CHAPTER V
The girl who was playing the accompaniments to La llorraine’s singing glanced aside once or twice from Deb to Jenny, contrasting mystery and mobility. Jenny attracted her the most; she made up her mind to speak to Jenny directly the song was over.... And then she saw Jenny bite her lip, clutch tightly at the arm of the chair ... after a minute or two of apparent bodily agony, rise and grope an unsteady way through the edges and corners of furniture, to the door. Antonia Verity went on with the Aria from “Samson et Delilah.” She had seen a swift look interchanged between Deb and Jenny, just before the spasm of pain which drove the latter from the room. Also, in the instant’s silence before the prima-donna had begun to let herself go in “Mon cœur s’ouvre a ta voix,” Antonia fancied she had detected a scraping sound and heavy breathing outside the door.
Stella had also remarked Jenny’s symptoms, and half rose to follow her out without interrupting the singing; but Deb murmured: “All right, Auntie, I’ll go” ... and slipped noiselessly in Jenny’s wake. Dolph was wrapt up in Manon, who was wrapt up in her own indifference to Dolph. And La llorraine was back in the Paris opera-house, eyes uplifted to the imaginary tiers of packed faces, voice soaring resonantly to a non-existent acoustic.... Antonia wondered if the drum of her left ear were being shattered; she also wondered a little what was afoot outside the door....
“Did you hear me sleuthing?” queried Ames, contentedly lopping the haddock to fit Cora’s limitations.
“Isthatwhat you were doing? Of course we heard.” The three had been recently present at a cinema film whichportrayed a quantity of flickering doors, set in a flickering corridor, down which a flickering procession of waiters, detectives and gentlemen burglars—all impartially in evening dress—portrayed the diverting art of sleuthing: they skulked along close to the wall, one arm shielding their eyes to avoid observation, and at every bedroom door they bent and applied an ear to the keyhole—then started erect, confirmed in their worst suspicion, and went to the next keyhole....
“I sleuthed all over the house, till I sleuthed outside Miss Lamb’s door——” he stopped abruptly.
“And then?”
“Then I stopped sleuthing. It’s an ignoble pastime. Get me my screw-driver; something’s wrong with Cora.” A minute later he was completely happy, surrounded by Cora in eleven fragments; while Jenny, very excitable and talkative, enacted to him exactly how she had been “taken ill” during La llorraine’s song.
“—There. Now she’ll do.”
“There was nothing wrong with Cora; you wanted an excuse to pull her to bits,” Deb accused him.
“A man is only a child; he must play.”
“Fiddling at things?”
“Tinkering with things. Pottering over things. That’s a mercy!” as Dalila, on the other side of the wall, died to silence. “Our invalid had better be hoisted on to the bed; they’ll be coming in to enquire.”
Just in time Jenny hurled herself among the pillows, and drew the quilt up to her flushed cheeks. A knock at the door. The soldier eliminated himself against the wall. Deb went softly to the threshold: “Is that you, Manon?... Yes, she’s in here.... No, I wouldn’t come in; she ...” Deb backed the unseen visitor onto the landing. The other two, listening breathlessly, heard her low, capable, reassuring explanations: “... be all right presently ... room too hot ... strain of the last few weeks ... might do her good ... tell them not to worry....”
Jenny inserted a moan of corroboration.
“I’m so vairry sorry——” from Manon.
Deb returned to the room, closing the door. And Jenny cried:
“Little humbug! much she cares!”
“Well, nurse, shall we operate?” demanded Ames cheerily.He stood at the bedside, assuming a professional manner, one finger on the patient’s pulse. “Um. Um. This is excellent. We shall soon be all right. Up to-day and down to-morrow and dead the next day. A great improvement here, nurse. I should give her ...” he drew the pseudo-nurse aside to a little distance, dropping his voice to a grave undertone. Jenny burst out laughing at the foolery—then shuddered—and laughed again:
“Bravo! It’s the real thing. God—how often I’ve seen ’em do just that at the hospitals and nursing-homes. I’ve been turned inside out and put on the table so often, I wonder there’s any of me left kicking. Like poor old Cora over there—the doctors had all the fun, tinkering and fiddling.”
