XII used to wonder, in the days when love and marriage seemed very beautiful and interesting and tremendous food for speculation, but utterly removed from reality andme, what the woman felt like when the question of money first cropped up, whether it spoilt the idealism and romance a little, upset the atmosphere like a Ransome lawn-mower introduced into the Garden of Eden.I used to wonder how I would like asking Cheneston for a new hat, and I always came to the conclusion that I would sooner wear the brim like a halo when the crown fell to pieces from old age than ask him.I suppose if men love you frightfully they make the question of finance easy; but I think my experience with mother and father has rather terrified me, they made the mutual finance discussion so utterly degrading—and I think listening to them has given me a nervous distaste, a sort of hyper-sensitive shrinking from the discussion of ways and means.It has always seemed so infinitely easier to go without things.When I sat in the train and thought of asking Cheneston for five hundred pounds to pay father's card debts I felt sick, and I felt the real me starting to close up tight, like a sea-anemone when you poke it with your toe.Mother travelled to Town with me.She questioned me about my farewells to Walter Markham—she has a serene way of questioning. I think she would have made a mark in the Spanish Inquisition."Did he show much distress at your leaving him, Pam?""I don't know whether he quite realised. He had a sort of relapse, and he was only partially conscious. The doctors thought me callous. The one like a rocking-horse told me I had no right to leave him. I said it was essential I should return. If he could have kept me there by force he would.""I understand from the sister that this sudden relapse makes it more unlikely than ever that he will pull through, apparently the next twenty-four hours are the test.""Yes.""Your nails are not very carefully manicured," said mother.I laughed; it was so like mother to obtrude utterly unimportant trivialities, to bring you crashing to earth with some ridiculous trifle."You will send the money as soon as possible, Pam.""I absolutely can't do it, mother!" I said desperately. I had a sudden vision of myself asking Cheneston for money."You must," mother returned hardily; she spoke casually, as if she were reminding me to send a postcard to notify her of my safe arrival. "I shall not hesitate to go to Cheneston and tell him you are frantically and desperately in love with him, and what may have been jest to him is grim reality to you, and unless he marries you he'll ruin your happiness. I shall be able to say it sincerely because I know it to be true. You are going to tell Cheneston that Walter Markham quite understands why you are staying at Cromer Court, that you have unlocked your lovers' hearts to each other."I spoke rudely to mother for the first time in my life, my fear of her was swept away by a sudden passion of rebellion."Oh, shut up!" I said furiously. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"She looked at me curiously, her lips a little compressed."We should have trained you for the stage," she said. "There is an abandon about you at times that would do better for the theatre than real life—where it is merely crude and bad form.""It seems to me that everything real and vital and honest, all forms of emotion and feeling, are bad form!""Nearly all.""Except borrowing from your friends and threatening your daughter."Mother shrugged and looked out of the window."Unless your father can produce five hundred pounds within the week he will be forced to resign his commission, in which case he would get no pension, and as he has no influence and no brains the prospect of our future does not intrigue me."I, too, looked out of the window; a light frost had crisped the leaves, and though there was no sun the landscape was so full of gold that it glowed and vibrated with apparent sunshine. The fields were full of workers, women in coloured linen overalls guiding ploughs, and allotment-workers on their patches, and the little cottage gardens were gay with autumn flowers; and I wondered if there were undercurrents in all these apparently simple lives, if the men and women out there in the brilliant golden world had furtive motives and social masks like mother and I.It is never safe to wonder for more than three seconds whether everything is what it seems unless you are over fifty—when you are under fifty it hurts, but when you are over fifty you know that you can never alter other people, only yourself, and you know that your disillusionment is half your own fault.I felt a sort of strangling bitterness. I was very grateful for it, because I knew that out of it you can grow a sort of hothouse don't-care-ness that makes it possible for you to do horrid things and not feel horrid until long after they are done.I caught a train to Cromer Court almost at once.Mother saw me off.She stood at the window and chatted charmingly. I am sure that all the people in the carriage were enchanted with her personality. Mother is so fastidiously, almost contemptuously refined and cultured. Had she lived in the time of the French Revolution she would have been gloatingly guillotined by the revolutionists for the very way she breathes."And you won't forget?" she said lightly."I won't forget," I answered.One of the most disappointing things in life is that you never go back to a place—even if you have only been away twenty-four hours—feeling exactly the same as when you left it. You can recover your old poise, but the going away has altered you, you make a dozen little mental readjustments on your return—you see things with the aid of the new experience you have gained during your absence. Life is one continual process of readjustment with people, places, and things, and ourselves.We marvel at the chameleon—his feats are nothing to the feats of a perfectly normal human.I went back to Cromer Court a different person.I met Cheneston as a different person.I know that he was different.Nothing stands still."How is he?" he said at once; and I answered:"They think he will pull through.""Oh, Pam!" he said; and then "Thank God!""Mother came to the hospital," I told him as I climbed into the dog-cart. "Grace Gilpin seemed to think I would be there. It was rather funny her thinking that.""I told her—I wrote," he said.I smiled; the don't-care mood was flourishing. I could feel it steadily swallowing up my little qualms and pitiful sense of honour and dignity, they were vanishing in it like débris thrown on thoroughly efficient quicksands."How is your mother?""Longing for your return. Oh! Pam—the tremendously strong feeling she has for you makes it doubly hard for both of us. You explained to Markham—everything?"I nodded."And they will telegraph news of him here?""Yes."He lifted me out of the dog-cart at the door of Cromer Court; his face looked grey."God bless you," he said, "for coming back to us!"XIIWe dined in Mrs. Cromer's room.She insisted and would take no denial.I thought she seemed stronger and more lovely than ever; she was full of whims and loveliness. She seemed to sparkle with happiness. She sent us away, she wanted a consultation with the cook."It is to be a very special dinner," she told us. "And Pam is to go and lie down. Sweetheart, have you a white frock?""No," I said, "only pink, dear, pink and grey.""You must wear white," she said. "I am bubbling with schemes for my dinner of dinners. I have a frock for you, Pam. Nurse shall bring it—you'll look like a funny little Dutch princess in it, stepped out of an old Dutch fairy-tale book. Now run away, Honey."Nurse was perturbed when she brought the frock; it was of softest ivory white satin, made in Empire style with a wealth of real point de rose lace."She will insist," she said, "and the doctor said she was to have her own way as much as possible—but I don't know. I don't know, I'm sure. She says you are to wear this pearl comb in your hair, and these little white satin shoes studded with pearls. Aren't they ducks? Are you going to pile your hair on the top of your head like those funny old pictures downstairs? I wish the doctor would call again. I think he'd veto this dinner idea, but I'm not sure it wouldn't upset her more to be thwarted than to give it. She's wonderful."There are moments in everyone's life when you feel as if you're taking part in an unreal play; there comes a sudden feeling of panic, as if you did not know your part. I got it that night when I was dressing—and yet there was a dreadful thrilling, electric sweetness about it all.I was excited, my fingers and my toes tingled and my spine felt creepy; and when I brushed my hair it cracked with electricity, and a funny little nerve near my ear that always betrays itself when I am excited began to wriggle.I suppose there is something of the joy of forbidden fruit in it—but it iswonderfuland gorgeous to have Cheneston look at me like a lover, even though I know it is only to satisfy his mother.I think it is awful the way we women can kid ourselves about love, drench ourselves in a sweetness that isn't really there, get intoxicated with a joy that exists only in our own imaginations.If I had been going to the altar with Cheneston I couldn't have been more thrilled than