“I suppose you know,” Virginia breathed suddenly into her smoke, “that I’m not to have my baby after all.”
“I don’t mean,” she explained, “that this operation affects that. It might and it mightn’t—oh, the beastly mess that women’s bodies are, and the lovely way that Swinburne wrote of them! Has a doctor ever written a great poem, I wonder, Ivor? I can’t imagine it.... Dr. David told me when I first went to see him that I’m not built the way of a child-bearing woman, and that if I ever had one it would be the kind of miracle that happens on the last page of a book. And you can’t imagine how sweetly the old man turned it into a compliment, the way he said: ‘You are the childless woman of the ages, madame.’ Oh, compliments are divine when they are quite meaningless, which may be why women like those men who are always thinking of something else. It’s almost worth while being ill to have met Dr. David....” She took a deep breath of her cigarette, then crushed it into the ash-tray by her pillow.
“Come near,” she begged him, “and I will tell you something ever so interesting.”
He sat at the side of the bed, and took her hand and played with it.
“You have made me tell you many stories,” he reminded her. “And now you tell me one....”
“Ah, but your stories have sharp endings—the way your life will end, maybe! You tell cruel stories, Ivor. I sometimes think you have a very cruel mind. And that leads me to think, I don’t know why, that you will die with a hard collar on, Ivor! But the story I’m going to tell has no ending at all—the point of my story, dear, is that it has no ending! Unless you say that a ‘dead-end’ is a proper ending....”
“I’m not going to say anything,” he said. “I am here to listen.”
“Yes, listen,” she begged him. “Years ago, when first you met me, I was running amok. Lois was, too, and so we ran amok together; and made quite a pretty little tradition of it, you remember? And every one seemed awfully pleased about it: the more we ran amok the more most people admired us and photographed us and said of us the kind of beastly things that make a woman certain she’s beautiful—except just a few severely romantic people like you, dear, who brushed us aside for the shoddy people we were. People said we were newer than any new generation had ever been before, which was quite true of some of us, but the rest of us were all the dear old generations wrapped up together and gone rotten. For, you see, Lois and I were ladies gone rotten—that’s exactly what we were, Ivor, rotten ladies. The only time Lois has ever lost her temper was when a man once called her a rotten lady. He was a nice man.... And so running amok was great fun for us, and great fun for our men too—though I do think that if the finest of them hadn’t died they would have sickened of us pretty soon; and perhaps they wouldn’t have been so eager for ‘fun’ if they hadn’t vaguely known that they weren’t long for this world—which must sound nonsense, I suppose. But perhaps they were fey, Ivor! But the few stern people who cursed us were on the wrong tack, for they said we were young fools trying to be mighty clever and thinking ourselves no end of fine people; whereas the one thing we were all very clear about in our minds was that we were nothing at all in England, that we didn’t matter one way or the other, that we didn’t represent anything in particular and had been somehow left behind in a valley or pushed on ahead into a kind of bog. Quite a nice bog it was, we thought, but still it was a bog, and we were stranded in it. Yes, it was just as though people had got together and said to us: ‘Look here, you dashing young people, push on ahead and see what it’s like out there’—and ‘out there’ we had found a bog with purple and yellow funguses all over it, and slimy pools of queer colours, and it looked so strange and lovely that we stepped right into it; and then people pointed to us, saying: ‘Just look how depraved they are! They are covered with verdigris, but they call it wet-white!’ But we weren’t all that, you know, we were just silly and rather cruel. And all that time I didn’t like what I was doing a bit. I liked it so little that I used to write letters to Kerrison about how fatuous life was, and death was, and love was, and I was, and of course he was. He understood things, you know, even though you couldn’t bear him. But somehow I went on, there seemed nothing else to do—and something shoddy and inevitable seemed to be pushing one on from behind, always and always. Rather like those poor wretches in Tchekov’s plays, you remember, who go on and on doing things in a kind of frantic boredom and despair, and talk cleverly about meaningless things.... Lois was different, she was always more decided than me; and she did a thing because she liked it and as long as she liked it, and she stopped when she was bored with it. In her heart Lois was always ambitious, she wanted to use the ‘Lady Lois’ legend as well as she could; she wanted to be ‘the famous beauty who is representative of the best artistic and intellectual qualities of the British patrician’—though there was never anything patrician about Lois except her lovely face, for her soul is an innkeeper’s soul; like those of all patricians who succeed in life, I think, for the real patrician tradition seems to be carried on in people’s hearts by those who fail, like Coriolanus—which, maybe, is at the root of snobbery, something fine at the root of something silly, a kind of spiritual respect for fine people who fail.... And so she married nice little Johnny, and now she lets Cabinet ministers and artists make love to her or get drunk and disorderly in her house so that she can influence their Work, and when she dies she will be as famous and as respected as Lady Ripon, but not nearly so nice inside.... But I went on. Or other people went on and left me behind. I don’t know. I did as I liked, and that’s a lonely business, for doing as one likes means always to be leaving one thing and going to another, it means that there are tags and ends of things and people sticking out all over one’s past life. I slopped about with such a determined face, Ivor! And all the time I felt I was going to a ‘dead-end,’ that there was a ‘dead-end’ at the end of my life. I couldn’t think round that ‘dead-end,’ my mind went to a cul-de-sac when I thought about it. And I was right, you know, for a woman of thirty-one was making for her ‘dead-end’—her ‘dead-end’ was in sight, it just was, as her horse cleared the hedge into that dark little lane by Lady Hall—and, behold! you were there, Ivor! Do you remember how gay I was at seeing you! Oh, I knew, you see, that something marvellous had happened! I knew that my ‘dead-end’ was beaten as it came—you were there, Ivor! And then I was a little sad, you remember, wondering whether you were still the same defensive and antagonistic person you had been years ago, and hoping you weren’t; for you were the man who had got in the way of my ‘dead-end,’ and I wanted you....”
And then her lover comforted Virginia, saying that there would be no “dead-end” for them now. And from some corner of his memory there leapt out Aunt Moira’s lines from a poem by Meredith, but he did not quote the lines, he just said: “We will be rapid falcons, Virginia, and we won’t be caught in any snare, but fly together to very high places. And, oddly enough, I know what I’m talking about....”
But some fantasy had come to Virginia, for suddenly she sat up in bed in almost frantic disorder.