“Itsoundsfun, when you put it like that,” Ames said appreciatively. And drew a clumsy penknife from his pocket. “Where will you have it?” he demanded considerately, throwing off his coat and rolling up his shirt-sleeves.
“Deb! Deb!” shrieked Jenny, in hysterical appeal.
Deb flung herself to the rescue. She and the soldier sleuthed each other malevolently round the room, he with the penknife and she with the screw-driver, till they ended up with a neat little burlesque of a murder in the middle of the carpet; La llorraine, next door, supplying unconscious atmosphere by the torture scene from “Tosca.”
“Die!” said Deb lightly.
“With my fingers buried in your raven tresses!”
“Miscreant!”
“Don’t call me names. I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’mnot!” he tried to hoist himself up by the coarse black ropes of her loosened hair. Deb resisted fiercely. Jenny, tossing from one side to another, called out petulantly that she was forgotten—it washerparty!—and was half off the bed, before another knock sent her flying back to the shelter of the coverlid. The soldier lurched into his special arm-chair and took up the screw-driver—“for a disguise,” he murmured. And Deb, wildly dishevelled, clutched after her expression of calm but anxious best friend to the invalid.
Antonia Verity entered, with a glass of tea and a slice of lemon.
“They thought this might do you good,” to Jenny, who extended a feeble hand, took the glass, raised it shakily to herlips, spilt a few drops, smiled bravely—then, with a sudden gesture of repugnance, handed it to Deb. “Presently, dear ... not now.”
Deb was surprised that she did it so well. Usually Jenny was prone to over-act.
After a single look bestowed upon the perplexing and unexplained presence of a gentleman in shirt-sleeves cooking asparagus over an oil-stove, Antonia’s eyes returned to Jenny:
“I thought you were shamming just now, in the next room. But I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
She lingered a moment, seemingly in expectation. But the atmosphere was feverish and hostile. “I’m sorry,” she repeated; and went.
“Jenny, you’re a genius! that bit of bye-play with the glass was magnificent.”
“I am, I am, aren’t I?—‘I thought you were shamming, but I was wrong,’” she mimicked triumphantly. “—Oh Hell!” and burrowed her face sharply into the pillow.
“What is it?” alarmed, Deb sprang forward.
“You taken in too?” Jenny, without lifting her head, broke into shrill peals of laughter which she seemed unable to repress. “Oh—oh—oh—I’ve taken you in too!... Dearest—” this in response to the soldier’s fingers roaming at the nape of her neck—“Don’t pull your hand away—don’t—it’s heavenly—it soothes me.... What does it matter? we’re all playing the fool; Dolph is playing the idiot in the other room; we’re all mixed up, anyway. Deb, give me that tea—I’m crazy with thirst,” she snatched the glass; gulped down the contents. “What about those asparagus?”
“They ought to be done enough now; you shall have some if you’re good. What do you think, nurse? one or two? and the rest for us.”
Deb nodded professionally. But it struck her that Jenny was rather making capital out of the privileges of her present rôle. Why had she not thought to be herself the one who was ill? But Jenny was really ill so often—it was less likely to cause suspicion.
The soldier removed the tin of asparagus from Cora; and seating himself on the edge of the bed, began to curl them slowly, tantalizingly, into Jenny’s mouth. “I’ve never seen you look quite so healthy; in case any more of the neighbours drop in to enquire, we may as well cast a dissembling shadowon that blooming cheek, those brilliant brown eyes. Deb, put out the light.”
Deb obeyed. The asparagus were finished, one by one. A crash of discordances, as though someone had suddenly sat on the keys of the piano, sounded from the adjoining room; and La llorraine’s wild, deep laughter. Jenny lay as though exhausted, nuzzling against Burton Ames’ shoulder.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“So miserable ... and I’m tired of going on.”
“I am, too. Never mind—it’s not so bad being miserable together.”
“You’re rather nice”—then lower still—“kiss me....”
He laid his cheek down against her’s—no more. But she seemed content ... and Deb turned away; stood, forlornly enough, with her back to the bed, looking down at Cora.... “I’m miserable too,” she whispered. But Jenny heard:
“Deb!—Deb, come over here—come over to me at once. How dare you not come ... feeling like that? Deb!”
