PART IIThey Saw
Azalea Deane was a much befamilied young woman, who was leaving “mile 30” behind so rapidly that it was already quite blurred in the distance. Ahead, there stretched a bleak and desolate roadway, leading right into the heart of that repository for the husks of men—Beechwood—and at the best of times, she found her journey wearisome and uninspiriting.
She did not cavil at her fate. No one ever heard Azalea complain—of poverty, obscurity, dullness or villenage. She accepted her destiny with a fine stoicism, which reflected itself in well-feigned indifference and enabled her to proceed along the same monotonous route at the same monotonous speed, with the same monotonous companions month after month, and year after year, without developing gangrene of the soul or breaking into open revolt.
“Oh, God,” she prayed each morning, before descending to the agitated atmosphere of the breakfast table, “keep me from being difficult to live with!”
And Heaven heard her prayer.
No one really knew Azalea—least of all, her family. Perhaps, no one ever really knows anyone else, a phase of ignorance which, personally, I am not inclined to deplore. Souls should be clad no less than bodies. They should be gowned with decency, and in so far as possible, loveliness; and if, now and again, the garment slips or wears thin, then should the beholder turn his eyes away, nor seek to pry into anything that may be so terrible or so sublime.
Outwardly, as Lady Denby had said, Azalea was a plain little person. She should have been dainty of form, but through some irreparable miscalculation, the Creator had dowered her with the large features, hands and feet designed for some much more ample person. Therefore, she gave no pleasure to the sensitive, artistic eye, and this was an acute grievance to her who possessed a deep and pagan love for Beauty. She was a toneless girl, with thin, straight, dun-coloured hair which she could not afford to keep marcelled. Her eyes were unarresting, as a rule; too sharp to be appealing and not lustrous enough to sparkle. Her skin had a sandy cast and usually shone. Even when rouge and the ubiquitous lip-stick assumed the respectability of universal usage, Azalea’s appearance was scarcely improved, for the former would not blend, and lay like a definite glaze upon her cheeks, while the latter only accentuated the flatness of her too-ample mouth, and made one wish that she had not tampered with it at all.
Her wardrobe was an appalling miscellany of discarded grandeur. Ladies whose clothes were too passé for their own adornment, bestowed them upon Azalea with the remark,
“You can see, my dear, that these are scarcely worn, and anyway, they are not the sort of things one could give the servants!”
She had learned to smother the hot rebellion that flared up in her heart, to thank them prettily, and to convey huge, unwieldy bundles through the streets and hold her tongue when her family commented upon the generosity of Lady This or Mrs. That. But she often wondered that her father never divined that Lady Elton’s cloth-of-gold dinner gown remodelled by her impatient and unskilled fingers, caused abrasions upon her spirit deeper than sackcloth could have produced, and blithely would she have consigned every stitch that she owned to the flames, for the joy of buying the most ordinary, commonplace, inexpensive frock at a bargain sale.
The future of the Deanes stretched behind them. The best of the family lay underground. Mr. Grenville Harrison Deane was the sole male survivor of an illustrious line that could be traced (so he declared) with an occasional hiatus, back to Alfred the Great! It was never clear to the upstarts whose genealogical tree took root in England about the time of the Conquest, or thereafter, how he arrived at his conclusion, but if antiquity of ideas was anything of a proof, then they were forced to admit that there was justification in his contention, for his views of life antedated those of Britain’s noble King.
Aloofness from fatiguing toil had rewarded him with an erectness that was impressive, and a complexion that a flapper might have envied. A Dundreary of silver gossamer caressed his cheeks, and his clear, lustrous eyes looked out from an unfurrowed setting. His chief characteristics were piety and an Eumenidean temper. The former, which should have been broad, was constricted to the dimensions of a number ten needle, and the latter, which should have been narrow, expanded to encompass impartially every one who held views divergent from his own. Particularly, was it directed against the blistering injustice of the Civil Service.
The Civil Service had served him faithfully for thirty-five years, despite his eternal villification of it. Recently, his incompetence had been recompensed by superannuation and the payment of seven-tenths of his salary—shall it be said, seven times as much as he was worth? But Mr. Deane had always fancied himself in the Premier’s place, or at least in a Ministerial capacity. Failing that, a Trade Commissionership, or even a Deputy’s post would have appeased him. Therefore, to be superannuated after thirty-five years’ inconspicuous hampering of the postal service, appeared to him as a blot upon the integrity of the Nation.
He was forever “taking up his case” with this or that influential person. What his case was, Azalea had but a misty idea, and whether he actually took it up or merely gloated over the notion of doing so, she had no means of ascertaining. Anyway, the matter had long ago ceased to interest her.
Mrs. Deane was the type of woman now happily becoming quite extinct, who was born to be dominated, and ably fulfilled her destiny. The eldest and most unattractive daughter of a rural English divine, she had won her husband by a trick for which he never forgave her, though he realised that she was in no way responsible. He had fallen fatuously in love with Dorothea, her younger sister, and had received the parental sanction to an engagement before setting sail for “Kenneda” and a post that his name might dignify. Six months later, Dorothea, who had quite innocently intrigued the affection of a visiting curate—a nephew of the Dean of Torborough, no less—had been prodded weeping to the altar, while Fanny was trundled on a steamer and shipped to Montreal to console the palpitant bridegroom, who had not even been apprised of the fact that a substitute had been forwarded.