I was when I entered Mrs. Cromer's room.Cheneston rose. He was looking very white and bewildered; and suddenly the fact that he was nonplussed made me feel almost cruelly gay and confident."Pam!" Mrs. Cromer said. "Oh, boy! boy! isn't she the very sweetest thing that ever happened?""Surely," he said.There was a round table laid for two, with a white linen tablecloth with a border of real lace eight inches wide, and in the centre stood a huge white and gold Venetian glass basket filled with lilies of the valley and maidenhair fern."I am going to have a little white love-feast all to myself for my two children," she said.I caught my breath—somehow I had not quite expected just that.For a dizzy moment I wondered what she would say and do if she knew the truth—that Cheneston and I had never been engaged and would never marry.Everything we had was white, from the artichoke soup to the iced pudding. It was a wonderful meal, exquisitely served; it tasted like straw to me—and it would have fascinated an epicure. There was champagne, the only note of colour on the table; and Cheneston and I talked at high tension.To me it had a peculiar and appealing joy; I could say to Cheneston some of the things I felt, and he accepted them as part of my rôle in the astonishing little farce; and from her bed the old lady watched us, an indescribably happy expression on her face.And Cheneston said things to me—things to remember and hoard in myself, and not the knowledge that they were just "part of the game" could rob them of their wonder for me.The atmosphere was extraordinary—to me it felt rather as if we were all being charming and polite, and listening for an explosion at the same time; and there were moments when the explosion seemed inevitable. It seemed as though itmustcome.At last she let us go—and yet I was loath to.As I was crossing the hall a maid came to me."The boy brought it nearly ten minutes ago—so I kept him. I didn't like to disturb you, miss."I took it. It was from the matron of the hospital. "Patient doing well. Out of danger.""No answer," I said.So Walter Markham was going to live, and I had promised——"Good news?" Cheneston said.I handed him the telegram, and he followed me into the drawing-room."Oh, Pam!" he said. "Then you can marry him and be happy! I wish I could do something just to show my enormous gratitude to you.""Do you really mean that?" I said. I swung round on the music-stool, on which I had seated myself, and smiled up at him."Of course I do.""Then give me five hundred pounds," I said.Cheneston lit a cigarette.I do think the girl who has been brought up among a pack of brothers and a crowd of male cousins misses something. When you start knowing men for the first time in your twenties—when your critical faculties are at their very keenest—you do get a fearful amount of astonishment and thrills out of the appalling difference there is between their ways and the ways of your own sex. It's a never-ceasing source of wonder to you.I had startled Cheneston by a totally unexpected demand for five hundred pounds—and he lit a cigarette.A woman would have played with something, probably the blind-tassel—Cheneston was standing near the window—repeated my question, and tried to read my face; the man did none of these things. I think cigarettes are to men what dangly things about dresses, and bracelets, and hairpins are to women—something they can play with and readjust when something has robbed them of their poise and sang-froid. I notice that nervy women and shy women often have scarves and bead necklaces and things they can finger in stressful moments."Would you like it in notes, or will a cheque do?" Cheneston asked quietly. "If you will take a cheque I will give it to you now; if you want notes I am afraid you must wait until I can drive in to the bank.""I want it in notes," I said.I wanted him to ask questions, to show enormous astonishment and interest. I was furious with him for being so calm."I think you owe me something for coming here," I said crudely.I wanted to rouse him at any price. I don't know quite what there is in feminine make-up that makes you suddenly want to hurt the man you love—and somehow the more aloof and patient and wonderful they are, the more you want to scratch. It's only when they get a bit peevish and earthly that you suddenly leave off and feel repentant. If a man, especially a husband, ever patted me on the head, I shouldbitehim; and I don't know why, but terribly gentlemanly men always make me feel horribly unladylike.I don't think I'm a nice character—but I don't think people who feel things terribly, and get themselves all sort of churned up with intensity, are very nice—not what ordinary people call "nice," anyway. I think ordinary people like to feel "sure" of you because it's a great compliment when it is said of you, "She's always just the same." They advance on you with the same trustful confidence that a kitten does on its saucerful of milk. I own it's bad luck to find a saucerful of dead sea, or a minute proportion of fire and brimstone."I owe you more than five hundred pounds," Cheneston said quietly; then he looked at me for the first time. "Pam," he said, "you've altered so lately. Are you happy?""I'm a twittering bunch of sunshine," I said.I felt black inside with bitterness and rebellion."I'm glad," he answered quietly, "you didn't just strike me that way."I wanted to cry like a silly kid, and yet I wanted to be a woman of the world and sting and say clever, lashing things full of prettily covered up spite.I wanted to feel old and hard and bad, and I could only feel young and inadequate and tearful and sniffy, and I hadn't even got a handkerchief.I opened the piano. I was thinking how horrid it is to have our parents thrust upon us, and have to do humiliating things for them that put you in a false position with the people you love best. My brain was a tangled bunch of rebellious "whys?" all squirming like blind kittens."Do you mind if I strum?" I asked."Please do," Cheneston answered courteously. "Will my smoking worry you?""Oh no," I said carelessly, and what I wanted to say was, "Don't you even care enough to ask me why I want that five hundred pounds from you? It's positively insulting of you just to give it to me without a single query as to its destination. How dare you—dare you—dare you think I am the sort of young woman who calmly asks for five hundred pounds for pin-money! Your silence implies that youthinkI am."The long narrow drawing-room looked so beautiful, so dainty, so fresh. The candle-light was reflected softly on the white panelled walls; the fierce little blue lobelia on the quaint grey chintz seemed to stand out, and the moonlight coming through the french diamond-paned windows lay in pools on the grey carpet like stagnant water—the room was so big that the mellow candlelight never spread to there.It was all so big and grave and stately that I felt like an angry mosquito—and yet fate had behaved rottenly to me, assigned to me an ignoble part.I chose the wonderful love-song from "Samson and Delilah," and I forgot Cheneston, I forgot the room, and the blue dragon-pots of late madonna lilies. I forgot myself—only the scent of the lilies stayed and drenched me with indescribable sweetness, and I seemed to struggle down into the soul of Delilah and understand why she hated and yet loved Samson for his strength, as I hated and loved Cheneston for his.Cheneston was sitting in the arm-chair, gripping the sides, and when I stopped he lit another cigarette.I could have smacked him."Thanks," he said, "it's a wonderful thing."I played the opening bars of "Thank God for a Garden."I felt like a worn-out mosquito."I'm afraid you're tired, Pam," he said when I had finished. "You look awfully tired.""I think I'll go to bed," I said. "My head is rather rotten.""I'll ask nurse to bring you an aspirin.""No thanks—it's just sleep I want. I shall be all right to-morrow.""I'm sorry your head is bad.""I often get headaches."He held open the door for me.I wondered if he were going to refer to the five hundred pounds."Good-night," I said slowly."Good-night," he answered gravely. "I hope your head will be better in the morning."Outside the door of old Mrs. Cromer's room I paused. I had a passionate and overwhelming desire to go and tell her the truth. I was in need of counsel. I craved advice. I felt that nothing in the whole world could ever be right again. The future terrified me, and all the people in it—Walter Markham, mother, father.I felt I would give anything to go and lay my burden on someone else's shoulder.If I felt like a mosquito at all, it was when it feels and fears the approach of winter.XIIII woke at midnight with an extraordinary feeling that I was the last person left alive on earth, a consciousness of desolation and isolation terrifying and indescribable. I used to get it when I was a child, and I would have gone into a lion's cage for company. I believe it is some form of nerve pressure medical men can't explain.I got up shivering and put on my little silk kimona.I felt I had to go to Mrs. Cromer—I had to tell her all about Walter Markham, who was getting better and who thought I loved him and wanted to marry me, and Cheneston who did not love me. I felt I had to tell her about Grace Gilpin—the very lovely person