The Education of Eric Lane. Stephen McKenna

you perhaps exaggerating your potential influence on my life?" he suggested.

      Barbara went back to her sofa and helped herself to a cigarette without hurry or fear that this time it would be taken from her; she smiled for a match—and smiled again when it was given her.

      "Aren't you perhaps boasting too soon, my self-satisfied young friend? Your education's only just beginning."

      Eric lighted a cigarette and sat down beside her. He no longer insisted that, for health or propriety, she must go home at once; and in some forgotten moment he had involuntarily taken off his overcoat.

      "I wonder what you think you can teach me," he mused. "I wonder what you know, to start with."

      "I know life."

      "A considerable subject."

      "I've had considerable experience."

      The clock on the mantel-piece chimed one. Neither seemed to notice it, for Barbara was becoming autobiographical. Her story was ill-arranged and discursive, with personal characteristics of Lord Crawleigh sandwiched between her life at Government House, Ottawa, and a thwarted romance between her brother and a designing American. She flitted from her four years in India to Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, with a procession of damaging encounters with her father as stepping-stones in the narrative. (From her account it was Lord Crawleigh who sustained most of the damage.) He could never shake off a certain pro-consular manner in private life and had reduced his sons to blundering and untrustworthy aides-de-camp and his wife to a dignified but trembling squaw. Barbara alone resisted him.

      "What can he do?" she asked. "He whipped me till I was ten, but I'm too big for that now. He can't very well lock me in my room, because the servants would leave in a body. They adore me. If he'd tried to stop my allowance, I should have gone on the stage—we've settled that point once and for all with Harry Manders, half-way through the stage-door of the Hilarity. Now I've got my own money. Mind you, I adore father, and he adores me; most people adore me; but I must do what I like. You see that now; but I had to shew you, I had to break my way in here by main force."

      Eric looked up in time to catch a glint in her eyes. It was unexpected and disconcerting. He had been imagining that she was merely over-indulged; but the glint warned him that Barbara would make a bad enemy, cruel perhaps and unscrupulous certainly. The next moment she was again like a child, grown haggard with fatigue; and he gave her a slice of cake and some milk, which she accepted obediently and with a certain surprised gratitude.

      "Where d'you imagine all this is going to end?" he asked her, though the question was addressed more to himself. "You're twenty-two, you've been everywhere, seen everything, met everybody. You're utterly uncontrolled and so sated and restless that, rather than go to bed, you'll compromise yourself by sitting talking to me half the night in a bachelor flat."

      "Poor Val Arden used to talk like that. He always called me Lady Lilith, because I was older than good and evil. I'm sorry Val's dead; he was such fun. 'In six years' time—one asks oneself the question. … ' It wasn't 'rather than go to bed,' not altogether."

      "It's a nervous disease," Eric interrupted shortly.

      "Because I cried just now? I was very unhappy, Eric."

      "My dear Lady Barbara, you live in superlatives. You don't know what happiness or unhappiness means. You were badly overwrought then, so you cried and said you were miserable."

      She looked at him and raised her eyebrows without speaking.

      "It's wonderful how wrong quite clever people can be," she said at length. "I was miserable, I wanted to be kissed, I was hungry for the smallest crumb of affection. I wanted to be happy. … And you can only see me as neurotic. D'you feel you're a good judge?"

      "Of happiness?"

      Eric smiled complacently and again glanced lovingly round the room. Barbara sighed in pity and looked at her watch.

      "I seem to have come in the way rather," she interrupted.

      "The butterfly that settles on the railway track may be said, I suppose, to come in the way of a train. … I'm going to take you home now."

      "You're not sorry I came? I'm not."

      "It was worth while meeting you," he laughed.

      As Eric struggled with the sleeves of his coat, she twined her arms round his neck. The scent of carnations was now faintly blended with the deeper fragrance of the single rose behind her ear.

      "And you'd never kissed any one before," she whispered.

      It was nearly day-light when they found themselves in the street. Two special constables, striding resonantly home, looked curiously at them; but Barbara had again pulled up her shawl until it covered half her face. Piccadilly was at the mercy of scavengers with glistening black waders and pitiless hoses; otherwise they seemed to have all London to themselves.

      With a head aching from fatigue, Eric tried to reconstruct the fantastic evening. Little detached pictures jostled their unconvincing way through his brain—Lady Poynter's formal dining-room and the barren, self-conscious literary discussion; Lord Poynter's wheezing confidences about the wood port which should properly be taken as a liqueur. He saw again the bridge-table with Gaymer, neat, immaculate and repellent, calling in a high nasal voice for Barbara to rejoin them. The drive home was a blank until he was galvanized by her leaning through the window and directing the coachman to Ryder Street. Thereafter facts gave place to emotions, and the other emotions to an incredulous elation that Barbara Neave should have thrown herself at his feet. Perhaps, of course, she was only emotion-hunting. … But she had lain at his mercy. … Perhaps that, too, was an emotion to be wooed, enjoyed and recorded. Any one less artificial could at least be glad that they were passing out of each other's life, as they had come into it, without expectation or regret.

      "You'd better not come any farther," she advised him, as they reached the end of Berkeley Street. "If anybody should be awake and looking out of the window … "

      He nodded and held out his hand.

      "You have your latch-key?"

      "Yes, thanks. Good-night, Eric."

      "Good-bye, Lady Barbara."

      "Between men on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From the diary of Eric Lane.

CHAPTER TWO

       LADY BARBARA NEAVE

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      "Constantine: From seventeen to thirty-four … the years which a man should consecrate to the acquiring of political virtue … wherever he turns he is distracted, provoked, tantalised by the bare-faced presence of woman. How's he to keep a clear brain for the larger issues of life? … Women haven't morals or intellect in our sense of the words. They have other incompatible qualities quite as important, no doubt. But shut them away from public life and public exhibition. It's degrading to compete with them … it's as degrading to compete for them. … "

      Granville Barker: "The Madras House."

1

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      The latest, costliest and most ingenious mechanical device in Eric's bedroom was an electric dial and switchboard communicating with the kitchen and so constructed that, by moving a clock-hand, the corresponding dial abandoned the non-committal elusiveness of "Please call me at——" for "Please call me at 8.00 (or 9.00 or 9.30)." There was something calculatedly dissolute about the invention (which cost £17.10