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VIII
Philosophy of the Grey-haired

The evening and all Lilian's emotions seemed to start afresh. The look of the restaurant was changed. The tables had been cleared of the grosser apparatus of eating, and showed white cloths with only white plates, fruit, small glasses, small cups, ash-trays. Most of the waiters had vanished; the remainder stood aside, moveless, inobtrusive, watchful. The diners had abandoned themselves to intimacy or the sweet coma of digestion. Some talked rather loudly, others in a murmur. Women leaned back, or put their elbows on the table, letting cigarette smoke float upwards across their eyes. A few tables were already deserted, and the purity of their emptiness seemed bafflingly to demonstrate that events may happen and leave behind absolutely no trace. Without consulting Lilian Mr. Grig gave an order and two small glasses were slowly filled to the brim with a green liquid. Lilian recognized it for the very symbol of delicate licence. She was afraid to sip, lest she might be disillusioned concerning it, and also lest the drinking of it might malignly hasten the moment of departure of the last train for Brighton.

Mr. Grig was of those who murmured. His wrists lay one over the other on the table and his face was over the table; and it seemed strange, so low and even was his speech, that Lilian could catch every word, as she did. The people at the next table could have heard nothing. All the animation and variety were in his features, none in his tone. He had been telling her about Brighton. He saw the town of Brighton as a living, developing whole, discussing it as a single organism, showing how its evolution was still in active process, and making the small group of men who were exploiting it and directing it appear like creative giants and the mass of inhabitants like midgets utterly unconscious of their own manipulation. And in his account of the vast affair there was no right and no wrong; there were merely the dark aims and the resolution of the giants determined to wax in power and to imprint themselves on the municipality. Lilian had never heard such revealing talk; she could not follow all of it, but she was fascinated, wonderstruck; profoundly impressed by the quality of the brain opposite to her and the contemptibleness of her own ignorance of life; amazed and enraptured that this brain could be interested in herself. Mr. Grig related the story of the middle-aged proprietor of one of the chief hotels who had married a young wife.

"He had broken up his family, and the family is the real unit of society-and there was no need for it! No need at all! But then, you see, he'd never had time in his existence to understand that a middle-aged man who has already had experience of marriage and marries a girl young enough to be his daughter is either a coward or a fool or without taste. He would only do it because he's mad for her, and that's the very reason for not doing it. When romance comes in that way it wants the sauce of secrecy and plotting-the double life, and so on. The feeling of naughtiness-naughtiness is simply a marvellous feeling; you must sometimes have guessed that, haven't you? – perversity, doing society in the eye. It's a continual excitement. Of course, it needs cleverness on both sides. You haven't got to be clumsy over it. The woman runs risks, but nothing to the risks she'd run in marriage. And if the thing dies out in her, and they haven't been clumsy, she's free as air to start again. She's got her experience gratis, and there's a mysterious flavour about her that's nearly the most enticing flavour on earth. Naturally people will talk. Let 'em. No harm in rumour. In fact, the more rumour the better." He went on with no pause. "You've not looked at me for about five hours. Look at me now and tell me you're disgusted. Tell me you're frightened."

She lifted her eyes and gazed at him for a few seconds, not smiling. Her skin tingled and crept. Then she sipped the crême de menthe and at first it tasted just like water.

"A woman wants making. Only a man can make a woman. She has to be formed. She can't do it herself. A young man may be able to do it, but he's like a teacher who swots up the night before what he has to teach the next day. And he's a fearful bungler, besides being cruel-unconsciously. Whereas an older man, a much older man-he knows! It's a unique chance for both of them. She has so much to give, and she has so much to learn. It's a fair bargain. Perhaps the woman has a little the best of it. Because after all she loses nothing that it isn't her business to lose-and the man may-well, he may kill himself. And the chance for a clever girl to be 'made' without any clumsiness! What a chance! … Well, I won't say which of 'em has the best of it… I'm speaking impartially. If you live to be as old as Ninon de l'Enclos you'll never meet a more honest man than I am."

