# After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 4

CHARLES, as he entered the Berkeley Hotel, could hear the nervous and stimulating music of a fox-trot, threaded with the sonorous note of the saxophone, teasing the ear and pleasing the feet. Clive Cary and Venetia would be moving easily over the dance floor with that smooth freedom combined with restraint that is the charm of modern dancing. There was no longer any rocking of shoulders, or superfluous movements of arms and heads to detract from the beauty of its rhythm. Charles loved to watch it. He thought it at its best intimate, yet chaste, subtle and yet uncomplicated. He never danced himself. He said he wasn't old enough to need rejuvenating. His real reasons were more complex. The thought of competing with his daughters and their young friends did not please him. Dances he loathed, and while he admitted that it might be pleasant to take an agreeable woman out to dine, alone, and to spend the whole evening dancing with her, he visualised too well the dangers to which he would be exposing himself.
He had discovered that the average attractive ​woman exacts a good deal from her male companion. She expected, he believed, to be dined expensively, danced with competently, and made love to discreetly. Charles wished to do none of these things. A kiss in a taxi was all very well for the very young. Venetia, for instance, occasionally advocated it as the correct ending to a particularly pleasant evening. It was harmless enough, of course. She knew how to keep her young men in their places. She could be as brusque and as tonic as a blast of east wind in March when she chose.
But these innocent amusements were not for Charles. He had little use for pretence, and the, to him, dubious small coin of love had no value. He knew in his heart of hearts that he must either be in love with a woman or be indifferent to her. And he took care that he should neither love nor be loved.
He had nearly, of course, been caught napping once or twice. There was Mrs. Harcourt, for instance, a tall, lovely creature with wide, soft brown eyes, like a young deer. She had captured Charles's imagination because she looked so ethereal, and because she knew a good deal about Majolica, of which he was very fond, and had some rare pieces. She possessed one great round platter that he openly coveted. He went to her house to see it and to meet her sister, who was, ​unfortunately, prevented from coming. He went again to meet a man who knew more about Majolica than any man in Europe, and again found her alone. The expert had disappointed her.
He was obliged to admit that she made these tête-à-têtes extraordinarily agreeable, but he never forgave her for the regrettable incident that followed the second one. They were at dessert when the butler came in to say that Mr. Harcourt would like to speak to Mrs. Harcourt on the telephone. She excused herself and went to it. She presently returned with a white face and the eyes of a harassed doe.
"You must go at once," she said. "My husband has to come home to get some papers, and wants me to give him lunch. He'll be here at any moment. He mustn't find you alone with me."
Charles got to his feet, bewilderment, no doubt, on his face.
"Oh, my dear," she cried, "and we were so happy!"
She flung her long thin arms about his neck. He felt her kisses.
"Go, go!" she cried, and clung to him. "You must go at once."
He put her from him, whether kissed or unkissed by him he could never afterwards remem​ber. In other respects, he retained his presence of mind.
"It's been a delightful lunch," he said clearly and firmly. "Thank you so much. I'm sorry I should have to rush off like this."
She thrust his hat and stick into his hands. There was no mistaking the genuineness of her alarm.
"My dear," she whispered, her great eyes looking tender things at him through their anxiety. The front door closed behind him. He proceeded with dignity and rage in the direction of his home. He would like to have smashed her Majolica platters over her head one by one.
She rang him up on the telephone at lengthening intervals. At last she rang him up no more. He thanked God for Mr. Harcourt.
Mrs. Chalmers was expecting him, he was told, and would he please go up. He entered the lift. He was suddenly and unpleasantly reminded of that time, twenty-two years ago, when he had gone to see Brenda at her hotel in Torquay. He wished that Caroline or Venetia or both might have come with him. Such social contacts as this seemed to him purposeless and undesirable, and to require far more effort than they were worth. But he would, of course, do what he could with the best grace possible to please Rupert Hinkson. He told himself that he would not be called ​on to make any conversational exertions. American women were famous talkers. He understood that this was due to the practice, begun at an early age, of entertaining beaux. Not one beau at a time, but several. He visualised a vivacious American girl sitting bolt upright in a chair, while arranged in a half-circle round her were half a dozen young rivals and competitors, holding their hats on their knees and delivering themselves, when given an opportunity, of admiring monosyllables.
Or didn't they do this sort of thing nowadays?
The page led him along a corridor, knocked at a door and announced: "Mr. Lester."
He entered a little room painted in green and silver. It was full of tulips. Beside a brightly-burning coal fire sat a slender, fair-haired woman dressed in black. She got up as he came in.
"How very good of you," she said, smiling.
Certainly, thought Charles, as he shook hands with her, that was a moment of clairvoyance he had had while she was speaking on the telephone. He assured her that he was perfectly charmed to have been given the opportunity, and trusted that he spoke convincingly.
"I can't account for the letter at all," she said as they sat down. "Mr. Hinkson told me he was writing to you a week or more before I left."
Charles said he thought there was a mail boat ​due the next day and that the letter would probably come by it, but that was an invention, for he knew nothing whatever about it.
