PART III
CHAPTER I
Deb was living with La llorraine. She indignantly refused to return home on the understanding that she was to be partially forgiven for an offence she had never committed; on the other hand, her affection for Ferdie caused her a pang of acute misery when she saw how the belief in her sins had stripped him of a certain chubby contentment which even the war and its complications had hitherto left unimpaired. For of course her swift dramatic rupture with her family toppled to an anti-climax. Richard took home the tidings of her whereabouts; and a day after her flight, Aunt Stella appeared at Zoe’s for a parley. The tolerance of the period did not permit an erring daughter to be blasted with a parent’s curse and left to suicide—or worse—in the dark cold streets of London. The tolerance of the period sanctioned some natural anxiety over the said daughter’s material welfare, tentative negotiations, and a return home to a great deal of nagging and an atmosphere of reproachful discomfort. Perhaps Deb foresaw the final inevitable item; perhaps also, her passionate self-persuasion that she could not bear continual witnessing of Ferdie’s sighs and worried forehead, was the outcome of a guilty suspicion that it was more by haphazard than by virtue that she was able to mount her pedestal and stand aggrieved upon it.
“It’s the fault of my very lax upbringing,” she argued with the guilty suspicion.
“Yes, but——”
“It’s lucky that I have a certain fundamental standpoint of moral decency,” with crushing pomposity.
“Yes, but——”
The yes-buts had it.
“I can’t live at home with Aunt Stella hating me like this,” weakly.
And here she was right. Even Ferdie recognized that his sister and his daughter were henceforth not likely to dwell together in a state of affectionate harmony. Stella had been queer about Deb ever since discovery that Deb was—initiated. What was to be done? And then La llorraine appeared at Montagu House, an emissary from Deb.
“My dee-urr—leave it to me.”
La llorraine was magnificent, she was Miladi, she was Josephine Beauhamais, and Madame de Maintenon and Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, and every otherintriguanteof foreign history, entrusted with dispatches and a cardinal’s secret, a go-between from one royal court to another. She wore filmy black, and a huge black hat cast a mysterious shadow over her eyes; she wore all her sables, and Parma violets; and fingered them meaningly with her long thin white hands as though they were a symbol of a lost cause. She flattered, cajoled and hinted, and laid down her cards and picked them up again; and her speech was worldly and witty and wise, and her smile was maternal, or suggestive, or discreet, and she overwhelmed Ferdie Marcus with dupery and diplomacy, and left him quite dazed, but convinced that the arrangement made was the only one possible in view of the subtleties involved; and that moreover it had emanated straight from him.
“So, my dee-urr, you join us in our humble little appartement, and your father will put you in possession of your own income. Have I done well?”
“—Turned out of home plus a cheque-book?—that’s what I call anéviction de luxe,” laughed Antonia, when Deb told her of the new arrangement, while re-packing her suit-case to quit Zoe’s flat five days after her weary arrival. Zoe was out at rehearsal.
“What are you going to pay La llorraine per week for board and lodging?”
“My-dee-urr,” Deb imitated the grand manner and the large gesture by which her future landlady had dismissed the question—“Zat—between us? it shall arrange itself——”
Antonia looked enigmatic, and warned Deb that the first time she arrived at the appartement, and found her breakfasting at eleven o’clock in a dirty wrapper and curl-papers, in the Venetian drawing-room, on stale mayonnaise, with La llorraine practising scales, and Manon being demure with the fishmongerbecause the canaille wanted to be paid, she would immediately haul her off to an environment less pictorial but more hygienic.
“Fishmonger, indeed!” Deb turned Quelle Vie out of the suit-case, “when we want fish, La llorraine, pale and haughty, kisses Manon on the brow and goes out to pawn the Crown Jewels; then she brings home the fish and chips in a piece of newspaper, and we sit down to enjoy it while she tells us sniggering anecdotes of fifth-rate music halls.”
“Look here,” demanded Cliffe, striding into the room, “I’ve been interviewing your brother, Deb, and he says that little bit of mange who calls himself Otto Redbury is responsible for our good name dragged in the mud. He says that verminous Dutchman called on your father full of a ‘brivate peesiness’ just before the row. What I want to know is,who told him? And a rumour has got about that you committed suicide last Friday night. That’s not exactly funny, is it? We’ve got to track those scandals to their sources. You don’t seem to realize how serious it is. Our honour is at stake!”
