Lover's Leap Read online

  LOVER’S LEAP

  by

  Martin Armstrong

  Contents

  Chapter 1 PHILIP

  Chapter 2 ROSE

  Chapter 3 PHILIP

  Chapter 4 MERIEL

  Chapter 5 PHILIP

  Chapter 6 MERIEL

  Chapter 7 PHILIP

  Chapter 8 ROSE

  Chapter 9 PHILIP

  Chapter 10 MERIEL

  Chapter 11 PHILIP

  A Note on the Author

  PHILIP

  I have often thought of keeping a diary, but the significant moment for beginning has hitherto been denied me. Now, at last, it has arrived, though it is one o’clock a.m., high time to be in bed. Was it by mere chance that I decided after all to go to the Ethertons’ party to-night? I so nearly, so terribly nearly, stayed at home. Here on my desk lies the telegram I began to write six hours ago: ‘So sorry, can’t come this evening …’ and there I paused, trying to think of a polite and convincing excuse. It would have to be an illness, but what illness? Listless and depressed as I was, I couldn’t hit on the right illness or the right phrase to put it into, and I sat here scribbling on the blotting-paper, drawing with meticulous care a half-open window and feeling more and more miserable with every stroke of the pen. Here it is, and the mere sight of it recalls the empty misery with which I worked at it. What a terrible power there is, for a morbid mind, in trifles such as this. If I had come home just now in the mood in which I went out, the discovery of this miserable sketch would have horribly aggravated my soreness. But now I am immune, gloriously immune from the loathsome thing: I can stare it in the face and laugh at it. When I had finished drawing it I returned to the telegram and found the hopeless problem still unsolved. For another five minutes I sat before it, numb, helpless, and then, for no reason that I can discover, I threw aside my pen and went dismally to my bedroom to dress.

  At the Ethertons’ gate in St. John’s Wood I paused again. Could I possibly bear it? Could I climb the steps, ring the bell, and face that crowd of happy, self-possessed people? I felt so horribly vulnerable. As a boy I used to keep caterpillars, and once, when one of them had spun a cocoon, I tore it open to see what was happening inside, and the creature fell out, livid and convulsively writhing. When it ceased to writhe and lay as if dormant I touched it with a leaf and again it writhed frantically as if the leaf had been red-hot, as if the slightest touch were an unendurable scald. That was how I felt as I stood at the Ethertons’ gate this evening. To healthy-minded people such a state is, I suppose, incomprehensible. Wouldn’t it be better to turn back and go home? Mrs. Etherton wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind, I recollected now, even if I were to tell her the truth, that I had no excuse, that I simply didn’t feel like a party. She rather likes her artistic friends to be freakish, to show occasional signs of the artistic temperament. But thank God I didn’t turn back. I stubbornly and desperately rang the bell and went in.

  Can it have been by pure chance that I went in? I so nearly turned back at the gate and hurried home to take refuge in the solitude I hated. None of my friends suspects, I’m sure, the awful loneliness of my life during the last two years on this top floor in Brunswick Square. They all think me very snug in my pleasant sitting-room looking down into the garden with its plane trees, the small airy bedroom at the back and the third room that I use as a studio. I have many friends. I need never lunch alone or dine alone and in the evening I can always be sure of meeting people I know at the Café Royal. And not only this: I have enough money to enable me, with care, to get on with my painting whether I sell pictures or not. No, my loneliness did not consist in being alone. I had all the friends I wanted. It consisted in an aimlessness, a restlessness which haunted me and sapped my energies. I was seeking blindly for something I could not find; something I hoped to find but never completely found in my friends; that I found sometimes in my work, but only when I was at work and only intermittently, and if I had turned back at the Ethertons’ gate this evening I should still be seeking. But I went in and I found.

  And yet the bare statement of what happened to me sounds ludicrously slight. I saw a young woman called Rose Bentley and later had a few words with her. That’s all. Yet it has been enough to change my life, to gather together and focus my aimless, restless desires, as a magnifying-glass gathers the pale, diffused sunlight into a burning core.

