第79章 THE FOURTH(6)

It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see now how pathetic.But I could not afford to succumb to her.Iwanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance....

4

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers.My first impressions of her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who said and did amusing and surprising things.When first I saw her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--andon the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree.On the intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth of memories.She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms.She is now the central fact in my life.It still seems a little incredible that that should be so.She has destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life.When Isit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which it had spread gigantic across the skies....

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice.She cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the underlings, "J.P." was in the car with us and explained her to us."One of the best workers you have," he said....

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'

house.It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black hair.Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture.And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with every one.It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father.She was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy.It seemed an opportunity too rare for them to miss.They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal and defiance.They declared she had read my books, which I thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading.Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue moon Isabel is well-behaved....!"Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a visit.Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious of his doubly-earned V.C.and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy.He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later.He interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that Ihad secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle.After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even in its winter desolation.And there the conversation suddenly picked up and became good.It had fallen to a pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension.""There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing.""You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of your predecessors," said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gathering.Margaret's blue eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke.A voice spoke out of the big arm-chair.

"We'll do things," said Isabel.