Deb crouched beside the bed, with Jenny’s arms tightly wound about her shoulders. The soldier’s knee, hard as granite, pressed against her side. They were all three very near together ... a magnetic sense of rest was born in this close contact—Jenny’s hot skin, Deb’s tumble of hair, harsh feel of the soldier’s frayed tweed coat.... There was no other illumination in the room, and Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of white light and black shadow.
“Good old Chorus,” breathed Jenny.
“You’re a really-and-truly person, Jenny, aren’t you?”
“Sweetheart, what do you mean?”
“I used to ask about people in stories: are they really-and-truly real? Somehow I always know that you are; at least you, if nobody else.”
“Of course she is,” grunted Ames; “considering she’s a Christian, quite remarkably real.”
“Hush!” quickly Jenny laid her fingers over his mouth; “you must leave me that at least—my religion.”
“Child, child, religion is a man-made door, blocking all hope of vistas beyond.”
“Faith is a crystal window,” whispered Jenny, her brown eyes steadfast.
“Maybe. Nothing so opaque as crystal.”
Deb said reproachfully: “What can you give her to hang on to, for what you take away?”
“Herself. The courage and pride in her. It’s much more comforting really than a vague hope that God will come to the rescue in extremes. You can be definitely certain of the measure of your own powers; but God is at best a gamble.”
Jenny’s eyes strayed fearfully ceilingward....
“Looking for the thunderbolt that will destroy the blasphemer?”
“I remember looking up in just that way, the first time I said damn,” Deb murmured reminiscently.
“It’s what we learn at our mother’s knee. We’ve all got mother’s knees in our system—Jenny here worst of all—and till we learn to see through it——”
“Your metaphor is in peril, as well as your soul.”
“S.O.S.,” he laughed.
But at this tendency of the conversation to become highbrow, Jenny’s mood, as usual, flickered to restlessness. “I ought to go and see if Bobby’s all right; I haven’t been in all the evening.”
“You forget that you’re in a highly critical condition, and mustn’t be seen dancing about the corridors. I’ll go.”
And Deb wondered, as she closed the door behind her, if, in her absence, Jenny would contrive to win the gallon of oil for Cora....
Bobby was soundly asleep in his cot; his round, monkey face, so comically a replica of Jenny’s, snuggled half under the bed-clothes to meet his huddled-up knees. Deb was compelled to bend and lightly kiss him, for the sake of her private fondness for all small boys. A night-light floating on the table beside him was suddenly quenched. Deb turned to grope her way out of the room. She heard a groan behind her—and, for Bobby’s sake, bit back a sharp scream of terror—
“It’s only me,” came Dolph’s despondent reassurance.
“You? But I thought you were with—with the others.”
“They don’t want me.”
She hung about uncomfortably, her hand on the door-knob.
“Jenny’s better,” she volunteered at last.
“Is she?” quite indifferent. Then he burst out: “Deb, d’you know that I’ll be rich one day, when my uncle dies. Rich. People will treat me differently then. I tell you, Deb, money does everything with some people. Not with a younggirl, of course—but with their mothers. I’m nobody now. Anyone can insult me, give me the sack. I wish I was dead and buried.... Bobby oughtn’t to be left the whole evening alone; tell Jenny I said so. That’s why I’m in here; that’s why; the only reason,” he mumbled. “Else why shouldn’t I be with the others?”
Apparently some shattering of the next-door alliance had occurred on this evening of happenings.
“Send Jenny in to me. I won’t sit alone. Why should I? She’s always shut away with you and Ames, when I want her.—Deb, I’m so wretched.”
“Yes ... but I don’t like you one bit,” reflected Deb. Aloud she said: “I expect it’ll be all right to-morrow, Dolph; La llorraine has sudden moods, like all artists.”
It was queer, this all-round tacit acceptance of unofficial affections, on the second floor landing at Montagu Hall.
Carew merely groaned again; which Deb interpreted as welcome dismissal.
