The Education of Eric Lane Part 31

He looked at her in astonishment, wondering dully what she aimed to achieve. If he insisted on asking her, she would certainly consent; but he could not ask her against her will. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing of women; some, he had been told, liked to be bullied and compelled, others were only to be won by yielding and deference.

"You don't want me to ask you that?"

"No! For G.o.d's sake, no! If anything happens, Eric--you know what I mean--if I _can_, then ask me, please ask me! But not now! I should be miserable and I should make you miserable! Eric, be generous!"

Her fingers were pressed deep into her cheeks, and he could see her bosom rising and falling.

"I oughtn't to have started this subject, Babs," he said, coming back to her side. "If it makes things easier in any way, I'll promise you solemnly never to ask you that question until you give me leave."

She opened her arms a second time. This time he leaned forward and kissed her.

"Thank you, darling!"

"And now I'm going to give you your beef-tea. What made you talk like this, Babs?"

"I wanted to know that you really loved me."

"You knew that before."

"I didn't! No, Eric, when you said good-bye that night----"

Something in his expression stopped her. He had wholly lost sight of their earlier contention, and it was coming back to him--unsettled.

"I'm afraid things are very much where they were that night," he said.

"If I don't promise to marry you, you'll leave me? I can't promise, Eric--yet."

There seemed a dim, treacherous comfort in the adverb, and he stayed with her.

"_Wine and love bring a similar intoxication. You can refuse to begin drinking, you can refuse to begin falling in love; (and love at first sight of a woman is as absurd as a morbid craving for drink at first sight of a bottle). You can trust that you will be able to say in time, 'I can no more.' And then you will find that you only see the turning-point when you are past it. The world then says without pity or understanding: 'The man's drunk.'_"--From the Diary of Eric Lane.

CHAPTER SIX

DAME'S SCHOOL EDUCATION

"ANN: I can neither take you nor let you go. . . . You must be a sentimental old bachelor for my sake. . . . You won't have a bad time. . . . A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income."

BERNARD SHAW: "MAN AND SUPERMAN."

1

"I don't know how lately you've seen Eric," said Lady Lane, "but I'm frightened at the way he's losing weight."

Dr. Gaisford smiled rea.s.suringly and rang for tea.

"I've ordered him a complete rest and change for three months."

"But he won't take it! The head of his department wants him to give a course of lectures in America, but he won't leave London. If you're more in his confidence than I am----"

"Eric pays us both the compliment of thinking us too old to have eyes, ears or brains--a common delusion among boys in love. No, he's told me nothing, but he's visibly wearing himself out in adoration of a very fascinating young woman; so, as _he_ won't go away, she shall. There's no present cause for alarm."

"I wish I could think that. . . . Of course, you must never tell him that I've been talking to you behind his back."

The warning was an anticlimax after Lady Lane's desperate remedy of coming to Wimpole Street and presenting all her fears and suspicions for the doctor's diagnosis. In a life-time of anxiety and effort she was hardly more communicative or self-pitying than her son; and Gaisford divined that more than ordinary compulsion had sent her to him.

"Speaking as a friend of both parties," he said, "I don't know what the hitch is. I haven't heard that the parents are making any trouble; and, if they did, I'm afraid naughty little Barbara would just snap her fingers at them."

"You think she's in earnest?" asked Lady Lane doubtfully.

"I do indeed--knowing something of her; and for the first time in her life. . . . I hope it will all come right. In the meantime, she's been ill and her father doesn't like the way the Government's conducting the war, so they're shaking off the dust of England for the Riviera. Eric will have his rest, whether he likes it or not."

For the first fifteen months of the war Lord Crawleigh had carried out a campaign, unsparing to his readers, his hearers and himself, to wake England to a more lively realization of her perils. His position and long record of public service secured him an undisturbed hearing as he floundered through the potentialities of Mittel-Europa with the aid of a lantern and pointer; and his audience was usually rewarded for its patience when he forsook high politics and set its flesh agreeably creeping with a peroration compounded equally of German spies and pro-German ministers. The campaign throve in the south, but slackened in the midlands and stopped short in the north. At the same time Lord Crawleigh's prescriptive right to the "leader" page of all daily papers met with a challenge from certain disrespectful sub-editors who first mislaid him among foreign telegrams and later buried him ignominiously in small type. It was when a thoughtful exegesis on "The War and Indian Home Rule," extending over two columns, had been held up for three days without acknowledgement, apology or explanation, that Lord Crawleigh decided to teach his countrymen a sharp lesson by withdrawing to the south of France until the spring.

