The Manticore

Netty was in high good humour. Dunstan Ramsay had been at Crossings, invited, I suppose, as Headmaster of a neighbouring school. He had paid Netty a good deal of attention. That was like Buggerlugs; he never overlooked anybody, and he seemed to put himself out to be gallant to women nobody else could stand. He had introduced Netty to Miss Gostling, the Headmistress of Bishop Caimcross's, and had said she was the mainstay of the Staunton household while Father had to be away on war business. Miss Gostling had been quite the lady; hadn't put on any airs. But it was a good thing that place was a school and not a hotel, because their coffee would choke a dog.

As we were going to bed, Caroline came to my room to thank me for the flowers. "I must say you did it in style," said she, "and you must have shopped around for quite a while to get yellow roses like that for five dollars. I know what these things cost; this is identical with the bunch Buggerlugs sent Ghastly Gostling, and I'll bet it didn't cost him a cent less than eight."

I was in a mood to dare much. "Who sent you the other flowers?" I asked.

"Scotland Yard suspects Tiger McGregor," she replied. "He's been lurking for a couple of months. Cheap creep! It looks like about a dollar seventy-five" – this with a glint of her pawnbroker's eye – "and he'll probably expect me to go to the Colborne dance with him on the strength of it. Maybe I will, at that… By the way, you and I are invited to tea at Judy Wolff's tomorrow. I worked that for you, so clean yourself up and do me credit."

So Buggerlugs had sent the roses and saved me from God knows what humiliation and servitude to Carol! Could he have known anything? Not possibly. He was just doing right by an old friend's daughter and having a little joke on his card. But he was a friend, whether he knew it or not. Was he more than a friend?… Damn Carol!

We went to tea with the Wolffs next day. It was not a social occasion I knew anything about, and I was in a frenzy of nerves. But the Wolff apartment was full of people, and Tiger McGregor was there and kept Caroline out of my way. I had a few words with Judy, and once she gave me a plate of sandwiches to hand around, so obviously she thought I was a trustworthy person and not just somebody who regarded her as an object of convenience. Her parents were charming and kind, and although I had experienced kindness, I was a stranger to charm, so I fell in love with all the Wolffs and Schwarzes in properly respectful degrees, and felt that I had suddenly moved into a new sort of world.

Thus began a love which fed my life and expanded my spirit for a year, before it was destroyed by an act of kindness which was in effect an act of shattering cruelty.

Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zurich to learn.

DR. VON HALLER: We must go into it a little, I think. You told her you loved her?

MYSELF: On New Year's Day. I said I would love her always, and I meant it. She said she couldn't be sure about loving me; she would not say it unless she was sure she meant it, and forever. But she would not withhold it, if ever she were sure, and meanwhile the greatest kindness I could show was not to press her.

DR. VON HALLER: And did you?

MYSELF: Yes, quite often. She was always gentle and always said the same things.

DR. VON HALLER: What was she like? Physically, I mean. Was her appearance characteristically feminine? A well-developed bosom? Was she a clean person?

MYSELF: She was dark. Complexion what is called olive, but with wonderful deep red colour in her cheeks when she blushed. Hair dark brown. Not tall, but not short. She laughed at herself about being fat, but of course she wasn't. Curvy. Those uniforms that schools like Bishop Cairncross's insisted on at that time were extraordinarily revealing. If a girl had breasts, they showed up under those middies, and some girls had positive shelves almost under their chins. And those absurd short blue skirts, showing seemingly miles of leg from ankle to thigh. It was supposed to be a modest outfit, to make them look like children, but a pretty girl dressed like that is a quaint, touching miracle. The sloppy ones and the fatties were pretty spooky, but not a girl like Judy.

DR. VON HALLER: You felt physical desire for her, then?