Non-combatants and Others Part 19

'Did you see me and Mr. Doye just now, in the road? You did, didn't you?'

'No,' said Alix.

'Oh,' said Evie, dubious, glancing at Alix's face, that was dimly wan in the faint light from the street lamps, and twisted a little with her toothache.

Pity seized Evie, who was kind.

'I say, kiddie, do go to bed. What's the use of coming down with a face-ache? You'd be much better tucked up snug, with a clove poultice.'

'No,' said Alix, uncertainly, and stood up. 'It's better now. I've put on cocaine.... Where are my shoes?... Of course I saw you and Basil in the road.... Did you have a jolly afternoon?'

Evie knew that way of Alix's, of going back upon her lies; that was where Alix as a liar differed from herself; you only had to wait.

'Yes, it was a lark,' said Evie carelessly. 'Mr. Doye's priceless, isn't he? Doesn't mind _what_ he says. Nor what he does, either. He makes me shriek, he's so comic. You should have heard him go on at tea. We went to the rink, you know, and had tea there. He's so _silly_.' Evie laughed her attractive, gurgling laugh.

They went down to supper.

2

Sometimes Basil and Evie lunched together. By habit they lunched in different shops and had different things to eat. Evie liked pea-soup, or a poached egg, bread and honey, a large cup of coffee with milk, and what she and the tea-shop young ladies called fancies. Basil didn't.

When they lunched together they both had the things Basil liked, except in coffee.

'Did you tell him two _noirs_?' Evie would say. 'Rubbish, you know I always have _lait_.'

'A corrupt taste. One _cafe au lait_, waiter. You like the most ridiculous things, you know; you might be eight. You aren't grown-up enough yet for black coffee, or smoking, or liqueurs. You must meet my mother; you'd learn a lot from her.'

'Oh well, I'm happy in my own way.... As for smoking, I think it's jolly bad for people's nerves, if you ask me. Alix smokes an awful lot, and her nerves are like fiddle-strings. I don't go so far,' Evie said judicially, 'as to say I don't think it's good form for girls. That's what mother thinks, only of course she's old-fashioned, very. So is Kate. But after all, there _is_ a difference between men and girls, in the things they should do; _I_ think there's a difference, don't you?'

'Oh, thank goodness, yes,' said Basil, fervently, not having always thought so.

'And I don't know, but I sometimes think if girls can't fight for their country, they shouldn't smoke.'

'Oh, I see. A reward for valour, you think it should be. That would be rather hard, since the red-tape rules of our army don't allow them to fight. If they might, I've no doubt plenty would.'

Evie laughed at him. 'A girl would hate it. She'd be hopeless.'

'Plenty of men hate it and are hopeless, if you come to that.'

'Oh, it's not the same,' a.s.serted Evie. 'A girl couldn't.' She added, after a moment, sympathetically curious, 'Do _you_ hate it much?'

'Oh, much,' Basil deprecated the adverb. 'It's quite interesting in some ways, you know,' he added. 'And at moments even exciting. Though mostly a bit of a bore, of course, and sometimes pretty vile. But, anyhow, seldom without its humours, which is the main thing. Oh, it's frightfully funny in parts.'

'Anyhow,' Evie explained for him, 'of course you're glad to be doing your bit.'

He laughed at that. 'You've been reading magazine stories. That's what the gallant young fellows say, isn't it?... Look here, bother the war. I want to talk about better things. Will you meet me after you get off this evening? I want a good long time with you, and leisure. These sc.r.a.ps are idiotic.'

Evie looked doubtful.

'You and me by ourselves? Or shall we get any one else?'

'Any one else? What for? Spoil everything.'

'Oh, _I_ don't mind either way. Only mother's rather particular in some ways, you know, and she ... well, if you want to know, she thinks I go out with you alone rather a lot. It's all rubbish, of course; as if one mightn't go out with who one likes ... but, well, you know what mother is. I told you, she's old-fashioned, a bit. And of course Kate's shocked, but I don't care a bit for Kate, she's too prim for anything.'

'We won't care a bit for any one,' suggested Basil. 'I never do. I don't believe you do really, either. If people are so particular, we must just shock them and have done. Anyhow, you don't suppose I'm going to give up seeing you.'

The quickening of his tone made her draw back from the subject. Evie liked flirtation, but did not understand pa.s.sion; it was not in her cool head and heart. It was the thing in Basil that made her at times, lately, shy of him in their intercourse; vaguely she realised that he might become unmanageable. She liked him to love her beauty, but she was occasionally startled by the way he loved it. She thought it was perhaps because he was an artist, or a soldier, or both.

'Well, perhaps I'll come,' she said, to soothe him. 'Where shall we go?

