Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 23

by George Warwick Deeping

XXIII

1

POUNDS, Mrs. Duggan's maid, had been with her mistress for three years. A little, dried-up slip of a woman with a tight mouth buttoned up under a Roman nose, she knew her mistress almost as well as she knew Mrs. Duggan's wardrobe. Pounds dressed her ladyship's moods much as she clothed her body, with matronly black velvet, or tissue of gold and of old rose, and when flesh-coloured stockings were in fashion Pounds supplied them and suffered my lady's ankles to assume the responsibility.

On a June morning, with the sun shining, Pounds carried in Mrs. Duggan's early tea. She had come to know her mistress's various voices, and being a facile cynic she reacted to them. She knew the winter voice and the spring voice, the "I'm an old woman" plaint, and the plump autumnal cry of the comfortable egoist. There was the Monte Carlo voice, and the Albert Hall voice, and the voice of "Aunt Dora." Pounds was an echo in Mrs. Duggan's world, but in her own world Pounds rent calico and smashed crockery.

"Two lumps of sugar this morning, Pounds."

"Yes, madam."

Pounds popped in the two lumps. She made the appropriate remark—"It's a beautiful day, madam," for the voice from the bed expressed Ascot and a successful frock and strawberries and cream and a punt on the river and a good appetite and youth and the desire to fool somebody.

"Tell Randal I shall want the car at eleven."

"Yes, madam."

"Mr. Sorrell may be here for lunch. And Miss Merrindin. Tell cook that. And we shall be dining at my club."

"Yes, madam."

Pounds was wondering whether the colour of the day should be a matronly and sumptuous black or something a little more June-like? What age was Mr. Sorrell?

"What dress, madam?"

"O,—something quiet," said the voice from the bed.

Mrs. Duggan drank her tea and ate two thin slices of bread and butter. She was all smiles and rotund beneficence. She had a feeling that she had her hand on the thing she wanted, and that a few careful caresses would make it hers. Or nearly hers, as much as a young thing could be hers. She wanted Kit, and she wanted him for all sorts of reasons, because he was flesh of her flesh, because he was young, because he belonged to Sorrell, because Sorrell had quietly defied her. She was a woman of strong appetites; she knew how to be generous; she had some knowledge of men. Her appreciation of Christopher had been instantaneous. Here was something difficult; his shyness and his reluctance had inflamed that sort of physical tenderness that was her love. He was a comely lad; he resembled her in his body. She was forty-nine, and she looked more than forty-nine, for in choosing to chase money she had had to live with oldish men, and that had aged her. They had been men who had drunk too much, and who had gone about like snappy old dogs. But youth,—the youth of her own son, to possess it, handle it, feel herself the mistress of it! A devoted son! To be able to score off that absurdly serious father——!

At a quarter past eleven Mrs. Duggan entered her car.

"O,—Pounds,—if Mr. Sorrell should arrive before I return,—show him his room. I should be back about half-past twelve."

"Where to, madam?" asked the chauffeur, before closing the door.

"The Halcyon Club."

Christopher's mother was a member of the Halcyon Club. It was domiciled in the house of a dead grandee, and inherited an atmosphere of spaciousness and dignity. It was a cock and hen affair, but more hen than cock. The club gave Saturday night dances, and Mrs. Duggan dropped in to make sure of her dinner table. She wanted the table for four in the corner where the statue of the Venus de Milo stood in a recess. She asked for the steward, and he assured her the table was hers.

"You are quite sure? Last time—you know—I found Lady Truget in possession. And I have a little party."

From the club she drove to Gaiter's in Regent Street and bought flowers, roses, luscious but conventional red and white roses with plenty of perfume. None of your too exotic flowers for a very serious minded boy. She called at Fuller's and purchased chocolates. She descended at her modiste's, not because she wanted a dress, but because she was feeling well, and it was a pleasant thing to do. "Melanie's" mirrors were kinder than most mirrors; they made you look less of a fright than you feared you might be.

Then, she told Randal to drive her round the park. She lay back comfortably to consider her preparations. She decided that it had been rather subtle of her to ask two charming girls to meet and amuse Christopher, and she included them in the furnishings and drapings of her temple of Venus. She thought that if she meant to get at the boy she would get at him most successfully through sex, not crudely, but by way of the pleasant emanations of sex, by suggesting to him what a good time she could give him.