The agony of that trip left its mark on Fanny Deane. A kindly lie would have spared her so much—for a time, at least. But the Rev. Arthur Somerset deemed suffering a salutory need, for others, and stated the case to his first-born with unequivocal lucidity . . . One phase of a woman’s duty is to grasp the opportunity for marriage and thus clear the way for her younger sisters, who, also, must have husbands. The prospect of fulfilling this duty in St. Ethelwyn’s was slender, and Fanny was no longer young . . . Did she want to be a burden in her old age to her family? . . . Dependent upon them for a home . . . Such inconsideration in a daughter of his was unthinkable . . . And as for young Deane, the Rev. Arthur waived his preference aside with a clerical gesture calculated to display advantageously his well-kept hand . . . Any man might be proud of a wife begotten and bred by Arthur Somerset, D.D.
“You must carry it off well, Fanny,” he adjured her, at the close of the interview, “for otherwise, you will be stranded in a strange country where . . .” the alternative was painted in no mean and unromantic terms.
Fanny “carried it off” successfully enough, though by no fault or virtue of her own. Too ill, almost, to stand, she crept down the gangway, and cowered before the eager-eyed young man who did not even recognise her when she addressed him.
Ah, if she had only been told that kindly little lie, and could have raised a radiant face to his, whispering,
“Here I am, dear! It was too wonderful that you should have sent for me!”
Instead, with ashen lips and shame-filled eyes, she muttered, “Mr. Deane, they married Dorothea to a curate—she couldn’t help it—she wanted you to know! Here is your ring . . . and . . . and . . . they made me come . . . For God’s sake, don’t send me back! I’ll work for you till I drop dead . . . I’ll be your servant—anything—only, for God’s sake, don’t send me home!”
He stared at her while the devastating truth burst over him like an engulfing flood. He shook with rage, with the anguish of blighted hopes and his own impotence in escaping the net that had been spread for him, while Fanny cringed beside him praying that God would strike her dead . . .
And Heaven did not hear her prayer.
Speechless, they faced one another. After a bit, he took her roughly by the arm.
“Come, girl,” he said, “we’ll get this rotten business over, quickly. The license reads ‘Dorothea’—I suppose I’ll have to get another one. There now, for God’s sake, don’t sniffle! People are looking at us.”
To give him credit, Grenville Harrison Deane never charged her with the deception of her parents. He never referred to it in so many words. But for two and forty years, Fanny lived in connubial torment, under the shadow of this smothering humiliation, and the fear that he might some day be led to speak of it. Often, there was that in his manner, that threatened to burst into violent and comminatory reproach.
She tried to efface herself, to reduce herself to nothingness, and to spare him the reminder of her substitution. She had a way of watching him, endeavouring to divine his whims and moods, that was loathesome in its humility. Her entire life was an apology for having failed to be her sister.
Unfortunately, Fanny never suspected that the greatest need of her overlord was association with a strong-minded tyrant, who, in the guise of the clinging-vine—or any other—would have thrust upon him the unexperienced pleasure of putting his shoulder to the wheel and hearing it creak as he moved it. He would have been happy doing things, being wheedled into service; but, as matters stood, Fanny Deane would have breathed for him, had such been possible. She relieved him of every burden and responsibility, and became a substitute not only for her silly, simpering sister, but for a shabby armchair and a pair of carpet slippers. Azalea, who was the youngest of five daughters, went so far as to say that the tomb to which his mortal envelope must one day be committed, would never equal in comfort the padded sepulchre her mother provided him while living.
Azalea’s earliest remembrance centred round a very common occurrence—her mother kneeling in the midst of broken toys and howling children, pleading,
“Don’t cry, my darlings! We will mend them! Sh-sh-sh—Pleasebe quiet!Don’tirritate your father.”
She lived in constant dread of irritating a man who would have kept his temper had he really been vouchsafed anything to be irritated about; and her life was one which no self-respecting dog would have endured.
No one was more surprised than Fanny Deane when her four elder girls found husbands. Naturally, perhaps, she regarded marriage as a difficult and sordid undertaking—for parents, that is to say. Many a night, as she sat beside a moaning baby, the thought that one day she might have to engineer her children into the State of Holy Wedlock was like a deadly stricture about her heart. However, Hannah, Flossie, Tottie and May all married without any fuss or flurry, in a satisfactory, chronological fashion, the Civil Service yielding up its living dead to provide their sustenance. They became the Mrs. Polduggans and Mrs. Crogganthorpes of Ottawa; that large, uneasy, imitigable body—scrabbling, straining, jostling, niggling, fighting for the power to give rather than receive—snubs!—and living largely in the hope of supplanting their superiors and lifting themselves out of the ruck composed of other women, whose husbands, like their own, were merely “something in the Government”.