Lilian felt intoxicated, but not with the Burgundy nor with the crême de menthe. Rather with sudden fresh air. She thought: "Be careful! Be careful! You aren't yourself. Something queer's come over you." She was not happy. She was alarmed. Once before she had been alarmed by herself, but this time she was really alarmed. She was glad that she had always despised boys of her own age. What did Mr. Grig mean by saying that a man might kill himself? She didn't know… Yes, she knew… She saw clearly that a woman must be formed by a man, and that until she was formed she would not be worthy of herself. She longed ardently to be formed. As she stood she was futile. She could exercise no initiative, make use of no opportunities; and her best wisdom was to remain negative-in order to avoid mistakes. Something that looked like a woman but wasn't one. She had the intelligence to realize how insipid she was. Ambition surged through her anew and with fresh power.

Mr. Grig drove her home, and the taxi was a little dark vibrating room in which they were alone together, and safe from all scrutiny. She was painfully constrained.

"Yes," said Mr. Grig, after an interminable silence. "My sister was quite right."

"What about?" Lilian asked in a child's voice.

"I'm in love. What are you going to do about it?" He turned his head impulsively towards her, gazed at her in the dim twilight of the taxi, and then kissed her. In spite of herself she yearned to give, and the yearning thrilled her.

"Please! Please!" she murmured in modest, gentle, passive protest.

Another pause.

"I shall write to you to-morrow," he said. "In the meantime, believe me, you're entirely marvellous." He was looking straight in front of him at the driver's shaggy shoulders. That was all that occurred, except the handshake.

When she let herself into the house the servant was just going upstairs to bed, after her usual sixteen-hour day.

"So you're back, miss."

"No!" thought Lilian. "It's somebody else that's come back. The girl you mean will never come back."

PART III

I
In the Hotel

Felix came quietly through the communicating door into Lilian's shuttered and close room. Between the two bedrooms was a bathroom. All the bedrooms in the hotel seemed to be designed on the same plan-too high, too long, too narrow, with the head of the bed behind the door and directly facing the window; a wardrobe, a dressing-table, a washstand, a writing-table, an easy chair (under the window), two cane chairs, a night-table, and two electric lights so devilishly arranged that they could not be persuaded to burn simultaneously; a carpet overgrown with huge, gorgeous flowers, and the walls overgrown with huge, gorgeous flowers of another but equally mirific plant. Outside the bedroom a bell rang at short intervals-all the guests in the neighbourhood performed, according to their idiosyncrasies, on the same bell-and slippered feet of servants rushing to and fro in the corridor shook the planks of Lilian's floor as they passed.

Amid the obscurity of the room Lilian's curved form, lying heaped on its side, and rather like a miniature mountain that sloped softly down towards the head and towards the feet, could be vaguely deciphered in the bed; and hillocks of attire, some pale, others coloured, some fragile and diaphanous, others resistant to the world's peering, lay dimly about on chairs and even on the writing-table. The air, exhausted by the night, had a faint and delicate odour that excited, but did not offend, Felix's nostrils.

"Is it time to get up?" Lilian murmured in the voice of a sleepy child.

"No."

Her brain slowly came to life. Flitting in and out of her happiness there were transient apprehensions-not about the morality, but about the security, of her situation. They disappeared, all except one, as soon as she looked firmly at them, because she had the most perfect confidence in Felix's good faith. The unity of the pair had begun in London, under conditions provided by Felix, who, however, did not care for them, and who had decided that he would take her away for a holiday in order that they might both reflect upon and discuss at length the best method of organizing a definite secret existence.

It was during the preliminaries to the departure that she had been specially struck by his straightforwardness. He would have no wangling with passports. She must travel as herself. She could think of no acquaintance qualified to sign the application for her passport. It was Felix's suggestion that she should go to the Putney doctor who had attended her father and mother. The pair had travelled separately on the same train de luxe, for which, with Felix's money, she bought her own ticket. The cost of the ticket and the general expensiveness of the purchases which Felix insisted on her making had somewhat frightened her. He reassured her by preaching the relativity of all things. "You must alter your scale-it needs only an effort of the imagination," he had said; and explained to her his financial status. She learned that he had an independent income, and his sister another though much smaller independent income, and that the typewriting business was a diversion, though a remunerative one; also that an important cash bonus just received from an insurance policy enabled him to be profuse without straining his ordinary resources.