... Had Jenny won that kiss in her absence?—Deb slid open the door, in a bewilderment of dread and curiosity.HadJenny——
Impossible to say. For La llorraine was sitting on the bed, eclipsing by gesticulation and oratory, a helplessly recumbent invalid. The soldier was calmly smoking and reading in the armchair at the farther end of the room, his back to the bed, Cora among his feet. His presence in the room seemed almost part of the general acceptance. How funny, Deb thought, if they all suddenly started questioning and sorting and clearing up....
It appeared that Nadya llorraine, at least, was doing something of the sort.
“My dee-urr, now listen to me. I tell you how to win backthathusband of yours. I have said to me: it is enough now, it shall end! Jenny, see how you lie here, wizout a manicure, your hair in a puzzle, a blouse that has no seduction.... And he, that fool, that booby,—shall I tell you vat vill happen? he falls into the hands of adventuresses! My dee-urr, they snap him up from you....” Sincerity of pity for the abandoned wife dominated any personal association with the said adventuresses.“They snap him up—and spit him out!” La llorraine dignified the process by accompanying pantomime, grotesquely mimicked by the enormous shadow cast on the wall behind her. “I will tell youthatsecret, Jenny, my dee-urr, which I ’ave learn: you must be woman to him as well as wife....” She grasped Jenny’s wrist, swooped forward, and lowered her tones to a key of thrilling confidence. She breathed in Jenny’s face. She took possession of Jenny.
Deb and the soldier were cut off to a complete isolation.
“What have you got?” she bent over his shoulder to see the title of the book he held. “Oh, that’s not fair!” indignantly. For the Chorus had been half-reading half-acting Shaw’s “Pygmalion” for their mutual amusement; and he had anticipated that portion of the play to which Deb had been secretly straining forward.
“You wanted to make sure of being Eliza in that bit where she throws the slippers, of course. You’re a shocking savage, Deb. And anyway, the part isn’t fit for any gentlewoman, and naturally falls to me. You can be Higgins.”
“I won’t be Higgins. I’ll be Eliza. You—you tempt slippers.”
“M’yes—I daresay I do. Slippers are mild. I’ll lend you my trench boots.”
“Thanks.”
“Why do you hate me so, Deb?” lazily he threw back one hand to where she was still leaning over his chair, and grasped some of her hanging hair.
She was exultant at having at last urged him to a personal reflection. “Because you don’t take enough notice of me,” she replied, in a freakish impulse of candour.
“Dear Eliza, isn’t my step bent straight for this room, when I enter the house?”
“That’s because of—Cora. Because we make you comfortable.”
“I suppose it is. Funny hair you’ve got, Eliza; like a strong, stormy black sea. I thought women’s hair was always fluffy and soft.”
“As one woman’s was? ...” flitted through Deb’s mind. But she did not say it.
He still examined with minute interest the thick tress which lay across the palm of his hand. “To a man of ingenuity and resource, it would be useful for all sorts of thingsif one were wrecked on an island; Eliza, I wish I could be stranded on a desert island with your hair.”
“With ... only my hair?” She was breaking through it now, that nameless barrier which her nameless creed had set up; useless barrier, Jenny had shown her.... Yes, but Jenny was different. Because she was married?—well, because she was different. Because she let her passions bubble over when and where and how she chose ... unruly, undisciplined Jenny. But Deb had promised herself to compete with Jenny this time.... A pulse ticked in each wrist—two frantic little clocks. On the other side of the wall someone—Antonia probably—was playing Debussy ... mournful, soul-flattening discordances ... La llorraine’s rush of inaudible speech still expounded man and the ways of man:
“And I say to ’im,thatminute ago even, my dee-urr: ‘You should kneel to your wife like a thief to a goddess, for you ’ave r-r-robbed ’er of all ’er gifts!’ Ha! ’e did not like that, Jenny, I tell you. He sulks now in his room, the booby——”
“Well, itwasrude, considering he was your guest,” from Jenny, in shrill defence of her male property.
... “What should I do with the rest of you, Eliza?”
“Would another man ask that?”