But Azalea was different. Marriage, in her opinion, was neither the subliminal pinnacle of feminine felicity, as her father claimed to conceive it, nor the Open Door to Independence, as her sisters averred. Shrewd observation led her to the conclusion that of independence there was little, and feminine felicity there was none. Always interested in the dark side of life, e.g., the married side, Azalea divided the women of her acquaintance into two classes—the parasites, who slyly or seductively tapped their husbands and appropriated their material and spiritual substance without suffering the smallest compensatory impulse, and the antithetical order, who resigned themselves to a stronger will and found matrimony a state of reluctant vassalage.
Azalea dreamed sometimes of an ideal companionship, or perhaps, a companionable ideal, but the paradigmatic young men whom her sisters (with the patronage of the successful angler who has already gaffed his fish and offers to instruct the novice how to bait a hook, and cast) enticed for her selection, inflamed her disgust rather than her romanticism.
Her greatest hunger was for economic independence, and this was summarily denied her.
Mr. Deane, drenched in archaic theories, confused idleness with refinement, and work with degradation. Moreover, he would have felt a sense of incompetence, mute reproach, even contempt, had he permitted his daughters to join the restless ranks of the employed. By such a measure, would he have confessed his inability to support them as befitted women of gentle breeding, and to provide them with all the amenities that their natures craved. That one of them should possess a bank account of her own and feel at liberty to spend money without the humiliating necessity of applying to him, was a condition that smacked of positive shamelessness. It was characteristic of him that although he never wished to perform any useful task unaided by the members of his household, he never allowed them to perform the task alone.
He had a genuine horror of the modern business woman who could look him unflinching in the eye, without that sweet deference which testified to his superiority. All business women were, in his opinion, coarse; besides, economic independence resulted in their getting “out of hand”, and a woman who got out of hand, was, in Mr. Deane’s judgment, a very dangerous proposition. Therefore, he refused Azalea the freedom she craved. He immolated her self-respect (and that of the community for her, in a measure) on the altar of his vanity, and condemned her to a life of servitude far more degrading than anything she would have chosen. She was depressed under the burden of obligations that gave her little benefit and no pleasure, and she secretly despised herself for being forced to accept them.
“Do let me go away and work,” she used to entreat, “I could teach. That’s a lady’s profession.”
But her mother made vague gestures of distress that said,
“Don’t bring up this dreadful subject again! Please, my dear, be careful or you will irritate your father!”
And father, giving every promise of fulfilling this prophecy, would reply,
“So long as I live, I hope that no daughter of mine will be forced from the shelter of her home, and out amongst the ravening wolves of commerce. When I am gone . . .” he left an eloquent pause “. . . But in the meantime . . .”
The words, not to mention the gesture that accompanied them, implied somehow that caravans of voluptuous commodities assembled by his protean labours, should continue to arrive at their very door.
He was unctuously proud of her friends, and actually toadied to her in deference to her association with the aristocracy of the Capital. So did her sisters, and their husbands, and the “char”, and the tradespeople, all of whom knew that she enjoyed sufficient intimacy with Lady Elton to assist at a luncheon or dinner-party—assist, that is to say, in the kitchen. And the splendid thing about this kind of assistance was that she received no honorarium for her services. That was where she took conspicuous precedence over Mrs. Wiggin, the char, and Ellen Petrie, who “waited on all the exclusive affairs of the city”. To work without salary was Mr. Deane’s conception of a lady’s highest calling, and a means whereby she might be kept from getting out of hand.
He was supported in this attitude by one of the foremost ladies in the land, who argued that “no woman engaged in earning her own living should be presented at the Drawing Room!”
The Dillings struck a new note in the monotone of Azalea’s existence. She had never seen their like, and was profoundly touched by their genuineness, their simplicity. For the first time in her life she felt that she had come into contact with people to whom friendship is dearer than the advantageous acquaintanceship that travesties it; for the first time in her life she could show an honest affection without being suspected of having an ulterior motive. At that time, Azalea had nothing to gain from the Dillings. On the contrary, she had something to give—an ineffably joyous experience—and she delighted in the sensation of being for once the comet instead of the tail; instead of the trailer, the cart.
Towards Raymond Dilling, she was conscious of an intense maternalism. Mentally, she acknowledged him her master, but in every other respect, he was an utter child—hard, undemonstrative, cold, but, despite that, a very appealing child. And she saw with her native shrewdness that mere mentality would never gain for him the success which he deserved. Ottawa, she knew, was thronged with brilliant people whose gifts were lost to the City—to the Dominion—because they lacked the empty artifices and consequent social standing which enabled them to get a hearing. No strolling mummer in the Middle Ages needed ducal patron more sorely than does a mere genius in the Capital of Canada.
