for my sister. I don’t so much want you to take care of me as I want to take care of you. I want——”
“Oh, come now,” said Peter.
“It’s true, though.”
They had turned themselves about in the window-seat, so as to secure for this surprising conversation a greater privacy from the party at the bridge-table, and were leaning out of the window. A hundred feet below Piccadilly roared and rattled, but here the clatter of it was shorn of its sharp edges; it was as if a stir of bees was swarming in some hive down there. Seen like this from above, passengers and vehicles alike were but crawling dots and blots; everything, from the swiftest motor down to the laziest loiterer, seemed to be drowsily and soundlessly sauntering. Often had Peter and Nellie leaned out here looking on the traffic at the base of the cliff, capturing for themselves a certain sense of isolation. Even leaning out they could see nothing of the precipitous cliff side of the house, for a couple of feet below the window a stone cornice jutted out some ten or twelve inches, and beyond the edge of that the nearest visible objects below were the tops of motor buses and the hats of the foot passengers along the pavements. So still was the air that now, when Peter flicked the ash off his cigarette, it floated down, still cohering, till it dwindled into invisibility. He followed its fall with that detached intentness which the surface mind gives to the ticking of a clock or the oscillation of some flower-head, when the whole psychic attention is focused elsewhere; and it seemed that Nellie, as far as her surface mind went, was trotting in harness with him, for though he had not hinted at what occupied his eyes, scarcely knowing it himself, she was equally intent.
“I’ve lost sight of it, Peter,” she said, breaking the silence of a whole minute.
“Of what?” he asked.
“Of your cigarette end. You were watching it too. Don’t pretend that you weren’t.”
“Well, if I was, what then?” he asked.
“Nothing particular. I only felt you were watching it—just the bond.”
He shifted himself again. Hitherto, as they leaned out, his left shoulder touched hers. Now he broke the contact.
“I think that’s about the extent of the bond,” he said. “And your marrying Philip shows precisely what sort of value you put on it. You’ve made it clearer than you know, for you’ve defined your feelings for me as being a desire to have a brother, or rather a sister to take care of. I don’t think that’s worth much. You defined it further by saying that you couldn’t tell whether you would marry me or not if I were rich, because if I were, I should be a quite different person. If the quality of the bond would be affected by that, it must be of remarkably poor quality, and you’re quite right to break it. When you began talking about the bond I thought you might be going to say something interesting, something I didn’t know, something that, when you stated it, I should recognize to be true. If that’s all your swan has got to sing it might as well have been a goose.”
Nellie’s eyebrows elevated themselves up under the loose yellow of her hair.
“Peter dear, are you quarrelling with me?” she asked.
“Yes. No. No, I’m not quarrelling. But the whole thing is such a bore. Where’s my tail, and where are the wet woods?”
She leaned her chin on her hands, that lay along the window sill.
“I wish you were in love with me,” she said.
“I’m extremely glad that I’m not,” said he. “Otherwise I suppose I should want to be Philip, or, as the madrigal says, some other ‘favoured swain.’ But for you to talk about a bond between us is the absolute limit. You want everything your own way, and expect everybody else to immolate himself, thankfully and ecstatically, on your beastly altar.”
“So do you,” murmured Nellie. “We all do.”
“I? How do you make that out?” demanded Peter.
“Because you object to my marrying Philip when you haven’t the smallest desire to have me yourself. If you knew that I should say ‘Yes,’ supposing you asked me to jilt Philip and marry you, you wouldn’t ask me to. You want me to marry nobody and not to marry me yourself. That’s not good enough, you know.”
Peter’s mouth lengthened itself into a smile, and broadened into a laugh.
“It’s a putrid business,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I take a neat header from the window and have done with it? I’m twenty-two, and already I think the whole affair is rot. And if it doesn’t amuse me now, when is it going to amuse me? It was even more amusing during the war, when one came back for a fortnight’s leave before going out to that hell again. One did grab at pleasure then, because in all probability one would be blown to bits very soon afterwards. But now that one is not going to be blown to bits very soon afterwards the whole seasoning has gone out of it. No, not quite. I want to be admired. What is love? Good Lord, what is love? As I haven’t the slightest idea, the best thing I can do is to grab at pleasures.”
“Or the worst,” suggested Nellie, rather sententiously.
“Now get off the high horse,” said Peter. “Or, rather, don’t attempt to get on it. You can’t, any more than I. Let’s be comfortable. Marry your silly Philip, and I’ll—I’ll—— Shall I take to drink? No, that wouldn’t do, for people would say I was trying to drown my despair at your marriage. I haven’t got feelings of that sort, and I should hate anybody to think that I had. I loathe being pitied, anyhow, and to be pitied for something you don’t suffer from would be intolerable. And though you will remain just the same to me after you’re married, and I shall certainly remain the same, our relations will be altered.”
Nellie let her eyes flit over him, never quite alighting. They skimmed over his crisp hair, over the handsome, smooth, soulless profile, over his shoulders, over the knee he was nursing, over the hiatus where white skin showed between his rucked-up trouser and a drooping sock. At this moment she, with the knowledge of the definite step that she had taken in life by engaging herself to Philip Beaumont, felt far older and more experienced than he. She, anyhow, could look ahead and see a placid, prosperous life in front of her, whereas Peter, a year older than she, was still as experimental as a boy. All the same, if he wanted anything, he had remarkable assiduity in the pursuit of it until he caught it, but nothing beyond the desire of the moment was to him worth bothering about. Her own prudence, her own commitment of herself she knew to be a development of to-day and yesterday, and now it seemed suddenly to have aged and consolidated her. But she had no answer for that voice crying in the wilderness “What is love?” Or was there some sort of signpost by the wayside enveloped in mist? She passed over that point.
“If it really all seems to you so putrid,” she said, “I can’t imagine why you don’t, as you say, take a header into the street. But you’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort. You would firmly resist any attempt of mine to tip you out. You like life quite passably as it is, you know, and also you do expect something more from it. In fact, I never saw anyone so thoroughly unlikely to give up living or to run any risk that could reasonably be avoided. You say it’s a putrid business, but really you find it a pleasant one.”
Peter sighed.
“Oh, yes, it will have to do,” he said. “Don’t tip me out, Nellie. But don’t, on the other hand, think that I cling so desperately to life.”
“Not desperately, but instinctively. It would be silly of anybody to throw