Deb was on a false trail, her manner hectic and unnatural, her senses over-stimulated. But, knowing all this, she dragged her reluctance to the gap in the last barrier—plunged through—bent her mouth to his up-turned, sleepy face——
And suddenly she remembered little Lothar von Relling ... and pleaded to whatever Justice might be presiding somewhere, that she had been generous then, had given ardently for a boy’s pleasure.... Would Justice please choose this moment to reward her?
... His fingers slowly loosened grip of her hair; it dropped heavily against his shoulders. And in swift reaction at seeing it there, Deb flung back her head, stood upright, pale and ashamed, ... over his head their eyes met in the mirror which topped the fireplace in front of them. Reaction ... she had had enough of this cramped, stuffy room, and all their cramped, stuffy passions; stupefaction of everyone’s moral sense; a sort of frowsiness; smoke and shut windows, and unaired emotions.... She wanted, at once and instantly,a wind blown in with the running tide; sanity and humour and keenness. Oh, anything but this room, at this moment, and the necessity of meeting the mirrored gaze of a man to whom she had just given herself away.
... The moment stretched, an interminable grey length. Then the music next door trickled away to silence, and it seemed as though the unsupported moment would have to trickle away with it....
“I’m only human!”—thus to himself the soldier stifled a protesting loyalty. Heavily he shifted round in his chair towards the girl, standing now so stiffly and primly erect behind him——
“Deb”....
A rap at the door. The evening had been punctuated by such staccato interruptions. This time it was Aunt Stella.
“Is Major Ames here? Yes? You’re wanted on the ’phone; trunk call, the page said. They came to look for you next door. Well, how’s the patient?” as Jenny emerged wanly from the clutch of La llorraine’s overpowering personality. “My dear child, surely you would be better inside your own bed than outside someone else’s. Off with you! Make your husband attend to the hot-water bottle ... fill it with his burning tears, if he likes. Deb, being your prying spinster aunt, it is my duty to inform you that this room has a horribly dissipated smell of fish and stove-oil and smoke, and one doesn’t put one’s hair down for the evening till all the visitors have left; I ought to fetch your grandpapa—only he’d have a stroke. Madame, Miss Verity threatens to go already, and wants to say good-bye.”
Burton Ames, as he lumbered downstairs, was angry with himself for being angry at the interruption. It was much better; if he once budged from his safe resolve, the Chorus would become quite impossible. And he would miss it—would miss them—quite intensely. They had obviously set out to try him pretty severely this evening. Why? Sheer mischief? Deb was the more dangerous of the two. One could feel tenderly, an absurd, almost pathetic tenderness, for Jennyout-of-bounds ... passionate, ill-used little urchin. But Deb....Damnthis ’phone call!
“Hello!”...
Deb and Jenny were alone.
“Deb—I saw.”
“Saw what?” said Deb absently.
“When you bent his head back ... just now. And then Mad’m came between. Deb—didhe?”
Deb did not answer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, hands clasped round her knees, ears straining, straining for his returning tread, she examined her behaviour of a moment ago, and decided that self-verdict must wait on subsequent events. If only he made it worth while....
The room had grown unaccountably darker. Jenny shuddered; propped herself up on one elbow:
“Deb, old girl, it’s a fool’s game to pretend one is ill when one isn’t, because——”
“There he is!” burst from Deb’s lips, oblivious of Jenny.
Burton Ames swung into the room, rejuvenated.
“Jenny—Deb—I’m off to-night,”
His voice was still quiet and controlled; but the weary inflexion to which they were accustomed from him had been replaced by tense virility; his bent shoulders were squarely flung back; his eyes snapped and tingled like bright blue fire under the grizzled jutting eyebrows.
“I’m off to-night.”
“She ... your wife ... she wants you again,” Jenny gasped.
“Yes. I spoke to her on the ’phone. She has taken a house in London; Campden Hill; just moved in. I’m joining her at once; she has invited me,” with a quick, whimsical smile. “I wish it hadn’t occurred to you to be ‘taken ill’ just to-night, Jenny dear; you could have helped me pack. Deb’s disqualified, of course; good little girls mayn’t pass the ogre’s threshold, according to Mother’s-Knee. Never mind, I’ll send my orderly down in the morning; can’t wait now. I say, look at Cora!”