And Dilling liked Azalea. She was a new and interesting type to him who had never considered feminine psychology a topic that was worth pursuing. His wife’s friends in Pinto Plains were, he realised, estimable creatures running to fat and porcelain teeth at middle age. They were conscientious mothers, faithful to their husbands and earnest seekers after a broader knowledge than that provided by their homely tasks. But they wearied him. Whenever he encountered a group of them, his dominant wish was to escape, and he rarely failed to gratify this desire by excusing himself with some such remark as,
“I’ll just slip off and leave you ladies free to discuss the three D’s”, by which he implied (with some degree of justification, doubtless) that the conversation of women is restricted to the topics of Dress, Domestics and Disease. He hated women’s chatter.
Azalea Deane was the only woman he had ever known who possessed what he later termed a bi-sexual mind. He was never irritably conscious, as was the case with Marjorie’s other friends, of the fact that she was a woman. Even when she discussed the three D’s, there was a broad impersonality, a pleasing and quizzical tang to her remarks that he chose to arrogate to the mind of man. Before he had known her any length of time, he discovered that, unlike Marjorie she not only understood what he said, but that in some startling and inexplicable manner she divined thoughts which he had expressly refrained from putting into words.
For him, she was a novel experience, whose flavour he enjoyed rather more intensely than he was aware. Not that his emotions were even remotely touched by the personality of the girl. No! She was a mental adventure which he followed with frank curiosity and a diminishing display of patronage. Her mind was full of exhilarating surprises, and he was astounded to discover how easily she ornamented arid facts with garlands plucked from her rich imagination. She had a neat twist in the handling of them which Dilling was not slow to see and imitate. She guided him into many a pungent domain of thought, where he lost himself completely in an exciting pursuit after some winking little light, that led to the very middle of an icy stream into which he fell, spluttering, only to find Azalea calm and dry, on the opposite shore, laughing at him. He contracted the habit of reading extracts from his speeches to her, and presently, he tried the effect of an entire discourse. Now and again, he sounded her as to what he considered saying, and discovered that her enthusiastic understanding was like an extra filter to his already well-clarified intention.
He stored up particularly smart bits of political repartee to tell her, while his own triumphs of wit were laid at her feet rather than those of his bewildered wife. And all this time, the prevailing fancy that overlaid his subconscious mind, was,
“Quite a good sort, that girl! Pity she isn’t a man!”
He voiced this latter sentiment to Azalea one evening shortly before prorogation and his return for the summer to Pinto Plains. In their sharp and peppery fashion, they had been discussing the Budget, inflated, Azalea contended, beyond all reason by the conscienceless demands of those picaresque buccaneers, Eastlake and Donahue, whose issue of private enterprise was begotten in the womb of the public treasury, when Dilling turned to her and cried,
“You’ve made out a good case, Miss Deane! You should have been a man!”
The girl’s cheeks burned a painful brick tint. But she laughed and retorted,
“By which you tactfully imply my unsuitability for the state to which it has pleased God to call me, and regret that physical limitations prevent my choosing a more adequate sphere. I confess to you in strict confidence, that frequently, I have deplored this condition, myself.”
“Come along into politics,” invited Dilling, a touch of seriousness behind his banter.
“Right-o! Just so soon as you amend the B.N.A. and offer me a refuge in the Senate,” she answered, and changed the subject.
Later that night, Marjorie hinted that he had hurt Azalea.
“Eh?” cried Dilling. “What are you talking about? Hurt her—how?”
“By what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“That she should have been a man.”
Dilling carefully twisted his collar free from the button. A violent physical action of any kind was foreign to him. Running the curved band between his fingers, he gave an abstracted thought to the possibility of wearing it again on the morrow, even while he turned to contradict his wife. “Nonsense, Marjorie, she liked it! All women like it; it’s a tribute to their mentality, my dear. One often has to say some such thing to a perfect ninny, but in this case I happen to be sincere and I think Miss Deane knew it.”
Marjorie did not contest the point. She never argued with Raymond, but once in a while she felt, as now, that his non-combatible correctness covered an error in judgment. Of course, he was sincere in paying a tribute to Azalea’s cleverness, and, of course, she knew he meant what he said. But that was the very trouble—the very barb that pierced her spirit!
In a strange and mysterious way (of which she was somewhat ashamed) Marjorie often reached perfectly amazing conclusions that were directly opposed to Raymond’s incontrovertible logic. And Azalea’s hurt was a case in point. Just why the words had stung, it was beyond Marjorie Dilling to explain. Orderly thinking and systematic juxtaposition of facts found their substitute in flashes of intuition which, throughout the ages, have stood for women in the place of reason. But she knew, without knowing how she knew, that Azalea would rather have impressed Raymond with her incomparable womanhood, than the fact that she was the possessor of a brain that should have functioned in the body of a man.
As for Azalea, she was not conscious that Marjorie had heard the echo of that discordant note, and she would have been inexpressibly surprised had she suspected it. Years of rigid discipline had taught her to conceal all the emotions she thought she had not strangled, and she was accustomed to being treated as a man when not as a nonentity. Times without number she had paid for an evening’s entertainment by escorting timourous and penurious ladies safely home in the silent watches of the night . . . a delicate assumption that she, herself, lacked sufficient fascination to stimulate brute design. On other occasions, hostesses frankly asked her to slip away quietly, “so that my husband won’t feel obliged to take you home, dear.” And once, a particularly considerate host glimpsing the blizzard that raged beyond his portal, had placed her in the care of a diminutive messenger boy, of some nine years, who struggled through the snowdrifts and sniffled that he had come from Hewitt’s Service, and please where was the parcel?
