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<h2>X</h2> <h3>MISUNDERSTOOD</h3> <h4>[To John Maynard Keynes]</h4> Her greatness was an accepted fact. Her fame had not been a dashing offensive but an inevitable advance quietly over-running the world. People who never read knew her name as well as Napoleon's. There was, somehow, something a little irreverent about being her contemporary. To attend the birth of so many masterpieces gave you the feeling of a legendary past invading the present. A few great critics wrote wonderfully about her, but a vast majority of them, trained only in witty disparagement and acute disintegrating perception, became empty and formal in face of an unaccustomed challenge to admiration and reverence. It is only the generous who give to the rich, the big who praise the big; the niggardly salve their consciences in doles to the humbly poor, making life into a pilgrimage of greedy patrons in search of grateful victims. June was radiantly removed from the possible inroads of charity. You couldn't even pretend to have discovered her—unless, of course, you had met her—then you were quite sure that you had. Her friends explained—as friends always do—that it was what she was, not what she did, that mattered, that her letters and her conversation were far more wonderful than her books, that she was her own greatest masterpiece. It was irritating to be forced out of it like that, but when you had seen her you began doing the same thing. It was impossible not to want to tell people that her hair was like a crisp heap of rusty October beech leaves, that she always had time for you. And then you began to explain that she was happily married, which led you to the fact that she was happy, which reminded you that you were happy, by which time no one was listening to you. But it didn't seem to matter. People would ask such silly questions about her. "Does she admire Dostoievski?" they would say, and you would answer, "She has the most enchanting brown squirrel——" George wasn't thinking any of those things. His mind didn't work like that. He was eating a huge breakfast, with the "Times" propped up against his coffee pot. The two and a half columns about her new book annoyed him. He hated a woman to get herself talked about—June, too, of all people. There was nothing new-fangled about June. Why, his mother loved her and she was so pretty and so fond of clothes and babies. There was really no excuse for her sprawling over his paper when she ought to have been moving discreetly through the social column like his other female friends. There was really no reason for a happy, cared-for woman to write. It wasn't even as if she had to earn her own living. Richard ought to put his foot down, but Richard didn't seem to mind. One might almost have thought that he was proud of his wife's reputation, if one hadn't known him to be such a manly man. After all, a woman's place was in her home—or the Court Circular. She should never stray from birth, deaths and marriages to other parts of the paper. Even the sporting news (though he liked a woman to play a good game of golf or a good game of tennis) was hardly the place for a lady. George knew that he was working himself up and he hated doing that at breakfast. So he started undoing the elaborate knot of a brown paper parcel to soothe his nerves—George never cut string. And out of it emerged her book—her new book. It was beautifully bound (she knew that he liked a book to look nice) and on the fly leaf was the inscription: "A leather cover, a little paper and my love." It was as if she had sent him a box or a paper weight or a clock. It wasn't the gift, it was the thought that mattered. She knew that he had never read any of her books, but they were as good a vehicle for her affection as another. "You are the only person," she had said to him, "to whom my books are really tokens," and she had smiled very radiantly as if he were the only person who had discovered the real secret of her books. George reflected sadly that he was the only person who understood her. Why, it was maddening to think that any one reading those paragraphs in the "Times" might imagine her middle-aged and ugly and spectacled. And how were they to know that her knowledge of cricket averages was probably greater than that of the Selection Committee? Probably, too, they pictured her with short hair, June, with her crinkling crown of autumn beach leaves; and thick ankles, June with her Shepperson legs; and blunt inky fingers, June with her rosy pointing nails and her hands like uncurling fans. His mind went to other things, her low hard volleys and the lithe, easy grace with which she leapt over the lawn-tennis net. In thinking of her, the irritation her writing caused him decreased. It seemed altogether too irrelevant. June was the sort of woman one did things for. Helpless, he reflected with satisfaction, thinking of her tininess. Why, he could lift her up with one hand. George always mixed up physical phenomena with psychological fact. Small women were in need of protection; pale women were delicate; clever women were masculine—the greatest of all crimes. June might think it funny to be clever, but no one could deny that she was feminine—the sort of woman who appealed to you to do little tiny things for her (things you would have done in any case), as if they were very important