She had trembled at the reception office of the great hotel, but Felix, laughing at her fears, accomplished all formalities for her quite openly, and indeed the discreet incuriosity of the hotel officials fully confirmed the soundness of his attitude. Ignoring the description on the passport, he had told her to sign as "Madame," and he threw out negligently that she was his cousin. This was his sole guile. Before going upstairs he had written out a telegram and shown it to her. It was to his sister, to say that he had arrived safely and sent his love. "She has to be deceived," he murmured, "but she's got to be treated decently. It was all I could do to keep her from coming to see me off at Victoria!" He smiled. Lilian was impressed. When Lilian found that Felix's bedroom stood next to her bathroom her anxieties were renewed. Felix laughed again, and rang, for the door between the bathroom and his bedroom was locked. In a few minutes a dark and stoutish chambermaid entered with a pleasant, indulgent, comprehending gravity, and unlocked the door. "What is your name?" he asked. "Jacqueline, monsieur," she replied, and cordially accepted a twenty-franc note from him. It was all so simple, so natural, so un-English, so enheartening. In two hours they had settled down. All the embarrassing preludes to the closest intimacy had been amply achieved in London.

Lilian stretched herself voluptuously, murmured with a magnificent yawn, "Ah! How I have slept!" and, slipping out of bed, padded unshod up the room to Felix, who sat passive in the easy chair. She took the bearings of his shape in the gloom, and dropped lightly on to his knees.

"What am I sitting on?" she exclaimed, startled.

"My newspapers."

Touched by the fact that he had been waiting to read his beloved papers until she should be ready to rise, she threw her arms passionately round his neck and crushed her face into his. Daily it became clearer to her that he adored her; and yet she could scarcely believe it, because she felt so young-even childish-and so crude and insipid. She determined with a whole-souled resolve that renewed itself every hour to stop at nothing to please him.

"Do I make you happy?" she whispered almost inarticulately, her lips being buried in his cheek.

"You do."

After a moment she sprang up, seized her thin, loose, buttonless dressing-gown, and having somehow got into it, opened the window and violently pushed back the shutters. Strong sunlight rushed blazing into the room like an army into a city long besieged and at last fallen. Millions of buoyant motes were revealed, and all the minutest details of the chamber. Lilian looked out. There were the shady gardens of the hotel, the white promenade with strolling visitors in pale costumes, the calm ultramarine Mediterranean, the bandstand far to the right emitting inaudible music, the yellow casino, beyond the casino the jetty with its group of white yachts, and, distant on either side, noble and jagged mountains, some of them snow-capped. Incredible! She heard Felix moving within the room, and turned her head.

"Darling, what are you doing?"

"Ringing for your coffee."

"What time is it?"

"Haven't the least."

"But your watch?"

"Haven't got it on."

"But you're all dressed."

"Haven't put my things in my pockets."

She clasped his arm and led him silently through the bathroom into his own bedroom, and up to the night-table, the drawer of which she pulled open. All his "things" were arranged carefully therein.

"Oh! Men are funny!" she laughed.

The number and the variety of the articles they carried in their innumerable pockets!

"I will put your things in your pockets," she said, and began to do so.

"Wrong!" he would protest from time to time; but he would give no positive direction, and she had to discover the proper pocket by experiment. It was a most wonderful operation, and it deliciously illustrated the exotic, incomprehensible, exquisite curiousness of men. She was proud of having thought of it, and proud of the pleasure in his face. As she glanced at the watch her brow puckered.

"I shall be frightfully late!"

"It is impossible to be late where time does not exist."

"Is that Jacqueline with my coffee?" she said, listening, and ran back to her room, pulling him after her.

Yes, she admitted she was a perfect child, but she could not help it. While she drank the coffee he put on his eyeglasses and opened the newspapers, one English, one French. She went into the bathroom.

"Felix! Felix!" she called presently from the bathroom. "Bring me in that soft towel I've left on the chair by the writing-table."

Then she returned to the bedroom and did her abundant glossy chestnut hair, and by innumerable small stages dressed. He was reading his papers, but she knew that he was also watching her, and she loved him to watch her dress, from the first stage to the last. She was too young to have anything to conceal, and his pleasure, which he tried to mask, was so obvious. He dropped The Times and turned to the French paper.

"Felix, do you know what?"

"What?"

"I'm frightfully ashamed of not being able to speak French. If I could only speak it a quarter as well as you do."