So Dilling’s words cut without producing an unendurable pain. The spot was well cocained and would ache long after the incision had been made. Azalea listened to his defence of his leader, his Party, and Messrs. Eastlake and Donahue, sensitive to a breath of discouragement beneath his words.
“I came to Ottawa expecting to find co-operation, and in its place fierce competition confronts me—competition,” he said, “within the very ranks of the Party! It may strike you as being particularly naive, but I confess that I had not expected to find this sort of friction. It puts a different complexion on politics.”
This was a tremendous admission for him to make, and in one of those flashing visions that supplemented her more leisured mental processes, Azalea saw that just as Marjorie groped along her level, so Dilling stumbled into pitfalls in his particular sphere, that a cumulus vapour of disenchantment threatened the horizon of his career, and that even as his wife bade fair to be a victim of the Social Juggernaut, so he would be crushed beneath the wheels of the political machine.
And they thought that this was The Land of Afternoon!
The Dillings returned to Ottawa refreshed in body and spirit. Their summer in Pinto Plains had been a prolonged triumph and its effect, beneficial. Not only had they been welcomed with affectionate deference, entertained sedulously, and permitted to depart with honest regret and a dash of frank envy, but they had been reclaimed by that splendid illusion from which six months in the Capital had freed them.
By the time they turned their faces eastward, they were quite prepared to attribute their disheartening experiences of the previous winter to hyper-sensitiveness—the difficulty generally felt in accommodating oneself to a new environment.
It was during the last stages of the journey that uneasiness returned, and expressed itself in remarks such as,
“Just think . . . this time last year we were strangers, and now, it seems almost like coming home!” or
“It’s nice to know that we have friends here, isn’t it? We won’t be so lonely, this year, will we?”
Each in a characteristic way tried to capture a sense of confidence, a glow of happiness, and to feel that being no longer aliens, Ottawa would be different—that is, as each would like to find it.
Marjorie succeeded better than her husband.
“It’s awfully exciting, isn’t it?” she cried, as the train panted along beside the canal, and familiar landmarks unfolded before her.
Across the muddy water where barges and the Rideau Royal Pair were tied up for the winter, she could see the Driveway, spotted with children and women casually attendant upon perambulators. The Pavilion at Somerset Street, where she used to sit with her little brood, looked bleak and uninviting, but she was glad to see it, just the same. Two lovers occupied a bench in front of the Collegiate, and kissed shamelessly as the train moved past. Marjorie’s heart warmed to them, not that she approved of kissing in public places, but because there was something human about them; they added weight to her theory that Ottawa was not so forbidding and formidable, after all.
Dilling stared out of the window, too, but he did not see the lovers, the Armouries, the Laurier Avenue Bridge, the Arena, nor the warehouses flanked by the Russell Hotel. He saw a straggling little lumber village, gay with the costumes of Red Men, voyageurs, and the uniforms of sappers and miners, who were at work on the Canal. What a mammoth undertaking and how freighted with significance! By the building of a hundred and twenty-six miles of waterway that linked Kingston with the infant Bytown, English statesmen provided an expedient for adding to the impregnability of the British Empire!
“War,” he mused. “How it has stimulated the ingenuity of man! With sacrifice, with blood and tears, we carve a niche for ourselves out of the resistant rock, in the hope that there we will find peace, but immediately the task is finished, we set ourselves to fortify it against the hour of war.”
He pictured the Cave Dweller, bent over his crude instruments of destruction, clubs of bone and stone, which, in all probability, the modern man could scarcely lift. He considered the inventor of primitive projectiles. That was a long step toward the mechanism of modern homicide. One could lie, ambushed, behind a mound and use a sling, a boomerang, a blow-pipe or a javelin, and arrows . . . he gave a mental shudder and thanked God that he had not lived a hundred years ago. There was something about an Indian that made his flesh creep; a traditional antagonism that he did not try to overcome. The romance of the Red Man never gripped him. Like all unimaginative people, his prejudices were sharp and immutable.
He picked the word “blunderbuss” from a confusion of pictures that combined Gibraltar and Queenston Heights, and cumbrous cannon that were dangerous alike to friend and foe, and repeated,
“War! Always fashioning some new tool to strengthen the hand of Death. They spent a million pounds on a ‘military measure’ to safeguard the Colony from invasion on the South . . . and behold, the Rideau Canal!”
He started when Marjorie thrust parcels into his arms, and observed that at last they had arrived.
Azalea met them at the station. She had opened their tiny house, and with the assistance of Mrs. Plum had put it in order.
Hers had been an exceptionally uneventful summer, and she had looked forward to the Dillings’ return with an impatience that astonished her.
