‘But not the other match?’ my friend said.

‘Oh no, I married her.’ While I was trying to think what to say next, he said:

‘But wasn’t that what you wanted?’

‘Yes, but it didn’t last.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ll tell you. One day—it was the third anniversary of our wedding day—we had a celebration. It was a slap-up affair, for I’d been doing well, and when we got home, I, being a bit tiddly told her the whole story, how I had faked the fall, and all that. I thought it would amuse her, but it didn’t. She burst into tears and said, “You deceived me—I need never have married you.” I was as upset as she was. I tried to make her understand that what I did, I did for love of her. But she wouldn’t listen. She kept saying I had played a trick on her emotions. “You didn’t need me you only wanted me. You’ve never had anything the matter with you from that day to this! You’re the most self-sufficient man I know—you always fall on your feet!”

‘ “Well, I didn’t that time”, I couldn’t help saying.’

‘ “Nor this time either,” she sobbed, angrier than ever, and the next morning she left me.’

I couldn’t have said those words so calmly once; but it was three years ago.

My friend got up and walked about the room.

‘And so you lived the story,’ he said, ‘or part of it.’

‘There isn’t any more,’ I said. ‘She went off with another man—the man she’d always been fond of, I suspect—and asked me to divorce her, but I wouldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ my friend asked.

‘Oh, I dunno. I still loved her, I am still in love with her, I suppose. She might come back to me.’

‘Would you divorce her now?’ my friend said.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Not even if I asked you?’

‘If you asked me?’

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I was the other man and I wrote the story, little knowing . . . You were right about coincidences. I didn’t have to fabricate a fall: I was always down and out, until she came. Perhaps my need is greater than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney didn’t say. Without her, I should be——’

I got up. ‘I’ll think it over,’ I said, ‘I’ll think it over.’ I turned away blindly and in turning my foot caught in the fold of a rug and I went headlong. He helped me to my feet.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, quite all right,’ I gasped. ‘But take care, and if she’s anywhere about, don’t tell her that I’ve had a real fall.’

A VERY PRESENT HELP

Deirdre O’Farrell (it wasn’t her real name, though she was Irish) had been George Lambert’s mistress for three years. She would have been his wife if he had had his way; but her position with regard to husbands, past, present and to come, was dubious. ‘It’s quite impossible,’ she would say when he urged marriage on her: ‘don’t ask me why.’ He didn’t ask her; he accepted her and everything about her without question, and those elements in her make-up that were mysterious and unexplained had a particular glamour for him. Like a retriever carrying a handbag, he was proud of being the bearer of her secrets.

A younger man would have been more exacting. A more experienced man would have looked askance at Deirdre. He would have seen what there was to be seen: a very pretty face, rather chocolate-box, and eyes so blue that they seemed to create a bluish mist between them and the beholder. Through this mist her eyes shone with so much innocence that (to use a vulgarism) it wasn’t true. But to George it was true. What gave life and character to her face was a kind of determination to make good. She was, in fact, a calculating little minx, a sexual tease and sometimes a sexual cheat. Every now and then she would withhold her favours, saying, ‘Oh, no, I’m not in the mood’; or she would find some pretext for breaking an engagement at the last moment, leaving George with an evening to himself; sometimes she would even hint at other attachments which might be going to supersede his. This policy, however, she used with the utmost caution; she had almost a genius for knowing how far she could go.

During the first two years of their relationship, however, she could have gone any length and George would not have noticed. The idea that he was being made a fool of never entered his head, and wouldn’t have influenced him if it had. There was a difference of eighteen years between them; he was forty-one when they met, and she, she said, was twenty-three. He was so much in love with her that his one desire was to satisfy her every whim. Indeed, her caprices only served to make him love her more, for they gave him unlimited opportunities for self-escape, which was, for him, his natural form of self-expression. On her he threw himself away with both hands. No neophyte in love with the love of God, and resolved above all else to do His will, could have got more satisfaction from self-sacrifice than George got.

His education in love had been a late development for two reasons, one psychological, the other material. By nature he was timid with women, and, though he wasn’t aware of it, an aesthetic idealist, a connoisseur of looks. Plain women did not attract him, and pretty women whom, from some feeling of inadequacy, he associated with the fashionable beauties of the glossy papers, he felt to be utterly beyond his sphere. As well might a working-man think of going into the Ritz and ordering a cocktail, as George could think of being within arm’s length of a beautiful woman. The working-man could do it, no one would prevent him, supposing he had the money and a decent suit of clothes, but equally nothing could persuade him to. The act was not impossible, but it was impossible for him. And so with George. The nimbus of glory that surrounded a pretty woman, added to the sundering effect of class, made her to him as unattainable as is the summit of Mount Everest to the average pedestrian. George knew that other men had scaled it, but knew that he could not.

The nearest he got to his divinities was to cut their pictures out and pin them to the wall—where he gazed at them with awe and reverence, and desire, but oh! how distantly.

Otherwise, he had not had much to do with women, for the second, the material factor in his late development was lack of funds. An only child, he had never mixed much with other children. His parents, who were dead, had scraped together enough money to send him to a small public school, but not enough to leave him any. He had a black-coated job in the City, and being conscientious, over-conscientious, as well as fearful for the future, his work came first with him. Too much so, in a way; for his preoccupation with doing it well made him miss opportunities for advancement which other men, with a keener eye to their own interests, and a wider range of vision, would certainly have seized.

So the legacy, the very substantial legacy from a distant relation which came to him at the age of thirty-nine, found him totally unprepared, socially, emotionally and mentally. Morally he was not so unprepared; his strong sense of obligation found immediate outlets: all sorts of people, and causes, could be benefited. The material aspect of his new position took him longer to realize: in fact he had to be told that with the money at his disposal he could buy himself a partnership in the firm—a proposal which, when it came, the firm welcomed with enthusiasm, for not only were they glad to have the money, they were glad to have him too, a modest, loyal, trust-worthy, hard-working man who had given them good service and no trouble. It could be truly said that no one grudged him his good fortune or the privileges that went with it—one of which was much more leisure, and another a widening range of social contacts.

It was not surprising that he found himself accepted in circles hitherto unknown to him. He was well-mannered, passably good-looking and undeniably eligible; and if he could not always tune in to the wavelength of the people he was with, didn’t quite speak their language or understand its nuances, these social shortcomings were readily forgiven him; indeed they were rather welcome than otherwise, for they made him into a kind of pet, a well-meaning animal that has not quite been trained. Several women, one of whom had incidentally been his pin-up girl, undertook to train him and were tireless in trying to raise him in his own esteem. In this they were not altogether disinterested; for they realized that unless a man had a fairly good opinion of himself, he could not be what they would have him be. But the harder they tried, the more deeply they involved him in their silken webs, the more they increased his sense of obligation and apartness. What could he do in return for all this enveloping kindness? Little presents he gave them, flowers and trinkets, presents which were sometimes misunderstood; but rapturously as these tokens were received, they left him with a haunting sense of falling short. They were not enough! They were not enough! Mrs. de Sole, for instance, ‘Délice’ to her friends; after an evening in her drawing-room, with all its amenities of relaxation, conversation, and near-love, he felt he ought to carry her heavy luggage for her, for miles and miles and miles.