“It’s so good of you to include mine,” Deb said meekly. “Sit down, Cliffe, and don’t rave. I suppose I started them myself!” And she related her dramatic confession to Samson Phillips. And Cliffe listened, frowning.
“But this is all hypothesis. You mentioned no names to Phillips. You didn’t actually specify that night at Seaview. I’m not reproaching you for the lie itself, Deb—that was merely silly; feminine boasting. But Otto must have got his definite facts from someone else, and I’ve written him an imperative letter on the subject. It begins: ‘Sir’”
“That’s not highly striking or original in itself, Cliffe. Why not ‘Honey?’”
Antonia laughed. “Tell us Otto’s answer when you get it, Cliffe. I respect you for taking a strong line!” But Cliffe did not show them the reply he received from Otto; he studied it in solitude and bewildered indignation. What could the man mean by reminding him of a certain conversation in the Tube? He recalled, with an effort, having once travelled in Otto’s company, and having talked a great deal of fantastic rubbish for Otto’s benefit, but he was quite sure that not the veriest scavenger could have picked Deb’s name from among the rubbish-heap—“I’ve always been very careful over names....”
Deb, taking her present emancipation as a vantage-point for a survey of her past, as a whole and in segments and phases, arrived at a conclusion that the general inadequacy on the amorous side was due to foolish compromise. She made up her mind, therefore, to reform, and be bad—thoroughly bad. In the episode with Samson she had proved to herself that she was no longer fit for the conventional extreme of respectful love and sheltered marriage. Her dilatory sense of daring must therefore be flogged to that other far extreme—“I hate betwixts and betweens!”
A little balm of self-deception had to be applied. Hitherto she had been more or less under home supervision; not stringent supervison, certainly; but a background of loving trust was a hindrance in itself. Now the trust had been withdrawn—and the background. Now she was on her own—free—disillusioned—slightly embittered—(Deb prodded the embitterment anxiously—yes, it was still there....) Now she was twenty-five and at the cross-roads——
Deb did not realize the truism that even as every woman’s life holds material for one novel, so that generic novel may generically and with perfect application bear the title: “Cross-roads.”
She had been on the look out for the hero to her heroine, and he had failed in the appointment. Now she was in search for the villain to her adventuress, and it seemed at first as though he would prove equally elusive. A series of minor experiments left her seriously convinced that in choice of a villain, a young girl cannot be too careful.... “He must make it worth while——” Perhaps after all she was still on the same old quest translated into different terms.
Meanwhile, the winter passed; and early spring woke her slightly bilious soul to fretfulness. Her habits had slackened to harmony with her environment of cosmopolitan bohemianism; but whereas a bed erected in the Venetian drawing-room and covered by day with a priceless piece of embroidery, seemed to La llorraine all that was necessary in the way of a tiring-room—“My dee-urr, you can use Manon’s mirror as your own—it goes without saying——” yet Deb was not quite happy at the general sloppiness of tea-gowns and mysterious foreigners and rich meals at all hours—or at nohours—Carmen for breakfast, Tosca for supper, and out-of-season dishes in between—music-hall managers strolling in to slap “my good llorraine” familiarly between the shoulders, and look avariciously at Manon, who, however, a child of mummers and motley, was interrogated with a strictness which Deb, daughter of strictest Israel, would never for a moment have suffered. But La llorraine knew more of her world and was wiser in education than Ferdinand Marcus; La llorraine, who sometimes put on enormous horn spectacles and sat knitting by the fire; and sometimes rose up like a prophetess and tossed a pair of desperate arms to Heaven, in denunciation ofthatwar which prevented return to a beloved continent which knew something of good music; La llorraine was equally genuine and lovable in either mood; and Deb grew to be sincerely fond of her. But Manon was another matter; Manon, at eighteen, held to her pose of exiled princess, a slender figure in the vast loneliness of the drawing-room—a lonely little heart mysteriously unsoiled by contact with aforesaid mummers and motley. She listened charmingly when Deb scattered ethics of rebellion; she appeared slightly shocked when decorum demanded that she should be shocked—and yet—and yet—for all the demureness of reproving eyelash and “Oh, but, Deb——” in the pretty lisping accent, Deb could not be rid of an impression that when it came to it, Manon would go further and fare a great deal better than herself. Manon had hitched her wagon to a fixed star, whereas it looked as though Deb had hitched hers to a travelling circus.