Cheneston cared for.The impossibility of struggling through the immediate future alone and unadvised appalled me; chiefly I was terrified about Walter Markham, the man to whom I had been so horribly unkind in my kindness, the man who believed I had gone to the hospital to see him because I cared. I had fostered the belief because he was dying—and he had lived, and all the hopes I had raised and the delusions I had tenderly fostered lived with him.My life had been the life of a little child until my meeting on the shore with Cheneston that day, all things ordered and planned for me, and now I was suddenly called upon to play a rôle almost verging on drama, requiring subtlety of which I was quite incapable, finesse of which I could have no knowledge.I crept, shivering, along the panelled landing, past Cheneston's door. I knew the nurse was sleeping in the little dressing-room attached to Mrs. Cromer's.I prayed Heaven she was asleep as I cautiously opened the door.The night-light on the washhand-stand burned steadily; it was reflected in little spots of primrose light on the mahogany furniture.I crept to the bed.The old lady was lying very still. She looked extraordinarily lovely and fragile, and a tiny smile curved the corners of her sweet old mouth, as if she had fallen asleep in a network of happy thoughts.She seemed so small in the big room full of furniture.I realised as I knelt beside her how much I loved her, what an ideal she would always be in my life.I softly kissed her hand, kneeling there, and then I realised it held a letter, and I caught sight of the words."I fall asleep happily because I leave you to another mother—little mother Pam of the big eyes and the big heart. The child loves you, Cheneston——"I touched her face; it was cold as ice. touched her hand.Cheneston's mother had fallen asleep happily."Oh, my dear!" I whispered. "And I came to tell you—and now you'll never know that I wanted to be his mother, and he wanted another sort."I don't know how long I stayed there. I seemed very close to her. She was so beautiful, the loveliest old thing with that little tender smile curving her lips; the peace of her, like the loveliness, was indescribable.I wondered if in heaven there were things to mother and love. I hoped so; her life had been so full of warmth, so radiant with humanity. I thought of her extraordinary quaintness, the delicious way she put things—I heard again her laughter.I looked at the letter."The child loves you, Cheneston."He mustn't see that; last words have a tremendous significance, and we credit those who are near heaven with super-insight; just those few words might set him questioning and wondering, might get between him and Grace Gilpin.Had I right to rob him of her last message?To leave it there would be to give myself a chance; to take it would be to destroy my last.I took it very gently from her fingers.I would not destroy it, it was not mine to destroy; I would cherish it very carefully, and after a while I would send it to him anonymously.I realised that the need for my presence at Cromer Court was over; I was free to go, my part was played and the curtain was down.Exit Pamela Burbridge from Cheneston Cromer's life.I staggered to my feet.It is easy to do dramatic things, to make your exit; but to slip away when you want to stay, when your whole heart is aching to stay, to make exits so silently and unostentatiously that the ones you long to miss you hardly know that you are gone—that is the hardest of all.I knew before I left Mrs. Cromer's side that I was going to run away—away from Cheneston and Walter Markham and mother and father.I had to. I couldn't stay and face things out.To begin somewhere else all over again.It was the explanation I was afraid of, explanations to mother, to father, to Cheneston, to Walter Markham.I was running away from Explanations.I wrote a little note and pushed it under Cheneston's door, where he would find it in the morning."Please send the five hundred pounds to mother.—P.B."I packed a few of my serviceable clothes in a handbag.I had five pounds in notes and fifteen shillings in silver.The dawn was just breaking when I left the Court.The world was wet and cold.I looked back at the house from the other side of the wrought-iron gate; its shuttered windows seemed like hostile eyes.I felt a little like Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden—I wondered if her expulsion had taken place on a wet morning before the sun was up.XIVI had read "Alone in London" stories, rather wonderful, poignant things. I remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by Peggy Webling. They had gripped me at the time. I had been so lonely in my real life that I always found it easy to get inside the skin of the heroines I was reading about, and for days my lonely walks with Pomp and Circumstance across the wet moors and through leafless lanes were no longer lonely or desolate—they had become the streets of the greatest capital in the world.If you have sufficient imagination and a cheap lending library near you your world is never unpeopled. I often think that the library is the one thing that prevents prisoners going mad—you couldn't go mad if you were allowed O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to read yourself to sleep with.Two things I hadn't expected about London happened: it was radiant with sunshine when I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice of me.I was a little nonplussed; then I found a boarding-house, not in Bloomsbury, where the wallpaper was not flowered and the atmosphere was not cabbagey; the landlady neither stared at me nor asked questions, and the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and there was a parrot in the basement who said "change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing could have been less sinister or more normal and cheery.I cried myself to sleep the first night—it seemed the right thing to do; but I left off in the middle because I couldn't think of anything more to cry about.I had a dear old lady in the room next to mine. She knocked at my door just as I was falling to sleep."My dear," she piped, "if you should hear a raid warning, if you would just tap the wall. We all go down into the cellar—and one likes to prepare a little.""Prepare?" I said."Hindes," she whispered apologetically, "curlers—you know—one doesn't like——"I fell asleep smiling on my first night in darkest, dreadfulest, naughtiest London.The next day I started to hunt for work. I was paying forty shillings a week, and had only four pounds ten left of my money.I found it at once. I took the money in a cinema booking-office. It was dull, and I got thirty shillings a week; I took it because it gave me the entire morning to hunt for more remunerative work.I met with no adventures in my hutch. I was sworn at several times for giving the wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in Prussian blue and silver uniform, who waved the people to their seats inside, gave me a packet of butterscotch. But the more remunerative work did not present itself. I was untrained. I could not type or do shorthand, and I had no previous experience. The men who interviewed me were most civil, they suggested Clark's College or Pitman's. I was no good to them.I had to change my boarding-house. I went to one near Kentish Town, it was very clean, and the landlady had been a professional cook. I boarded with the family, and a Polish Jewess also lived there, a skirt hand in a big West End tailor's. She used to press my skirts.I wondered if anybody was advertising for me, or if there was any fussation going on. I did not think I was worth a whole detective for one minute. I did not attempt to hide. I had read somewhere that to live an ordinary life was the surest way to escape detection.I wondered, as the months slipped by, if Cheneston had married Grace Gilpin.I did not lose Cheneston. I could always step right back in memory into the days I had spent with him, days of infinite and dear delight.I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted passionately to be his wife; that if he were to ask me to marry him I would marry him rapturously and thankfully, even though I knew he didn't care two straws about me and would need a photograph to remember the way I did my hair.I believe the "if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be" sort of people are very, very jelly-fishy.If you care for a man you care for him, and that's all there is to it; the fact that he cares for someone else or doesn't care for you doesn't alter your feelings, it only makes the pain and hurt of it an artistic success.I wish I was jelly-fishy in my feelings for people. If I were I could say of Cheneston, "I can't stick here! I'll float on." But I'm a barnacle creature where I love. I shall be Cheneston's girl even if I never see him again. My heart went from me when I first met him, and the doors closed after it and left a little hole. It will always ache, and I shall always know there is a hole where a heart should be—especially when I listen to wonderful music or see sunsets or little children at play.I shall never, never have another heart to give away; some women have theirs on bits of elastic so that they can always pull them back and give them away again; a man sort of