"That's nothing. I couldn't say two words without a Frenchman knowing instantly that I wasn't French."

"But you can talk it so quickly. Couldn't I have someone in here every morning to teach me for an hour? People do. I could get up earlier."

"Certainly not," Felix replied. "If you did you'd have something to be late for. You'd bring time into existence and spoil everything. Besides, learning French is hard work. You wouldn't learn it by instinct, as you learn clothes. And you aren't here for hard work. Learn French by all means, but not in this place. London's the place for hard work. Exercise your sense of the fitness of things, my clever girl."

She did not fully understand this philosophy, but she accepted it admiringly.

"What dress would you like me to wear, darling?" She was at the wardrobe.

"That white one."

"Then I shall have to change my stockings."

"Well, the yellow one, then. It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters," she said with earnestness, sitting down religiously, fanatically, to change her stockings. "Don't you know that I don't want anything in the world except to please you? I only wanted to learn French so you shouldn't have to be ashamed of me."

II
The Big Yacht

After lunching to music beneath a vast parasol in the hotel garden, which looked like a tented field, they were bowed away by servitors in black and white, and bowed into the hotel by servitors in blue and gold, and bowed along the central artery of the hotel by apprentice-servitors in scarlet, and bowed out of the hotel again on to the promenade by servitors in blue and gold. It was half-past two; the glorious sun was already slipping down; they had done absolutely nothing, and yet they had not wasted a moment; and on the faces of all the many-coloured servitors there was the smiling assurance that they had been admirably exerting themselves in full correctness, and had not a moment to waste if they honestly desired to pursue idleness as idleness ought to be pursued. Indeed, the winter day was too short for the truly conscientious.

"Your little fur?" exclaimed Felix, who was wearing his overcoat; he stopped.

"But, darling, I'm far too hot as it is!"

"In an hour the day will be gone," said he, and insisted on the treachery of the climate.

He frequently insisted on the treachery of the climate. If he happened to cough ever so slightly, he would say that the entire Riviera was bad for the throat and that a sore throat was the most dangerous complaint known to man. Lilian indulgently thought him fussy about her health and his own and the awful menaces of the exquisite climate; but she did not attribute his fussiness to his age; she regarded him as merely happening to be a bit fussy on certain matters. Nor did she regret the fussiness, for it gave her new occasions to please him and (in her heart) to condescend femininely towards him.

"I shan't need it-"

"Please! I'll fetch it, and I'll carry it. No! You stay there."

"But do you know where it is, Felix?"

"I know where it is." His voice had become very firm and somewhat tyrannic.

She stood on the pavement, put up her orange sunshade, and mused contentedly upon his prodigious care for her-proof of his passionate attachment. People were passing in both directions all the time on the broad digue beyond the roadway. Some strolled in complete possession of idleness; others hurried after it, with tools such as tennis rackets to help them. Nearly all, men and women, stared at her as they passed, until at length she turned round and faced the revolving door of the hotel.

"Oh! Thank you, dearest; you're spoiling me horribly. Do let me take it."

"I will not. Of course I am spoiling you. That is what you're here for. Your highest duty in life is to be spoiled. Let's go on the Mole."

They set off. A dark man, overdressed in striped flannels, nearly stood still at the sight of Lilian, gazing at her as though he had paid five francs for the right to do so.

"My goodness!" she muttered. "How they do stare here!"

"Why grudge them harmless enjoyment," Felix observed. "You're giving pleasure to every man that looks at you, and envy to most of the women. You're fulfilling a very valuable function in the world, If anyone is justified in objecting, I am, and I don't object. On the contrary, I'm as proud of the staring as if I'd created you. There's nothing to beat you on this coast, with your ingenuous English style of beauty, and half the pretty women here would sell their souls to look as innocent as you look, believe me!"

Lilian said nothing in reply. The fact was that the man simply could not open his mouth without giving her more to think about than she could manage.

At the quay they examined all the yachts, big and little, that were moored, stern on, side by side. There were three large steam yachts, and the largest of the three, with two decks and a navigating deck, all white and gold and mahogany and bunting and flowers and fluttering awnings, overpoweringly dominated the port. Felix stopped and stared at the glinting enormity.

"Is that only a yacht?" Lilian cried. "Why! It's bigger than the Channel steamer!"

