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Nobody's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book One - Chapter 13 |
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_ BOOK ONE CHAPTER XIII "How this came about I don't even quite know," Tallente remarked, an hour or so later, as he laid down the menu and smiled across the corner table in the little Soho restaurant at his two companions. "I can tell you exactly," Nora declared. "You are in town for a few days only, and I want to see as much of you as I can; Susan here is deserting me at nine o'clock to go to a musical comedy; I particularly wanted a sole Georges, and I knew, if Susan and I came here alone, a person whom we neither of us like would come and share our table. Therefore, I made artless enquiries as to your engagements for the evening. When I found that you proposed to dine alone in some hidden place rather than run the risk of meeting any of your political acquaintances at the club, I went in for a little mental suggestion." "I see," he murmured. "Then my invitation wasn't a spontaneous one?" "Not at all," she agreed. "I put the idea into your head." "And now that we are here, are you going to stretch me on the rack and delve for my opinions on all sorts of subjects? is Miss Susan there going to take them down in shorthand on her cuff and you make a report to Dartrey when he comes back to-morrow?" She laughed at him from underneath her close-fitting, becoming little hat. She was biting an olive with firm white teeth. "After hours," she reassured him. "Susan and I are going to talk a little nonsense after the day's work. You may join in if you can unbend so far. We shall probably eat more than is good for us--I had a cup of coffee for lunch--and if you decide to be magnificent and offer us wine, we shall drink it and talk more nonsense than ever." He called for the wine list. "I thought we were going to discuss the effect of Grecian philosophy upon the Roman system of government." She shook her head. "You're a long way out," she declared, "Our conversation will skirt the edges of many subjects. We shall speak of the Russian Ballet, Susan and I will exchange a few whispered confidences about our admirers, we shall discuss even one who comes in and goes out, with subtle references to their clothes and morals, and when you and I are left alone we may even indulge in the wholesome, sentimental exercise of a little flirtation." "There you have me," he confessed. "I know a little about everything else you have mentioned." "A very good opening." she approved. "Keep it till Susan has gone and then propose yourself as a disciple. There is only one drawback about this place," she went on, nodding curtly across the room to Miller. "So many of our own people come here. Mr. Miller must be pleased to see us together." "Why?" Tallente asked. "Is he an admirer?" Nora's face was almost ludicrously expressive. "He would like to he," she admitted, "but, thick-skinned though he is, I have managed to make him understand pretty well how I feel about him. You'll find him a thorn in your side," she went on reflectively. "You see, if our party has a fault, it is in a certain lack of system. We have only a titular chief and no real leader. Miller thinks that post is his by predestination. Your coming is beginning to worry him already. It was entirely on your account he paid me that visit this afternoon." "To be perfectly frank with you," Tallente sighed, "I should find Miller a loathsome coadjutor." "There are drawbacks to everything in life," Nora replied. "Long before Miller has become anything except a nuisance to you, you will have realised that the only political party worth considering, during the next fifty years, at any rate, will be the Democrats. After that, I shouldn't be at all surprised if the aristocrats didn't engineer a revolution, especially if we disenfranchise them.--Susan, you have a new hat on. Tell me at once with whom you are going to Daly's?" "No one who counts," the girl declared, with a little grimace. "I am going with my brother and a very sober married friend of his." "After working hours," Nora confessed, glancing critically at the sole which had just been tendered for Tallente's examination, "the chief interest of Susan and myself, as you may have observed, lies in food and in your sex. I think we must have what some nasty German woman once called the man-hunger." "It sounds cannibalistic," Tallente rejoined. "Have I any cause for alarm?" "Not so far as I am concerned," Susan assured him. "I have really found my man, only he doesn't know it yet. I am trying to get it into his brain by mental suggestion." "You wouldn't think Susan would be so much luckier than I, would you?" Nora observed, studying her friend reflectively. "I am really much better-looking, but I think she must have more taking ways. You needn't be nervous, Mr. Tallente. You are outside the range of our ambitions. I shall have to be content with some one in a humbler walk of life." "Aren't you a little over-modest?" he asked. "You haven't told me much about the social side of this new era which you propose to inaugurate, but I imagine that intellect will be the only aristocracy." "Even then," Norah sighed, "I am lacking in confidence. To tell you the truth, I am not a great believer in my own sex. I don't see us occupying a very prominent place in the politics of the next few decades. The functions of woman were decided for her by nature and a million years of revolt will never alter them." Tallente was a little surprised. "You mean that you don't believe in woman Member of Parliament, doctors and lawyers, and that sort of thing?" "In a general way, certainly not," she replied. "Women doctors for women and children, yes! Lawyers--no! Members of Parliament--certainly not! Women were made for one thing and to do that properly should take all the energy they possess." "You are full of surprises," Tallente declared. "I expected a miracle of complexity and I find you almost primitive." She laughed. "Then considering the sort of man you are, I ought to have gone up a lot in your estimation." "There are a very few higher notches," he assured her, smiling, "than the one where you now sit enthroned." Nora glanced at her wrist watch. "Susan dear, what time do you have to join your friends?" she asked. Susan shook her head. "Nothing doing. I've got my seat. I am going when I've had my dinner comfortably. There's