holds it until somebody else wins it, like a challenge shield or a football cup.I gave mine entirely and unconditionally; I believe that time will cocaine the hole.I look to time to do a lot for me in the healing and dulling line—all that the poets and the proverbs say it will. Time never fails you—when all else fails, you can always kid yourself you haven't given it long enough to perform the miracle.I don't ever want to see anyone I knew in the old life. I feel that the Pamela Burbridge of those days is dead, poor thing! but she has a more exciting time than most defunct people, because every night I shake her up and make her live over again her enchanted halcyon days by the sea and at Cromer Court.She lives in sunshine and happiness for an hour or two of memory every night, even if she has to die off while I go and do my day's work.Life is really awfully funny and un-understandable. Why are we given feelings we've got to squash?Are we big if we squash them and little if we let them grow?I wouldn't squash my feelings about Cheneston.I simply love them.I couldn't squash them even if I knew I would grow such a huge and splendid national character, and such a power for good, that they would give me a gold-leaf Pamela Memorial in Kensington Gardens with a lightning conductor, and ten lines in theLondon Guide Bookall to myself.XVI have lost my job, and the little Russian tailoress presses my skirt every day and has lent me a pound.Russia doesn't seem a lucky country for me; the cinema proprietor was a young Russian Jew, and when the August orders about Russians serving came up he got five months' exemption, and now he's joined up and the cinema has been turned into a Y.M.C.A. canteen. I help them two nights a week.It was funny; the other day there were a lot of men expected in. It's just outside the station, and often we get officers, and an officer in Walter Markham's regiment came in. I knew it was his battalion. The officer was just home on leave. I asked him if he knew Captain Markham."Used to be under him," he said. "Went West, poor chap! Died in a hospital somewhere up North.""Are you sure he died?" I said."Positive. He had a sudden relapse. Ballyntine, one of our senior officers, was pipped at the same time and got sent to the same hospital. He was there when Markham died. He's rejoined since; he's out there now. Why? Did you know Markham?""He was a great friend of a friend of mine.""Jolly decent chap," the young officer said.I thought it such an accurate epitaph. He was a jolly decent chap. I turned away because my eyes were so full of tears.If he had recovered and I had married him I could never, never have made him happy. I should have been one of those wives who suddenly look at their husbands with vacant eyes, and have thoughts they cannot tell when they are asked—you see, Cheneston Cromer is with me for keeps, the memory of him will never go, and I know that often I should wander away from Walter with Cheneston, and be sorry to come back, and Walter was too great a dear to treat like that, a very gallant and honest English gentleman.Regina Merolovitch has found me a "job" at twenty-five shillings a week. She says it is only temporary, and soon I shall find something better; but I don't know. I am only "honest and willing," and the world seems overcrowded with honesty and willingness unadorned.I "do anything" for Madame Cherry, who has a little cherry-coloured shop with grey fittings and purple hangings in the West End. Sometimes I am in the showroom, sometimes I make tea for the girls, sometimes I pick pins off the showroom floor, sometimes I "match" things at the big London stores, sometimes I take things home to customers.I marvel at the prices people pay for clothes. The people who fluff in and say, "I must have some little cheap thing, madame," seem to pay most and buy most.Madame made a wonderful "little cheap thing" the other day—black tulle over blue tulle, and all of it edged with blue beetles' wings, and blue tissue round the waist to match.It was done in a violent hurry because "he" was coming home on leave; "he" was staying at the Savoy with her for a few days, and then they were going down to their country seat when he had seen about his kit.She paid for the girl's "hurry."Madame never breaks her promises.She had promised it by seven, and I was to deliver it at the Savoy."And wear your best coat and skirt; and if it is fine you can wear that blue velour hat that has just come in, but don't put any pins in it," said Madame. "I can't have people carrying my boxes and going to the Savoy looking anyhow."Madame's boxes are French grey with bunches of cherries on them, tied with gay cherry ribbons, and "Cherry" written across. They are a part of her general scheme.I had one of them on my arm when I went to the Savoy.I like the Savoy; it never smells foody, and the orchestra chats to itself instead of shouting at you. I like an orchestra that chats to itself, and then you can talk without feeling you oughtn't to.I was very, very tired, and I did feel an awful alien in that place. It's not personality or breeding that makes you feel at home in big restaurants and hotels—it's just clothes. It doesn't matter if you've given your twelve country seats to the country for hospitals, and you've got the newest thing in Rolls Royce's nestling on the kerb outside; if you've got the wrong clothes on you feel as out-of-place and insignificant as a flapper at a silver wedding.I found the right suite and delivered the box; an ecstatic young woman rushed out in a violet kimona with black storks on it. I think my appearance rather nonplussed her, it's horribly embarrassing to wear decently cut clothes sometimes."Are you Madame Cherry's daughter?" she said. "Well—it's frightfully decent of you to bring it—er—will you have a cocktail or anything?"I went down the lift with a huge box of Fuller's chocolates tucked under my arm.I adore Fuller's chocolates.As I stepped out of the lift at the bottom someone grasped my arm and said:"Pam! Pamela Burbridge!"It was Grace Gilpin.She looked simply gorgeous.She wore a cloak of dull velvet the exact colour of her hair, with a great skunk collar. There was a sort of laughing radiancy about her, as if she were bubbling and dancing with happiness.I wondered if she knew that my people didn't know where I was. I thought I could trust mother for that. I was right."I met Mrs. Burbridge not so very long ago," she said. "She was most mysterious and injured about you, Pam. What have you been doing? She seemed quite martyred. I couldn't get anything out of her. Have you got married, or gone on the stage, or what? Won't Cheneston be surprised! You must stay and have dinner with us and tell us all your misdeeds.""Cheneston?" I said.People were drinking their coffee and staring at Grace, just as they always did."Yes, he's home on leave and staying here. Pam—didn't you know I was married?""Yes," I lied swiftly.I knew that Cheneston was behind me. I knew it without turning. I felt it; once more the old thrilling excitement, the tension of expectancy, stirred in me—for another woman's husband."Where is that husband of mine?" Grace said in her familiar, high, sweet, laughing voice. "I do want you to meet."I wanted to say, "He's behind me. You don't know it, butIdo. I can feel it all down my neck and spine. He belongs to you, but you can't feel it. I'm glad you can't feel it. Glad! Glad! Glad!"Instead I said:"Good heavens! I was forgetting! I'm going on to dinner, and my husband's outside in the car. I went up to see some friends, and said I wouldn't be a second.""You married, Pam! I never knew that!""I must absolutely fly!" I said."But, Pam—I'm so interested. Who did you marry, Pam? Hang it all! I'm thrilled to the core—you can't run away like this! Besides, Cheneston's here, and—— Pam,why did you break off your engagement to Cheneston?""Must fly!" I said.I caught sight of Cheneston. He had not recognised my back, he was waiting to come forward and join his wife.That queer, quizzical, bored look was on his face. He's the only man whose thoughts I ever pined to know.I would have given the world to have been able to stop and say:"Whatareyou thinking about?"I heard Grace say in that queer, lilting voice of hers:"Oh, bother! Cheneston, you're just too late! That was Pam Burbridge—only she isn't any more, she's married, and her husband is outside in a car."And as I hurried out into the courtyard a woman getting out of a car said:"Look at that woman; isn't she wonderful!"Of course it was Grace; if it had been me she would have said:"Look at that funny little moth-eaten rabbit of a girl hurrying away as if there was a stoat after her. You really do see the queerest people everywhere nowadays."
XI
I used to wonder, in the days when love and marriage seemed very beautiful and interesting and tremendous food for speculation, but utterly removed from reality andme, what the woman felt like when the question of money first cropped up, whether it spoilt the idealism and romance a little, upset the atmosphere like a Ransome lawn-mower introduced into the Garden of Eden.
I used to wonder how I would like asking Cheneston for a new hat, and I always came to the conclusion that I would sooner wear the brim like a halo when the crown fell to pieces from old age than ask him.
