PART I
A CALL
I
IT was once said of Mr. Robert Grimshaw: “That chap is like a seal”—and the simile was a singularly just one. He was like a seal who is thrusting his head and shoulders out of the water, and, with large, dark eyes and sensitive nostrils, is on the watch. All that could be known of him seemed to be known; all that could be known of the rest of the world he moved in he seemed to know. He carried about with him usually, in a crook of his arm, a polished, light brown dachshund that had very large feet, and eyes as large, as brown, and as luminous, as those of his master. Upon the occasion of Pauline Lucas’s marriage to Dudley Leicester the dog was not upon his arm, but he carried it into the drawing-rooms of the many ladies who welcomed him to afternoon tea. Apparently it had no attractions save its clear and beautiful colour, its excellent if very grotesque shape, and its complete docility. He called upon a lady at tea-time, and, with the same motion that let him down into his chair, he would set the dog upon the floor between his legs. There it would remain, as motionless and as erect as a fire-dog, until it was offered a piece of buttered tea-cake, which it would accept, or until its master gave it a minute and hardly audible permission to rove about. Then it would rove. The grotesque, large-little feet paddled set wide upon the carpet, the long ears flapped to the ground. But, above all, the pointed and sensitive nose would investigate with a minute attention, but with an infinite gentleness, every object within its reach in the room, from the line of the skirting-board to the legs of the piano and the flounced skirts of the ladies sitting near the tea-tables. Robert Grimshaw would observe these investigations with an indulgent approval; and, indeed, someone else once said—and perhaps with more justness—that Mr. Grimshaw resembled most nearly his own dog Peter.
But upon the occasion of Pauline Lucas’s marriage to Dudley Leicester, in the rustle of laces, the brushing sound of feet upon the cocoa-nut matting, to the strains of the organ, and the “honk” of automobiles that, arriving, set down perpetually new arrivals, the dog Peter pursued no investigations. Neither, indeed, did Mr. Grimshaw, for he was upon ground absolutely familiar. He was heard to be asked and to answer: “WheredidCora Strangeways get her dresses made?” with the words: “Oh, she gets them at Madame Serafine’s, in Sloane Street. I waited outside once in her brougham for nearly two hours.”
And to ladies who asked for information as to the bride’s antecedents, he would answer patiently and gently (it was at the very beginning of the winter season, and there were present a great many people “back from” all sorts of places—from the Rhine to Caracas)——
“Oh, Pauline’s folk are the very best sort of people in the world. Her mother was army, her father navy—well, you all know the Lucases of Laughton, or you ought to. Yes, it’s quite true what you’ve heard, Mrs. Tressillian; Pauline was a nursery governess. What do you make of it? Her fatherwouldgo a mucker in South American water-works because he’d passed a great deal of his life on South American stations and thought he knew the country. So he joined the other Holy Innocents—the ones with wings—and Pauline had to go as a nursery governess till her mother’s people compounded with her father’s creditors.”
And to Hartley Jenx’s croaking remark that Dudley Leicester might have done himself better, Grimshaw, with his eyes upon the bride, raised and hardened his voice to say:
“Nobody in the world could have done better, my good man. If it hadn’t been Dudley, it would have been me. You’re come to the wrong shop. I know what I’m talking about. I haven’t been carting Yankees around ruins; I’ve been in the centre of things.”
Hartley Jenx, who estimated Dudley Leicester at five thousand a year and several directorates, estimated Grimshaw at a little over ten, plus what he must have saved in the six years since he had come into the Spartalide money. For it was obvious that Grimshaw, who lived in rooms off Cadogan Square and had only the smallest of bachelor shoots—that Grimshaw couldn’t spend anything like his income. And amongst the guests at the subsequent reception, Hartley Jenx—who made a living by showing Americans round the country in summer, and by managing a charitable steam-laundry in the winter—with croaking voice, might at intervals be heard exclaiming:
“MydearMrs. Van Notten, my dear Miss Schuylkill, we don’t estimate a girl’s fortune here by what she’s got, but by what she’s refused.” And to the accentuated “My’s!” of the two ladies from Poughkeepsie he added, with a singular gravity:
“The bride of the day has refused sixty thousand dollars a year!”
So that, although the illustrated papers lavishly reproduced Pauline’s pink-and-white beauty, stated that her father was the late Commodore Lucas, and her mother a daughter of Quarternion Castlemaine, and omitted the fact that she had refused twelve thousand a year to many seven and a few directorates, there were very few of those whom Grimshaw desired to have the knowledge that did not know this his tragedy.
On the steps of the church, Robert Grimshaw was greeted by his cousin, Ellida Langham, whose heavily patterned black veil, drooping hat of black fur, and long coat all black with the wide black sleeves, enhanced the darkness of her coal-black eyes, the cherry colour of her cheeks, and the rich red of her large lips. Holding out her black-gloved hand with an odd little gesture, as if at the same time she were withdrawing it, she uttered the words:
“Have you heard anything of Katya?” Her head seemed to be drawn back, birdlike, into the thick furs on her neck, and her voice had in it a plaintive quality. Being one of two daughters of the late Peter Lascarides, and the wife of Paul Langham, she was accounted fortunate as owning great possessions, a very attached husband, and sound health. The plaintive tone in her voice was set down to the fact that her little daughter of six was said to be mentally afflicted, and her sister Katya to have behaved in the strangest possible manner. Indeed, Mr. Hartley Jenx was accustomed to assure his American friends that Katya Lascarides had been sent abroad under restraint, though her friends gave it out that she was in Philadelphia working at a nerve-cure place.
“She is still in Philadelphia,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “but I haven’t heard from her.”
Ellida Langham shivered a little in her furs.
“These November weddings always make me think of Katya and you,” she said; “it was to have been done for you in November, too. I don’t think you have forgotten.”