Any inducement to leniency was overruled when Barbara succ.u.mbed to an attack of pleurisy. As soon as she was fit to move, he ordered his villa to be made ready, set the dismantling of his London house in hand, closed Crawleigh Abbey and carried his wife and daughter to Charing Cross with a relentlessness and speed which gave their departure the appearance of an abduction. The pleurisy developed four days after Christmas, and Eric had not seen Barbara since the night of their sick-room dinner. A week after they reached the Riviera, he heard a story, traced without difficulty to Gerald Deganway, that Lord Crawleigh had spirited Barbara away from the danger of a _mesalliance_. But, in wrestling with the necessary evils of life, Eric was finding, as others had done before him, that Gerald Deganway was the irreducible minimum; it was of greater importance that for three months no one would have cause to gossip about them; and by that time even the Warings could not reasonably hope for tidings of Jack.

Her departure cleared Eric's mind of its last misgivings and convinced him that Barbara was no longer a casually pleasant companion but an urgently needed wife. In her absence, he was thrown back on the bachelor society of the Thespian Club, though with every meal that he ate there came a growing dread that he would be absorbed into it until younger generations, watching him as he pored over the day's bill of fare with his cronies or grew petulant with the servants, came to regard him as part of the club's furniture--as part of every club's furniture--wifeless, childless, friendless and uninterested, a bore who had outstayed the welcome and even the toleration of a community founded to keep his like from utter loneliness. Sometimes, as he looked at the men who would never marry, he wondered what would become of him if Jack Waring appeared suddenly, if Barbara fell in love with some one else, if she fell out of love as quickly as she had fallen in love. . . .

At the end of March a telegram from Folkestone announced her return and invited him to dine with her.

Eric walked up the familiar stairs, with the august butler, at whose nod or frown he had once trembled, turning at intervals to impart confidences from the advantageous height of an advance stair. ("We" had only come back the day before and were, on the whole, better for the change. He was afraid her ladyship would hardly be dressed yet. . . . If Mr. Lane did not mind waiting a moment. . . . There was the evening paper. . . .) Eric settled himself with a comfortable sense of home-coming, his eyes on Barbara's bedroom door, wondering how she would greet him. Their last dinner together demanded recognition and a subtile modification of manner.

"Darling, how are you after all this time?" Barbara was on her knees by his chair before he realized that she was in the room. "When do you start? You never said a word about it in your letters."

He stood up and pulled her gently to her feet. Invitingly she craned her head forward, offering him her lips.

"About what?"

"Your American tour. The _Vieux boulevardier_ said you were going to deliver a course of lectures in America."

Common-form invitations had reached him from time to time through his agent, but, after the first, he had relegated them unread to the waste-paper basket. And his department was still urging him abroad.

"I've no intention of going yet awhile," he told her. "It was only a newspaper rumour; perhaps some day I shall make it true. You remember that there was another rumour which my mother told me had in fact got into some provincial rag? Some day that also may be true."

He lighted a cigarette and looked at her with a faint, enquiring smile.

"Eric!" she cried with reproachful warning, though he felt that she was enjoying the thin ice on to which they had glided.

As a smile dimpled its way into her cheeks, he tired of the badinage.

"Well, did you have a good time, Babs?" he asked abruptly.

"Good? M'well. . . . I travelled the whole way with all the clothes in the world wrapped round my throat and chest. When I woke up just beyond Ma.r.s.eilles, it was so hot that I threw off one thing after another, until I'd got down to a blouse and skirt. Next morning, there was a glorious hot sun. . . . I jumped out of bed and ran bare-foot into the verandah and stood there--don't be shocked, darling!--in my night-gown, stretching out my arms to gather all the heavenly warmth. I couldn't have coughed if you'd paid me to. It was divine, but I suddenly discovered there was one thing wanting. Can you guess what it was?"