"It makes no difference," he said. "I can guess what was in it perfectly well. I know what I would have written myself."
"I felt like an imposter this afternoon," she told him.
"Absurd," he protested. "Any friend of Rupert Hinkson's is my friend, I hope." He thought: "The worst of these contacts is the perfectly inane things one is obliged to say." He continued: "Rupert has been like an elder brother to me. Twenty years ago he was like a father."
Lydia said that she had found him charming.
"We met at the house of a friend in New York, and he was kind enough to take some advice from me about books. Of course, that made me his friend for life. I saw a great deal of him after that. New York bewildered him a little, I think, but he enjoyed it."
There was something daughterly in the way she spoke of him. Books and authors were clearly the chief bond between them, and Charles was relieved to discover it. He didn't want to see his old friend consoling himself with this or any other young woman. As for her, she would find a husband anywhere.
​She was entirely without that nervous animation that he looked for in her countrywomen. She spoke quietly, and was watchful of the things he said. Her alertness, he judged, was mental rather than physical. Physically, he thought, she might be a rather lazy woman. He couldn't, somehow, imagine her playing games. The slenderness of her arms and legs was unlike the delicately sinewed slenderness of Venetia, for instance. She was thoughtful; she was not an impetuous woman; he thought her neither cold nor emotional. Her Americanisms pleased his ear.
"I would have brought a daughter with me to-night," said Charles, "if one had been available. Venetia is downstairs dancing at this moment. My other daughter is enjoying herself in some more intellectual way."
"Absurd," she said, "your having grown-up daughters." She stated a fact, merely. There was no intention of making a compliment. "Mr. Hinkson says they're lovely."
Charles told her that when they were fourteen or so and were at school each would sign herself, when writing, "Your loveliest and favourite daughter, Venetia," or "Caroline," as the case might be. They weren't, he said, as amusing now as they were then. He thought fifteen a perfect age for a girl. He would like to have kept them there.
​While he talked, and he talked more than she did, he was observing Mrs. Chalmers somewhat more closely than he appeared to be. He wondered why more women couldn't remember to leave off as many things as Mrs. Chalmers left off. She seemed to leave off everything except what was correct and necessary in a prudish world. That is, she was discreetly clothed, but so simply. Her fair hair was formally waved and done low in a small knot, without ornament. Her black silk dress showed a slender and unadorned neck. She wore nothing on her arms and nothing on her hands but a wedding ring, which, he thought, looked as though it retained its lonely position with hopeless bravado in a lost or losing cause. An eloquent ring. Her pointed black slippers bore paste buckles, the only bit of glittering stuff about her. She might have dined anywhere. She might have been ten minutes over her toilet or two hours. It was impossible to tell. Only the lobes of her small ears showed under her hair. The whole effect seemed careless, yet skilful. A woman, Charles thought, to drive some women mad with envy. She wasn't beautiful, in spite of good skin and good grey eyes. Her face was shapely, tapering to a somewhat pointed chin, and being quite unprejudiced on this first evening, and an impartial critic, he thought her nose too wide at the nostrils. Her mouth, he felt certain, was ​also a trifle large, but it was a good-tempered mouth, and generous, and seemed to suit her very well.
"If Rupert sends me any more women," he said to himself, "I prefer that they should be variations on this same type."
After half an hour of conversation-making, they found themselves talking.
Lydia said, apropos of her interest in books, that she was tired to death of dipping into things. She had done nothing but dip into things all her life.
"Like so many other women," she said; she added that she had studied harmony with a view to a better understanding of music, and that she'd gone to lectures on art at the Metropolitan Museum; that she'd done a little book reviewing for a newspaper editor who had been a friend of her father's; that she had studied a little philosophy and a little logic.
"I like all the things I ought to like, and nothing well enough. I'm tired to death of that sort of thing."
"My daughter Caroline would say," observed Charles, "that you were a cultured parasite. Which I think is just what a woman ought to be. Women ought to keep out of the sweat and the scuffle, if they can. If they can't, that's another matter."
​She said: "Isn't that rather an old-fashioned point of view?"
"Good Lord, no," said Charles. "Feminism is old-fashioned, and dying out. I represent a still newer school of thought. I look forward to a return of the Victorian woman minus the sentiment and the hoops. The sort of woman who is dependent not because she can't help being dependent, but because she wants to be. Because she knows this talk about the right to work is all bosh. Right to work! Who on earth would toil in a factory or an office if they didn't have to?" He added: "But this business of making a virtue of necessity is the purest hypocrisy. I have no use for it."
She smiled at him. She recognised a conversational gauntlet when she saw it, and decided not to take it up.
"I can only claim," she said, "to have been a satisfactory housekeeper for something like twelve years. Now I come to think of it, I don't think I ever once heard my husband make a complaint. That's something to be proud of, I suppose."
"It must be a record," Charles said, "even among American husbands, who are popularly supposed, in Europe, where men still have some rights, to take everything lying down."
She laughed at that.
"It would amuse me to know," she said, "what ​you really think of American husbands over here. We hear rumours occasionally."