“I’m going to walk in the Park for ten minutes,” Grimshaw replied. “Peter’s in the shop. Come too.”
She hooked herself on to his arm to be conducted to her coupé at the end of a strip of red carpet, and in less than two minutes they were dropped on the pavement beside the little cigar-shop that is set, as it were, into the railings of the Park. Here Peter the dachshund, sitting patiently on the spot where his master had left him, beside the doormat, greeted Robert Grimshaw with one tiny whimper and a bow of joy; and then, his nose a hair’s-breadth from Robert Grimshaw’s heel, he paddled after them into the Park.
It was very grey, leafless, and deserted. The long rows of chairs stretched out untenanted, and the long perspective of the soft-going Ladies’ Mile had no single rider. They walked very slowly, and spoke in low tones.
“I almost wish,” Ellida Langham said, “that you had taken Katya’s offer. What could have been said worse of her than they say now?”
“What do you say of her as it is?” Robert Grimshaw answered.
Mrs. Langham drooped in discouragement.
“That she is engaged in good works. But in Philadelphia! Who believes in good works in Philadelphia? Besides, she’s acting as a nurse—for payment. That isn’t good works, and it’s disagreeable to lie even about one’s sister.”
“Whatever Katya did,” Robert Grimshaw answered seriously, “she would be engaged in good works. You might pay her a king’s salary, and she’d still do more than she was paid for. That’s what it is to do good works.”
“But if you had taken her on her own terms ...”—Mrs. Langham seemed as if she were pleading with hint—“don’t you think that one day she or you will give in?”
“I think she never will, and she may be right,” he answered. “I think I never shall, and I know I am.”
“But if no one ever knew,” she said “wouldn’t it be the same thing as the other thing?”
“Ellida, dear,” he answered gravely, “wouldn’tthatmean a great deal more lying for you—about your sister?”
“But wouldn’t it be much better worth lying about?” she appealed to him. “You are such a dear, she’s such a dear, and I could cry; I want you to come together so much!”
“I don’t think I shall ever give in,” he answered. And then, seeing a real moisture of tears in the eyes that were turned towards him, he said:
“I might, but not till I grow much more tired—oh,muchmore tired!—than I am.”
And then he added, as briskly as he could, for he spoke habitually in low tones, “I am coming in to supper to-night, tell Paul. How’s Kitty?”
They were turning across the soft going, down towards where Mrs. Langham’s motor was waiting for her beside the door of the French Embassy.
“Oh, Doctor Tressider says there’s nothing to be fundamentally anxious about. He says that there are many children of six who are healthy enough and can’t speak. I don’t exactly know how to put it, but he says—well, you might call it a form of obstinacy.”
Robert Grimshaw said “Ah!”
“Oh, I know you think,” his cousin commented, “that that runs in the family. At any rate, there’s Kitty as lively as a lark and perfectly sound physically, and she won’t speak.”
“And there’s Katya,” Mr. Grimshaw said, “as lively as a thoroughbred, and as sound as a roach, and a great deal better than any angel—and she won’t marry.”
Again Mrs. Langham was silent for a moment or two, then she added:
“There was mother, too. I suppose that was a form of obstinacy. You remember she alwaysusedto say that she would imitate poor mother to the death. Why—mother used to dress ten years before her age so that Katya should not look like a lady of fifty. What a couple of angels they were, weren’t they?”
“You haven’t heard”—Mr. Grimshaw continued his musings—“you haven’t heard from your mother’s people that there was any obstacle?”
“None in the world,” she answered. “There couldn’t have been. We’ve made all the inquiries that were possible. Why, my father’s private bank-books for years and years back exist to this day, and there’s no payment in them that can’t be traced. There would have been mysterious cheques if there were anything of the sort, but there’s nothing, nothing. And mother—well, you know the Greek system of dealing with girls—she was shut up in a harem till she—till she came out here to father. No, it’s inexplicable.”
“Well, if Kitty’s obstinatenotto imitate people,” Grimshaw commented, “you can only say that Katya’s obstinacy takes the form of imitation.”
Mrs. Langham gave vent to a little sort of wail.
“You aren’t going back on Katya?” she said. “It isn’t true, is it, that there’s another?”
“I don’t know whether it’s true or not true,” Grimshaw said, “but you can take it that to-day’s ceremony has hit me a little hard. Katya is always first, but think of that dear little woman tied to the sort of obtuse hypochondriac that Dudley Leicester is!”
“Oh, but there’s nothing in Pauline Lucas,” Mrs. Langham objected, “and I shouldn’t say Dudley was a hypochondriac. He looks the picture of health.”
“Ah, you don’t know Dudley Leicester as I do,” Grimshaw said. “I’ve been his best friend for years.”
“I know you’ve been very good to him,” Ellida Langham answered.
“I know I have,” Grimshaw replied, as nearly as possible grimly. “And haven’t I now given him what was dearest and best to me?”
“But Katya?” Mrs. Langham said.
“One wants Katya,” Grimshaw said—“one wants Katya. She is vigour, she is life, she is action, she is companionship. One wants her, if you like, because she is chivalry itself, and so she’s obstinate; but, if one can’t have Katya, one wants....”
He paused and looked at the dachshund that, when he paused, paused and looked back at him.
“That’s what one wants,” he continued. “One wants tenderness, fidelity, pretty grace, quaintness, and, above all, worship. Katya could give me companionship; but wouldn’t Pauline have given me worship?”
“But still ...” Mrs. Langham commenced.
“Oh, I know,” Grimshaw interrupted, “there’s nothinginher, but still....”
“But still,” Mrs. Langham mocked him, “dear old Toto, youdowant to talk about her. Let’s take another little turn; I can give you five minutes more.”
She beckoned to her car to come in at the gates and follow them along the side-walk past the tall barracks in the direction of Kensington.
