The days passed heavily. Vance and Halo held no further communication with the Pension Britannique. Vance returned the cheque to Colonel Churley, with a note saying that the twenty pounds had been a gift to Chris, and that Chris was aware of it; and the following week a copy of Mr. Dorman’s parish bulletin was left at the pink villa, with an underscored paragraph announcing that Colonel Churley, in memory of his son, had given twenty pounds to the Church library (Purchasing Committee: the Chaplain, Lady Dayes–Dawes, Miss Plummet.) Vance was diverted at the thought of the works which would be acquired with this fund; he amused himself and Halo by drawing up a probable list, and they smiled over the brilliant additions that Chris would have made to it.
But Vance was still full of disquietude. Everything in his life seemed to have gone wrong, to have come to grief. He asked Halo, the day after Mrs. Dorman’s visit, if she would not like to leave Oubli; but she said with a smile that she didn’t see why they should alter their plans to suit the Pension Britannique. They had taken the villa for a year, and she wanted him to have a taste of the summer life, the boating and bathing, the long hot days on the sands. “There’ll be nobody to be scandalized then — the Pension Britannique closes in summer. If you suppose I mind what those poor women say,” she added carelessly; and he understood that nothing could be more distasteful to her than to seem aware that she was the subject of gossip and criticism.
Vance himself had no feelings of the sort. He resented furiously any slight to Halo, but saw no reason for appearing to ignore such slights. He supposed it was what he called the “Tarrant pride” in her; the attitude of all her clan; the same which had helped Tarrant to stiffen himself against the moral torture of his talk with Vance, and affect indifference when every nerve was writhing. It all seemed an obsolete superstition, as dead as duelling; yet there were moments when Vance admired the stoicism. He could think of girls — straight, loyal, decent girls — who, if they loved a man, and lived with him, would have gloried in the fact, and laughed at social slights and strictures. But Halo suffered acutely from every slight and stricture, yet bore herself with the gayest indifference. “All those old institutions — I suppose there was something in them, a sort of scaffolding, an armour,” he thought. He felt how often his own undisciplined impulses needed the support of some principle that would not have to be thought out each time.
But if Halo did not want to leave Oubli, he did; and she was not long in divining it. There was no longer any question of his working; the manuscript lay untouched. If he were ever to finish “Colossus” he must get away — get away at once. When he had lectured Chris on the evils of idleness he had little imagined that within a few weeks he would be exemplifying them. “I told him he’d be able to work fast enough if he had to — such rot! Look at me now!” he said bitterly.
“But it’s just because of Chris that you can’t work. You’re still suffering too much.”
“A good many books have been made out of suffering.”
“Perhaps; but not out of tattered nerves. You’ve got to get away.” He was silent. “Why not go to London?” she suggested suddenly. “It’s time you saw your publishers about ‘Colossus’. Go now; it’s just what you need. You could stay with Tolby, who’s so often invited you.”
Vance felt a rush of life in his veins. London — London! He remembered the look in Chris Churley’s eyes when he had heard the magic suggestion. “I wonder if my eyes look like that to Halo,” Vance thought with a twinge of compunction; but the twinge was fleeting. London, Madrid, Constantinople — it hardly mattered which. Freedom was what they all meant — change and freedom! And how good to see old Tolby again, and drop back into the current of their endless talks. Everything connected with the idea of departure seemed suddenly easy and inviting.
“You’d really rather stay here?” he faltered.
“I’d rather,” she smiled.
In the train, on the boat, and now in Tolby’s snug smoky quarters, Vance felt the same glow of liberation. With his first step on English soil had come the sense of being at home and at ease. The feeling of sureness and authority underlying the careless confidence with which life was conducted, soothed his nerves, and put him quietly yet not unironically in his place — a strangely small one, he perceived, yet roomy and comfortable as one of Tolby’s armchairs.
Tolby lived off the King’s Road, on top of a house divided into old~fashioned flats. Attached to his studio were two bedrooms, a kitchenette and a slit of a bathroom, with a geyser which had to be managed like a neurasthenic woman. “When you get to know her it’ll be all right; she’ll get tired of trying on her tricks. She’s always a bit nervous at first,” Tolby explained. No one else in the flat was nervous. From the kitchen, at stated intervals, a broad calm woman (who removed a black bonnet with strings when she entered the flat), appeared with crisp bacon, kippered herring, cold beef and large placid puddings. To Vance the diet was ambrosial. He delighted also in the tidiness of the studio, where everything was shabby and paintless, but neat and orderly, with a handful of spring flowers on the breakfast table, a pleasant fire in the grate, and a general seemliness that reminded him of Halo. “You must be glad to get back to this from Montparnasse,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Yes; when I’ve had enough talk.”
“Isn’t there any talk in London?”
“Yes; but it’s not a sport or a career. It’s done in corners — furtively.”
“At any rate,” Vance thought, “I’m not likely to hear any of that drivel that poor Chris ran after.”
Little by little the social immensities of London began to dawn on him, its groups within groups, each, in spite of all the broad~casting and modern fluidity, so walled in by silence and indifference, and he became more and more sure that there was no risk of any communication between Tolby’s group and Sir Felix Oster’s. Among the young painters and writers who came to the studio he found himself already known, but not what Floss Delaney would have called celebrated. These young people had read his books, and were interested in them but not overwhelmed. The discovery roused his slumbering energy, and he said to himself in a burst of creative enthusiasm: “They’re dead right about what I’ve done so far; but wait till they see ‘Colossus’ — I’ll show them!”
His first days were spent in wandering about the streets, alert yet dreaming, letting the panorama of churches, museums, galleries, stream through his attentive senses. Tolby, himself hard at work, seldom joined him till the evening, and then they either supped (since dining, in Tolby’s group, was out of fashion) with other pleasant busy people, chiefly writers or painters, or went to hear old music or to see new dancing. But by the end of the first week the desire to write had once more mastered Vance, and he shut himself u............