As for the two girls,—O,—well—they were very modern. Lola Merrindin's vivacity might suffice for a week-end in somebody's bungalow on the river. Fluffy Tarrant was like a pot of marmalade, but she was as hard as the pot.

"I wonder if the boy has arrived? And what has Steve's attitude been? Not liking it much!"

Christopher had arrived. He was's tanding with his hands in his pockets in the middle of his mother's drawing-room, looking at the photo of the double-chinned captain of industry who had been Duggan. Kit's mother had thought it a nice touch,—this putting out of the family photographs.

2

Christopher did not like the face of the dead Duggan.

His impressions of this opulent room in an opulent house were peculiarly vivid, perhaps because this was the first occasion upon which he had experienced the gilding of the lily. His modernity had a clean temper, like the knife which he was to use so skilfully in after years. So this was where his mother lived upon the fortunate proceeds of two marriages, after her adventurous discarding of Kit's father. The room and its furniture were as modern as Kit's unsentimental outlook upon life. The walls were blue, the furniture gold, the carpet apple green, the cushions and curtains black. It seemed to be full of bolsters and tuffets in gaudy colours. Kit had never seen anything like it. The sofa was so upholstered that it resembled the overblown and spreading petals of a flower.

It was a suggestive sofa.

"Oh,—it is all right—I suppose," he thought, "for a rather exciting half-hour. Makes one think of a highly stained microscopic slide."

He preferred things to look shabbier, less vocal with colour. He thought of the shabby old blue trousers his father had worn in the old days.

A car stopped outside the house, and Kit went to the window. It was his mother's car, and something in him grew rigid. He retreated to the other end of the room, as far as it was possible for him to get from the blue door, and he stood there with his hands in his pockets, his eyes curiously hard.

She burst in upon him. She had put on tortoiseshell spectacles, things Kit particularly detested. The mature and intellectual touch!

"My dear, well—here you are. I've been so busy. Congratulations. Now—sit down and tell me all about it."

He had remained at the far end of the room, looking very tall and stiff in his grey suit. It was a good suit. He looked well in it.

"Afraid I'm early."

"Not a bit. I've two girls coming to lunch. We have got half an hour. Now—sit down and tell me all about it."

She sat down on the voluptuous sofa.

"About—what?"

She was very animated.

"Why—about your wonderful exam. I hear you were third on the list."

"That's unofficial How did you know?"

"Your tutor told me."

"O," said Kit, and sat down on one of the flimsy gold chairs.

This highly coloured room was all surface, and without depth, and his mother's enthusiastic animation reduced Christopher to a mere surface. He found himself quite unable to respond to her vivacity, and since he persisted in sitting there like a graven image of his own youth, she had to continue her attack.

"I'm sure you must be awfully tired after all that work. And rowing—too. I'm going to give you a real—lazy—jolly week-end. There will be a little dance to-night at my club, but it will be over at twelve."

He told her that he was not much of a dancer.

"Fudge, my dear boy, an athletic child—with your figure. My two flappers will—make—you dance."

She thought him monstrously shy, and his seeming shyness did not displease her. Her eyes were making an intimate examination of him while she talked, taking in all the clean texture of his youth and enjoying it, contrasting it unconsciously with her many impressions of the oldish men with whom she had lived. She looked at Kit's fresh, brown hands with their young skin and supple fingers. How different they were from the blue and branny hands of John Duggan, or the wrinkled skinniness and yellow blotched claws of Arthur Sampits. Yes, old age was detestable. She herself was on the edge of it, and her urgent vitality craved the young blood of her son.

"You take after me, Kit,—a little—I think." . .

She was ready to let herself go. She wanted him to come across and kiss her.

"In looks—I mean. Just turn your head a little. Yes, you have my ears—exactly."

She laughed.

"You shy thing!"

His self-conscious rigidity became painful. She was making him feel a fool, and his glance glazed itself upon those American goggles of hers. Why on earth did she wear And talking about his ears—too! What perfect rot!

He withdrew his eyes as though he were plucking his glance away from her. He surveyed the room.

"I'm going to Vienna for two months. Rather a sound idea. The pater's idea."

She smiled right through this digression.

"To study?"

"The language, and other things. I don't want to loaf all through the Long Vac."

"You mustn't work too hard."

"What a fool saying," he thought, and just stared at her.

"The pater had to work pretty hard. Besides, it's the best thing. He and I understand each other."

"That must be very nice for you."