Simultaneously the three turned and stared at the altar of their union; the line of flame was slowly narrowing, and thewalls and ceiling and furniture, and the faces of the three grouped round and on the bed, hitherto sharply defined in black and white, were already smudged to a mere dimness.
“Cheap irony—oh, very inexpensive indeed!” scoffed Deb. And she was grateful to Cora ... deeply grateful.
“On the contrary, a histrionic sense of the fitness of things. When did you last fill the oil-tank, Deb?”
“Before dinner—no, though, I didn’t—I remember now, Jenny came in and distracted me. That explains it.”
Nevertheless, the gradual ebbing of the light, coincident with the silence succeeding the waves of noise and music next door, wrought eerily upon the nerves of the two of the Chorus who had not received their call of “all’s right with the world.”
Even Ames was touched to a cheery sentimentality: “I shall miss you both tremendously; you’ve been so awfully good to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ve been very welcome,” said Deb lightly. “You’re in a hurry—don’t let these obsequies delay you. We bury Jenny the day after to-morrow, at two o’clock, if you care to attend.”
“As I was responsible for her death-bed scene, I suppose I must. But it’s been worth it, hasn’t it, Jenny beloved, to have had this last fling together?”
Jenny played up. “Oh, it has! it has! I’ve lived my life down to the very dregs! And now, as the light slowly fades——”
“And the music dies away——” supplemented Deb.
“And the asparagi have been trickled one by one down that dark and narrow path that engorges all asparagi——”
“So that young life, too, throbbed to silence. Whistling, he went on his way, and never knew till afterwards——”
“I can’t whistle,” the soldier interrupted Deb. “But I’ll do all the rest of the stunts. Good-bye, Jenny, my darling; I’ve been a fearful rotter ...” his voice broke in mock pathos. Secretly he was rather glad of this burlesque which covered any necessity for real pathos; because he was so happy, he just could not pretend otherwise.
“I’m—not—in—pain!” gasped Jenny. “See—I’m smiling ... quite a beautiful smile, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall be well ... to-morrow. No, I shan’t!” she screamed. “No to-morrow for me. Soldier ... don’t—don’t go.... Wait till ... I ...”
“Sweetheart, I can’t; you might be ever so long about it, and I really must be off. Good-bye, Jenny; good-bye, Deb”; he lingered a moment still, though it was evident that every nerve in him was chafing at the delay. “You’ve both been so awfully decent to me,” he repeated, sincerely this time. And he kissed first Jenny and then Deb, in boyish, spontaneous gratitude.
So they gained, quite without effort, what they had set out to gain, that evening.
“Good-bye!” the door slammed behind him in sheer exuberance of high spirits. Then repetition of the same business with his bedroom door. Then silence. And the room a black pall now, with just a last faint quaver of light—suddenly quenched.
It was unnecessary, Deb reflected, that he should have shown himself to them in this new splendour of recovered buoyancy.... It was bad enough before.... Her fancy, feverishly active, followed his taxi along the streets, followed him up the steps and past the front door of the house in Campden Hill—into the room where a woman waited——
Fancy was jerked to a standstill here; he would utter her name; what was it?—Cicely?—Irene?—Eleanor? ... Yes, she could hear his voice speaking any of these ... very low and taut ... “Eleanor”....
Then of course he would kiss her. Well....
And for the girl who sat on the edge of the bed, the knowledge of having made—rather an exhibition of herself. It did not help much that he seemed to have forgotten the incident. The main thing was that she remembered it. Would always remember it.
She thought she heard a little sigh from the bed. Jenny! ... quick and warm came to Deb realisation of the blessed solace of a companion in suffering. Jenny would just understand, as she never failed to understand the simple everyday things such as hunger and pain and the loss of love. Jenny would heal her with that wonderful touch of hand and cheek that was like balm.... Deb felt shivery and childish and desolate.... She laid her head down on Jenny’s breast, and lay for several moments quite still, waiting for comfort to steal into her. She was glad that Jenny did not attempt to talk about what had happened.
Suddenly Deb started away, wildly frightened. Why—Jenny’s heart was not beating....