fried chicken coming and no considerations of friendship would induce me to hurry away from it." Nora sighed plaintively. "There is no doubt about it, women do lack the sporting instinct," she lamented. "Now if we'd both been men, and Mr. Tallente a charming woman, I should have just given you a wink, you would have muttered something clumsy about an appointment, shuffled off and finished your dinner elsewhere." "Our sex isn't capable of such sacrifices," Susan declared, leaning back to enable the waiter to fill her glass. "There's the champagne, too." The meal came to a conclusion with scarcely another serious word. Susan departed in due course, and Tallente called for his bill, a short time afterwards, with a feeling of absolute reluctance. "Shall we try and get in at a show somewhere?" he suggested. She shook her head. "Not to-night. Four nights a week I go to bed early and this is one of them. Let's escape, if we can, before Mr. Miller can make his way over here. I know he'll try and have coffee with us or something." Tallente was adroit and they left the restaurant just as Miller was rising to his feet. Nora sprang into the waiting taxi with a little laugh of triumph and drew her skirts on one side to make room for her escort. They drove slowly off along the hot and crowded street, with its long-drawn-out tangle of polyglot shops, foreign-looking restaurants and delicatessen establishments. Every one who was not feverishly busy was seated either at the open windows of the second or third floor, or out on the pavement below. The city seemed to be exuding the soaked-in heat of the long summer's day. The women who floated by were dressed in the lightest of muslins; even the plainest of them gained a new charm in their airy and butterfly-looking costumes. The men walked bareheaded, waistcoatless, fanning themselves with straw hats. Here and there, as they turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, an immaculately turned-out young man in evening dress passed along the baked pavements and dived into one of the theatres. Notwithstanding the heat, there seemed to be a sort of voluptuous atmosphere brooding over the crowded streets. The sky over Piccadilly Circus was almost violet and the luminous, unneeded lamps had a festive effect. The strain of a long day had passed. It was the pleasure-seekers alone who thronged the thoroughfares. Tallente turned and looked into the corner of the cab, to meet a soft, reflective gleam in Nora's eyes. "Isn't London wonderful!" she murmured dreamily. "On a night like this it always seems to me like a great human being whose pulses you can see heating, beating all the time." Tallente, a person very little given to self-analysis, never really understood the impulse which prompted him to lean towards her, the slightly quickening sense of excitement with which he sought for the kindness of her eyes. Suddenly he felt his fingers clasped in hers, a warm, pleasant grasp, yet which somehow or other seemed to have the effect of a barrier. "You asked me a question at dinner-time," she said, "winch I did not answer at the time. You asked me why I disliked James Miller so much." "Don't tell me unless you like," he begged. "Don't talk about that sort of person at all just now, unless you want to." "I must tell you why I dislike him so much," she insisted. "It is because he once tried to kiss me." "Was that so terrible a sin?" he asked, a little thickly. She smiled up at him with the candour of a child. "To me it was," she acknowledged, "because it was just the casual caress of a man seeking for a momentary emotion. Sometimes you have wondered--or you have looked as though you were wondering--what my ideas about men and women and the future and the marriage laws, and all that sort of thing really are. Perhaps I haven't altogether made up my mind myself, but I do know this, because it is part of myself and my life. The one desire I have is for children--sons for the State, or daughters who may bear sons. There isn't anything else which it is worth while for a woman thinking about for a moment. And yet, do you know, I never actually think of marrying. I never think about whether love is right or wrong. I simply think that no man shall ever kiss me, or hold me in his arms, unless it is the man who is sent to me for my desire, and when he comes, just whoever he may be, or whenever it may be, and whether St. George's opens its doors to us or whether we go through some tangle of words at a registry office, or whether neither of these things happens, I really do not mind. When he comes, he will give me what I want--that is just all that counts. And until he comes, I shall stay just as I have been ever since my pigtail went up and my skirts came down." She gave his hand a final little pressure, patted and released it. He felt, somehow or other, immeasurably grateful to her, flattered by her confidence, curiously exalted by her hesitating words. Speech, however, he found an impossibility. "So you see," she concluded, sitting up and speaking once more in her conversational manner, "I am not a bit modern really, am I? I am just as primitive as I can be, longing for the things all women long for and unashamed to confess my longing to any one who has the gift of understanding, any one who walks with his eyes turned towards the clouds." Their taxicab stopped outside the building in which her little flat was situated. She handed him the door key. "Please turn this for me," she begged. "I am at home every afternoon between five and seven. Come and see me whenever you can." He opened the door and she passed in, looking back at him with a little wave of the hand before she vanished lightly into the shadows. Tallente dismissed the cab and walked back towards his rooms. His light-heartedness was passing away with every step he took. The cheerful little groups of pleasure-seekers he encountered seemed like an affront to his increasing melancholy. Once more he had to reckon with this strange new feeling of loneliness which had made its disturbing entrance into his thoughts within the last few years. It was as though a certain weariness of life and its prospects had come with the temporary cessation of his day-by-day political work, and as though an unsuspected desire, terrified at the passing years, was tugging at his heartstrings in the desperate call for some tardy realisation. _ |
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