There was a pause, and Christopher sat through this pause in the conversation with a seeming stolidity that neither helped nor thwarted her. His mother's animation reasserted itself. He listened, with the appearance of an attentive young foreigner who was unable to understand the language she was using. He was not sorry for her. She was no more than a stranger who was trying to produce an effect, and instinctively he resisted, though his resistance was passive. He was wise as to her intention; though he could not disentangle all her motives, but his feeling was that she had made up her mind to win him over, and he did not mean to be won over.

His mother was growing irritated, but was able to hide it, and when a young thing in an amber-coloured frock floated into the room, Mrs. Duggan arose with enthusiasm and kissed her.

"Kit, this is Lola,—Miss Lola Merrindin."

Kit stood up, and bent stiffly at the hips, and his smile was vague. He was aware of Lola Merrindin as a very attractive creature, one of those slim, black, highly mobile young women with a brilliant white skin and gazelle's eyes. Her hair had a slight kink in it. Her nose spread its eager nostrils with some breadth above a capacious red mouth. She smiled a great deal and showed very white teeth. She was intensely alive, and she was never still, flicking herself into varying postures and evanescent expressions, getting up and sitting down, laughing and then looking out under her brilliant forehead with elfish and half-sullen solemnity.

Mrs. Duggan left them together.

"Amuse him, darling. I must go and tidy up. Fluffy will be here any minute."

It was Kit's first experience of this particular type of young woman, and he sat there and surveyed her with an air of polite suspicion. He had a feeling that she was too furiously attractive to be safe, for how attractive she was the young male in him knew. Her little nervous movements, the quick and provoking tricks of her eager body, her laughter, her mobile mouth and sidelong and expressive eyes made his male shyness afraid. For the young male can be as timid as a hare.

Miss Merrindin chattered. She had the voice of a Neapolitan singing-girl. Wasn't Aunt Dora a dear? And wasn't her house perfectly sweet? She tried to push Kit into a flow of soul, to make him talk about the May Races, and dancing, and motor cars and Wimbledon, but Kit's soul refused to flow. He sat there and agreed smilingly with everything she said, and sensed her as a sort of sexual Chinese cracker jumping around his shyness.

Did he know "Why do I feel wicked?"

No, he didn't. What was it?

She flung herself at Aunt Dora's piano, and crashed out a Fox Trot, her whole body vibrating on the stool. She began to sing, while Kit sat there like a dolorous and dull dog on the point of howling.

Aunt Dora returned in the midst of all this brightness, followed by a very thin young woman with a flat, pale face, and a bobbed head of fiery hair.

Kit was introduced to Miss Tarrant.

They went down to lunch.

The remainder of the day was kaleidoscopic. At lunch Kit was made to drink white wine and a liqueur, and he had to confess that he liked the wine; it assisted his flow of soul. Lola Merrindin became less alarming. After coffee and cigarettes in the new art drawing-room, they put on hats and packed into Mrs. Duggan's car. Pound handed in cigarettes, chocolates, rugs. Kit had proposed taking one of the swivel seats, but he was made to go to bed in the deeply cushioned back seat of the saloon between his mother and Lola Merrindin. It was a bit of a squeeze, but everybody seemed to like it. Fluffy Tarrant occupied one of the swivel seats, and ate chocolates, or smoked cigarettes. The car whirled them down to Maidenhead, with Kit lying comfortably wedged between two perfumed and exotic creatures. He felt the pressure of Lola's body, of her thigh and leg. She fidgeted a great deal, and her movements pleasantly disturbed him. He pretended to quarrel with her over the chocolate box. They had a playful struggle. The smell of her hair smote him. His mother smiled.

At Maidenhead they had tea in the garden of one of the hotels. Fluffy Tarrant took Christopher on the river in a punt with orange and purple cushions. It appeared to be her turn. She looked at Kit with the considering eyes of a young leopardess; her pose was one of extreme and cheeky frankness; she pretended to be as old as Eve.

She told Kit that he was a child.

"You don't know—anything."

She did not say what anything was. She splashed him with her paddle, and appeared ironical and sophisticated and superior. On the way home she and Lola exchanged seats, and to Kit Miss Tarrant appeared all thigh-bone. The pressure was constant; it did not flicker and jerk and quiver. It was more ardent or might have been, yet was less disturbing. Kit's fate promised that dark women were to trouble him, dark women with a certain languorous and appealing type of brown eye.