“Yes, I dearly want to talk about Pauline,” Grimshaw said, and his cousin laughed out the words:
“Oh, you strong, silent men! Don’t you know you are called a strong, silent man? I remember how you used to talk to Katya and me about all the others before you got engaged to Katya. When I come to think of it, the others were all little doll-things like Pauline Leicester. Katya used to say: ‘There’s nothinginthem!’ She used to say it in private to me. It tore her heart to shreds, you know. I couldn’t understand how you came to turn from them to her, but I know you did and I know you do....
“You haven’t changed a bit, Toto,” she began again. “You play at being serious and reserved and mysterious and full of knowledge, but you’re still the kiddie in knickerbockers who used to have his pockets full of chocolate creams for the gardener’s mite of a daughter. I remember I used to see you watching her skip. You’d stand for minutes at a time and just devour her with your eyes—a little tot of a thing. And then you’d throw her the chocolate creams out of the window. You were twelve and I was nine and Katya was seven and the gardener’s daughter was six, but what an odd boy I used to think you!”
“That’s precisely it,” Grimshaw said. “That’s what I want in Pauline. I don’t want to touch her. I want to watch her going through the lancers with that little mouth just open, and the little hand just holding out her skirt, and a little, tender expression of joy. Don’t you see—just to watch her? She’s a small, light bird. I want to have her in a cage, to chirrup over her, to whistle to her, to give her grapes, and to have her peep up at me and worship me. No, I haven’t changed. When I was that boy it didn’t occur to me that I could have Katya; we were like brother and sister, so I wanted to watch little Millie Neil. Now I know I might have Katya and I can’t, so I want to watch Pauline Leicester. I want to; I want to; I want to.”
His tones were perfectly level and tranquil; he used no gesture; his eyes remained upon the sand of the rolled side-walk, but his absolutely monotonous voice expressed a longing so deep, and so deep a hunger that Ellida Langham said:
“Oh, come, cheer up, old Toto; you’ll be able to watch her as much as you want. I suppose you will dine with the Leicesters the three times a week that you don’t dine with us, and have tea with Pauline every day, won’t you?”
“But they’re going out of England for a month,” Grimshaw said, “and I’m due to start for Athens the day before they come back.”
“Oh, poor boy!” Ellida commiserated him. “You won’t be able to watch your bird in Leicester’s cage for a whole ten weeks. I believe you’d like to cry over her.”
“I should like to cry over her,” Robert Grimshaw said, with perfect gravity. “I should like to kneel down and put my face in her lap and cry, and cry, and cry.”
“As you used to do with me years ago,” she said.
“As I used to do with you,” he answered.
“Poor—old—Tot,” she said very slowly, and he kissed her on her veil over her cheek, whilst he handed her into her coupé. She waved her black-gloved fingers at him out of the passing window, and, his hands behind his back, his shoulders square and his face serious, tranquil, and expressing no emotion, he slowly continued his stroll towards the Albert Memorial. He paused, indeed, to watch four sparrows hopping delicately on their mysterious errands, their heads erect, through the grimy and long grass between the Park railings and the path. It appeared to him that they were going ironically through a set of lancers, and the smallest of them, a paler coloured hen, might have been Pauline Leicester.
II
THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert Grimshaw and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep just before her time to pour out tea.
“What is the matter?” she asked; “you know youaren’tlooking well, Toto.”
Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that he allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short beard, might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back upon his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at a Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however, were singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no one exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed rather “close,” because he severely limited his expenditure. He commanded a cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called Jervis, who was the husband of his cook, and he kept them upon board wages. His habits were of an extreme regularity, and he had never been known to raise his voice. He was rather an adept with the fencing-sword, and save for his engagement to Katya Lascarides and its rupture he had had no appreciable history. And, indeed, Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly forgotten in Mayfair that he was beginning to pass for a confirmed bachelor. His conduct with regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had expected him to marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate that he had achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink from the disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life. Himself the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides, he had lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he had been brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and in the daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively late—perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his cousins as his sisters—he had become engaged to his cousin Katya, very much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs. Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have taken place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off, for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert Grimshaw had become his uncle’s sole heir. But he was understood to have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his uncle’s great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood, but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs. Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church, whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture, there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent; and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency, for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had been one of Miss Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race—she had been before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.—that not only had Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a little out of the picture—at any rate, of the picture of the slim, dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark eyes that they remembered her to have had.
But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for this southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to receive from her cousin any of her father’s money, so that that, too, had some of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate, of her having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as her sister Ellida said, “to good works.” But whatever the cause of the quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the blow very severely—as severely as it was possible for such things to be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and western portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time, though it was understood that he had been spending several months in Athens arranging his uncle’s affairs and attending to those of the firm of Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become a director. And even when he returned to London it was to be observed that he was still very “hipped.” What was at all times most noticeable about him, to those who observed these things, was the pallor of his complexion. When he was in health, this extreme and delicate whiteness had a subcutaneous flush like the intangible colouring of a China rose. But upon his return from Athens it had, and it retained for some time, the peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly after his return he engrossed himself in the affairs of his friend Dudley Leicester, who had lately come into very large but very involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who, whatever he had, had no head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw’s fag at school, and had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and ever since. But little by little the normal flush had returned to Robert Grimshaw’s face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared to become more occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and more gentle.
It was on observing a return of the excessive and chalk-like opacity in Robert Grimshaw’s cheeks that Ellida, when that afternoon he called upon her, exclaimed:
“What’s the matter? You know you aren’t looking well. One would think Peter was dead.”
“You’ve got,” he said, “to put on your things and come and see them off at the station.”
“I?” she protested. “What are they to me?”
He passed his hand over his forehead.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I’ve got to see the last of Pauline.”
Ellida said: “Oh!”
“It’s not,” he answered, “a question of what you are to them, but of what I am to you. You’re the only sister I’ve got in the world.”
Ellida was walking up to him to put her hands upon his shoulders.