  I have read somewhere that love is a terrible thing because it removes a man’s centre from within himself and sets it outside so that his life is at the mercy of another. But what of the man who has no centre? For such a man love is salvation, for it gives him the centre he lacked. Yet, for all that, it is dangerous, because the centre it gives him is outside his control. Yes, I recognize my danger and I tell myself too that she may never return my love, but these things mean nothing to me at present. I feel only complete happiness, complete confidence. I feel that I have been given something that can never be taken from me and that I am satisfied. Of course that is a delusion: I can prove it to myself by simply saying, as I said just now as I walked home: ‘Perhaps she is already in love with another man. Perhaps in a month she will be married and lost to me.’ That thought terrified me and terrifies me now, but only for a moment. To restore myself I have only to recall her as I saw her for the last time an hour ago. She had said good night and left the drawing-room, but in a minute or two the door opened again and she appeared in the doorway in her fur coat, ready to go, leaning against the doorpost, one hand on the door-handle, and trying half timidly to catch Mrs. Etherton’s eye for some last word; and at that vision of her my terror vanishes and a flood of confidence and happiness rushes back into my heart.

  I return again and again to the brief glimpse of her which I shall never forget, and try to discover what it was in her that seemed to me at that moment so exquisitely lovely. Was it her pose as she leaned against the doorpost with a sort of intimate artlessness which made me feel that I had surprised her with her party manners forgotten, talking alone to a friend; or her half-eager, half-timid absorption in the attempt to attract Mrs. Etherton’s attention; or something in the curve of her parted lips and the momentary gleam of lamplight in her eye and on her teeth? How vividly and instantaneously one observes such moments. I noticed, and I see it still as I call up her face to my mind’s eye, that those two gleaming teeth in the upper jaw are slightly crossed and that her upper lip is a little fuller on one side of its centre than on the other; and those two small irregularities seem to me, the Lord knows why, to give an irresistible pathos and distinction to her beauty.

  And yet how strange it is to think, now, that I did not notice her at all till after dinner. I arrived, it is true, a little late, as they were all drifting into the dining-room in the unceremonious way customary at the Ethertons’, and she sat on my side of the table, separated from me by two others and so out of sight. It was old Etherton, our host, who drew my attention to her afterwards in the drawing-room. He is often absent from his wife’s parties: he has none of her bounteous, indiscriminate interest in ‘artistic’ people. In fact, until they have proved to him that they can do something—which means, of course, do something that he approves of—or, alternatively, that they have a certain sharpness of intelligence, he regards them as rather a nuisance. I am an exception, because I was introduced into the Etherton circle not by her but by him. He is an old friend of my father’s and when I came to live in London he invited me to dine at his club, came and inspected my pictures and declared that there was something in them.

  ‘You may as well join my wife’s circus,’ he said to me, and soon afterwards a note from Mrs. Etherton invited me to one of her evenings. ‘My husband will be at home,’ she wrote, and whenever she invited me afterwards this information was added. This i
ndicated that I belonged to him, not to her. Not that she disliked me. Hospitable, large-hearted old thing that she is, she dislikes nobody, I believe; and I’m sure nobody could dislike her. But she made no disguise, from the first moment of seeing it, of disliking my work. ‘Very good, no doubt,’ she said, ‘but too modern for me, my dear’; and my work became a friendly joke between us. ‘I must introduce you to Mr. Philip Marling,’ she would say in my hearing; ‘he paints the most atrocious modern pictures.’

  She and her husband are equally open in their disagreement. ‘You won’t like her, William,’ she would say of a newly discovered violinist, ‘she plays with a great deal of temperament.’

  ‘The first task of the music teacher,’ Etherton declared, ‘is the eradication of temperament.’

  Polite, cynical, and somewhat aloof in manner, with his aristocratic nose and closely cropped grey moustache, he acts as an acid corrective to the easy enthusiasms of these evenings. ‘Music,’ he remarked to me quietly one evening after a young Frenchman had given us a fluent rendering of a Chopin Étude, ‘is insufferable unless it is admirable’; and on another occasion, when I asked him about the work of a new poet recently added by Mrs. Etherton to her collection of geniuses, he answered: ‘O tolerable, quite tolerable. But as you doubtless know, there is nothing so easy to write as tolerable verse. That is why most of us refrain.’