I suppose if men love you frightfully they make the question of finance easy; but I think my experience with mother and father has rather terrified me, they made the mutual finance discussion so utterly degrading—and I think listening to them has given me a nervous distaste, a sort of hyper-sensitive shrinking from the discussion of ways and means.
It has always seemed so infinitely easier to go without things.
When I sat in the train and thought of asking Cheneston for five hundred pounds to pay father's card debts I felt sick, and I felt the real me starting to close up tight, like a sea-anemone when you poke it with your toe.
Mother travelled to Town with me.
She questioned me about my farewells to Walter Markham—she has a serene way of questioning. I think she would have made a mark in the Spanish Inquisition.
"Did he show much distress at your leaving him, Pam?"
"I don't know whether he quite realised. He had a sort of relapse, and he was only partially conscious. The doctors thought me callous. The one like a rocking-horse told me I had no right to leave him. I said it was essential I should return. If he could have kept me there by force he would."
"I understand from the sister that this sudden relapse makes it more unlikely than ever that he will pull through, apparently the next twenty-four hours are the test."
"Yes."
"Your nails are not very carefully manicured," said mother.
I laughed; it was so like mother to obtrude utterly unimportant trivialities, to bring you crashing to earth with some ridiculous trifle.
"You will send the money as soon as possible, Pam."
"I absolutely can't do it, mother!" I said desperately. I had a sudden vision of myself asking Cheneston for money.
"You must," mother returned hardily; she spoke casually, as if she were reminding me to send a postcard to notify her of my safe arrival. "I shall not hesitate to go to Cheneston and tell him you are frantically and desperately in love with him, and what may have been jest to him is grim reality to you, and unless he marries you he'll ruin your happiness. I shall be able to say it sincerely because I know it to be true. You are going to tell Cheneston that Walter Markham quite understands why you are staying at Cromer Court, that you have unlocked your lovers' hearts to each other."
I spoke rudely to mother for the first time in my life, my fear of her was swept away by a sudden passion of rebellion.
"Oh, shut up!" I said furiously. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
She looked at me curiously, her lips a little compressed.
"We should have trained you for the stage," she said. "There is an abandon about you at times that would do better for the theatre than real life—where it is merely crude and bad form."
"It seems to me that everything real and vital and honest, all forms of emotion and feeling, are bad form!"
"Nearly all."
"Except borrowing from your friends and threatening your daughter."
Mother shrugged and looked out of the window.
"Unless your father can produce five hundred pounds within the week he will be forced to resign his commission, in which case he would get no pension, and as he has no influence and no brains the prospect of our future does not intrigue me."
I, too, looked out of the window; a light frost had crisped the leaves, and though there was no sun the landscape was so full of gold that it glowed and vibrated with apparent sunshine. The fields were full of workers, women in coloured linen overalls guiding ploughs, and allotment-workers on their patches, and the little cottage gardens were gay with autumn flowers; and I wondered if there were undercurrents in all these apparently simple lives, if the men and women out there in the brilliant golden world had furtive motives and social masks like mother and I.
It is never safe to wonder for more than three seconds whether everything is what it seems unless you are over fifty—when you are under fifty it hurts, but when you are over fifty you know that you can never alter other people, only yourself, and you know that your disillusionment is half your own fault.
I felt a sort of strangling bitterness. I was very grateful for it, because I knew that out of it you can grow a sort of hothouse don't-care-ness that makes it possible for you to do horrid things and not feel horrid until long after they are done.
I caught a train to Cromer Court almost at once.
Mother saw me off.
She stood at the window and chatted charmingly. I am sure that all the people in the carriage were enchanted with her personality. Mother is so fastidiously, almost contemptuously refined and cultured. Had she lived in the time of the French Revolution she would have been gloatingly guillotined by the revolutionists for the very way she breathes.
"And you won't forget?" she said lightly.
"I won't forget," I answered.
One of the most disappointing things in life is that you never go back to a place—even if you have only been away twenty-four hours—feeling exactly the same as when you left it. You can recover your old poise, but the going away has altered you, you make a dozen little mental readjustments on your return—you see things with the aid of the new experience you have gained during your absence. Life is one continual process of readjustment with people, places, and things, and ourselves.
We marvel at the chameleon—his feats are nothing to the feats of a perfectly normal human.
I went back to Cromer Court a different person.
I met Cheneston as a different person.
I know that he was different.
Nothing stands still.
"How is he?" he said at once; and I answered:
"They think he will pull through."
"Oh, Pam!" he said; and then "Thank God!"
"Mother came to the hospital," I told him as I climbed into the dog-cart. "Grace Gilpin seemed to think I would be there. It was rather funny her thinking that."
"I told her—I wrote," he said.
I smiled; the don't-care mood was flourishing. I could feel it steadily swallowing up my little qualms and pitiful sense of honour and dignity, they were vanishing in it like débris thrown on thoroughly efficient quicksands.
"How is your mother?"
"Longing for your return. Oh! Pam—the tremendously strong feeling she has for you makes it doubly hard for both of us. You explained to Markham—everything?"
I nodded.
"And they will telegraph news of him here?"
"Yes."
He lifted me out of the dog-cart at the door of Cromer Court; his face looked grey.
"God bless you," he said, "for coming back to us!"
XII
We dined in Mrs. Cromer's room.
She insisted and would take no denial.
I thought she seemed stronger and more lovely than ever; she was full of whims and loveliness. She seemed to sparkle with happiness. She sent us away, she wanted a consultation with the cook.
"It is to be a very special dinner," she told us. "And Pam is to go and lie down. Sweetheart, have you a white frock?"
"No," I said, "only pink, dear, pink and grey."
"You must wear white," she said. "I am bubbling with schemes for my dinner of dinners. I have a frock for you, Pam. Nurse shall bring it—you'll look like a funny little Dutch princess in it, stepped out of an old Dutch fairy-tale book. Now run away, Honey."
Nurse was perturbed when she brought the frock; it was of softest ivory white satin, made in Empire style with a wealth of real point de rose lace.
"She will insist," she said, "and the doctor said she was to have her own way as much as possible—but I don't know. I don't know, I'm sure. She says you are to wear this pearl comb in your hair, and these little white satin shoes studded with pearls. Aren't they ducks? Are you going to pile your hair on the top of your head like those funny old pictures downstairs? I wish the doctor would call again. I think he'd veto this dinner idea, but I'm not sure it wouldn't upset her more to be thwarted than to give it. She's wonderful."
There are moments in everyone's life when you feel as if you're taking part in an unreal play; there comes a sudden feeling of panic, as if you did not know your part. I got it that night when I was dressing—and yet there was a dreadful thrilling, electric sweetness about it all.
I was excited, my fingers and my toes tingled and my spine felt creepy; and when I brushed my hair it cracked with electricity, and a funny little nerve near my ear that always betrays itself when I am excited began to wriggle.
I suppose there is something of the joy of forbidden fruit in it—but it iswonderfuland gorgeous to have Cheneston look at me like a lover, even though I know it is only to satisfy his mother.
I think it is awful the way we women can kid ourselves about love, drench ourselves in a sweetness that isn't really there, get intoxicated with a joy that exists only in our own imaginations.
If I had been going to the altar with Cheneston I couldn't have been more thrilled than I was when I entered Mrs. Cromer's room.
Cheneston rose. He was looking very white and bewildered; and suddenly the fact that he was nonplussed made me feel almost cruelly gay and confident.
"Pam!" Mrs. Cromer said. "Oh, boy! boy! isn't she the very sweetest thing that ever happened?"
