The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [124]
"Though you are able to eat," said Lilian, propping her elbows on the marble-topped table and pulling off her gloves by the finger tips (Lilian never uncovered any part of her person without a degree of consciousness: there was a little drama when she untied a scarf or took off her hat), "though you are able to eat, I should not try anything rich." She caught a waitress's eye and ordered what she thought right. "Look what a far-off table I got," she said. "You need not be afraid of saying anything now. I say, why don't you take off your hat, instead of keeping on pushing it back?"
"Oh Lilian, I haven't really got much to tell you, you know."
"Don't be so humble, my dear; you told me there was a plot."
"All I meant was, they have been laughing at me."
"What made them laugh?"
"They have been telling each other."
"Do you mean Eddie, too?"
Portia only gave Lilian an on-the-run look. Obedient slowly, she took off the ingenuous little hat that Anna thought suitable for her years, and put the hat placatingly down between them. "The other day," she said, "that day we couldn't walk home together, I ran into Mr. St, Quentin Miller—I don't think I told you?—and he very nearly gave me tea in a shop."
Lilian poured out, reproachful. "It does no good," she said, "to keep on going off like that. You are only pleased you nearly had tea with St. Quentin because he is an author. But you don't love him, do you?"
"Eddie has been an author, if it comes to that."
"I don't suppose St. Quentin's half so mean as Eddie, laughing at you with your sister-in-law."
"Oh, I didn't say that! I never did!"
"Then what's the reason you're so mad with her? You said you didn't want to go home."
"She's read my diary."
"But good gracious, Portia, I never knew you ever—"
"You see, I never did tell a soul."
"You are a dark horse, I must say. But then, how did she know?"
"I never did tell a soul."
"You swear you never did?"
"Well, I never did tell a single soul but Eddie..."
Lilian shrugged her shoulders, raised her eyebrows and poured more hot water into the teapot with an expression Portia dared not read.
"We-ell," she said, "well, good gracious, what more do you want? There you are—that's just what I mean, you see! Of course I call that a plot."
"I didn't mean him. I don't mean a plot like that."
"Look, eat some of that plain cake; you ought to eat if you can. Besides, I'm afraid people will look at us. You know, I don't think you're fit to go all the way down the Strand. If you didn't eat any cake, we could afford a taxi. I shall go with you, Portia: I don't mind, really. I think he ought to see you have got a friend."
"Oh, he is a friend. He is my friend all the time."
"And I shall wait, too," Lilian went on, "in case you should be too much upset."
"You are being so kind—but I'd rather go alone."
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state—or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds. With its accession to full power, feeling becomes subversive and violent: the proud part of the nature is battered down. Then, those people who flock to the scenes of accidents, who love most of all to dwell on deaths or childbirths or on the sickbed from which restraint has gone smell what is in the air and are on the spot at once, pressing close with a sort of charnel good will. You may first learn you are doomed by seeing those vultures in the sky. Yet perhaps they are not vultures; they are Elijah's ravens. They bring with them the sense that the most individual sorrow has a stupefying universality. In them, human nature makes felt its clumsy wisdom, its efficacity, its infallible ready reckoning, its low level from which there is no further to drop. Accidents become human property: only a muffish dread of living, a dread of the universal in our natures, makes us make these claims for "the privacy of grief." In na