“We’ve had enough of this,” exclaimed Antonia, an unexpected visitor after a tour in the car which had lasted the whole of February—“Not dressed yet? and it’s nearly twelve o’clock; sluggish appetite?—no wonder, if you smoke scented cigarettes with your coffee and eggs. Even as I prophesied!”
“Don’t be hard on me,” Deb pleaded; “I’m not entirely dead to better things—really, Antonia. I feel the call of Spring urging me out and out.... Let’s go to a cinema, shall we?”
“On the contrary, we shall gird up our loins and do war-work, my child,” grimly. “We shall speak to our mothers and ask them what particular niche is vacant for one willing but ignorant daughter of pleasure, and we shall send word of the result by this evening latest. And meanwhile, we will withdraw our plaits that writhe like blue-black serpents amongthe exquisite but macabre foliage of last year’s tablecloth, and put away the dregs of green chartreuse, and sit up and comb ourselves out, and try to be a credit to a nation at war.”
Deb laughed and said she was quite willing to do war-work, and had meant to enrol herself since some time, but had thought it too late....
“Oh, I think the war may be trusted to last another month or two.”
“I meant,” in fractious explanation, “that it always seems to me too late to do something afterwards which one hasn’t done before.”
“Lazy little Oriental.... You will visit my mother at 6 p.m. precisely this evening and receive your instructions,” with which Antonia departed.
“Blair Stevenson is said to be coming back to the Foreign Office” was the sub-conscious wriggle of motive underlying her sincere belief that Deb would be the better for a more strenuous existence.
For Blair Stevenson, in the Diplomatic Service, was Gillian’s friend; Antonia liked him, appreciating to the full his supple wit and undeniably perfect breeding; his pursuit of her was ardent enough for her to enjoy keenly the sensation of flying ... he never drew near, and presently the pursuit slackened; he was sent abroad—British Resident of some West African province; and when he returned, fell easily into place as one of her group—an excellent occasional. Antonia was aware that he was still on good terms with Gillian ... and that if accidentally he met Deb there—“What does it matter?” But the fierce desire persisted to keep the child ... pure.
The eventful climax of the meeting between Gillian and Deb on Zoe’s doorstep, Antonia accepted quietly and almost with relief. It had happened, and there was no more to be done—by her at least. A week afterwards she was forced to leave London—her Major-General was perpetually touring and inspecting and dashing hither and thither. Deb in her letters had spoken no further word of Gillian (Deb was afraid, as a matter of fact, knowing Antonia’s probable state of mind), but Gillian, in divine unconsciousness, dashed off a hasty postcard on which “dear Deb,” struck out, was replaced by “dear Antonia.” It was probably the only card Gillian could find amongst the frenzied litter on a desk which Winifred ought to have kept tidy ... but it told Antonia all she wanted toknow—all that she did not want to know: Deb and Gillian were getting on nicely....
And now Blair was returning. For all her liking of Blair’s society, she infinitely preferred him in Greece, where he was at least safe from the result of Cliffe’s parties or Gillian’s introductions.... Antonia could not be for ever vigilant ... the Major-General was beckoning once more——
And then came that sunny letter from Cliffe Kennedy informing her of a marvellous studio party he had arranged. “I borrowed your studio as usual, and you can have Seaview in the summer whenever you want it. These are little eddies of communal brotherhood that one day will unite to a surging river that will sweep away, etc.——”
Antonia skipped a page or two till the names she sought, dreading to find, sure to find, sprang at her from the page—“Blair Stevenson—Deb....”
... “I had a sort of presentiment that something was bound to happen if I brought those two together.... And again, Antonia, my experimental nerve had twitched to some purpose. Bet you a copy of the Omar Khayyam (I’ve got seventy-two) that this fusion of personalities will have Results—dramatic or beautiful or horrid.... Do come home and join the audience—I’m so excited.”