  This evening, as we entered the drawing-room after dinner, he took my arm and led me to a sofa near the window. ‘I have something to show you,’ he said.

  He has a fine collection of drawings and he now carefully extracted from a vellum portfolio his latest acquisitions, two pencil drawings of nudes by Matisse. ‘My poor wife thinks them awful,’ he remarked with humorous distress when I had finished admiring them. ‘And yet her taste is often good. What, for instance, do you think of her new acquisition?’

  He waved a hand that held a cigarette between first and second finger towards his wife who was standing near the piano talking to a tall, slim, golden-haired young woman dressed in dull blue. ‘Something quite unusual, don’t you think?’

  ‘What does she do?’ I asked. One always asks that of Mrs. Etherton’s new acquisitions.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said old Etherton. ‘Nothing, let us hope.’

  At that moment Mrs. Etherton opened the piano and Rose Bentley sat down to play. ‘A pianist, alas!’ said Etherton. ‘But at least one has the opportunity of studying her profile.’

  Rose glanced up at Mrs. Etherton and smiled, and instantly, as if an electric spark had shot between us, a tremulous excitement took hold of me, so that I forgot old Etherton on the sofa beside me, forgot the Ethertons’ drawing-room and the nine or ten guests that filled it, and became absorbed in her.

  Is it merely a certain kind of physical beauty that, perhaps half a dozen times in a lifetime, produces that sudden, palpitating, breathless state which I can only describe as physical conversion? Or are there other and obscurer causes? In other words, is love at first sight really a profound and complex event or a thing no more significant than a sneeze? And why should I only, of all the people there, have been converted? Everyone would probably have agreed that Rose is beautiful, but none, I suppose, that she is, as she seems to me, so overwhelmingly enchanting. Is it just my imagination, then? Can it be that these strange, instantaneous conversions are subjective, that they are the final product of a gradual process in the convert, the slow compression of a spring that at the right moment is released by any mouse that happens to nibble? Was I, unknown to myself, all ready to fall in love, and if Rose Bentley had not been at the Ethertons’ to-night would any other personable young woman have set me off equally well when the psychological moment—nine-fifteen, or whenever it was—arrived? No, I can’t believe it. Body, mind, and soul revolt instantly against such a cheapening of my precious Rose. No, it was because my eyes were opened, because I alone of all in the Ethertons’ drawing-room saw her as she really is, that the dazzling revelation came to me only. It happened in a flash, before she had even raised her hands to the piano, and I had time to long passionately for her not to begin playing, not to break the spell with music I disliked or the murder of music I loved and so reveal imperfections in the perfection which was hers now in this brief, immortal moment of silence.

  Surely I might have known that her playing would have been as beautiful as herself. She played a sonata by Mozart, making of it a warm and sparkling jewel of sound that seemed to be the audible expression of her beauty. There is a plant called the Rose of Jericho which, when kept away from earth and moisture, is a mere lump of dead fibre, like dried moss; but when put into water it slowly comes to life and unfolds and flowers into a living green rosette. That is the effect that Rose’s playing had upon me, and so it was her music, no doubt, that completed my conversion by laying me open to her beauty.

  And yet, when she had finished, nobody else in the room showed more than ordinary appreciation—nobody except old Etherton. I felt him make a sudden movement on the sofa.

  ‘O but that’s the real thing,’ he said; ‘that’s delicious,’ and his voice and movement recalled me abruptly to myself.

  ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘and yet none of them seem to have noticed it!’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why should they?’ he said acidly.