Let's go _inside_ something, I say, not walking in the dark like last time. Oh, it was very jolly, of course, but it's not so snug and comfy.

We might do a play?... I say, it's nearly two. I must get back. I got into a row yesterday for being late--that was your fault.'

They walked together to the side door of the select hat shop.

'Not really a shop,' as Evie explained sometimes. 'More of a studio, it is. It's awfully artistic, our work.'

While she went upstairs, she was thinking, 'Dommage, his getting so warm sometimes. It spoils the fun.... He'll be wanting to tie me up if I'm not careful, and I'm not ready for that yet.... There are plenty of others.... I don't know.'

3

As it happened, she met one of the others when she left the shop at five, and he took her out to tea at the most expensive tea place in London, which was always his way with tea and other things. He was on leave from France, and had met Evie for the first time three days ago, when she was out with Doye, whom he knew. His name was Hugh Montgomery Gordon, and he was the son of Sir Victor Gordon of Ellaby Hall in Kent, Prince's Mansions in Park Lane, and Gordon's Jam Factory in Hackney Wick. He was handsome in person, graceful, clear-featured, an old lawn-tennis blue, and a young man with great possessions, who, having been told on good authority that he would find it hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven, had renounced any idea of this enterprise he might otherwise have had, and devoted himself whole-heartedly to appreciating this world. He was in a cavalry regiment, and had come through the war so far cool, unruffled, unscathed, and mentioned in despatches. He had a faculty for serenely expecting and acquiring the best, in most departments of life, though in some (such as art, literature, and social ethics) he failed through ignorance and indifference. Meeting Evie Tucker in Bond Street, and perceiving, as he had perceived before, that her beauty was in a high cla.s.s of merit, he was stirred by a desire to acquire her as a companion for tea, and did so. Evie liked him; he was really more in her line than Basil Doye (artists were queer, there was no getting round that, even if they had given it up for soldiering and had lost interest in it and fingers), and she liked the place where they had tea, and liked the tea and the cakes and the music, and liked him to drive to Clapton with her in a taxi afterwards.

'You don't seem economical, do you?' she remarked, as they whirred swiftly eastward.

'I hope not,' said Hugh Montgomery Gordon, in his slow, level tones. 'I can't stand economical people.'

He left her at Violette and drove back to his club, feeling satisfied with himself and her. She was certainly a find, though it was a pity one had to go so far out into the wilderness to return her where she belonged. Her people were, no doubt, what his sister Myrtle would call quite imposs.

4

As Evie and Captain Gordon had taxied down Holborn, they had pa.s.sed, and been held up for a minute near Alix, Nicholas, and West, who stood talking at the corner of Chancery Lane.

'Hugh Montgomery Gordon,' Nicholas murmured. 'Bright and beautiful as usual. Know him, Alix? Surely he doesn't visit at Violette? I can't picture it, somehow.'

'Oh, he might, for Evie's sake. Evie picks them up, you know; it's remarkable how she picks them up. They look very beautiful together, don't they? Is he nice?'

'Just as you saw. I scarcely know him more than that. He was a Hall man; my year. I believe he had a good time there. He looks as if he had a good time still. West's opinions about him are more p.r.o.nounced than mine. Is he nice, West?'

'He's in the family jam,' West told Alix, as sufficient answer.

'Gordon's jam, if that means anything to you.'

'Wooden pips and sweated girls,' Alix a.s.sented, having picked up these things from her mother. 'It must be exciting: so many improvements to be made.'

'No doubt,' agreed West. 'But the Gordons won't make them. They make jam and they make money--any amount of it--but they don't make improvements that won't pay. A bad business. It will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, at least I hope it will. They've been badgered and bullied about it by social workers for years, but they don't mind.... And at the same time, of course, they've no more ideas about what to do with their money than--than Solomon had. They put it into peac.o.c.ks and ivory apes. These rich people--well, I should like to have the Gordons in a dungeon and pull out their teeth one by one, as if they were Jews, till they forked out their ill-gotten gains for worthy objects.... If you ever meet Gordon, Miss Sandomir, you might tell him what I think about him. Tell him we have a meeting of the Anti-Sweating League in our parish room every Monday, and should be glad to see him there.'

Nicholas wondered, though he didn't ask Alix, whether Evie was still on with Basil Doye, or whether a breach there had made a gap by which Hugh Montgomery Gordon was entering in. One thought of Evie's friendships with men in these terms; whereas Alix might drive with a different man every day without suggesting to the onlooker that one was likely to oust another. The difference was less between Evie and Alix (for Evie was of a fine and wide companionableness) than in what men required of them respectively.