From the last of June until the first of September, Ottawa is like a City of the Dead. Despite the fact that these are the pleasantest weeks of the year, the town is deserted by every one who can get away, even though the exodus extends no farther than Chelsea, on the other side of the river. But Azalea hadn’t even got so far, this summer. Her time had been pretty fully occupied carrying out commissions for more fortunate friends. Lady Denby who had gone to the sea, asked her to superintend the installation of the winter’s coal. Mrs. Long preferring the irresponsibility of Banff to the responsibility of presiding over her country home and a succession of unappreciated house-parties, decided that this was an excellent opportunity for papering some of the obscurer portions of her town residence, and ‘knew that Azalea wouldn’t mind overseeing the work’. She interviewed a cook for Mrs. Blaine, hunted up a photograph of Sir Mortimer Fanshawe taken on the golf links (before he had acquired the game) and excellent as a pictorial feature for a sporting supplement. She shopped, exchanged articles, paid bills that had been forgotten, and found herself generally confronted with theres angusta domiof a woman without an income. She did not grumble. At the same time, she could imagine a hundred happier ways of spending a summer.
Mr. and Mrs. Deane left the shelter of their comfortable home to suffer in turn the hospitality of each of their married daughters, who holidayed according to their means (i.e., spent a good deal more money than they could afford, and returned home soured by the necessity for retrenchment). Azalea could have gone, too, but there were limits even to her endurance.
The Dillings fell upon her joyously, not only Marjorie and the children, but Raymond.
“You must come home with us,” he cried, “and tell us all the news. Is it true that Pratt is running for the Federal House? I heard a rumour to that effect on the train.”
Azalea nodded.
“You can’t be surprised. This has been his wife’s ambition for years. She’ll achieve it, too, if there’s anything in persistent campaigning. But I’ve something else to say—I wrote you about it a few days ago, before your wire came. The house that Lady Denby has been so keen for you to take, is empty. I have an option on it in your name.”
Marjorie could not suppress an exclamation. The house in question was large, and in her opinion, unduly pretentious. Their living expenses would be more than doubled. It seemed strange to her that people of their modest means should be encouraged—urged, indeed—to make such extravagant outlay. Display of any sort was, in the eyes of Pinto Plains, vulgar, and a cardinal sin upon which her friends felt themselves qualified to sit in judgment, was that of trying to appear above one’s station.
To Marjorie, one of the most amazing features about life in the Capital was the discovery that women who dressed with most conspicuous elegance, lived in impressive style and drove in motor cars, commanded only a Civil Servant’s meagre salary. Later, she learned that over their heads a cloud of debt continually hung, but it caused them no more distress than did the dome of the sky. The infamous credit system in the city was responsible for these moral callouses which she simply could not understand. Debt, to her, was synonymous with dishonesty, and that anyone could become accustomed to living in its shadow, was beyond the limits of her comprehension. It was a shock for her to learn that respected families had unpaid accounts at the large stores extending over a period of twenty years!
Virtually, any tradesman would supply merchandise on account to a Civil Servant, because although the salary could no longer be garnisheed, they hoped that a small payment would be snipped with regularity from the infallible Governmental cheque.
“Why don’t you buy a set of sectional bookcases for your husband’s books?” asked Azalea’s sister, Flossie, during the progress of a call.
Marjorie’s reply was ingenuous, naively truthful. “We’ve been under so much expense lately,” she said, “I felt that I couldn’t afford them.”
Mrs. Howard, whose husband was an anaemic little man, occupying a humble post in the Department of Labor, opened her eyes in genuine astonishment.
“You don’t have topayfor them,” she cried. “Hapgood is most considerate in the matter of his accounts. I generally have to beg for mine!”
This latter remark was not strictly in line with the truth—not in Mrs. Howard’s case. She had heard it, however, dropped from the lips of one of Ottawa’s twenty-three millionaires, and appropriated it, she felt, with some effect.
But Marjorie couldn’t see any future happiness at all, knowing that she would be faced with financial problems, and she was absolutely unable to understand the attitude of Lady Denby, who, throughout the previous winter, had stressed the necessity for making a better appearance “for the sake of the Party”.
“When people are wealthy and have an assured position,” she counselled, “they can enjoy a freedom of action that is denied those less fortunately conditioned. Mrs. Hudson is an example. She could, if one of her extraordinary whims dictated, dine at Government House in her great-grandmother’s faded bombazine, without injuring her position in the slightest degree. On the other hand, shouldyouattempt the smallest unconventionality, I assure you the result would be socially disastrous. The same principle applies in the matter of entertaining. You are no less a part of public life than is your husband, and you can render him no greater assistance than by displaying a judicious and well-regulated hospitality. Cultivatenicepeople—er—the Minister’s wives, and so on . . . Entertain them and entertain them well, but—” she broke off, abruptly, “—you can’t do ithere!”