“Yes, dear,” she was beginning, with the note of tenderness in her voice.
“And,” he interrupted her, “you’re the only sister that Katya’s got in the world. If I’ve arranged this marriage it’s for your sake, to keep myself for Katya.”
She gave a little indrawing of the breath:
“Oh, Toto dear,” she said painfully, “is it as bad as that?”
“It’s as bad as that—it’s worse,” he answered.
“Then don’t go,” she pleaded. “Stop away. What’s the use of it?”
“I can’t,” he said numbly. “It’s no use, but I can’t stop away;” and he added in a fierce whisper: “Get your things on quickly; there’s not much time. I can’t answer for what will happen if you’re not there to safeguard Katya’s interests.”
She shivered a little back from him.
“Oh, Toto,” she said, “it’s not that I’m thinking of. It’s you, if you’re in such pain.”
“Be quick! be quick!” he insisted.
Whilst she was putting on her furs she sent in to the room the small, dark, laughing and dumb Kitty. With steps of swift delight, with an air at once jolly and elfin, the small, dark child in her white dress ran to catch hold of the lappets of her uncle’s coat, but for the first time in his life Robert Grimshaw gazed out unseeing over his niece’s head. He brushed her to one side and began to walk feverishly down the room, his white teeth gleaming with an air of fierceness through the bluish-black of his beard and moustache. But even with their haste, it was only by almost running along the platform beside the train that Ellida was able in the dusk to shake the hands of Dudley Leicester and his wife. Grimshaw himself stood behind her, his own hands behind his back. And Ellida had a vision, as slowly the train moved, of a little, death-white, childish face, of a pair of blue eyes, that gazed as if from the face of Death himself, over her shoulder. And then, whilst she fumbled with the flowers in her breast, Pauline Leicester suddenly sank down, her head falling back amongst the cushions, and at the last motion of her hand she dropped on to the platform the small bunch of violets. Ellida leaned forward with a quick and instinctive gesture of rescue.
“She’s fainted!” she exclaimed. “Oh,poorchild!”
The train glided slowly and remorselessly from the platform, and for a long time Robert Grimshaw watched it dwindling out of the shadow of the high station into the shadows of the falling November dusk, until they were all alone on the platform. And suddenly Robert Grimshaw ground the little bunch of flowers beneath his heel vindictively, his teeth showing as they bit his lower lip.
“Toto!” Ellida exclaimed in a tone of sharp terror and anguish, “why did she throw them to you? She shouldn’t have. But why do you do that?”
His voice came harshly from his throat.
“They were my flowers—my gift. She was throwing them away. Hadn’t you the sense to see that?” and his voice was cruel.
She recoiled minutely, but at his next action she came swiftly forward, her hands outstretched as if to stop him. He had picked up the violets, his lips moving silently. He touched with them each of his wrists, each of his eyes, his lips and his heart.
“Oh, don’t,” she said. “You aren’t serious—you can’t be serious!” for, as it seemed to her, semi-ironically her cousin was going through a Greek incantation that they had been told of by their old Greek nurse. “You can’twantto retain that poor little thing’s affections.”
“Serious!” Robert Grimshaw muttered.
“Oh, Robert,” she said, “what have you done it for? If she’s so frightfully in love with you, and you’re so frightfully in love with her ... and you’ve only got to look at her face to see. I never saw such misery. Isn’t it horrible to think of them steaming away together?”
Robert Grimshaw clenched his teeth firmly. “What did I do it for?” he said.
His eyes wandered over the form of a lady who passed them in earnest conversation with a porter. “That woman’s going to drop her purse out of her muff,” he said; and then he added sharply: “I didn’t know what it would mean; no, I didn’t know what it would mean. It’s the sort of thing that’s done every day, but it’s horrible.”
“It’s horrible,” Ellida repeated. “You oughtn’t to have done it. It’s true I stand for Katya, but if you wanted that child so much and she wanted you so dreadfully, wasn’t it your business to have made her happy, and yourself? If I’d known,Ishouldn’t have stood in the way, not even for Katya’s sake. She’s no claim—none that can be set against a feeling like that. She’s gone away; she’s shown no sign.”
She stopped, and then she uttered suddenly:
“Oh, Robert, you oughtn’t to have done it; no good can come of it.”
He turned upon her sharply.
“Upon my word,” he said, “you talk like an old-fashioned shopkeeper’s wife. Nothing but harm can come of it! What have we arrived at in our day and our class if we haven’t learnt to do what we want, to do what seems proper and expedient—and to take what we get for it?”
They turned and went slowly up the long platform.
“Oh, our day and our class,” Ellida said slowly. “It would be better for Pauline to be the old-fashioned wife of a small shopkeeper than what she is—if she cared for him.”
They were nearly at the barrier, and he said:
“Oh sentimentality, sentimentality! I had to do what seemed best for, us all—that was what I wanted. Now I’m taking what I get for it.”
And he relapsed into a silence that lasted until they were nearly at home. And seated beside him in her coupé, Ellida, with the little deep wisdom of the woman of the household, sat beside him in a mood of wonder, of tenderness, and of commiseration.
“And it’s always like this,” she seemed to feel in her wise, small bones. “There they are, these men of ours. We see them altogether affable, smiling, gentle, composed. And we women have to make believe to their faces and to each other that they’re towers of strength and all-wise, as they like to make out that they are. We see them taking action that they think is strong; and forcible, and masculine, and that we know is utterly mad; and we have to pretend to them and to each other that we agree in placid confidence; and then we go home, each one of us with our husbands or our brothers, and the strong masculine creature breaks down, groans and drags us after him hither and thither in his crisis, when he has to pay for his folly. And that’s life. And that’s love. And that’s the woman’s part. And that’s all there is to it.”
