“What good do I do them?”
“Now, Scylla, be decent!”
“I am learning behaviour from you.”
“You’re so young,
So attractive—”
“I am several years older than you.”
Philip really said that, and when Scylla giggled, the string that tied them burned through and snapped. She remembered Picus at home: under Gault. A cup in a well: in a house. Out of India: in a book out of no man’s land.
Most men steer there, and away before they have properly landed. ‘Land me where my friend and her fancy-man are waiting to bite.’ She noticed how they hunted a single line as a double technique—Lydia wanting to find out, Philip to defame. It infuriated her that she should be hurt.
Lydia was saying:
“I am awfully fond of those boys, Scylla, but they’re
“What is that?” (Don’t defend.)
“Well, you know—”
“No, I don’t. Try again.”
Lydia did:
“Why did you break up so soon? You said Felix had gone to Paris and you don’t seem to know about the others. Where’s Clarence?”
If she knew even that, she would have something to keep the old heart-break company.
Philip was saying:
“Scylla, why don’t you marry Clarence: People say he’s a beauty, and it’s time you picked up a husband—”
“She wouldn’t,” said Lydia,—“despises Clarence. But she can’t go on like this.”
“Go on like WHAT?” Philip answered her.
“You know what people say about a set with no real men in it.”
“What is a REAL MAN?”
“They don’t amount to anything, and you know it. I’ve seen the world in my little way, and that sort don’t count. I think I’ve got Lydia out of that kind of thing. We mean to make a good business of things as we find them. Can’t finnick about with white hands, old standards, and fancy words these days. Don’t mean to, do we? And we shan’t get into quite the messes we might find if you asked us down South. Perhaps that’s why you don’t. And, honestly, I don’t know if I’d let Lydia go—”
“If you mean that you’d find Ross having an affair with Nanna, you can go and look.”
Philip went on:
“You know we don’t mean that. If you’ll excuse me, but Lydia said the other day that you’re getting to think of nothing but sex—”
Insolent little cub. She had a last look at Lydia, twisting her wedding-ring.
“Of course, I am,” she said. “I know something about it. Very naturally, now. I’ve been trying to tell you. We have all separated now because (not my brother, of course) we can’t decide which one of them shall marry me, and we’ve run away to think; I can’t make up my mind. Not Ross, or Picus. But I’ve decided not to look outside our set.”
She saw the blood rising in Lydia’s face. Not a blush, a tide to the brain.
‘Now I’ve done it. I’ve lied. I’ve hurt her. Considering my present relations with Clarence—’
Lydia was saying:
“I don’t know. There is something fatal about your life, Scylla.” She noticed that it excited Philip to think of her desired.
A gulf had opened between them, on whose widening edge they shouted brutal farewells. They were telling her that her brother had given dishonoured cheques: that Picus had syphilis: Carston blackmailed: Ross was a satyr and a stunt painter. And Philip that Clarence had shewn cowardice at the front. Then his wife turned on him a look of insanity, and Scylla saw a tiny thread of blood run out of her nostril. A posy stood in Felix’s wedding-present, a bowl of flint glass. Philip dashed the water of it on her forehead, and held the sweet scented names to her nose. Lydia struggled up and the bowl was knocked out of his hands and splintered. Scylla had to force herself to laugh, and not to say: ‘It’s a camp story I told you: invented it, spite for spite.’ “I’m going,” she said.
Lydia cried: “Is that all that happened?”
Again she almost meant to say ‘No, it’s a long business. I came here to ask what you thought.’ Then was damned if she would.
She said: “What’s the good of my staying here? We shall all be back there soon. I’ll ask about the syphilis and the satyriasis. Does one put a notice in the papers about Felix’s cheques? Shall I tell Clarence to let you know how he escaped court-martial in spite of his seven wounds?”
He was struggling with the branch line of a remote english railway. He got to a place where people changed, and was in the mood to bear with the proceedings of another century.