It quite took Marjorie’s breath away to learn that Lady Denby considered women important in politics, and that they might sway their husbands for or against a fellow member was an idea that had never entered her mind. Neither could she understand how her own popularity could be a factor in Raymond’s success, and that it was dependent upon maintaining a position she would not afford, instead of living according to her means and simplicity of requirement—was an attitude of mind that she never completely grasped. But the necessity for it all was made evident even to Raymond, and by no less a person than Sir Eric himself, who ably coached by his wife, remarked that “to save, one must first learn to spend!”
“Establish yourself, my dear fellow,” were his words, “establish yourself in the life of the Capital, and when the roots are firmly implanted in this loamy soil, draw in your horns—if one may be permitted to mix a metaphor. I am not advocating a reckless expenditure of more than you have to spend,” emphasised the advocate of all the verbotens, “but rather the point that it is not advisable for a young politician to appear to hoard his salary. Education, you say? The children’s education will, I trust, be well provided for by a generous and appreciative country.”
So the Dillings moved, and Marjorie memorialised the occasion by issuing invitations to a large tea.
“I suppose you didn’t keep a visiting list?”
“No!”
Azalea had expected a negative answer, so she was not disappointed. But Marjorie added,
“I’m sure I shan’t forget any of my friends.”
“Doubtless! The difficulty will lie in remembering all your active enemies!”
“Oh, Miss Deane—I mean Azalea—what shocking things you say! Surely, I don’t have to ask people who have—that is, who haven’t—who aren’t exactly what you might call friendly with me?”
“Positively!”
“Oh, but that doesn’t seem right!” protested Marjorie, in dismay. “It’s deceitful! There’s no use liking people if you treat the ones you don’t like just as well!”
“Sound logic, my dear, but impractical from a social standpoint. You see, it’s something like this—” Azalea slipped a thin gold bracelet from her arm, pouring within and about it, a quantity of pen nibs. “Society is like this bangle, and these nibs are the people who compose it. I’ll jostle the desk and then see what happens to those who are not safe within its golden boundary. They fall off and go down to oblivion. The others, though disturbed, are in a sense secure, so you can see, my dear, that the paramount business of life in the Capital is to getinside. Of course, there are circles within circles, and you must learn about them, later. But for the moment, concentrate upon getting within the shining rim. Once there, you can stick, and prick, and jab, and stab to your heart’s content, and you need not treat your friends and enemies alike. But until youdoget there—well, you really won’t matter, one way or the other. Your friendship will be prized scarcely more than your enmity will be deplored.”
“But,” objected Marjorie. “I never heard of dividing people into lots, unless—” a sudden thought occurred to her “—unless you mean that all the nice people are inside and the other kind are not. Is that it?”
“Indubitably,” laughed Azalea. “And you must affirm your belief that this is so, on each and every occasion.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why, you must find all the people within the circle charming and brilliant and desirable, and all those outside commonplace and dull, and not worth while. You must like the former and despise the latter. Oh, it’s quite simple, really!”
Marjorie smiled the smile she reserved for her husband’s excursions in wit. She thought, of course, that Azalea was joking.
“Now, there’s sometimes a little difficulty in classifying people who teeter on the edge,” she poised a nib on the golden circle to illustrate her point. “A little push one way or the other will decide which way they will go, and until they get pushed, I admit they are something of a problem. However, we’ll begin with the certainties, and then I’ll borrow a list from Lady Denby, so as to be sure not to overlook anybody . . . The Ministers’ wives—Mrs. Blaine, Mrs. Carewe, Mrs. Haldane, Mrs. Carmichael, Lady Denby . . .”
Azalea wrote rapidly for a few moments, carefully spelling the French names as she recalled them.
“Then the wife of the Black Rod: she goes everywhere—”
“And I like her,” interrupted Marjorie. “She’s not a bit stiff, is she?”
Azalea laughed and shook her head. Marjorie’s dread of women who were “stiff” and men who were “sarcastic”, amused her.
Between consultations with Lady Denby, the Parliamentary Guide and the Telephone Book, the invitations were issued, and Azalea sat back, sighing after her labours.
“Now you will have paid off all your tea obligations,” she said, “but you really must keep a list. Separate ones for luncheons, dinners and suppers. Probably, a dinner will be the next thing.”
“And who must I ask for dinner, when I give one?” enquired Marjorie, ignoring in her distress the rules of grammar.
“Why, the people who have had you, of course! Not luncheon people, not tea people, mind!” Azalea was quite stern. “But the people who have had you fordinner! It will be simple until you have been entertained frequently, and then you will have to sort out members of different sets.”
“I don’t like it,” said Raymond Dilling’s wife. “I don’t want to entertain that way. I tell you, it’s deceitful!”
“Entertaining,” said Azalea, with a suspicion of hardness in her voice, “is an admirable illustration of the ‘eye for an eye’ transaction mentioned in Holy Writ. Only, in the Capital, an astute woman schemes to obtain two eyes for one optic, and a whole set, upper and lower, for the molar she has sacrificed. When she accomplishes this, my dear, then she has achieved real social success. Bismillah!”