Deb, entirely absorbed in her canteen work, had given up scanning the horizon for the villain of the piece; so that it was with a shock that she looked up and found him standing quite close to her, waiting for his cue.... Almost she hoped that he would prove not worth while.... Those nights under the gaunt station roof, watching the restless watchers for the leave train, watching the grimy burdened soldiers tumble with dazed eyes out of their compartments on to the platform ... till roused to the necessity for rapid mechanical dole of coffee and sandwiches—wash up—start afresh—hour after hour.... These nights had become more real than the arrangement and re-arrangement of her own temperament.
But Blair was so definitely worth while that Deb dared not refuse him as a prospective—what? The old dream was dead, of course ... dream of the big thing—husband whoknew of all her past idiocies, and called her a goose and laughed at her, and understood; small sturdy boy in a dark blue jersey and rumpled hair several shades too light for such a brown skin.... “You are being not only sentimental, but also futile!” she informed herself. “Next there will be pretty fancies all about a dream-garden”—and straightway there was the garden, at the magical hour of after-tea when the grass looks as though it had been freshly painted, and the canterbury bells are adrip from recent watering....
Sternly Deb removed husband, child and garden by the dream-scruff of their dream-necks,—she sought for some delicate means to enlighten Blair Stevenson of her willingness to—to——
Self-communion slurred over the verbal expression of good—or bad—intent. For it refused to present itself with more elegance than “to go the whole hog”—and such blatant slang did not associate itself readily with Blair’s personality.
“To fulfil my womanhood,”—but that sounded priggish. “To tread the primrose path” was affectation. “To take a lover” was the final selection—but still imperfect. She chose it for the sake of the word “lover” which still hummed to her on that deep sonorous note of wind along the wires ... “lover.”
Meanwhile, her watchfulness lay in ambush for that splendid flare of passion which was to be her impetus and justification. She had a passionate temperament.... How could it be otherwise, with those eyelids and that mouth? Men and women alike had accused her of hot Eastern blood; insisted upon it; warned her, laughing or in envy, of the penalties. She accepted this established version of herself in an unquestioning spirit.
“Child, you’d lead a man to hell!” a victim had once foretold. Now she waited for a man to lead her to hell. She could at least be assured that Blair Stevenson would instinctively and unostentatiously choose quite the least travelled and the most refined and expensive route thither. He was that kind of man; with a reputation, but not a vulgar one, for success with women. Deb, seeking to express crudely the sense he aroused of having dipped to her class from that elusive class which lies midway between the upper middle-class and the aristocracy, told herself in confidence that he made her feel not unlike a housemaid being took notice of by one of thequality. Hitherto, most of the men with whom she had come in contact, could be tabulated as solid business or professional—like Samson or her own father; or else urged by the prevalent rebellion to type, into the artist or vagabond pose—like Cliffe Kennedy.
Blair Stevenson was of such excellent family that he never mentioned his family; probably most of it was extinct, and the rest knew better than to encircle him save at a distance. He had travelled extensively both in cities and in the wilds, so that he combined cosmopolitan ease with the British knack of being able to cope with emergencies. Although he was not much more than thirty-five, the Foreign Office had already recognized his perfect tact and suavity, combined with knowledge of languages, to be extremely useful to them; so that he was accounted one of those mysterious beings “in the know”; “behind the scenes”; one of the men who “pulled strings.”... He had been entrusted with a rather tricky mission to the Balkans, prior to his present leave. His natural appendages and equipments one would assume to be a faithful valet in his town chambers, a faithfulmaître d’hotelin every capital, and a faithful mistress no one knows where; because Stevenson, though ardent, was discreet where women were concerned; but certainly the carriage of her head proclaimed her exquisite breeding, and she cost him a great deal of money....
And all this about him, speculative and positive, did not quite convey why Deb was not always sure (metaphorically) how to use her knives and forks in his presence. Easy to make mistakes—tiny, silly mistakes of conduct or subtlety—and read in his eyes a dawning recognition that she was not quite “it” after all, or his amusement perhaps at her quaint lapses from sophistication: “Am I an amateur compared with what he’s accustomed to?” Then angrily: “Oh, he swanks, and I’m a snob!” which was inaccurate. He took “form” for granted, and she was shaky about it. Blair Stevenson could be relied on for good manners; not so much the surface good manners connected with the graceful opening of doors for the lady’s exit, but the more fundamental good manners which broke a heart as a heart would most wish to be broken.