and very dramatic and very difficult. George liked the sort of woman who said to him: "Mr. Carruthers, you who know everything——" It was apt, of course, to lead you into a lot of trouble, but that was one of the necessary results of being a man and having a superior intellect. June wasn't like that. She never asked you for legal advice or financial tips. She simply thought it most angelic of you to have fetched her coat and so clever of you to have noticed that it was getting chilly. And when you sent her flowers on her birthday, she would explain to you the flow of delight she had felt and perhaps a tiny little moment of surprise until she realised that of course it wasn't surprising at all, but just exactly what she knew at the bottom of her heart you would do—you, who were such a wonderful friend. Only the flowers were far more beautiful than she could have imagined and how had you been able to find them? George had a photograph of June on his writing table. People were apt to stop short at it and say: "Is that the great June Rivers, the writer?" And he would brush the question aside—one must be loyal—and say: "She is a friend of mine," rather stiffly, as if they had said that she had run away from her husband or been found drunk. He looked at it this morning, and suddenly he felt that he must see her—a feeling she frequently inspired. He knew that she hated the telephone, so he sent her a little note. "Dear June: Thank you for your beautifully-bound book. May I come round this afternoon? I long to see your hair." He wondered why he had put that: it was a silly sort of thing to say; so he scratched out the "hair" very carefully so that you could see nothing, and substituted "you." Then he wrote "George" and, after a moment's hesitation, added the postscript: "Of course you saw that Macaulay had taken four wickets for two runs?" Half an hour later her answer reached him. "George dear, please come this afternoon. I was so hoping you would. Come whatever time suits you. I shall be happy and patient and impatient waiting for you." ("That doesn't mean anything," he growled to himself. "Pity she can't write more clearly.") "Of course I saw about Macaulay. June." At five he was on her doorstep, and a very few moments later he was holding both her hands. They seemed somehow to have got lost in his. Her hair was crisper and rustier than ever, swirling about in competitive overlapping ripples. Her eyes, like a shallow Scotch brook, were laughing at him: like transparent toffee they were or burnt sugar or amber. "June," he said, and his voice was funny and thick, "I had forgotten how pretty you were." "That was just a little plot you were making with yourself to please me," she said. They sat happily on a sofa and talked about the wonderful way Mr. Fender managed the Surrey bowling; they discussed the iniquities of the Selection Committee; they decided that no woman who played the base line game could ever be quite first class. They considered the relative merits of Cromer and Brighton from the point of view of George's mother; they agreed that being braced was one thing and being overbraced another. Then June told George that he ought to marry, and George said that he was not a marrying man, and June said that men became the worst old maids and that a man's place was in the home and George thought that she had got it wrong by accident. June was perfectly happy. She loved talking to George—George who adored her without knowing that she had genius, only that she had sympathy—had no idea that she was a great woman, only that she was a charming one. He was looking at her with a worried expression. "June," he said, "you look tired." "Oh, but I'm not a bit." He put her feet up and covered them with a shawl. "I wish you would stop writing," he said. "What good do books do? Health is the only thing that matters." "Loving is the only thing that matters," she murmured, "loving and being loved." "Well," (George thought it so like a woman to go off at a tangent like that), "you've got Richard." "Richard," she twinkled, "is not like you. He loves my books." "He ought to know better," George asserted severely, and at that moment in he came. "George!" Richard was jubilant. "Have you heard the news?" "What news?" George was thinking of the Carpentier-Lewis fight due that night. "June has been awarded the Nobel prize." "How splendid!" George looked a little puzzled. "Is it for life saving?" "Yes," June put in quickly. "I'm not at all surprised." George beamed at her. "You always were as plucky as they made 'em and gifted. Do you remember how charmingly you used to sing? 'Not a big voice, but so true,' Mother used to say, and she's a great judge." "Your mother has always been so sweet to me." "What a talented woman like you wants to write for beats me." George had got back to his grievance again, but she lured him on to the subject of irises on which they were both experts, and it was not till just before dinner that he hurried away. Then suddenly he remembered that he hadn't asked her whose life she had saved. How silly and how selfish! It was so like her not to talk about herself, and then he saw on a patch of posters: "June Rivers awarded the Nobel prize," and though he was very late he stopped to buy an evening paper. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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