5 of

You are browsing the full text of the article: The Return

 

 

Click here to go back to the list of articles for Issue: Volume: 1 of Coterie

 

Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 62
 
 The Return
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
RAYMOND PIERPOINT

THE RETURN
 
I HAD come back — miles — and you sent down to greet me a pale young woman (the sister of a man whom I had fought beside), who was later to ask me to dine with her at her club because she thought me interesting — and, of course, because you had told her to pity me. Intensely cold; logs piled high. The girl smoked cigarettes through a long, dark amber holder. How like her brother she was: a subversive replica — the same laugh, as she laughed when I told her of my waiting on the station, where one changed, for an hour. Cold. I was hot from the warm gold of the East, and back in the flinty coldness of this Northerly village I froze. And you sent down to greet me this young girl who searches — searches life — for firstly, a man who will be violent; secondly, for mental sensations which will excite, so that the first, when found, may be the more eluctable.

I had come miles to see you — down through that narrow valley of the sand-locked river, over the sea: that toy sea of the ancients, with artificial blueness, and lake-like stupidity of motion; and lastly, up through this land of ours during the night. And you sent down this girl — I had come back to see you — why didn’t you come down? I had, in the train, expected you in the doorway, with two hands outstretched, your twisted smile, and the oblique glance under the lowered lids of the eyes. You had greeted me once before like that, and I remember wondering which book it was which you had lately read that had given you the “tip” — I think you said Welcome. I know I wanted to kiss your hands, but that, as you had knitting under one arm, and the Times under the other, I could not lift them up to a high-enough level. This omission annoyed you, I know, but then you might, I think, have left the knitting and newspaper upstairs.
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 63
 
 The Return
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
This time you sent me down this pale-faced girl in her knitted jersey and tweed skirt, who smoked cigarettes through a long amber tube, whilst I ate my boiled eggs. How cold it was! I had been three years in the sun — the sun tumultuously splendid, naked, flaunting powerfully its heat, unashamedly claiming surrender from the earth.

There was a new butler, too — no longer the quaint, sly man who leered with greasiness which evoked immediately scullerysinks and the swilling of pans. As he collected my clothes for brushing, he had been used to talk out of the corner of his mouth; you often wondered how I knew so much. The new man was your husband’s man; this was apparent, even more so when, later, you told me he was a perfect fool.

About mid-day you came downstairs from your room: on the way down you knew that I was waiting for you in the large hall by the fire, and you thought of what to say first, and flickerings from the biographies of the great tumbled through your mind as you searched for a formula of suitable greeting. Atop of these thoughts for me, you also thought that you would not think of m6 at all, that you were coming downstairs as you ever did, and that you were going through the normal process of meeting a guest.

When you reached me and held out your hand I saw that the lapse of time had left you unchanged, practically untouched. Perhaps a little reserved (yes, you were that), but the grin was the same, as was also the oblique look. This time I could see that obeisance over the proffered hand was not expected. We were not to get on any further with one another than we had ever been. At once our attitudes were struck, you with that slight lean towards me, I with a stiff spine and head tilted back. You once told me that you could trust yourself to travel round the world with me.

You sat down on the fire-seat and I too. You asked me what I was doing at “home.” I very nearly told you the truth, almost told you that it was because you had written to me saying, that if I didn’t hurry home I should be forgotten. I
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 64
 
 The Return
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
would have made you see that wild sun, brazenly battening the decent stiffness out of the earth, and your words on the paper, written in a hurry, forgotten with the dropping of them into the house post-box. Miles of land by train, and that sea by boat. One sentence —

“You should have stayed over the winter,” you said within the first minutes of our reunion. “This climate.”

This was after I had said that I had been sent home.

After luncheon we again sat over the fire. Your husband had loomed and gone off with the pale girl into the wood. Then you produced a boy’s poems over which you rhapsodized. They were good but you didn’t know it, you never really knew. That is why I kept my manuscripts up in my room, locked away.

“What are you going to do now?” you asked. The future was indeterminate, viscous, mutable. One sentence and a packet of well-told lies had landed me beside your fire. There was no future — a blue haze of shadowy hopes and unresolved desires cannot be called a future.

But I said that I should go back to the sun, the sand, the sphinx. You said that you were sure it would be better so.

Then you suddenly told me the size of the pale girl’s income. I decided that it was not enough — enough for what, I was not quite sure about.

I walked through the wild air, towards evening, under a rainwashed sky, clouds flying, the bare boughs of the stark trees moaned their keen sadness, the road, full of puddles of grey glassiness, wound away for miles, climbing the countryside. Grey birds took my thoughts with them, flying. I wanted to write a poem about friends, the longed-for friends, the friends to whom one could be really true, to whom one would be a round not a flat, before whom one would stand nude, without gesture. Flocks of crows speckled the sky, — burnt paper fluttering past a white silk screen.

Of course you meant that sentence when you wrote it in your letter to me, it had been pleasant for once to sprawl a heart
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 65
 
 The Return
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
across a sheet of paper. Afterwards you had forgotten — fluctuating modality. The sea running out over a long beach of wet sand, the sea a million little receding waves quarrelling … I ought to have known. After all, it was mostly nausea which drove me to travel those miles home; but it was the sentence in your letter which created the awareness of the nausea. Blown sea spume before a gale. So I had lied to get to you, to sit over a fire and read another man’s poems. I wanted to say that it was the sentence that sat me by your fireplace. But it would have flattered you too much, and you would so have swallowed it. Sea that can engulf a thousand ships without alteration of level.

When I returned from my walk Lady Decima had arrived. A black bulk topped with white hair, a snow-capped hill. Loquacious, painted, she asked me what I was doing. The lie piled up.

Over the dinner-table it grew larger. I sat on your right: you were at one end of the table with the husband the other. Next to me was the French governess who had lost her lover during the war, and she had therefore become a victim of cerebral onanism. On the right hand of your spouse sat Lady Decima, and on his left hand the pale girl with the named income. On your left sat your daughter, to whom you seldom gave a kind word, but were always perfectly reasonable.

We drank champagne, Lady Decima and I, the rest of you cider. As the courses followed one another she became the “life and soul of the party.” She told endless tales, mostly witty …

How I wish I had got drunk and then had wept in your lap as we sat over coffee in the library. The others were listening to the pale girl playing Debussy, cool coloured discords strayed in through the open door, and you knitted and smiled.

Your husband and I were left alone for about a quarter of an hour, just after you had all gone to bed, diffident one of the other, staccato phrases, pusillanimity — he told me a Rabelaisian tale, at your request, about a secret agent. The lie grew.
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 66
 
 The Return
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
At the end of my visit we were to go to London together, you and I; you were passing through on your way to somewhere; would I mind if we travelled together, — as your husband was remaining behind to shoot.

A wire was sent to some person in Town to meet us on our arrival at the terminus.

He was there on our reaching King’s Cross.

In the cab, on the way to my rooms, where you were dropping me, this man who had met us came out of the field of memory to me. We three had formed a trio before, at some time previous to my going East — he was better-looking now, trimmed, tittivated. We three had travelled in a railway carriage together, and you two had shared a rug. I remember that between you the flow was placid, implacably onward. He had been sure and firm. I, at that time, was not concerned — never was, until I received that sentence.

Now, there he was. He was living in your Town house. This I had learned earlier, only his name had not imaged a human being to me. Now — the lie flamed, spluttered — died. Bleak towers of granite closed their ranks, forming a solid phalanx.

A few days later you wrote asking me to assure you that you had not failed me. This assurance I gave you, swiftly. It was then that the pale girl asked me out to dine with her.