Love
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 3
Christopher had had an inspiration—sudden, as are all inspirations—the night before, after walking up and down his room for the best part of an hour: he would throw over his uncle and golf the next day, and devote the afternoon to calling on Catherine, thus getting in ahead, anyhow, of Stephen. How simple. Let his uncle be offended and disappointed as much as he liked, let him leave his thousands to the boot-boy for all he cared. He would go and see Catherine; and keep on going and seeing her, the whole afternoon if needs be, if she were out at the first shot. Whereupon, having arrived at this decision, peace enfolded him, and he went to bed and slept like a contented baby.
He began calling in Hertford Street at three.
She was out. The porter told him she was out when he inquired which floor she was on.
‘When will she be in?’ he asked.
The porter said he couldn’t say; and Christopher disliked the porter.
He went away and walked about in the park, on wet earth and with heavy drops falling on him in showers from the trees.
At half-past four he was back again. Tea time. She would be in to tea, unless she had it in some one else’s house; in which case he would call again when she had had time to finish it.
She was still out.
‘I’ll go up and ask for myself,’ said Christopher, who disliked the porter more than ever; and at this the porter began to dislike Christopher.
‘There’s only this one way in,’ said the porter, his manner hardening. ‘I’d be bound to have seen her.’
‘Which floor?’ said Christopher briefly.
‘First,’ said the porter, still more briefly.
The first-floor flat of a building in Hertford Street seemed removed, thought Christopher as he walked up to it on a very thick carpet, and ignored the lift, which had anyhow not been suggested by the hardened porter, from the necessity for travelling by tube. Yet she had said she always went to The Immortal Hour by tube. Was it possible that there existed people who enjoyed tubes? He thought it was not possible. And to emerge from the quiet mahoganied dignity of the entrance hall of these flats and proceed on one’s feet to the nearest tube instead of getting into at least a taxi, caused wonder to settle on his mind. A Rolls-Royce wouldn’t have been out of the picture, but at least there ought to be a taxi.
Why did she do such things, and tire herself out, and get her lovely little feet wet? He longed to take care of her, to prevent her in all her doings, to put his great strong body between her and everything that could in any way hurt her. He hoped George had taken this line. He was sure he must have. Any man would. Any man—the words brought him back to Stephen, who was, he was convinced, a suitor, even if she did forget his name. Perhaps she forgot because he was one of many. What so likely? One of many...
He felt suddenly uneasy again, and rang the bell of the flat in a great hurry, as if by getting in quickly he could somehow forestall and confound events.
The door was opened by Mrs. Mitcham, whom he was later so abundantly to know. All unconscious of the future they looked upon each other for the first time; and he saw a most respectable elderly person, not a parlourmaid, for she was without a cap, nor a lady’s maid he judged for some reason, though he knew little of ladies’ maids, but more like his idea—he had often secretly wished he had one—of a nanny; and she saw a fair, long-legged young man, with eyes like the eyes of children when they arrive at a birthday party.
‘Will Mrs. Cumfrit be in soon?’ he asked; and the way he asked matched the look in his eyes. ‘I know she is out—but how soon will she be in?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, considering the eager-eyed young gentleman.
‘Well, look here—could I come in and wait?’
Naturally Mrs. Mitcham hesitated.
‘Well, I’ll only have to wait downstairs, then, and I can’t stand that porter.’
Mrs. Mitcham happened not to be able to stand the porter either, and her face relaxed a little.
‘Is Mrs. Cumfrit expecting you, sir?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Christopher boldly; for so she was, the following Sunday week.
‘She usually tells me——’ began Mrs. Mitcham doubtfully; but she did draw a little aside, upon which he promptly went in. And as he gave her his hat and coat she hoped it was all right, for she thought she had her mistress’s friends and acquaintances at her fingers’ ends, and the young gentleman had certainly never been there before.
She took him towards the drawing-room.