They dressed and drove to the Halcyon Club. A young elderly man with a high forehead, a neat smudge of black hair, and a very small mouth, was waiting for them in the lounge. His name was Luke Sykes. He was to make the fourth for the postprandial dance.

Kit took an immediate dislike to Mr. Sykes. He was the sort of man who looked bored and wearily superior, and who said—"O, really!" to everything. He talked about places and people that Kit had never heard of,—and his trousers were too well braided.

They dined, and emptied two bottles of champagne. Kit was facing Miss Tarrant, also the naked statue of Venus, and he would not acknowledge the presence of the statue, and Miss Tarrant seemed wickedly aware of his self-suppression. Lola grew somewhat excited; she talked a great deal, laughed, jerked that mobile body of hers, while Kit's mother behaved like an amiable dowager. Mr. Sykes seemed somehow shy of Kit, and trailed his bored experiences through a series of night-clubs, and since Kit knew nothing of night clubs his eloquence was limited.

Afterwards they went up to the ball-room and danced. Kit found Lola on his bosom. She seemed to have flung herself at him and arrived there with one of those rapid and disturbing movements. She kept smiling and looking at him in the eyes; he saw the shadowy curves of her nostrils, her red and wavy mouth.

She danced extraordinarily well, like a Latin girl, and she made Kit dance better than he knew. Mr. Sykes and Miss Tarrant were striding up and down and round-about at a great pace, looking like a couple of wooden dolls with their thin legs stuck on with pins. Kit's partner kept up a humming to the music. She smelt good. Her mouth——. And then Kit trod heavily on her right foot and apologized.

"I say—I'm awfully sorry. Did it hurt?"

He felt the warm pressure of her body suddenly increase. She smiled in his eyes.

"A bit.—But I don't—mind, Kiddy."

He inhaled the scent of her hair.

3

Christopher woke with a headache.

His memories of the previous night encouraged him to believe that he had taken part in a rapid-motion picture whose movements had been quickened by the drinking of too much champagne.

A maid brought him early tea, and made it known te him that Mrs. Duggan was taking breakfast in bed, and that Kit could have his breakfast brought up to him if he wished it. Kit did not wish it. He got up and had a cold bath, used his tooth-brush vigorously, put away his tumbled clothes of the previous night, and felt better. He breakfasted alone on porridge, a boiled egg, tea and toast, and at the end of the meal Pounds appeared and made an announcement.

"Mrs. Duggan will be down, sir, by twelve."

"I'm going out," said Kit.

"Lunch is at half-past one, sir."

The sun was shining and Kit went out and walked with a concentrated energy that poured up from below. He walked without heeding the outer world, and he seemed to see neither the trees nor the people nor the dogs nor the motor-cars. He just walked. He began to work up his full speed in Hyde Park, and he went through it, and across to the Green Park, and over the Mall into St. James's. He stood on the bridge spanning the water and watched the various water-birds. His headache had gone; his stridings of the morning had broken the rhythm of those other stridings to syncopated tunes with a girl pressing close against him.

No. 3, Cheltenham Terrace.

No. 3 was the house in which Lola lived, and he happened to know that he had been walking away from it, and that in spite of the fact that she had said it to music in the approved fox-trot manner. Obviously, she had expected him to keep in step, but Kit's mood was very much out of step with the rapid movements of the previous day.

It wasn't that the young male in him did not desire her. He had gone to bed lying upon roses and thorns, but the Kit of the morning was Sorrell's Kit, the young man who had trained for the May Races, and for that other and greater race, and with the morning his father's grip came back to him.

"I must get out of this," was his abrupt reflection.

He remembered that he had to spend the rest of the day with his mother. His impatience and his disinclination to go back to her were so very strong that they permeated his whole unsciousness, compelling him to recognize in her some natural enemy. He had more than a suspicion that his mother was offering him bribes, the enticements that might be expected to make an appeal to a very young man. She was trying to get at him through his body, and through his more disorderly emotions. Sorrell had never done that.

Kit walked back less rapidly to South Audley Street. It was one o'clock, and he found his mother in the drawing-room, looking far fresher than he felt, and dressed in a shimmery blue dress. She smiled at him, and her smile had a confident roguishness, for Kit's rigidity had disappeared during the last hour at the Halcyon Club.

"You naughty boy!"

She patted the sofa, and the gesture invited him to share it. Moreover, it was borne in upon him that she expected him to kiss her.