"Surely," he said.
There was a round table laid for two, with a white linen tablecloth with a border of real lace eight inches wide, and in the centre stood a huge white and gold Venetian glass basket filled with lilies of the valley and maidenhair fern.
"I am going to have a little white love-feast all to myself for my two children," she said.
I caught my breath—somehow I had not quite expected just that.
For a dizzy moment I wondered what she would say and do if she knew the truth—that Cheneston and I had never been engaged and would never marry.
Everything we had was white, from the artichoke soup to the iced pudding. It was a wonderful meal, exquisitely served; it tasted like straw to me—and it would have fascinated an epicure. There was champagne, the only note of colour on the table; and Cheneston and I talked at high tension.
To me it had a peculiar and appealing joy; I could say to Cheneston some of the things I felt, and he accepted them as part of my rôle in the astonishing little farce; and from her bed the old lady watched us, an indescribably happy expression on her face.
And Cheneston said things to me—things to remember and hoard in myself, and not the knowledge that they were just "part of the game" could rob them of their wonder for me.
The atmosphere was extraordinary—to me it felt rather as if we were all being charming and polite, and listening for an explosion at the same time; and there were moments when the explosion seemed inevitable. It seemed as though itmustcome.
At last she let us go—and yet I was loath to.
As I was crossing the hall a maid came to me.
"The boy brought it nearly ten minutes ago—so I kept him. I didn't like to disturb you, miss."
I took it. It was from the matron of the hospital. "Patient doing well. Out of danger."
"No answer," I said.
So Walter Markham was going to live, and I had promised——
"Good news?" Cheneston said.
I handed him the telegram, and he followed me into the drawing-room.
"Oh, Pam!" he said. "Then you can marry him and be happy! I wish I could do something just to show my enormous gratitude to you."
"Do you really mean that?" I said. I swung round on the music-stool, on which I had seated myself, and smiled up at him.
"Of course I do."
"Then give me five hundred pounds," I said.
Cheneston lit a cigarette.
I do think the girl who has been brought up among a pack of brothers and a crowd of male cousins misses something. When you start knowing men for the first time in your twenties—when your critical faculties are at their very keenest—you do get a fearful amount of astonishment and thrills out of the appalling difference there is between their ways and the ways of your own sex. It's a never-ceasing source of wonder to you.
I had startled Cheneston by a totally unexpected demand for five hundred pounds—and he lit a cigarette.
A woman would have played with something, probably the blind-tassel—Cheneston was standing near the window—repeated my question, and tried to read my face; the man did none of these things. I think cigarettes are to men what dangly things about dresses, and bracelets, and hairpins are to women—something they can play with and readjust when something has robbed them of their poise and sang-froid. I notice that nervy women and shy women often have scarves and bead necklaces and things they can finger in stressful moments.
"Would you like it in notes, or will a cheque do?" Cheneston asked quietly. "If you will take a cheque I will give it to you now; if you want notes I am afraid you must wait until I can drive in to the bank."
"I want it in notes," I said.
I wanted him to ask questions, to show enormous astonishment and interest. I was furious with him for being so calm.
"I think you owe me something for coming here," I said crudely.
I wanted to rouse him at any price. I don't know quite what there is in feminine make-up that makes you suddenly want to hurt the man you love—and somehow the more aloof and patient and wonderful they are, the more you want to scratch. It's only when they get a bit peevish and earthly that you suddenly leave off and feel repentant. If a man, especially a husband, ever patted me on the head, I shouldbitehim; and I don't know why, but terribly gentlemanly men always make me feel horribly unladylike.
I don't think I'm a nice character—but I don't think people who feel things terribly, and get themselves all sort of churned up with intensity, are very nice—not what ordinary people call "nice," anyway. I think ordinary people like to feel "sure" of you because it's a great compliment when it is said of you, "She's always just the same." They advance on you with the same trustful confidence that a kitten does on its saucerful of milk. I own it's bad luck to find a saucerful of dead sea, or a minute proportion of fire and brimstone.
"I owe you more than five hundred pounds," Cheneston said quietly; then he looked at me for the first time. "Pam," he said, "you've altered so lately. Are you happy?"
"I'm a twittering bunch of sunshine," I said.
I felt black inside with bitterness and rebellion.
"I'm glad," he answered quietly, "you didn't just strike me that way."
I wanted to cry like a silly kid, and yet I wanted to be a woman of the world and sting and say clever, lashing things full of prettily covered up spite.
I wanted to feel old and hard and bad, and I could only feel young and inadequate and tearful and sniffy, and I hadn't even got a handkerchief.
I opened the piano. I was thinking how horrid it is to have our parents thrust upon us, and have to do humiliating things for them that put you in a false position with the people you love best. My brain was a tangled bunch of rebellious "whys?" all squirming like blind kittens.
"Do you mind if I strum?" I asked.
"Please do," Cheneston answered courteously. "Will my smoking worry you?"
"Oh no," I said carelessly, and what I wanted to say was, "Don't you even care enough to ask me why I want that five hundred pounds from you? It's positively insulting of you just to give it to me without a single query as to its destination. How dare you—dare you—dare you think I am the sort of young woman who calmly asks for five hundred pounds for pin-money! Your silence implies that youthinkI am."
The long narrow drawing-room looked so beautiful, so dainty, so fresh. The candle-light was reflected softly on the white panelled walls; the fierce little blue lobelia on the quaint grey chintz seemed to stand out, and the moonlight coming through the french diamond-paned windows lay in pools on the grey carpet like stagnant water—the room was so big that the mellow candlelight never spread to there.
It was all so big and grave and stately that I felt like an angry mosquito—and yet fate had behaved rottenly to me, assigned to me an ignoble part.
I chose the wonderful love-song from "Samson and Delilah," and I forgot Cheneston, I forgot the room, and the blue dragon-pots of late madonna lilies. I forgot myself—only the scent of the lilies stayed and drenched me with indescribable sweetness, and I seemed to struggle down into the soul of Delilah and understand why she hated and yet loved Samson for his strength, as I hated and loved Cheneston for his.
Cheneston was sitting in the arm-chair, gripping the sides, and when I stopped he lit another cigarette.
I could have smacked him.
"Thanks," he said, "it's a wonderful thing."
I played the opening bars of "Thank God for a Garden."
I felt like a worn-out mosquito.
"I'm afraid you're tired, Pam," he said when I had finished. "You look awfully tired."
"I think I'll go to bed," I said. "My head is rather rotten."
"I'll ask nurse to bring you an aspirin."
"No thanks—it's just sleep I want. I shall be all right to-morrow."
"I'm sorry your head is bad."
"I often get headaches."
He held open the door for me.
I wondered if he were going to refer to the five hundred pounds.
"Good-night," I said slowly.
"Good-night," he answered gravely. "I hope your head will be better in the morning."
Outside the door of old Mrs. Cromer's room I paused. I had a passionate and overwhelming desire to go and tell her the truth. I was in need of counsel. I craved advice. I felt that nothing in the whole world could ever be right again. The future terrified me, and all the people in it—Walter Markham, mother, father.
I felt I would give anything to go and lay my burden on someone else's shoulder.
If I felt like a mosquito at all, it was when it feels and fears the approach of winter.
XIII
I woke at midnight with an extraordinary feeling that I was the last person left alive on earth, a consciousness of desolation and isolation terrifying and indescribable. I used to get it when I was a child, and I would have gone into a lion's cage for company. I believe it is some form of nerve pressure medical men can't explain.
I got up shivering and put on my little silk kimona.