It is not to be imagined that Ellida did anything so unsubtle as to put these feelings of hers, even to herself, into words. They found vent only in the way her eyes, compassionate and maternal, rested on his brooding face. Indeed, the only words she uttered, either to herself or to him, were, with deep concern—he had taken off his hat to ease the pressure of the blood in his brows—as she ran her fingers gently through his hair:
“Poor old Toto!”
He remained lost in his abstraction, until they were almost at her door. Then he squared his shoulders and resumed his hat.
“Yet I’m sure I was right,” he said. “Just consider what it was up to me to do. You’ve got to think that I don’t by any means care for Katya less. I want her for myself. But I want to see to it that Pauline has a good time, and I want to see her having it.”
“How can she have it if you’ve given her Dudley Leicester when she wants you?”
“My dear child,” he answered, and he had become again calm, strong, and infinitely lofty. “Don’t you understand that’s how Society has to go on? It’s the sort of thing that’s got to happen to make us the civilized people that we are. Dudley’s the best fellow in the world: I’m sure he’s the best fellow in the world. I know everything he’s ever done and every thought he’s ever thought for the last twenty years, and everything that Pauline wants to do in this world he’ll do. She’ll make a man of him. She’ll give him a career. He’ll be her life’s work. And if you can’t have what you want, the next best thing is to have a life’s work that’s worth doing, that’s engrossing, that keeps you from thinking about what you haven’t got.”
Ellida refrained from saying that what a different thing it was, and with his air of tranquil wisdom he went on:
“We’re all—all of us, in our class and our day, doing the same thing. Every one of us really wants the moon, and we’ve got somehow to get on with just the earth, and behave ourselves. I suppose what I really want is both Katya and Pauline. That sort of thing is probably in our blood—yours and mine—and no doubt in the great days of our race I should have had both of them, but I’ve got to sacrifice physical possession of one of them to the amenities of a civilization that’s pleasant enough, and that’s taken thousands of years to bring together. We’re the children of the age and of all the ages, and if at times it’s painful, we’ve got to get over the pain somehow. This is done with. You won’t see me wince again, not ever. It’s my business in life just to wait for Katya, and to see that Pauline has a good time.”
Ellida did not say: “You mean, in fact, to keep as much as you want of both of them?” She said instead: “What’s wanted is that Katya should come back from Philadelphia to look after you. You need to be looked after by a woman, and I’m going to get her.”
“Oh yes, I need to be looked after,” he said. And he added:
“But you know, dear, you do it splendidly.”
She nodded in the very least.
“Yes,” she said, “but you need to be looked after by at least two of us, and to have the whole time of at least one. I’ve got Paul and I’ve got Kitty as well as you.” She added to herself: “Katya will be able to manage you with my hints. I don’t believe she could without, if she is anything like the passionate darling she used to be.” And she concluded out loud: “It’s Kitty that’s going to bring her back from Philadelphia. I’ve had my trump card up my sleeve for some time, but I haven’t wanted to interfere in matters with two such volcanoes as you and she really are. It seemed too much of a responsibility. And I’ve sort of felt that a little person like Pauline was the person who ought to havemarriedyou. I know it now. You ought to have married Pauline and given her a good time. Then you could have gone on waiting for Katya till the end of the chapter.”
Robert Grimshaw said “Oh!”
“But you’re in,” she shut him up, “such a hopeless pickle as it is that I don’t believe even Katya, darling as she is, could make you any worse. So that if she comes back you’d better just take her on her own terms, and make the very best of it.”
III
PAULINE LEICESTER’S mother’s cottage had only one spare bedroom. It stood in the New Forest, some seven miles from Brockenhurst, with no house nearer it than just that seven miles. And Mrs. Lucas, the mother of Pauline Leicester, suffered from angina pectoris. She was a little, pleasant woman, with the greatest tact that was ever known; she played a variety of Patiences, and she had one very attached servant. But, little and pleasant and patient and tactful, she suffered very much pain.
It was not, indeed, angina pectoris, but pneumonia that brought the Leicesters down in March.
“And, poor dear!” Pauline said to her husband, “no one knows what she has borne. And now ...”
She was sitting alone opposite Leicester in the railway carriage; she was still in furs, for March was by no means done with, and the black, grey-tipped hairs encircling her porcelain cheeks and chin, the black, grey-tipped furs crowning her brow, that was like soft and translucent china, she leaned back in the seat, and was so tiny that her feet did not touch the floor. Her brows curved out over her eyes; their lashes curved out and upwards, so that she had an expression of being a newly awakened and wondering child, and about her lips there hovered always one of those faint ghosts of smiles that are to other smiles as the faint odour of pot-pourri is to the scent of roses. Her husband called her Puff-Ball, because he said a breath of wind would scatter her like an odorous smoke, gone in a second; but she had acquired her faint smile whilst tending five very robust children when she had been a nursery governess. She was twenty-three.
“You see,” she went on, “it was always mother’s ambition—her secret ambition—to have a white pony and a basket-work open chaise. It must be a white pony and a basket-work chaise. You know, the New Forest’s the place where all Admirals go to die, and all their widows always set up these chaises, just as all the Admirals always have parrots. Not that I ever considered mother as a widow. I suppose that was because I hardly saw her at all in her weeds, and I hardly ever saw her with my father—and yet she was in such an agony of fear whenever the wind blew, or when the weather was fierce. When it blew in the Forest, it used to remind her that there might be wind at sea; when it was a dead calm, she was always convinced that that meant that there was a particularly vicious cyclone somewhere else. She always seemed most characteristic when she was sitting bolt upright, with one hand close to her heart—listening. And I don’t think she was the woman for father. He was so big and grizzled, and loud and romantic. He used to shout at her: ‘What’d a puff of wind do to a first-class cruiser? What’d it do, d’you think?’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t prouder of her than you are of me. Why, I’ve seen him take her up in his arms and hoist her towards the ceding, as if she had been a baby, and roar with laughter. But I don’t think that was very good for mother. And you know she got her first touch of heart trouble when theVictoriawas rammed. She was in Lyndhurst, and read it on the placards—Flagship sunk:Admiral and six hundred lives lost.’ She put her hand over her heart and fell over backwards. Oh! poor dear!”