“I’ve waited long enough,” said Deb.
It suddenly frightened her that again she was hesitating too long; that decision was wearing thin and threadbare with the days.... Perhaps Blair had not realized ... it must be puzzling for a man nowadays to differentiate between the merely good; the frankly bad; the good trying to be bad; and the bad resolved to be good.
“I suppose he needs what Aunt Trudchen used to call ‘a little encouragement,’” Deb reflected.
Then by what sign could she convey to him that her intentions were dishonourable? They had, of course, dispassionately talked of sex, which is the weather-subject of to-day’s men and girls.... Deb was afraid, standing on tiptoe to the clubman and the cosmopolitan, that she might have given an excessive impression of sophistication; and that he was inwardly astonished, now, that she delayed to pass him some customary code-word or countersign necessary to his advancement. She had not the faintest idea what was expected of her, so she essayed a semi-confidence in La llorraine.
That royal veteran of a more clear-headed period, when courtesans were expected to know their alphabet, could not fail to be good-humouredly contemptuous at the spectacle of these children playing their variations of an old game with such quaint and ponderous seriousness; and getting so very little out of it in the way of genuine passion, genuine fun, and ermine cloaks.
Out of the question, certainly, that Manon should join these games. But Deb was six years older and had “made a muff from her chances,” as Manon would never be permitted to do. Moreover, Deb was not La llorraine’s own daughter.... So La llorraine shrugged her shoulders, and gave her the necessary tip.
Deb was on her way to call upon Blair Stevenson unexpectedly at his rooms in Jermyn Street. It was a quarter past ten in the evening, and because she had just been relieved from duty at Victoria Station, she was wearing a long disguising cloak over silk garments that slip on the skin with a suggestion of suave fingers. Blair was at home—she had telephoned during the day, and, preserving an incognito, had asked thevalet what would be the best time to telephone again? The valet said: “I believe that ten o’clock to-night will be most likely to find Mr Stevenson.”... Blair would realize the significance of her visit; and—and once lifted to response, her fatal temperament could be relied upon to do the rest.
“I’ve waited long enough. Oh, suppose I waited till nobody wanted me any more, and then I wanted it more than anything else....”
She leant against the door for a pause of short, quick breathing. The neighbourhood, the steps and passages, the windows, were all discreet good form, world of the clubman, the cosmopolitan, the man who knows ... utterly alien world to the forlorn little virgin, who stands, suddenly erect and stiff and pearly-white; thumb pressed firmly on the bell-button of No. 141B.
“It’snow....”
Queer—never before had she realized the present so vividly; “it has been a minute ago,” “it will be the day after to-morrow” ... but “It’s now,” as Blair, with a smile and a subtle look, threw away his half-smoked cigar, took the half-finished cup of coffee from her hands.
“Now—now——”
She was one pulse that beat for initiation. Her cheap artist fancy had always decorated the temple of initiation so heavily with incense and tiger-skins and divans and rose-leaves, all the crude stock and properties of rapture, that the reality of this ordinary room, big leather arm-chairs and a few prints on the plain dark walls, and a bookcase, and several ash-trays scattered about, this so essentially a man-room, left her disappointed. Had she relied too much upon the trappings? ... but—Blair had taken her in his arms,now....
And still no response from that—that most damnably sluggish temperament.
Very precisely and dispassionately she noticed for the first time that one of his lids lay over the eye with a heavier slouch than the other. She was pleased with the behaviour of his face under stress of emotion ... it did not grow hot nor red nor damp; the veins did not bulge; his breath was under control. She had been right in her selection of Blair Stevenson—but—but——
The ungrateful temperament, which she had provided with the best advantages, was failing her utterly....
She kissed his exacting lips with as much of faked ecstasy as she could coax to her aid, and then wondered, supposing she laughed,—the word ecstasy always made her want to laugh—if that indecorum could be passed off as further ecstasy?
And all this time she did Stevenson the injustice of believing him imperceptive.
“Deb ... my dear....”