I felt I had to go to Mrs. Cromer—I had to tell her all about Walter Markham, who was getting better and who thought I loved him and wanted to marry me, and Cheneston who did not love me. I felt I had to tell her about Grace Gilpin—the very lovely person Cheneston cared for.
The impossibility of struggling through the immediate future alone and unadvised appalled me; chiefly I was terrified about Walter Markham, the man to whom I had been so horribly unkind in my kindness, the man who believed I had gone to the hospital to see him because I cared. I had fostered the belief because he was dying—and he had lived, and all the hopes I had raised and the delusions I had tenderly fostered lived with him.
My life had been the life of a little child until my meeting on the shore with Cheneston that day, all things ordered and planned for me, and now I was suddenly called upon to play a rôle almost verging on drama, requiring subtlety of which I was quite incapable, finesse of which I could have no knowledge.
I crept, shivering, along the panelled landing, past Cheneston's door. I knew the nurse was sleeping in the little dressing-room attached to Mrs. Cromer's.
I prayed Heaven she was asleep as I cautiously opened the door.
The night-light on the washhand-stand burned steadily; it was reflected in little spots of primrose light on the mahogany furniture.
I crept to the bed.
The old lady was lying very still. She looked extraordinarily lovely and fragile, and a tiny smile curved the corners of her sweet old mouth, as if she had fallen asleep in a network of happy thoughts.
She seemed so small in the big room full of furniture.
I realised as I knelt beside her how much I loved her, what an ideal she would always be in my life.
I softly kissed her hand, kneeling there, and then I realised it held a letter, and I caught sight of the words.
"I fall asleep happily because I leave you to another mother—little mother Pam of the big eyes and the big heart. The child loves you, Cheneston——"
I touched her face; it was cold as ice. touched her hand.
Cheneston's mother had fallen asleep happily.
"Oh, my dear!" I whispered. "And I came to tell you—and now you'll never know that I wanted to be his mother, and he wanted another sort."
I don't know how long I stayed there. I seemed very close to her. She was so beautiful, the loveliest old thing with that little tender smile curving her lips; the peace of her, like the loveliness, was indescribable.
I wondered if in heaven there were things to mother and love. I hoped so; her life had been so full of warmth, so radiant with humanity. I thought of her extraordinary quaintness, the delicious way she put things—I heard again her laughter.
I looked at the letter.
"The child loves you, Cheneston."
He mustn't see that; last words have a tremendous significance, and we credit those who are near heaven with super-insight; just those few words might set him questioning and wondering, might get between him and Grace Gilpin.
Had I right to rob him of her last message?
To leave it there would be to give myself a chance; to take it would be to destroy my last.
I took it very gently from her fingers.
I would not destroy it, it was not mine to destroy; I would cherish it very carefully, and after a while I would send it to him anonymously.
I realised that the need for my presence at Cromer Court was over; I was free to go, my part was played and the curtain was down.
Exit Pamela Burbridge from Cheneston Cromer's life.
I staggered to my feet.
It is easy to do dramatic things, to make your exit; but to slip away when you want to stay, when your whole heart is aching to stay, to make exits so silently and unostentatiously that the ones you long to miss you hardly know that you are gone—that is the hardest of all.
I knew before I left Mrs. Cromer's side that I was going to run away—away from Cheneston and Walter Markham and mother and father.
I had to. I couldn't stay and face things out.
To begin somewhere else all over again.
It was the explanation I was afraid of, explanations to mother, to father, to Cheneston, to Walter Markham.
I was running away from Explanations.
I wrote a little note and pushed it under Cheneston's door, where he would find it in the morning.
"Please send the five hundred pounds to mother.—P.B."
I packed a few of my serviceable clothes in a handbag.
I had five pounds in notes and fifteen shillings in silver.
The dawn was just breaking when I left the Court.
The world was wet and cold.
I looked back at the house from the other side of the wrought-iron gate; its shuttered windows seemed like hostile eyes.
I felt a little like Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden—I wondered if her expulsion had taken place on a wet morning before the sun was up.
XIV
I had read "Alone in London" stories, rather wonderful, poignant things. I remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by Peggy Webling. They had gripped me at the time. I had been so lonely in my real life that I always found it easy to get inside the skin of the heroines I was reading about, and for days my lonely walks with Pomp and Circumstance across the wet moors and through leafless lanes were no longer lonely or desolate—they had become the streets of the greatest capital in the world.
If you have sufficient imagination and a cheap lending library near you your world is never unpeopled. I often think that the library is the one thing that prevents prisoners going mad—you couldn't go mad if you were allowed O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to read yourself to sleep with.
Two things I hadn't expected about London happened: it was radiant with sunshine when I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice of me.
I was a little nonplussed; then I found a boarding-house, not in Bloomsbury, where the wallpaper was not flowered and the atmosphere was not cabbagey; the landlady neither stared at me nor asked questions, and the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and there was a parrot in the basement who said "change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing could have been less sinister or more normal and cheery.
I cried myself to sleep the first night—it seemed the right thing to do; but I left off in the middle because I couldn't think of anything more to cry about.
I had a dear old lady in the room next to mine. She knocked at my door just as I was falling to sleep.
"My dear," she piped, "if you should hear a raid warning, if you would just tap the wall. We all go down into the cellar—and one likes to prepare a little."
"Prepare?" I said.
"Hindes," she whispered apologetically, "curlers—you know—one doesn't like——"
I fell asleep smiling on my first night in darkest, dreadfulest, naughtiest London.
The next day I started to hunt for work. I was paying forty shillings a week, and had only four pounds ten left of my money.
I found it at once. I took the money in a cinema booking-office. It was dull, and I got thirty shillings a week; I took it because it gave me the entire morning to hunt for more remunerative work.
I met with no adventures in my hutch. I was sworn at several times for giving the wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in Prussian blue and silver uniform, who waved the people to their seats inside, gave me a packet of butterscotch. But the more remunerative work did not present itself. I was untrained. I could not type or do shorthand, and I had no previous experience. The men who interviewed me were most civil, they suggested Clark's College or Pitman's. I was no good to them.
I had to change my boarding-house. I went to one near Kentish Town, it was very clean, and the landlady had been a professional cook. I boarded with the family, and a Polish Jewess also lived there, a skirt hand in a big West End tailor's. She used to press my skirts.
I wondered if anybody was advertising for me, or if there was any fussation going on. I did not think I was worth a whole detective for one minute. I did not attempt to hide. I had read somewhere that to live an ordinary life was the surest way to escape detection.
I wondered, as the months slipped by, if Cheneston had married Grace Gilpin.
I did not lose Cheneston. I could always step right back in memory into the days I had spent with him, days of infinite and dear delight.
I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted passionately to be his wife; that if he were to ask me to marry him I would marry him rapturously and thankfully, even though I knew he didn't care two straws about me and would need a photograph to remember the way I did my hair.
I believe the "if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be" sort of people are very, very jelly-fishy.
If you care for a man you care for him, and that's all there is to it; the fact that he cares for someone else or doesn't care for you doesn't alter your feelings, it only makes the pain and hurt of it an artistic success.
I wish I was jelly-fishy in my feelings for people. If I were I could say of Cheneston, "I can't stick here! I'll float on." But I'm a barnacle creature where I love. I shall be Cheneston's girl even if I never see him again. My heart went from me when I first met him, and the doors closed after it and left a little hole. It will always ache, and I shall always know there is a hole where a heart should be—especially when I listen to wonderful music or see sunsets or little children at play.
I shall never, never have another heart to give away; some women have theirs on bits of elastic so that they can always pull them back and give them away again; a man sort of holds it until somebody else wins it, like a challenge shield or a football cup.
