“Goodbye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my room.
“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!” That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said: “You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends.
She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving tomorrow, and therefore the disorder.
We talked.
In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk. Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to where they should exactly go.
She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair.
Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them, you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear, and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth.
Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used some words as though she had never heard anyone else using them. “Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.” But Miss Clemence Dane in Legend was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me Legend is an achievement in literature.
“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she said. “Their breath smells of … oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: The Grand Tour particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said. “Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer.
“I detest the word ‘stunt,’ ” I said.
“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her. She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,” she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called Guy and Pauline. There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly, “like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly liked was The Passionate Friends, with perhaps the last part of Tono-Bungay. “And, of course,” she said, “The Good Soldier,” Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up Joyce’s Ulysses, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.
“It’s a funny thing,” she mused. …
“What’s a funny thing?”
“Satirists. … They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?”
“Why?” I said. “But, really—”
She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about. …
“Genius,” I said, “has—”
“Of course, genius. But—”
“They are striving,” I said, “for—”
“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome, Florence. …”