"Well, how's Lola this morning?"

She was accusing him of having slipped off to No. 3, Cheltenham Terrace.

"I haven't seen her."

"Lazy young thing. Wasn't she up?"

"I have been walking," said Kit; "in the Park."

"And she didn't turn up? Sly-boots! Well,—you belon to me to-day, my dear, and Lola can wait till to-morrow."

"I have got to be back to-morrow," he said stubbornly, refusing to explain that he had no arrangement with Miss Merrindin, and quite determined not to be over-persuaded.

"My dear, there is no hurry."

"Work,—you know."

She patted the sofa, and half jokingly she began to hint that Sorrell was exercising a fatherly restraint, but Kit did not allow the innuendo to pass. It was necessary for him to make a stand.

"No. The pater and I understand each other. I'm keen on my work."

"But it's the vacation."

"Oh,—I have plenty of reading to do."

She readjusted her attitude. She had seen his young reserve unfold itself on the previous night, but this morning its petals were firmly closed. She realized that she would have to vary the quality of her emotional sunlight, temper it to Kit's peculiarities, play upon his absurd seriousness. She remembered that he had not told her what his future was to be.

"You mean to be so tremendously clever. I want to hear all about it. We will have a nice long drive this afternoon. Leith Hill or somewhere like that. We don't know each other properly yet, Kit, do we?"

He did not tell her that their mutual ignorance was not his fault.

They drove to Leith Hill by way of Leatherhead, Dorking and Abinger, sharing the road with a crowd of flurrying Sabbath cars. Kit kept well in his own corner. Shut up there with this stranger who was his mother, a hopeless and inarticulate self-consciousness possessed him; he resented her attempts to draw him out; he resisted. Failing to make him talk as she wished him to talk, she began to put a touch of pathos into her appeal, nor was her pose the result of mere self-suggestion. She had begun to feel more than she had expected to feel. She wanted Kit, she wanted to possess him and his secret self, all the youth shut up in the hard young casket of his reserve. She was the mother fet His almost sullen aloofness had began to hurt er.

They walked up to Leith Hill, and she tried to sentimentalize over the view. She did it badly. Her rising emotion was making her jerky and impulsive.

"It's horrible," she said suddenly, as they were driving back to the Hatch for tea, "we seem like strangers."

Her sudden fierce frankness frightened him. He sat, rigid, looking straight through the glass screen at the road winding between the pines.

"I'm sorry," he said; "but I don't see—how it could be helped."

"O,—Kit!"

She put out a hand and touched a rigid arm.

"I know—I must seem all wrong to you——"

Kit's face looked old.

"Well,—you see,—I belong to the pater. He has been such a great pal to me. We—we understand each other——"

For a while she said no more.

4

Christopher never spoke to anyone, not even to his father, of that last emotional scene with his mother. Whenever he thought of it in after years it brought him a sense of flushed discomfort. He would feel himself shut up in that gaudy room with a woman who gradually had lost all self-restraint.

He had felt both scorched and cold, so terribly cold.

He had been so cruelly conscious of the unfairness of it, of her immoderate protestations, her appeals, her attempted caresses. He would remember how she had walked about the room, weeping, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth, looking at him ever and again with a kind of passionate rage.

"Von won't understand. I—always—wanted you. You are my boy."

She had flung herself at him suddenly and seized him, her face red and convulsed.

"He's poisoned you against me. It wasn't my fault that I couldn't love him——"

Kit had stood like a prisoner lashed to a tree, rigid, making no response, while she had hung about him, and wept and raged. It had been his first experience of woman as an emotional creature, and he was never to forget it, and doubtless it coloured his experiences with other women. He remained shy of the woman who showed signs of trying to submerge him in an emotional storm.

He had ended it by breaking away and locking himself in his bedroom, and he had got out of the house at six o'clock next morning, and carried his suit-case to Paddington Station.

At Winstonbury he strolled casually into his father's room, and stood by the window, looking out into the June garden. He was glad to be back in this male room, more glad than Sorrell knew.

"Enjoyed yourself, old chap?"

"Not much."

Sorrell asked him no bothering questions, for which wise restraint Christopher was supremely grateful.

"I think I'll go out for a good grind, pater."

"All right," said his father.

Later in the day, when Sorrell was lighting his after-tea pipe, he had the wise man's reward.

"I'm not going up there again, pater."

"Just as you like," said Sorrell, drawing a breath of silent and profound relief.