I gave mine entirely and unconditionally; I believe that time will cocaine the hole.
I look to time to do a lot for me in the healing and dulling line—all that the poets and the proverbs say it will. Time never fails you—when all else fails, you can always kid yourself you haven't given it long enough to perform the miracle.
I don't ever want to see anyone I knew in the old life. I feel that the Pamela Burbridge of those days is dead, poor thing! but she has a more exciting time than most defunct people, because every night I shake her up and make her live over again her enchanted halcyon days by the sea and at Cromer Court.
She lives in sunshine and happiness for an hour or two of memory every night, even if she has to die off while I go and do my day's work.
Life is really awfully funny and un-understandable. Why are we given feelings we've got to squash?
Are we big if we squash them and little if we let them grow?
I wouldn't squash my feelings about Cheneston.
I simply love them.
I couldn't squash them even if I knew I would grow such a huge and splendid national character, and such a power for good, that they would give me a gold-leaf Pamela Memorial in Kensington Gardens with a lightning conductor, and ten lines in theLondon Guide Bookall to myself.
XV
I have lost my job, and the little Russian tailoress presses my skirt every day and has lent me a pound.
Russia doesn't seem a lucky country for me; the cinema proprietor was a young Russian Jew, and when the August orders about Russians serving came up he got five months' exemption, and now he's joined up and the cinema has been turned into a Y.M.C.A. canteen. I help them two nights a week.
It was funny; the other day there were a lot of men expected in. It's just outside the station, and often we get officers, and an officer in Walter Markham's regiment came in. I knew it was his battalion. The officer was just home on leave. I asked him if he knew Captain Markham.
"Used to be under him," he said. "Went West, poor chap! Died in a hospital somewhere up North."
"Are you sure he died?" I said.
"Positive. He had a sudden relapse. Ballyntine, one of our senior officers, was pipped at the same time and got sent to the same hospital. He was there when Markham died. He's rejoined since; he's out there now. Why? Did you know Markham?"
"He was a great friend of a friend of mine."
"Jolly decent chap," the young officer said.
I thought it such an accurate epitaph. He was a jolly decent chap. I turned away because my eyes were so full of tears.
If he had recovered and I had married him I could never, never have made him happy. I should have been one of those wives who suddenly look at their husbands with vacant eyes, and have thoughts they cannot tell when they are asked—you see, Cheneston Cromer is with me for keeps, the memory of him will never go, and I know that often I should wander away from Walter with Cheneston, and be sorry to come back, and Walter was too great a dear to treat like that, a very gallant and honest English gentleman.
Regina Merolovitch has found me a "job" at twenty-five shillings a week. She says it is only temporary, and soon I shall find something better; but I don't know. I am only "honest and willing," and the world seems overcrowded with honesty and willingness unadorned.
I "do anything" for Madame Cherry, who has a little cherry-coloured shop with grey fittings and purple hangings in the West End. Sometimes I am in the showroom, sometimes I make tea for the girls, sometimes I pick pins off the showroom floor, sometimes I "match" things at the big London stores, sometimes I take things home to customers.
I marvel at the prices people pay for clothes. The people who fluff in and say, "I must have some little cheap thing, madame," seem to pay most and buy most.
Madame made a wonderful "little cheap thing" the other day—black tulle over blue tulle, and all of it edged with blue beetles' wings, and blue tissue round the waist to match.
It was done in a violent hurry because "he" was coming home on leave; "he" was staying at the Savoy with her for a few days, and then they were going down to their country seat when he had seen about his kit.
She paid for the girl's "hurry."
Madame never breaks her promises.
She had promised it by seven, and I was to deliver it at the Savoy.
"And wear your best coat and skirt; and if it is fine you can wear that blue velour hat that has just come in, but don't put any pins in it," said Madame. "I can't have people carrying my boxes and going to the Savoy looking anyhow."
Madame's boxes are French grey with bunches of cherries on them, tied with gay cherry ribbons, and "Cherry" written across. They are a part of her general scheme.
I had one of them on my arm when I went to the Savoy.
I like the Savoy; it never smells foody, and the orchestra chats to itself instead of shouting at you. I like an orchestra that chats to itself, and then you can talk without feeling you oughtn't to.
I was very, very tired, and I did feel an awful alien in that place. It's not personality or breeding that makes you feel at home in big restaurants and hotels—it's just clothes. It doesn't matter if you've given your twelve country seats to the country for hospitals, and you've got the newest thing in Rolls Royce's nestling on the kerb outside; if you've got the wrong clothes on you feel as out-of-place and insignificant as a flapper at a silver wedding.
I found the right suite and delivered the box; an ecstatic young woman rushed out in a violet kimona with black storks on it. I think my appearance rather nonplussed her, it's horribly embarrassing to wear decently cut clothes sometimes.
"Are you Madame Cherry's daughter?" she said. "Well—it's frightfully decent of you to bring it—er—will you have a cocktail or anything?"
I went down the lift with a huge box of Fuller's chocolates tucked under my arm.
I adore Fuller's chocolates.
As I stepped out of the lift at the bottom someone grasped my arm and said:
"Pam! Pamela Burbridge!"
It was Grace Gilpin.
She looked simply gorgeous.
She wore a cloak of dull velvet the exact colour of her hair, with a great skunk collar. There was a sort of laughing radiancy about her, as if she were bubbling and dancing with happiness.
I wondered if she knew that my people didn't know where I was. I thought I could trust mother for that. I was right.
"I met Mrs. Burbridge not so very long ago," she said. "She was most mysterious and injured about you, Pam. What have you been doing? She seemed quite martyred. I couldn't get anything out of her. Have you got married, or gone on the stage, or what? Won't Cheneston be surprised! You must stay and have dinner with us and tell us all your misdeeds."
"Cheneston?" I said.
People were drinking their coffee and staring at Grace, just as they always did.
"Yes, he's home on leave and staying here. Pam—didn't you know I was married?"
"Yes," I lied swiftly.
I knew that Cheneston was behind me. I knew it without turning. I felt it; once more the old thrilling excitement, the tension of expectancy, stirred in me—for another woman's husband.
"Where is that husband of mine?" Grace said in her familiar, high, sweet, laughing voice. "I do want you to meet."
I wanted to say, "He's behind me. You don't know it, butIdo. I can feel it all down my neck and spine. He belongs to you, but you can't feel it. I'm glad you can't feel it. Glad! Glad! Glad!"
Instead I said:
"Good heavens! I was forgetting! I'm going on to dinner, and my husband's outside in the car. I went up to see some friends, and said I wouldn't be a second."
"You married, Pam! I never knew that!"
"I must absolutely fly!" I said.
"But, Pam—I'm so interested. Who did you marry, Pam? Hang it all! I'm thrilled to the core—you can't run away like this! Besides, Cheneston's here, and—— Pam,why did you break off your engagement to Cheneston?"
"Must fly!" I said.
I caught sight of Cheneston. He had not recognised my back, he was waiting to come forward and join his wife.
That queer, quizzical, bored look was on his face. He's the only man whose thoughts I ever pined to know.
I would have given the world to have been able to stop and say:
"Whatareyou thinking about?"
I heard Grace say in that queer, lilting voice of hers:
"Oh, bother! Cheneston, you're just too late! That was Pam Burbridge—only she isn't any more, she's married, and her husband is outside in a car."
And as I hurried out into the courtyard a woman getting out of a car said:
"Look at that woman; isn't she wonderful!"
Of course it was Grace; if it had been me she would have said:
"Look at that funny little moth-eaten rabbit of a girl hurrying away as if there was a stoat after her. You really do see the queerest people everywhere nowadays."