  How I longed to rush up to her, to … to what? Certainly not to chatter thanks and compliments. Indeed if Mrs. Etherton had taken me to her at that moment, I should have been tongue-tied. I was afraid of meeting her, afraid of the certainty of having nothing to say to express my overpowering feelings. But at the moment Mrs. Etherton was talking to Rose beside the piano from which she had just risen, and it was not until a few minutes later that they both crossed the room to where Etherton and I were sitting. We rose to our feet and old Etherton, in his courtly way, began to congratulate her.

  ‘You, Miss Bentley, are one of those who have discovered that there’s more music and more feeling in that Sonata than in all the Sturm und Drang of Tristan.’

  She smiled. ‘O, I certainly think there is,’ she said.

  ‘Of course there is,’ said Etherton. ‘But in Mozart it’s concentrated into a crystal, while in Wagner it’s whipped into mounds of froth and foam.’

  I stood by silent, while they talked. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Etherton remembered that I hadn’t been introduced to her.

  ‘But the froth and foam are sometimes very beautiful,’ Rose was saying.

  ‘O I agree,’ he said; ‘when one can forget the crystal. But it’s the crystal that lasts.’ He moved to one side. ‘But do sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit here and talk to my friend Philip Marling. He’s a Mozartian too; in fact, there’s a good deal of Mozart in his pictures, though he probably doesn’t know it.’

  With that Etherton left us, left us, of course, completely at cross-purposes, for I was nothing to her, a complete stranger, whereas she was already infinitely precious to me, a vital part of my life.

  If I had begun there and then to pour out my real feelings to her, she would certainly have thought me drunk or mad; but to me it seemed just as mad to play at being strangers, to assume a careful pretence of polite indifference and talk formally and intelligently of Mozart and Wagner and her playing and my painting. I dared not raise my eyes to her face. My desperate desire to attract her to me produced the very opposite effect, for I found it impossible to talk to her naturally as I would have done to another stranger, and felt that, in spite of myself, I was growing cold, harsh, aloof. I must certainly, I realized miserably, be giving her the impression that I disliked her. If only I could have been merely frivolous or cheerful; but I couldn’t. I was so involved in my wretched perplexity that I could hardly listen, hardly reply, to what she was saying. I don’t even remember what we talked about during our brief interview.

  ‘I should like to see your pictures. Perhaps you will show them to me some day.’ Her voice came to me through the turmoil of my emotions.

  ‘Yes,’ I said lamely, ‘yes, I s
hall be delighted.’

  At that moment Mrs. Etherton came and took her from me and left me to realize my utter stupidity. What a fool I was. It would have been so simple to invite her to come and see my work: it was the natural reply to her request. And yet I had let that golden opportunity slip; I had thrown away the chance of ever seeing her again.

  The thought of that brought me to some extent to my senses: I determined that I would force myself to speak to her again before the party broke up; ask her, as I ought to have asked her before, to come to my flat and see my work; and I spent the rest of the evening in watching anxiously for an opportunity.

  But the opportunity never came. I couldn’t break into the group of laughing, chattering people to which Mrs. Etherton had carried her off, and fire a point-blank invitation at her; and soon Mrs. Etherton’s tiresome old dramatic critic came over and held me firmly tethered in interminable conversation. I shot a despairing glance across the room and saw Rose Bentley shaking hands with Mrs. Etherton. She was going. She glanced round the room and then came across to say good night to her host who was standing by the fireplace not far from me and the critic. I turned abruptly, cut the critic off in the middle of a sentence, in the hope of catching her eye. My heart was beating so fast that I felt almost stifled. Then, as she turned from old Etherton, thank God she saw me and held out her hand.

  ‘If … if you will … if you’d really like to see some of my work,’ I stammered, ‘won’t you come to my studio some afternoon, any afternoon that suits you?’

  I felt as if I had done a deed of desperate courage: I could feel the blood beating in my temples: the muscles of my face twitched.Yes, she would come with pleasure: she would come next Thursday. What was my address? A moment later I had given her the address and she was gone.

  The dramatic critic had drifted away and I dropped into the sofa beside me, trembling with relief and happiness. I sat there closed in upon myself, oblivious of my surroundings, and when at last I raised my eyes it was to have that final vision of her in the half-open doorway.