He had from the beginning philosophically summed her up as incapable of extremes. But it was not as though he were dependent.... He did not love Deb; he was a little bit in love with her; and she was elfish, delicate, captivating, freshly surprising at each encounter, like in June the first strawberry whose unremembered flavour one has taken for granted through the winter months. Yes, she was charming. And he was wrong in his estimate of her. After all, she had come to him——
One tiny gesture of his—and Deb’s histrionics lay shattered like a wave into foam....
“No ... no ... no—notnow.... Oh,please!”
A moment later, and Blair said, from the other end of the room: “There was no need for that ‘please,’ dear. The first ‘no’ would have been enough.”
She lay angrily sobbing, hair not even disordered, her drapings of pale ninon shamefully untumbled. The desperate encounter had yielded her one scrap of self-knowledge—nothing else: That she was not in the least passionate by nature, and that only love could raise her nature to passion; that she had been misled all her life by a mere illusion deduced by herself and others from her face and her way of moving, and her recklessness of speech and her Jewish pliability.... To her mother who was a Gentile, was due this slight chilliness, blown like a hoar-frost over what might otherwise have been an exotic blossoming.
And the man by the window murmured: “‘To play at half a love with half a lover,’ ... is that what you wanted, child, and couldn’t express? I didn’t understand. Well——”
He crossed again to the couch and stood looking down upon her, hands clasped behind his back, mouth bent to a whimsical smile—“Well—It’s not too late, is it?”
For that explanation both solved the enigma of her visit, and coincided with his former conception of her. The surprise had been her acquiescence, not her rebuff.
She looked up at him pitifully, and shook her head.... His mouth grew hard: if not mistress, nor demi-maid, then what did she expect he would make of her? Surely she could not be hoping.... Blair Stevenson’s wife, if ever materialized from wraithdom, would not be the sort of girl who came to his rooms alone at 10.15 p.m. Nor would his mistress—she not at all a wraith—plead to leave them again after a futile half-hour of compromise. No, Deb (and he still thought her charming) was qualified not for chastity nor for fierce desire.... What did she want of him?
Her intuition leapt to what was passing in his mind; and in stinging agony that he should behold in her a huntress for a likely husband, she said quickly—“I did—Ididwant to play—only to play. But—you frightened me....”
“Forget that. I’m getting old and dense. And all men try ... once, you know. But it’s all right, Deb....”
It was all right—now; at the demi-price of her demi-virtue, she had saved at least that tattered beggar-maid she still called her pride. “I believe you thought I had come with a matrimonial lasso coiled up in my hand,” she taunted him.
And Blair was deceived, for all his penetration. How was he to know, indeed, that daringly as she had repudiated his suspicion, in a little backwater of thought trembled still an eddy from old times and old traditions: “It—would—have—been—rather nice ... to marry him....” But you have just proved you are not in love with him. “Oh—that kind of thing—wouldn’t matter. I believe it would grow of itself ... if he were looking after me.” Her set smile curved into real merriment as it struck her how Samson would approve of these sentiments. Perhaps she and Samson were kindred souls, after all!
But Samson would most certainly not have approved of her present abandonment to a demi-lover. She lay with an apathetic hand straying over his hair and eyebrows, wondering a little at the hard cheek pressed close to hers, wondering a little ... how soon she could say it was time to go, whether there were any letters waiting for her at home, if that pale young lance-corporal who had fainted as she put the coffee-cup into his hands, had recovered yet; wondering a little, asBlair shifted their positions, and drew her head down to where his shirt opened on to his heart—Did Blair really enjoy this? ought she not to say she was uncomfortable and had a crick in her neck? Whether she were now what is called a sinner?—pêcheressein French ... or was itpécheuse? one of them meant the “fisherman’s wife”—she remembered that from school—yes,pêcheuse, surely—they were taught to tell the difference by the resemblance of the circumflex to the roof of the fisherman’s hut. The other has an accent aigü—but Deb had never been quite able to disentangle a vague notion that a fisherman’s wife was also a sinner.Pêcheuse—pécheresse....
She wondered anew if that monstrosity on the wall opposite were a Hogarth? if her watch would be mended by to-morrow, as the man at the shop had faithfully promised?...
“Are you happy, you small white Deb?”
She sighed “Yes....”
“You must come to me often now we understand each other....”
And again: “Yes ... often....”