Pauline looked at her husband.
“Yes, old boy,” she said, “you don’t know what we women have to suffer.”
He was like a large, pleased spaniel assaulted by a Persian kitten. He was so slow that he seemed never to get a word out; he was so happy that he never made the effort. He had promised to stand for Mid-Kent when they had been married one year, because she declared that he needed an occupation, and would be tired of her prattle. She said she could hold him a year; after that he’d have to go out of the house. And, indeed, she ran on and on, but it was pleasant enough to hear her as she thought aloud, her mind linking up topic to topic.
“Yes,” she said, “there were father’s speculations, that were as bad for her as the winds on the sea. He’d roar out: ‘I never put into anything in any one year more than three-fifths of my year’s screw. I never did, and I never will. And the wheel’s bound to turn right side up.’ But it never did, and it never would. And he had expensive tastes, and there was me to dress. And I’ve seen him sitting with his chin between his hands. So that when he died his coffin stood in an empty house—the brokers had cleared it that day. And I was at the Brigstocks’—up in the nursery.”
Dudley Leicester swore suddenly at Fate that had so misused his Puff-Ball.
“I’ve never really told you this,” Pauline said, “though I dare say you knew it.”
“I never knew it,” he said. “By God! I’d like to, ... Well, the most I knew was, I heard the Brigstocks only gave you three days for your father’s funeral, and cut it off your holidays next summer.”
“Well, I’ve got to thank them that I never really think of mother as a widow. I’m glad of that; and therewerefive children in the nursery, and only me to look after them.”
Mr. Leicester muttered beneath his breath that they were cursed hogs.
“Well, I’ve got to thank them foryou!” she said. “For if Mr. Grimshaw hadn’t come up into the nursery—if he hadn’t been so fond of children—he’d never have seen me, and so he’d never have helped mother to patch up her impossible affairs, and get her compassionate allowance, and keep out of rooms in Hampton Court that she dreaded so.You’dnever have come to Hampton Court. You’ve never been to Hampton Court in your life.”
“Ihave,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “When I was a kid I scratched a wart off my hand on the hollies in the maze; there’s the scar on the little finger. And I wish you’d call him Robert. I’ve told you so many times. It’s deuced bad form to call him Mr. Grimshaw.”
Pauline’s lower lip curved inwards.
“Anyhow, mother’s ambition to have a pony was a secret all the time.”
“She might have had fifty ponies if I’d known,” Leicester said.
“But you were engaged to Etta Stackpole all the while,” Pauline mocked him. “You know you’d have married her if she had not flirted with the boot-blacks. You’ve told me so many times! And anyhow, she didn’t want fifty ponies: she only wanted one. And, now I’m off her hands, and she’s been able to get one—there comes this....”
For Mrs. Lucas, driving out with her pony for the third time in the Forest, the pony—white, with extreme age—had fallen, and lay still, and a March storm had come sweeping up from the Solent. So that there was the pneumonia.
“And the only reason I tell you all this,” Pauline said, “is to make you very quiet and good, and careful not to knock things over, because it’s such a tiny box of a place, and you’re such a clumsy creature, and falling crockery is so bad for a weak heart. I should say it’s worse than sudden deaths or runaway marriages....”
But Dudley Leicester had no chance of breaking his mother-in-law’s china. He was fond of standing before her little mantelshelf, and, with a motion of his shoulder-blades, knocking her blue vases into the fender, and his dismal contrition then had always been almost worse for Mrs. Lucas’s nerves than the actual crash and collision. He had no chance, because the little cottage was full to overflowing. There were two nurses in attendance; there were a doctor and a specialist at the moment of the Leicesters’ arrival, and there was only one spare bedroom, and only one servant. And there was no other dwelling-place within seven miles. Dudley Leicester was left to imagine that it was the cold, calm, closely-lipped nurses in their white aprons that seemed to stand out so stiffly, to take up so much space, and with their rustlings so to fill the tiny house—that it was they who sent the quite dismal Dudley Leicester back to town. But no doubt, though she never let him suspect it, or the shadow of it, it was Pauline. With the secret consciousness that his presence, though he never went near the sick-room, was a constant torture to her mother—it was Pauline who really ejected him from the cottage, who put against the fact that he was willing to sleep on the sofa or in the loft over the white pony’s stable the other fact—that Ann, the servant, was terribly overworked already, with so many extra beds to make, meals to cook, and plates to wash up. In fact, gay and brave and pleading, Pauline put her hands on her husband’s chest and pushed him backwards out of the crowded house. And he never realized that it was she who did it.
IV
SO tall that he looked over most men’s heads, so strong that his movements must be for ever circumscribed and timid, Dudley Leicester had never in his life done anything—he had not even been in the Guards. Least of all did he ever realize personal attitudes in those around him. The minute jealousies, the very deep hatreds, and the strong passions that swelled in his particular world of deep idleness, of high feeling, and of want of occupation—in this world where, since no man had any need of anything to do, there were so many things to feel—Dudley Leicester perceived absolutely nothing, no complexities, no mixed relationships. To him a man was a man, a woman a woman; the leader in a newspaper was a series of convincing facts, of satisfying views, and of final ideals. Belonging as he did to the governing classes, Dudley Leicester had not even the one outlet for passion that is open to these highly groomed and stall-fed creatures. The tradition of the public service was in his blood. He owned a slice of his kingdom that was more than microscopic on the map. But though he had come into his great possessions at the age of twenty-seven, he made no effort whatever to put things straight, since he had more than enough to satisfy his simple needs,—to provide him with a glass bath and silver taps, to pay his subscription at his club, to give him his three cigars a day, his box at a music-hall once a week, his month on the Riviera—and to leave him a thousand or two over every year, which was the fact most worrying to his existence.