"I'd better not tell you," Charles answered, "till I know you better."
"Even in America," she reminded him, "which gets generalised about more than most countries, there are husbands and husbands."
"Oh, that's true, of course, but there's a type. The average American husband—I'm speaking now of people more or less like ourselves—differs very much from the average English husband. The American is trained for matrimony. He's house-broken from early youth. The Englishman isn't. The American likes his chains. The Englishman doesn't. He only endures the chains because he sees they're unavoidable. The American likes them to be as tight as possible. For the first few years, at any rate. He rattles them and says: 'Look at me; I'm properly bound and tied. Can't move hand or foot without my wife knowing it. This is the real thing. It's great.' But the Englishman consciously makes a sacrifice when he marries. He says: 'I'm a sort of slave. I don't ask for pity. I did it with my eyes open. But I love the creature.'"
"Do you talk to your daughters like this?" she asked, much amused.
"Oh, yes. I may add that I don't expect them to be influenced by anything I say. I think chil​dren nowadays are best left to their own divorces."
"How absurd of you," she said, liking him. "You may say what you like about matrimony, but I'm certain that you want your daughters to marry."
"I don't want them to marry at all," he said. "But I shall never try to prevent it. It wouldn't be the slightest use, for one thing. The conservatism of the young always surprises me. They rarely try to introduce new things of any importance. Reforms are always left to the aged. Although my daughter Caroline," he added, "may take a different course."
"Tell me about her," she said.
"No, no," Charles protested. "I've talked too much about myself. I haven't even asked you how you like London. Not that Londoners ever do ask."
"Since you have," she said, "I must confess I know it very superficially. I was here some years ago with my husband. It was a business trip, so I did a good deal of sight-seeing, alone. I didn't go anywhere to speak of, except to places of interest, and to the theatres, but I loved it all. I love it now, lonely as I am. I hadn't meant to tell you," she said, "that I was lonely."
"Why?"
"It sounds so . . . oh, so like a bid for sym​pathy. I don't mean it as that. Still, the fact remains. But it's my own fault for coming alone."
"I don't know if Venetia and Caroline will be of any use," Charles said. "Venetia models all day at the Polytechnic, and plays golf on Saturdays, and Caroline writes articles with a view to inflaming the masses. But you must come and dine one night and meet them. Any night. What about Monday?"
"Monday? I should love that. But I don't want you to feel responsible for me, just because of Mr. Hinkson."
"I have made it a lifelong rule," said Charles, "never to take on any responsibilities unless I know they're going to be agreeable ones. In that way I've avoided a great deal of inconvenience. We'll say Monday, then."
She sent for something to drink before eleven, proving that she was not ignorant of the ways of London, and Charles, in a distinctly talkative mood, drank a whisky-and-soda and gave a rough outline of the machinery of English Government, not without a certain satirical humour that she saw was natural to him. He had little reverence, she perceived, for anything. He had only likes and dislikes, and his reasons for them. He enjoyed laughing at things better than praising them, that was obvious, although he could praise, when he wished to do so, heartily enough. Ed​ward, she remembered, had never laughed at anything unless it was quite clearly intended as a joke. Existing institutions he regarded as sacred. If witch-burning had been approved of by the Government of the United States, he would have died in defence of it. Edward was, from the point of view of rulers, the perfect citizen.
Charles stayed until nearly twelve. This, he admitted to himself, was unnecessarily long, but he also admitted to himself that he had rarely met a woman in whose company it was pleasanter to stay. She had talked very little about herself, a fact he regretted, but he gathered that she had spent a dozen years or so in ordering dinners, and seeing that her husband had nothing to complain of. She didn't say so, but that was the impression he got. And yet the chances were that she was ready to marry again. Incomprehensible!
Well, suppose that she didn't marry? What would she do with herself? Charles knew very well what he would do if he were a pretty woman and a widow. He'd have no scruples whatever about keeping a dozen men dangling, just for the amusement to be got out of them. And yet, he supposed, even that got boring at times. But surely four or five years of it would be profitable and interesting. After that, perhaps, a woman might begin ordering dinners again . . .
He resisted the temptation to glance into the ​restaurant to see if Venetia were still there, and went home not displeased with his evening. Only Caroline was in, and she had gone straight up to bed, leaving a note on the hall-table.
"I've had a thrilling evening. I heard Roscoe Kelly speak. He's a perfect inspiration. I've asked a friend of mine to dinner on Monday night. I'll tell you more in the morning. Also I've got some news for you." She signed herself: "C. Lester."
If Mrs. Chalmers could be regarded as news, he would also have news for C. Lester. He took the second volume of Amiel's Diary up to bed with him, but before he had turned many pages he felt the nearness of sleep, and switched off the light. He remembered, as he did so, that he had omitted to tell Mrs. Chalmers that dinner was at eight. He'd have to ring up in the morning, or write a note. Or, better yet, one of the girls could do it.
Then it occurred to him that Sunday lay in between. She would probably find Sunday hideously dull.
"Oh, well, hang it all," he said to himself as he turned over, "I can't be expected to brighten the life of every lonely American woman in London."