"No!" said Felix, "but she's the fourth largest yacht in the world. That's the celebrated Qita. Crew of eighty odd. She came in last night for stores, and she's leaving again to-night, going to Naples. And here are the stores, you may depend." A lorry loaded with cases of wine drove up.

"But it's all like a fairy tale," said Lilian.

"Yes, it is. And so are you. You see, the point is that she's just about the finest of her kind. And so are you. She costs more than you to run, of course. A machine like that can't be run on less than a thousand pounds a week. Come along. Who's staring now?"

"A thousand pounds a week!" Lilian murmured, aghast. Her imagination resembled that of a person who, on reaching a summit which he has taken for the top of the range, sees far higher peaks beyond. And the conviction that those distant peaks were unattainable saddened her for a moment. "It's absolutely awful."

"Why awful? If you have the finest you must pay for it. A thousand a week's nothing to that fellow. Moreover, he's a British citizen, and he did splendid service for his country in the war. Among other things, he owns two of the best brands of champagne. The War Office gave him a commission and a car; and he travelled all over Europe selling his own champagne at his own price to officers' messes. After all, officers couldn't be expected to fight without the drinks they're accustomed to, could they?"

Lilian obscurely divined irony. She often wished that she could be ironical and amusing, as Felix was; but she never could. She couldn't conceive how it was done.

They reached the Mole, which was quite deserted, being off the map of correctness, and surveyed the entire scene-ships, blue water, white hotels, casino, villas, green wooded slopes all faint in the haze, and rising sharply out of the haze the lofty line of snow. In the immediate foreground, almost under their feet, was a steel collier from the north. Along the whole length of the ship carts were drawn up and cranes were creaking, and grimy ragged men hurried sweating to drop basketfuls of coal into the carts, and full carts were always departing and empty carts always coming. The activity seemed breathless, feverish and without the possibility of end-so huge was the steamer and so small were the pair-horse carts.

Two yacht's officers passed in shiny blue with gilt buttons and facings. Growled one:

"Yes, and how the hell do they expect me to keep my ship clean with this thing between me and the weather?"

"Yes," agreed the other. "How in hell do they? Why they don't make 'em unload somewhere else beats me."

Then Felix and Lilian turned seawards and watched the everlasting patience of the fishers on the rocks below.

"Better put your fur on," said Felix suddenly.

She put it on.

Returning to the quay Lilian could not keep her eyes off the superb yacht. But in a moment she bent them suddenly and quickened her pace.

"You're feeling chilly," said Felix triumphantly. "The sun's got behind the fort."

On the lower deck of the yacht, under an awning and amid easy chairs and cushions, she had seen a tall man earnestly engaged in conversation with a young and pretty girl. She thought the man was Lord Mackworth. She felt sure it was Lord Mackworth. She wanted to turn her head and make certain, but she dared not lest he should see her. She was blushing. There was nothing whatever in the brief relations between Lord Mackworth and herself to which the slightest exception could be taken by the strictest moralist. Yet she was blushing. She blushed because of the dreams she had once had concerning him. Her old, forgotten thoughts, which nobody on earth could ever have guessed, made her into a kind of criminal. It was very strange. Perhaps also she feared a little what Lord Mackworth might think of her if he saw her in that place, in those clothes, with a man much older than herself. How inexpressibly fortunate that the yacht was leaving that night! Instead of looking over her shoulder at Lord Mackworth, she looked over her shoulder at Felix, to reassure herself about her deep fondness for him and about his reliability in even the greatest crises.

"I love him," she reflected, "because he is so marvellously clever and kind and dependable and just, and because he worships me-I don't know why."

But she was devoted to him because he had picked her out of a batch and opened her eyes to the apple on the tree and made her eat it, and because she had worked and watched and suffered for him in the office, and been cast out of the office for him, and because of a funny enigmatic look in his wrinkled eyes. She would have liked him just the same if he had been cruel and undependable and had not worshipped her. And she desired ardently to be still more and more beautiful and luxurious for him, and more and more to be stared at for him, and to render him still happier and happier. She was magnificently ready to kill him with bliss.

After several hundred yards she turned round and looked at the yacht. No figures were distinguishable now on the deck. She thought captiously:

"I wonder who that doll was and what they were talking about with their heads so close together."