Back Aa

Non-Combatants and Others

<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2> <h3>ALIX AND EVIE</h3> <h4>1</h4> Basil had Evie on the brain. He liked her enormously. He was glad he had a month's more leave. He took to meeting her after she came out from her hat shop and seeing her home. They spent Saturday afternoons together. Alix saw them parting one Saturday evening, as she came home. Spring Hill was dim and quiet, and they stood by the door into the Park, on the opposite side of the road to Violette, chaffing and saying good-bye. Alix saw Basil suddenly kiss Evie. It might be the first time: in that case it would be an event for them both, and thrilling. Or it might be not the first time at all: in that case it would be a habit, and jolly. Anyhow Evie said, 'Oh, go along and don't be a silly.... Are you coming in to-night?' He said 'No' and laughed. Then they saw Alix turning into Violette. 'There now,' said Evie. 'She must have seen you going on. Couldn't have missed it.... Whatever will she think?' 'She won't think anything,' said Basil Doye. 'Alix is a nice person, and minds her own business.' 'I believe it's her you're in love with really,' said Evie, teasing him. He kissed her again, and said, 'Oh, do you?' After a little more of the like conversation, which will easily be imagined, they parted. Evie went into Violette. She ran upstairs and into her dark bedroom and flung off her outdoor things. Turning, she saw Alix sitting on the edge of her bed. 'Goodness, how you startled me,' said Evie. 'Sorry,' said Alix. 'Got a toothache.' She was holding her face between her hands. Evie said, 'Oh, bad luck. Try some aspirin. Or suck a clove.... I say, Al.' 'What?' 'Did you see me and Mr. Doye just now, in the road? You did, didn't you?' 'No,' said Alix. 'Oh,' said Evie, dubious, glancing at Alix's face, that was dimly wan in the faint light from the street lamps, and twisted a little with her toothache. Pity seized Evie, who was kind. 'I say, kiddie, do go to bed. What's the use of coming down with a face-ache? You'd be much better tucked up snug, with a clove poultice.' 'No,' said Alix, uncertainly, and stood up. 'It's better now. I've put on cocaine.... Where are my shoes?... Of course I saw you and Basil in the road.... Did you have a jolly afternoon?' Evie knew that way of Alix's, of going back upon her lies; that was where Alix as a liar differed from herself; you only had to wait. 'Yes, it was a lark,' said Evie carelessly. 'Mr. Doye's priceless, isn't he? Doesn't mind what he says. Nor what he does, either. He makes me shriek, he's so comic. You should have heard him go on at tea. We went to the rink, you know, and had tea there. He's so silly.' Evie laughed her attractive, gurgling laugh. They went down to supper. <h4>2</h4> Sometimes Basil and Evie lunched together. By habit they lunched in different shops and had different things to eat. Evie liked pea-soup, or a poached egg, bread and honey, a large cup of coffee with milk, and what she and the tea-shop young ladies called fancies. Basil didn't. When they lunched together they both had the things Basil liked, except in coffee. 'Did you tell him two noirs?' Evie would say. 'Rubbish, you know I always have lait.' 'A corrupt taste. One café au lait, waiter. You like the most ridiculous things, you know; you might be eight. You aren't grown-up enough yet for black coffee, or smoking, or liqueurs. You must meet my mother; you'd learn a lot from her.' 'Oh well, I'm happy in my own way.... As for smoking, I think it's jolly bad for people's nerves, if you ask me. Alix smokes an awful lot, and her nerves are like fiddle-strings. I don't go so far,' Evie said judicially, 'as to say I don't think it's good form for girls. That's what mother thinks, only of course she's old-fashioned, very. So is Kate. But after all, there is a difference between men and girls, in the things they should do; I think there's a difference, don't you?' 'Oh, thank goodness, yes,' said Basil, fervently, not having always thought so. 'And I don't know, but I sometimes think if girls can't fight for their country, they shouldn't smoke.' 'Oh, I see. A reward for valour, you think it should be. That would be rather hard, since the red-tape rules of our army don't allow them to fight. If they might, I've no doubt plenty would.' Evie laughed at him. 'A girl would hate it. She'd be hopeless.' 'Plenty of men hate it and are hopeless, if you come to that.' 'Oh, it's not the same,' asserted Evie. 'A girl couldn't.' She added, after a moment, sympathetically curious, 'Do you hate it much?' 'Oh, much,' Basil deprecated the adverb. 'It's quite interesting in some ways, you know,' he added. 'And at moments even exciting. Though mostly a bit of a bore, of course, and sometimes pretty vile. But, anyhow, seldom without its humours, which is the main thing. Oh, it's frightfully funny in parts.' 'Anyhow,' Evie explained for him, 'of course you're glad to be doing your bit.' He laughed at that. 'You've been reading magazine stories. That's what the gallant young fellows say, isn't it?... Look here, bother the war. I want to talk about better things. Will you meet me after you get off this evening? I want a good long time with you, and leisure. These scraps are idiotic.' Evie looked doubtful. 'You and me by ourselves? Or shall we get any one else?' 'Any one else? What for? Spoil everything.' 'Oh, I don't mind either way. Only mother's rather particular in some ways, you know, and she ... well, if you want to know, she thinks I go out with you alone rather a lot. It's all rubbish, of course; as if one mightn't go out with who one likes ... but, well, you know what mother is. I told you, she's old-fashioned, a bit. And of course Kate's shocked, but I don't care a bit for Kate, she's too prim for anything.' 'We won't care a bit for any one,' suggested Basil. 'I never do. I don't believe you do really, either. If people are so particular, we must just shock them and have done. Anyhow, you don't suppose I'm going to give up seeing you.' The quickening of his tone made her draw back from the subject. Evie liked flirtation, but did not understand passion; it was not in her cool head and heart. It was the thing in Basil that made her at times, lately, shy of him in their intercourse; vaguely she realised that he might become unmanageable. She liked him to love her beauty, but she was occasionally startled by the way he loved it. She thought it was perhaps because he was an artist, or a soldier, or both. 