It was Robert Grimshaw who set his estates in order; who found him a young, hard steward with modern methods; who saw to it that he built additions to several Church schools, and who directed the steward to cut down the rent on overburdened farms, to raise other rents, to provide allotments, to plant heavy land with trees, and to let the shootings to real advantage. It was, indeed, Robert Grimshaw who raised Dudley Leicester’s income to figures that in other circumstances Leicester would have found intolerable. But, on the other hand, it was Robert Grimshaw who put all the surplus back into the estates, who had all the gates rehung, all the hedges replanted, all the roofs of the barns ripped and retiled, and all the cottages rebuilt. And it was Robert Grimshaw who provided him with his Pauline.
So that at thirty-two, with a wife whom already people regarded as likely to be the making of him, a model landlord, perfectly sure of a seat in the House, without a characteristic of any kind or an enemy in the world, there, gentle and exquisitely groomed, Dudley Leicester was a morning or so after his return to town. Standing in front of his mantelshelf in a not too large dining-room of Curzon Street, he surveyed his breakfast-table with an air of immense indifference, of immense solitude, and of immense want of occupation. His shoulder-blades rubbed the glass front of the clock, his hand from time to time lightly pulled his moustache, his face was empty, but with an emptiness of depression. He had nothing in the world to do. Nothing whatever!
So that turning round to take a note from the frame of the mirror behind him was with him positively an action of immense importance. He hadn’t a visit to pay to his tailor; there wouldn’t be at his club or in the Park anyone that he wanted to be talked to by. The one bright spot in his day was the P—— exercise that he would take just before lunch in his bath-room before the open window. This interested him. This really engrossed him. It engrossed him because of his docility, his instructor having told him that, unless he paid an exact attention to each motion of his hands and wrists the exercises would cause him no benefit whatever. He longed immensely for physical benefit, for he suffered from constant panics and ideas of ill-health. He remembered that he had an aunt who had been a consumptive; therefore he dreaded tuberculosis. He had read in some paper that the constant string of vehicles passing us in the streets of London so acted on the optic nerves that general paralysis was often induced. Therefore sometimes he walked along the streets with his eyes shut; he instructed his chauffeur to drive him from place to place only by way of back streets and secluded squares, and he abandoned the habit of standing in the window of his club, which overlooked Piccadilly. Because Pauline, by diverting his thoughts, diverted also these melancholy forebodings, he imagined that marriage had done him a great deal of good. The letter that he took from the mantelshelf contained an invitation from the Phyllis Trevors to dine that night at the Equator Club, and to go afterwards to the Esmeralda, the front row of whose stalls Phyllis Trevors had engaged. That matter was one for deep and earnest consideration, since Dudley Leicester had passed his last three evenings at the place of entertainment in question, and was beginning to feel himself surfeited with its particular attractions. Moreover, the Phyllis Trevors informed him that Etta Stackpole—now Lady Hudson—was to be one of the party. But, on the other hand, if he didn’t go to the Phyllis Trevors, where in the world was he to spend his evening?
Promptly upon his return to town, he had despatched letters to the various more stately houses where he and Pauline were to have dined—letters excusing himself and his wife on account of the extreme indisposition of his wife’s mother. He dreaded, in fact, to go to a dinner alone; he was always afraid of being taken ill between the soup and the fish; he suffered from an unutterable shyness; he was intolerably afraid of “making an ass of himself.” He felt safe, however, as long as Pauline had her eyes on him. But the Phyllis Trevors’ dinners were much more like what he called “a rag.” If he felt an uncontrollable impulse to do something absurd—to balance, for instance, a full glass on the top of his head or to flip drops of wine at his neighbour’s bare shoulders—nobody would be seriously perturbed. It was not necessary to do either of these things, but you might if you wanted to; and all the Phyllis Trevors’ women could be trusted either to put up the conversation for you, or—which was quite as good—to flirt prodigiously with their neighbours on the other side. The turning-point of his deliberations, which lasted exactly three-quarters of an hour, the actual impulse which sent him out of the room to the telephone in the hall, came from the remembrance that Pauline had made him promise not to be an irrational idiot.
He had promised to go out to some dinners, and it was only dinners of the Phyllis Trevors’ sort that he could bring himself to face. So that, having telephoned his acceptance to Mrs. Trevor, who called him the Great Chief Long-in-the-fork, and wanted to know why his voice sounded like an undertaker’s mute, a comparative tranquillity reigned in Dudley Leicester’s soul. This tranquillity was only ended when at the dinner-table he had at his side red-lipped, deep-voiced, black-haired, large, warm, scented, and utterly uncontrollable Etta Stackpole. She had three dark red roses in her hair.
V
ETTA STACKPOLE—now Lady Hudson—had been Dudley Leicester’s first and very ardent passion. She was very much his age, and, commencing in a boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had lasted many years. She was the only daughter of the Stackpoles of Cove Place, and she had all the wilfulness of an only daughter, and all the desperate acquisitiveness of the Elizabethan freebooters from whom she was descended. Robert Grimshaw said once that her life was a series of cutting-out expeditions; her maids used to declare that they certainly could not trust their young men in the hall if Miss Etta was likely to come down the stairs. It was perhaps her utter disrespect for the dictates of class that made Dudley Leicester finally and quite suddenly break off from her.
It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had the merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester—one of those men who are essentially monogamous—had suffered unheard-of agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the landscape near the Park to look like hell; he had supported somehow innumerable Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole cousins, and Boveys. But the name of Bugle stuck in his gorge. “Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished gold capitals over the signboard of the vet’s front-door! It had made him have a little sick feeling that he had never had before. And that same afternoon Etta’s maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted with pitiful rage, to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta soon, or she herself would never get married. She said that her young man—her third young man that it had happened to—had got ideas above his place because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited at table. So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third footman too. His name was Moddle....
