Non-combatants and Others Part 20

'Evie and he,' Alix commented, considering them. 'They might be good friends, I think. They might fit. The jam wouldn't get between them--nor the money.... _I_ rather like him too, I think. He's so beautiful, and looks as if he'd never been ill. That's so jolly.' She was giving the same reasons which Basil had given for liking Evie. It occurred to her to wonder whether, if she'd been to the war, these two things would take her further in her mild inclination towards Hugh Montgomery Gordon--much further. Perhaps they would....

Alix went to her bus at the corner of Gray's Inn Road. Nicholas went back to his rooms to finish an article. West went to a Sweated Bootmakers' protest meeting in his parish room. West attended too many meetings: that was certain. Meetings, a clumsy contrivance at best, cannot be worth so much attendance. But he went off to this one full of faith and hope, as always.

5

Evie was using the telephone in the hall. She was saying, in her clear, cheery tones, 'Hullo, is that you? Awfully sorry, don't expect me to-morrow evening. I can't come.... Awfully sorry.... Don't quite know.... I'll write.'

Alix went up to her room.

Presently Evie came in.

'Did you hear me 'phoning?' she inquired superfluously. 'It was to Mr.

Doye. Fact is, I think he and I'd both be better for a little rest from each other. It'll give him time to cool down a bit. He's got keener than I like, lately. Fun's all very well, but one doesn't want to be hustled, does one? I don't want him asking me anything for a long time.'

Alix, sitting on her bed with one shoe off, pulling at the other, said in a small voice, 'I don't think he will.'

Evie turned round and looked at her, questioningly.

'You don't? Why, whatever do you know about it?'

Alix was bent over her shoe; her voice was m.u.f.fled.

'Basil is like that. He doesn't mean things....'

'Oh....' Evie turned to the gla.s.s, and drew four pins out of the roll of hair behind her head, and it fell in a heavy nut-brown ma.s.s, glinting in the yellow gaslight. She began to comb it out and roll it up again.

'Doesn't mean anything, doesn't he?' she said thoughtfully. 'You seem awfully sure about that.'

'Yes,' agreed Alix. She had pulled off both shoes now, and tucked her stockinged feet under her as she sat curled up on the bed. She drew a deep breath and spoke rather quickly.

'He's always the same, he was the same with me once, he doesn't really mean it....'

'The same with you--' Evie, without turning round, saw in the gla.s.s the blurred image of the huddled figure and small pale face in the shadows behind her.

She drove in two more hairpins, then turned sharply and looked at Alix.

'You don't mean to say he used to be in love with you.'

'Oh ... in love....' Alix's voice was faint, attenuated, remote.

'Well--anything, then.' Evie was impatient. 'You needn't split hairs....

He went on with you, I suppose.... And you....'

She broke off, staring, uncomfortably, at a situation really beyond her powers.

Her cogitations ended in, 'Well, I think you might have told me at first. I thought you and he were just good friends. _I_ didn't want him.

I wouldn't have let him come near me if I'd known it was like that. I never do that sort of thing. Now do I, Alix? You've never seen me mean to other girls like that, have you? I never have been and I never will be.... _I_ don't want him. You can have him back.'

Alix giggled suddenly, irrepressibly.

'What's the matter now?' said Evie.

'Nothing. Only the way you talk of Basil--handing him about as if he was a kitten. He's not, you know.'

Evie smiled grudgingly. 'Well, anyhow _I_ don't want him. Particularly if he doesn't mean anything, as you say.... It isn't every one I'd believe if they told me that; they might be jealous or spiteful or something. But I don't believe you'd say it, Al, if you didn't think it was true'--(Alix said, 'Oh,' on a soft, indrawn breath)--'and you know him, so I expect you're right. And I'm not going on playing round with a man who makes love like he does and doesn't mean anything. It isn't respectable.'

'Oh--respectable.' Alix laughed, again, shakily; it was such a funny word in this connection, and so like Violette.

'Well, I don't see it's funny,' said Evie. 'It's awfully important to be respectable, and I always am. I'll be good pals with any number of men, but when they begin to get like Basil Doye I won't have it unless they _mean_ something.'

Thus Evie enunciated her code, and washed her hands and face and put on her dress and went downstairs. At the door she paused for a moment and looked back at Alix.

'I say, Al--I'm awfully sorry. I didn't mean to be a sneak, you know; I _wouldn't_ have, if I'd known.'

'Not a bit,' Alix absurdly and politely murmured.

'Well, do get a move on and come down. It's too cold for anything up here.... I say'--Evie paused awkwardly--' I say, kiddie, you didn't really _care_, did you?'

Alix shook her head. 'Oh no.' Still her voice was small, polite, and attenuated.

'Well then,' said Evie cheerfully, 'no harm's done to any one. But still, it's not the style I like, a man that plays about first with one girl, then another.... I'm going down.'

She went.

6

The cold made Alix shiver. She stiffly uncurled herself and got off the bed. She brushed her hair before the gla.s.s. Her face looked back at her, pointed and ghostly, in the gaslight and shadows.

'Cad,' whispered Alix, without emotion, to the pale image. 'Cad--and liar.'

'It's the war,' explained Alix presently, with detached, half-cynical a.n.a.lysis. 'I shouldn't have done that before the war. I suppose I might do anything now. Probably I shall. There seems no way out....'

Alix had heard and read plenty of views on the psychological effects of war; some of them were interesting, some were true; many were true for some people and false for others; but she did not remember that even the most penetrating (or pessimistic) had laid enough emphasis on the mental and moral collapse that shook the foundations of life for some people.

For her, anyhow, and for Paul; and they surely could not be the only ones. Observers seemed more apt to take the cases of those men and women who were improved; who were strengthened, steadied, made more unselfish and purposeful (that was the favourite word), with a finer sense of the issues and responsibilities of life; or of those young sportsmen at the front who kept their jollity, their sweetness, their equilibrium, through it all. Well, no doubt there were plenty of these. Look at Terry. Look at Dorothy and Margot at Wood End, in their new strenuousness and ardours. They weren't demoralised by horror, or eaten by jealousy like a canker. They could even minister to combatants without envying them....

There were such. There might be many. But Alix looked at them far off, herself a broken, nerve-wracked, frightened child, grabbing at other people's things to comfort herself, ashamed but outrageous.

'There seems no way out,' said Alix, and looked, as she changed her frock, down vistas of degradation.

Downstairs Florence rang the supper bell. The smell of Welsh rarebit drifted through Violette. That, anyhow, was something; Alix liked it.

CHAPTER XII