-crested tree. He would take Boris away. He would go back with Boris into Russia. He would take Boris home. He had found what he had come to find. Not the other one, who, after all, wasn’t a gentleman. An awful, delicious fear that Boris could read his mind, had heard his last thought and was amused by its stupidity. While the American sobered up to be surprised at Felix, all his high and mighty airs melted before that notorious lost wolf-cub. God only knew what sort of a not bad sort originally, but finished by having to live on its wits. And Boris was a trifle embarrassed, observant, indifferent, and thoroughly enjoying himself. An evening after his own heart.
They were on the shore of the Place de la Concorde, this time an empty sea. The taxi raced across its grey glass, over the arc of a bridge, and began to thread old Paris like a furious shuttle.
“O bel! O gai!” whispered Felix, upright now between them, his dark blue eyes turned stars. Both admired him a little, nervously. Both profoundly hoped he’d enough money on him, the Russian because he had none, the American because he had no intention of spending any he had. And Felix saw Europe folk-wandering, and how out of the movements of the peoples he had found his companion, young and wicked, and in need and kind. Like a bow bent and relaxed, and strung with fresh arrows, his desires took purpose. At a ghastly little mixed bordel, he walked in like a prince come home.
SCYLLA
She arrived in London at the time when all reasonable citizens are trying to leave it, and the place seems fuller than ever. Full of townspeople shewn up by the magnificence of summer, with children who appear brutalised from want of contact with things growing; where, in spite of every grit-weathered leaf, there is a pretence made that all is for the best inside the vast, roaring, fortuitous wilderness: that Epping Forest is the true green wood, and Southend virgin sea. If Paris is a lovely salon displayed for conversation, London is a lumber-room to be foraged for junk, rubbish, white elephants, treasure. Midsummer is not the time to do it.
Scylla walked through the green park, fresh from no substitute hills and the sea, and not in the least grateful for them. Yet with only contempt for the posters and pretence that represented the Londoners’ poor escape to the land. Her yellow lawn frock blew up over her knees, under her powdered arms and throat there was a faint gold patina of freckles. Her little neck-scarf flying out behind her, she walked like a nymph in a temper, blessing nothing she passed.
Something had been taken away from her. Not Picus or Felix, but what they had made her think about. Apples of Iduna the goddess, given her to feed the Aesir, without which she pined without dying. What happened to Iduna and her apples after? Loki, Saturday, had stolen them and shut her up in a giant’s castle, and she had been waited on by elf-women, very pleasant in front, but round the back made out of hollow boards. Beastly hot day and no adventures. Business at grey offices in Lincoln’s Inn. The only woman she really liked married to a boy she did not. She was going to dinner there.
She remembered that the woman, her friend Lydia, had wanted once to marry Clarence. Might have married him until, one day, Clarence had made a scene: said that he could not leave Picus: that Picus needed him: had told Lydia that she did not love him: that it was a trick to get a husband: and had broken down badly after. Lydia had said nothing. And ‘had never been quite the same since.’ That said it exactly. Had probably married her slick young outsider to annoy Clarence. A real chorus-boy beauty with a spirit to match. She would dine there, in their pretentious flat, all shams. It pleased Lydia if her friends flattered her husband. Scylla knew that it might please her that evening if she shewed contempt.
So no sweet temper adorned her as she swung into the new sitting-room with its faked cabinets and painful majolicas, and saw Lydia in a too-short frock and a too-tight hair wave, and a too-pink make-up, reading the Romaunt de la Rose. A woman bred out of great stone castles for a life of power and danger, she looked a fool, stripped of what should have been on her, the formal setting that should have extended north, south, east, and west of her. Not necessarily castles. A bare table and a window stuffed with sacking might have suited her purpose, when the purpose was her own, not a stunt to please her husband, like a lion riding a bicycle at a fair.
Vexed deliberation marked the ivory forehead, her chief beauty. Her stockings were not drawn tight, and did not match. An intelligence made for children and learning and administration was adapting itself to marriage, with a gigolo, in a shaky business, in London, without capital, after the war. Would do it badly unless she broke him. Could not break him, he would twist and slip off.
A cathedral had better not turn mouse-trap, or a chalice a cocktail shaker. A ten-inch gun should not be trained on a mark that is not there.
And Scylla found that all she could do was laugh to see her friend so much in love.