That very afternoon—it had been six years before—Dudley Leicester had announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced it to the maid Agnes first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage overcoming him that he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits of class.
“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for myself; but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken her apron down from her eyes to jump for joy.
And very gradually—the process had taken years—hot rage had given way to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at her side at the dinner-table, and she talked to him—about concerts! She had a deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to her neighbour it was with so much abandonment always that she appeared to be about to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to rest her white breasts upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself always with a peculiar, musky scent that her father, years ago, had discovered in Java.
“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the best man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching. If I shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I can get hold of.Realtears! ... But to look at, she’s like a bad kodak—over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be sodécolletée, and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had her do it down at Well-lands....
“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”
“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley said grimly.
“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday Pop. We were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East Kent to Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you remember? It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to the Shires, but stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with Joachim and Strauss and Ries and Piatti! I wonder what they played? I’ve got the programme still. Those quaint old green programmes! I’ll look it up and let you know. But oh, it’s all gone! They’re all dead; there are no Pops now and St. James’s Hall.... And yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you remember how dear old Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his ’cello in shape?”
Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that moment wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as a matter of fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if they rose very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost invariably of a singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta Stackpole, who, like many troublesome but delightful things, had become a habit to be broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it were, chopped her off in the very middle because of a train of thought. She could carry on with the Traceys, the Greshams, the Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it pained him he could yet just bear it, for he imagined that he would be able to defend his hearth against them. But when it had come to Bugle, the farrier’s son, and to Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly come into his head that you couldn’t keep these creatures off your hearth. He knew it had been as impossible as it would be sickening....
So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only how Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked it. Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great Southern Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he passed his time in travelling from one end of the world to the other, whilst Etta carried on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug harbour in Curzon Street, or from the very noble property known as Well-lands in Surrey. But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the Hudsons lived in the same street, their points of contact were almost non-existent, and since their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta Stackpole had never met. His mother, indeed, who had managed his estate a little too economically till her death three years ago, had let Hangham, the Leicesters’ place, which was just next door to Cove Park, and Etta, perhaps because she thought it was full time, or perhaps because she had stipulated for some agreeable arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately “made a match” with the director of railways. And although it would be hard to say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it down in his own words that railway directors were not in it. But vaguely and without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had gathered—it is impossible to know how one does gather these things, or perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea for his simple brain—that the Hudsons were one of several predatory and semi-detached couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with each other. They hit where they liked, like what used to be called “chain shot,” dangerous missiles consisting of two cannon-balls chained one to the other and whirling through Society. Robert Grimshaw had certainly gained this impression from his two friends, the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de Mauvesine, the wives of two of the diplomatic body in London, two ladies who, though they were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta Hudson, were yet in a perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It was as if, witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and imagined that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a fairyland—from a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t imagine how it was possible to be married and yet to be so absolutely free. They couldn’t, indeed, imagine how it was possible to be so absolutely free in any state, whether married, single, or any of the intermediary stages. And, indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that moment opposite them at the table, was leaning across the little blonde man who was always known as Mr. “Phyllis” Trevor, for much the same reason that Dudley Leicester came afterwards to be known as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester—Senhora de Bogota was leaning, a splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her diminutive neighbour’s form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent to Madame de Mauvesine:
“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien de pareilles!”
And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a peaked, almost eel-like face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to the ceiling that was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with chains of roses and gambolling cherubs.
VI
ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them home from the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof, and the horse, checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the kerb. They were midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was about half-past twelve of a fine night.
“We’re getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless Dudley Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”
It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful woman. He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He saw her bend forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of the cab, and the next moment she was on the pavement. He thought so slowly that he had no time to think anything at all before he found himself, too, on the kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and thankful driver.
“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us ...”
She hooked herself on to his arm.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen at the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She moved herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop him in her black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her features appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very deep and full of chords.
“Whatever you can say against me ...” she began and paused.
Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is at that hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses sounding in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.
“You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was conscious that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round to gaze upon them.
“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you can’t say I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.”
“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were alone in the car; it was not anyone else.”
They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung him round.
“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the back streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my shrieking, you can’t prove it. But I can prove that you called me a penguin in your last nice letter to me.”
In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night, her warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her subtle and comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were an invisible cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she, leaning her body forward, her face back to him, to draw him along, as in a picture a nymph might lead away a stripling into scented obscurities into leafy woods.
“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity, “that I couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly knew what a penguin was.”
“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are remembering them now.”
She laughed again.
“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that day—the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop—we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary place in London—the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”
She shivered under her cloak.
“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”
“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses. I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”
He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but she cried:
“Oh, you traitor! Youhavecalled her one of these names. Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”
The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.
“Go away,” she said—“go away.”
“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.
“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her.
Suddenly she slackened her steps.
“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it now. Youfeellike a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am now.”
She paused, and then she brought out:
“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me. Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”
Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite: “Why should anyone want to down you?”
“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would their dinners be—where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me for an attraction? ...
“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t you—about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley, it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”
Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black, deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass of windows, the sound of his footsteps—for her tread was soundless, as if she moved without stepping—the cold, the solitude, all these things and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long, early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not act at the bidding of duty.
No man, indeed, can serve two women—no man, at any rate, who is essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley Leicester.
“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.
“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you—you knew I shouldn’t betray you—it was because you were afraid of what the other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions, but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you.”
Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.
“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game—if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish—I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through....
“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....
“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “youdidcall me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”
He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home”—as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him. For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times—after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always—always—just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value.
And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils!
He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home” again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found its vent in his saying:
“You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.”
“Then put it up for me,” she said saucily.
Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He trembled—as he had been used to tremble—when his hands touched her warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly.