Пользователь - WORLD'S END

V

The three ladies and a maid arrived, and Lanny was at the train to meet them and take them to the villa. He had the keys, and knew the place and showed it to them. He had lived on the Cap all his life, and could tell them about the shops and services and other practical matters. Also he knew about servants - the innumerable relatives of Leese were available and the ladies had only to choose. The most exclusive English family could hardly reject the assistance of such a polite and agreeable youth.

Mrs. Codwilliger was a tall, thin-faced lady from whom Lanny might have learned how Rosemary would look when she was forty; but he didn't. She and her sister, tall and still thinner, were the daughters of Lord Dewthorpe, and estimated themselves accordingly. But when Lanny's mother offered to call, they could not say no; and when they heard the romantic story of the painter who stayed in his studio alone, never appearing in public without a veil, their deep English instincts of self-sufficiency were touched. When Lanny offered to lend them several of his stepfather's seascapes to remedy the rather crude taste in art of the baroness, they had to admit that the habitability of their home had been increased.

Rosemary was a year older than Lanny, which meant that she was now a young lady. As it happened, she was a very grand one, belonging to a set which managed to impress other people - they "got away with it," to use the American slang. The youth was prepared to worship her at a distance. But they strolled off, and sat where they could see the moonlight flung across the water in showers of brilliant fire. There was a distant sound of music from the great hotel - all the lovely things which they remembered on the banks of the Thames.

So Lanny was moved, very timidly, to draw closer to this delightful being, and she did not seem to mind. When he gently touched her hand she did not draw it away, and presently they resumed, quite naturally and simply, the relation they had had in the old days. He put his arm about her, and after a while he kissed her, and they sat dissolved in the well-remembered bliss. But this time it did not stop at the same point.

Rosemary Codwilliger was a friend and admirer of that ardent suffragette, Miss Noggyns, who had so upset Kurt Meissner at The Reaches with the coming of the war these redoubtable ladies had dropped their agitation, but they expected to have their demands granted before the war was over; and what were they going to do with their new freedom? That they would go into Parliament, attend the universities, and move into all the professions - such things went without saying. But what would they do about love and sex and marriage? What would they do about the so-called "double standard," which permitted men to have premarital sex relations without social disgrace, but denied that privilege to women?

Obviously, there were two alternatives. Women could adopt the double standard, or they could demand that men conform to the single standard. It soon appeared that the latter was very difficult, whereas the former was easy. The subject was made more complex by the possibility that not all women were alike; what might be pleasing to some might not be to all. In magazines, pamphlets, and books of the "feminist" movement these questions were vehemently debated, and the ideas were tried out by numbers of persons, with results not always according to schedule.

Rosemary's young mind was a ferment of these theories. First of all, she had been taught, you must be frank. You couldn't be so with the old people, of course; but young people in love, or thinking of being in love, had to be honest with each other and try to understand each other; love had to be a give and take, each respecting the other's personality, and so on. The problems of sex had apparently been changed by the discovery of birth control, which Mr. Bernard Shaw called "the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century." Since you no longer needed to have babies, the question to be considered was whether love would bring happiness to the lovers.

Rosemary was blond, with features regular and a manner gentle and serene. In many ways she reminded Lanny of his mother, and perhaps that was why she had drawn him so strongly. He was a mother's boy, used to being told what to do, and Rosemary was prepared to deal with him on that basis - it was, apparently, what they all meant by "women's rights." Anyway, they sat in a remote and well-shadowed part of the garden, with arms around each other; and it seemed unavoidable that they should talk of intimate matters. Lanny told about love problems which puzzled him, and Rosemary imparted ideas which she had gathered from a weekly journal called the Freewoman.

When Lanny had listened to Kurt Meissner's expositions of German philosophy, he had attributed it all to Kurt's wonderful brain; so now he thought that Rosemary had worked out the theory of sexual equality for herself. Of course he was deeply impressed, and at first rather frightened. But after these ideas had been discussed for two or three evenings, they no longer seemed so strange; the boy who had become a man within the last year began to wonder whether all those words about freedom and happiness might possibly apply to him and his lovely friend. This had an alarming effect; a wave of excitement swept over him, and his teeth began to chatter and his hands to shake uncontrollably.

"What's the matter, Lanny?" asked the girl.

He didn't dare to answer at first, but finally he told her: "I'm afraid maybe I'm falling in love with you." It was all as if it had never happened in the world before.

"Well, why not, Lanny?" she asked, gently.

"You mean - you really wouldn't mind?"

"You know I think you are a very dear boy."

So he kissed her on the lips - the first time he had ever done that. They sat clasped together, and a clamor arose in him. He pressed her to him, and when she submitted, he began to fondle her more and more intimately. He knew then that the experience had come to him about which he had heard everybody talking, and which had been such a mystery in his thoughts.

The girl stayed his trembling hands. "You mustn't, Lanny. It wouldn't be safe." Then she whispered: "I'll have to go to the house first, and get something."

So they got up and walked. Lanny found his knees shaking, which perplexed him greatly. It must be what the French novelists call la grande passion! He waited some distance from the house while Rosemary went in - as it happened, there was company and no one paid any heed to her. Presently she came back, and they lost themselves in a secluded part of the garden, and there she taught him those things about which he had been so curious. At first his agitation was painful, but presently he was dissolved in a flood of bliss, which seemed to justify the theories of the "new women." If he was happy and she was happy, why should the vague and remote "world" of their elders concern itself with their affairs?

VI

It wasn't long before Lanny told his mother about this affair. Impossible not to, because she asked pointed questions, and it would have been hurting her feelings to evade. Beauty's reaction to the disclosure was a peculiar one. She had been what you might call a practicing feminist, but without any theories; she had had her own way about love, but always with the proper feeling that she was doing wrong. It was hard to explain, but that feeling seemed necessary; you knew it was wrong, and that made it right. But to assert that it was right was a shocking boldness. And when a girl was only seventeen!' "Was she virgin?" asked Beauty, and added with distaste: "Certainly she didn't act like it." Lanny didn't know and couldn't make inquiries.

Beauty couldn't altogether dislike Rosemary, but she never got over the idea that there was something alarming about her - a portent of a new world that Beauty didn't understand. The mother's feeling was that her dear little boy had been seduced, and that he was much too young. She took the problem to her husband, but failed to get him excited. "Nature knows a lot more about that than you do," said the painter, and went on painting.