‘What name shall I say, sir, when Mrs. Cumfrit comes in?’ she inquired, turning to him at the door.
‘Mr. Christopher Monckton,’ he said, —abstractedly, because he was going to see Catherine’s room, the room she probably spent most of her time in, her shrine; and Mrs. Mitcham hesitating a little—for suppose she had done wrong, letting in a stranger, and the tea-table put ready with poor Mr. Cumfrit’s silver spoons and sugar-basin on it? Ought she not rather to have asked the young gentleman to wait in the hall?—Mrs. Mitcham, with doubt in her heart, opened the door and allowed him to pass in, eyeing him as he passed.
No, he didn’t look like that sort of person at all, she rebuked and encouraged herself. She knew a gentleman when she saw one. Still, she left the door a tiny crack open, so that she would be able to hear if—— Also, she thought it as well to cross the hall with careful footsteps, and cast an appraising eye over his coat.
It was the coat of a gentleman; a rough coat, a worn coat, but unmistakable, and she went softly back into her kitchen, leaving its door wide open, and while she as noiselessly as possible cut bread and butter she listened for the sound of her mistress coming in, and, even more attentively, in order to be quite on the safe side, for the sound of any one going out.
The last thing, however, in the world that the young man who had just got into the drawing-room wanted to do was to go out of it again. He wanted to stay where he was for ever. Wonderful to have this little time alone with her things before she herself appeared. It was like reading the enchanting preface to a marvellous book. Next to being with her, this was the happiest of situations. For these things were as much expressions of herself as the clothes she wore. They would describe her to him, let him into at least a part, and a genuine part, of her personality.
And then, at his very first glance round, he felt it was not her room at all, but a man’s room. George’s room. George still going on. And going on flagrantly, shamelessly, in his great oak chairs and tables, and immense oil paintings, and busts, marble busts, corpsey white things on black pedestals in corners. Did nobody ever really die, then? he asked himself indignantly. Was there no end to people’s insistence on somehow surviving? Hardened into oak, gathered up into busts and picture frames, the essence of George still solidly cohabited with his widow. How in such a mausoleum could she ever leave off remembering him? Clearly she didn’t want to, or she would have chucked all this long ago, and had bright things, colour, flowers, silky soft things, things like herself, about her. She didn’t want to. She had canonised George, in that strange way people did canonise quite troublesome and unpleasant persons once they were safely dead.
He stood staring round him, and telling himself that he knew how it had happened—oh yes, he could see it all—how at the moment of George’s death Catherine, flooded with pity, with grief, perhaps with love now that she was no longer obliged to love, had clung on to his arrangements, not suffering a thing to be touched or moved or altered, pathetically anxious to keep it exactly as he used to, to keep him still alive at least in his furniture. Other widows he had heard of had done this; and widowers—but fewer of them—had done it too. He could imagine it easily, if one loved some one very much, or was desperately sorry because one hadn’t. But to go on year after year? Yet, once one had begun, how stop? There was only one way to stop happily and naturally, and that was to marry again.
And then, as he was looking round, his nose lifted in impatient scorn of George’s post-mortem persistence, and quite prepared to see whisky and cigars, grown dusty, on some table in a corner—why not? they would only be in keeping with all the rest—he caught sight of a little white object on the heavy sofa at right angles to a fireplace in which feebly flickered the minutest of newly lit fires. A bit of her. A trace, at last, of her.
He darted across and pounced on it. Soft, white, sweet with the sweetness he had noticed when he was near her, it was a small fox fur, a thing a woman puts round her neck.
He snatched it up, and held it to his face. How like her, how like her. He was absorbed in it, buried in it, breathing its delicate sweet smell; and Catherine, coming in quietly with her latchkey, saw him like this, over there by the sofa with his back to the door.
She stood quiet in the doorway, watching him with surprised amusement, because it seemed so funny. Really, to have this sort of thing happening to one’s boa at one’s age! Queer young man. Perhaps having all that flaming red hair made one...
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