‘For the simple reason’ – Gombauld mimicked her voice – ‘that you want me to make love to you and, when I do, to have the amusement of running away.’
Anne threw back her head and laughed. ‘So you think it amuses me to have to evade your advances! So like a man! If only you knew how gross and awful and boring men are when they try to make love and you don’t want them to make love! If you could only see yourselves through our eyes!’
Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his canvas with the ardour of irritation. ‘I suppose you’ll be saying next that you didn’t start the game, that it was I who made the first advances, and that you were the innocent victim who sat still and never did anything that could invite or allure me on.’
‘So like a man again!’ said Anne. ‘It’s always the same old story about the woman tempting the man. The woman lures, fascinates, invites; and man – noble man, innocent man – falls a victim. My poor Gombauld! Surely you’re not going to sing that old song again. It’s so unintelligent, and I always thought you were a man of sense.’
‘Thanks,’ said Gombauld.
‘Be a little objective,’ Anne went on. ‘Can’t you see that you’re simply externalizing your own emotions? That’s what you men are always doing; it’s so barbarously naïve. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.’
‘Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case,’ said Gombauld, without looking up.
Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh. ‘I’m at a loss to know whether you’re more silly or more rude.’
After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak again. ‘And then there’s Denis,’ he said, renewing the conversation as though it had only just been broken off. ‘You’re playing the same game with him. Why can’t you leave that wretched young man in peace?’
Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger. ‘It’s perfectly untrue about Denis,’ she said indignantly. ‘I never dreamt of playing what you beautifully call the same game with him.’ Recovering her calm, she added in her ordinary cooing voice and with her exacerbating smile, ‘You’ve become very protective towards poor Denis all of a sudden.’
‘I have,’ Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a little too solemn. ‘I don’t like to see a young man . . .’
‘. . . being whirled along the road to ruin,’ said Anne, continuing his sentence for him. ‘I admire your sentiments and, believe me, I share them.’
She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about Denis. It happened to be so completely untrue. Gombauld might have some slight ground for his reproaches. But Denis – no, she had never flirted with Denis. Poor boy! He was very sweet. She became somewhat pensive.
Gombauld painted on with fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his mind, making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When it was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was painting her in the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting. Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent abandonment. He had emphasized the lazy curves of her body; the lines sagged as they crossed the canvas, the grace of the painted figure seemed to be melting into a kind of soft decay.
The hand that lay along the knee was as limp as a glove. He was at work on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the canvas, doll-like in its regularity and listlessness. It was Anne’s face – but her face as it would be, utterly unillumined by the inward lights of thought and emotion. It was the lazy, expressionless mask which was sometimes her face. The portrait was terribly like; and at the same time it was the most malicious of lies. Yes, it would be diabolic when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered what she would think of it.
CHAPTER XXII
FOR THE SAKE of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of ‘accidie.’ He felt, like Ernest Dowson, ‘a little weary.’ He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same time – how should he put it? – a little infinite. He though of Anne, of love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind – the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant quatrain had flowed from beneath his pen:
‘A brooding love which is at most
The stealth of moonbeams when they slide,
Evoking colour’s bloodless ghost,
O’er some scarce-breathing breast or side . . .’
when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight through the gate in the right-hand wall. That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was going to sit for him again. His pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion; angrily he threw his quatrain into the waste-paper basket and ran downstairs. ‘The stealth of moonbeams,’ indeed!
In the hall he saw Mr Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain. Mr Scogan’s eye glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.
‘Not so fast,’ he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed nails – ‘not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take the sun. We’ll go together.’
Denis abandoned himself; Mr Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm in arm. On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yew-tree walk. It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he had kissed her, here – and he blushed with retrospective shame at the memory – here that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was awful!
‘Sanity!’ said Mr Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. ‘Sanity – that’s what’s wrong with me and that’s what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you’re old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil.’
Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. ‘After all,’ he said to himself – ‘after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential. . . .’
‘Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,’ Mr Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. ‘Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason – never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory – reason.’
They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent of lavender bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed hot, dry perfume instead of, air – it was here that Mr Scogan elected to sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight.
‘Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus.’ He took out his pipe and began to fill it as he talked. ‘There was Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at first – a new virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and venerated him. But did he move them to behave as he wanted them to behave –