'Well, perhaps I'll come,' she said, to soothe him. 'Where shall we go? Let's go inside something, I say, not walking in the dark like last time. Oh, it was very jolly, of course, but it's not so snug and comfy. We might do a play?... I say, it's nearly two. I must get back. I got into a row yesterday for being late—that was your fault.' They walked together to the side door of the select hat shop. 'Not really a shop,' as Evie explained sometimes. 'More of a studio, it is. It's awfully artistic, our work.' While she went upstairs, she was thinking, 'Dommage, his getting so warm sometimes. It spoils the fun.... He'll be wanting to tie me up if I'm not careful, and I'm not ready for that yet.... There are plenty of others.... I don't know.' <h4>3</h4> As it happened, she met one of the others when she left the shop at five, and he took her out to tea at the most expensive tea place in London, which was always his way with tea and other things. He was on leave from France, and had met Evie for the first time three days ago, when she was out with Doye, whom he knew. His name was Hugh Montgomery Gordon, and he was the son of Sir Victor Gordon of Ellaby Hall in Kent, Prince's Mansions in Park Lane, and Gordon's Jam Factory in Hackney Wick. He was handsome in person, graceful, clear-featured, an old lawn-tennis blue, and a young man with great possessions, who, having been told on good authority that he would find it hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven, had renounced any idea of this enterprise he might otherwise have had, and devoted himself whole-heartedly to appreciating this world. He was in a cavalry regiment, and had come through the war so far cool, unruffled, unscathed, and mentioned in despatches. He had a faculty for serenely expecting and acquiring the best, in most departments of life, though in some (such as art, literature, and social ethics) he failed through ignorance and indifference. Meeting Evie Tucker in Bond Street, and perceiving, as he had perceived before, that her beauty was in a high class of merit, he was stirred by a desire to acquire her as a companion for tea, and did so. Evie liked him; he was really more in her line than Basil Doye (artists were queer, there was no getting round that, even if they had given it up for soldiering and had lost interest in it and fingers), and she liked the place where they had tea, and liked the tea and the cakes and the music, and liked him to drive to Clapton with her in a taxi afterwards. 'You don't seem economical, do you?' she remarked, as they whirred swiftly eastward. 'I hope not,' said Hugh Montgomery Gordon, in his slow, level tones. 'I can't stand economical people.' He left her at Violette and drove back to his club, feeling satisfied with himself and her. She was certainly a find, though it was a pity one had to go so far out into the wilderness to return her where she belonged. Her people were, no doubt, what his sister Myrtle would call quite imposs. <h4>4</h4> As Evie and Captain Gordon had taxied down Holborn, they had passed, and been held up for a minute near Alix, Nicholas, and West, who stood talking at the corner of Chancery Lane. 'Hugh Montgomery Gordon,' Nicholas murmured. 'Bright and beautiful as usual. Know him, Alix? Surely he doesn't visit at Violette? I can't picture it, somehow.' 'Oh, he might, for Evie's sake. Evie picks them up, you know; it's remarkable how she picks them up. They look very beautiful together, don't they? Is he nice?' 'Just as you saw. I scarcely know him more than that. He was a Hall man; my year. I believe he had a good time there. He looks as if he had a good time still. West's opinions about him are more pronounced than mine. Is he nice, West?' 'He's in the family jam,' West told Alix, as sufficient answer. 'Gordon's jam, if that means anything to you.' 'Wooden pips and sweated girls,' Alix assented, having picked up these things from her mother. 'It must be exciting: so many improvements to be made.' 'No doubt,' agreed West. 'But the Gordons won't make them. They make jam and they make money—any amount of it—but they don't make improvements that won't pay. A bad business. It will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, at least I hope it will. They've been badgered and bullied about it by social workers for years, but they don't mind.... And at the same time, of course, they've no more ideas about what to do with their money than—than Solomon had. They put it into peacocks and ivory apes. These rich people—well, I should like to have the Gordons in a dungeon and pull out their teeth one by one, as if they were Jews, till they forked out their ill-gotten gains for worthy objects.... If you ever meet Gordon, Miss Sandomir, you might tell him what I think about him. Tell him we have a meeting of the Anti-Sweating League in our parish room every Monday, and should be glad to see him there.' Nicholas wondered, though he didn't ask Alix, whether Evie was still on with Basil Doye, or whether a breach there had made a gap by which Hugh Montgomery Gordon was entering in. One thought of Evie's friendships with men in these terms; whereas Alix might drive with a different man every day without suggesting to the onlooker that one was likely to oust another. The difference was less between Evie and Alix (for Evie was of a fine and wide companionableness) than in what men required of them respectively. '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. <h4>5</h4> 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 muffled. 'Basil is like that. He doesn't mean things....' 'Oh....' Evie turned to the glass, and drew four pins out of the roll of hair behind her head, and it fell in a heavy nut-brown mass, 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 glass 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. <h4>6</h4> The cold made Alix shiver. She stiffly uncurled herself and got off the bed. She brushed her hair before the glass. 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 analysis. '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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.