Several circumstances combined to make possible the large and representative crowd that attended Mrs. Raymond Dilling’s first big crush. The day was fine, the season was only beginning so that there were few counter-attractions, and the Parliamentary set, who were hearing with increasing frequency of the fervid young prophet of the prairies, went out of curiosity to see, as Mrs. Lorimer tactfully put it, “Whathe had married.”
Dilling had already made a strong impression—partly favourable, and partly the reverse. But it was definite in either case.
Lastly, the Hollingsworth house, into which the Dillings had moved, was a landmark which still bequeathed a flavour of by-gone grandeur to its successive tenants, although no member of the illustrious family had lived beneath its roof for close upon half a century. But no matter who lived there, it was a mansion into which one could pass with dignity and a certain satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that even should it be converted into a boarding-house, there would remain the manifest though indefinable air that differentiates the messuages of patricians from the tenements of the proletariat.
That the Hollingsworths’ should be transformed into anything so needful as a private hostelry, however, was almost inconceivable, for Ottawa’s last concern was her housing problem.
Accommodation was so scarce at the seat of Government that many Members began to fear, after a discouraging search, that they would have to stand. Over-furnished rooms, and under-furnished houses were offered at opulent rentals, but of comfortable pensions, there were none. There are but two or three to-day. What solution has been reached, may be attributed to the number of picturesque old residences that have been remodelled and split into half a dozen inconvenient mouse-traps.
Inside, the Hollingsworths’ was a riot of fantastic ugliness. A gaunt reception hall engulfed the visitor and cast him, from beneath a series of grilled oak arches, into a sombre drawing room. One end was bounded by folding doors that resisted all efforts at movement, and beyond, there yawned a portentous bay window that invited invasion by the house next door and reduced the cubic contents of the dining-room. Strange abutments, niches that looked as though they had been designed for cupboards and abandoned before completion, appeared in unsuspected places. Angles were everywhere. The ceilings were lumpy, like the frosting of a birthday cake, and there wasn’t a gracious line to be seen.
Marjorie’s hangings, chosen with the idea of giving a cheerful touch, looked somewhat as a collar of baby ribbon might have looked upon the neck of an elephant. Her Brussels rugs were suggestive of a postage stamp on a very large envelope, while the Mission furniture and mahogany What-not, added to the general air of discord. With several violent examples of the lithographers’ skill on the walls, there was completed a terrorising picture that might aptly have been labelled “The Carnage of Art”.
Marjorie stood in front of the cherry-wood fireplace and tried not to be nervous, but she couldn’t forget that immense issues depended upon the success of this tea—Raymond’s entire future, perhaps! It was a thought that almost petrified her.
Pamela de Latour was one of the first guests to arrive. She was early because she was assisting, and she was assisting because Lady Denby had made the matter a personal favour to herself. It was customary, in Ottawa, for unmarried ladies to “assist” in the dining-room, no matter what their age, while matrons, either old or young, officiated at the tea table. It therefore frequently developed that youthful matrons—brides, indeed—were comfortably seated behind the tea-urn, or that they cut interminable ices, while spinsters thrice their age, percolated kittenishly among the guests on high-heeled slippers, deprived by man’s short-sightedness, of the rest which their years were craving.
Miss Lily Tyrrell, aristocrat by inclination and democrat by necessity—a charming woman whose family had been both wealthy and conspicuous in an older generation—also assisted, as did the wholesome Misses McDermott. These latter were so much in demand that their “assistance” had become almost a profession, as had tea-pouring for Mrs. Chalmers, wife of the Black Rod, and presiding at meetings for Mrs. B. E. Tillson.
“I’m so pleased to see you,” said Marjorie to Miss de Latour, a little too precipitously, and spoiling the effect of Hawkin’s announcement.
Hawkins “announced” at every function of any importance, and infallibly employed the precise nuance of impressiveness with which to garnish each name.
“Miss de Latour,” he called, and in a tone which plainly said, “Here’s Somebody!”
“Missus ’Anover,” he droned, a moment later, looking over that lady’s shoulder, and taking a deep breath before booming,
“Lydy Denby!”
That was his way.
“It was so good of you to come,” Marjorie continued. “I didn’t know but that you would have forgotten me.”
“Not at all,” murmured Miss de Latour, gazing with a sort of outraged intensity about the room. “Had you a pleasant summer?”
“Oh, wonderful, perfectly wonderful! It was so good to get home and feel . . .”
“Missus Moss,” observed Hawkins, listlessly.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Marjorie, nervously cordial. (She recalled later, with considerable puzzlement, that most of her guests said briefly, “How d’y do?” If they reciprocated her friendly sentiments, they displayed admirable restraint in suppressing the fact.) “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
“Glorious,” agreed Mrs. Moss, estimating Miss de Latour’s dress at an even hundred. “I suppose you’re glad to be back in Ottawa? Those little prairie towns must be so dull!”
Before Marjorie could spring to the defence of Pinto Plains, Mrs. Hotchkiss was announced. The smile with which she was prepared to meet her guest changed to a look of surprise. The rather plain little person advancing towards her was not the dashing Mrs. Hotchkiss she so greatly admired.
“You were expecting my namesake, I see,” laughed the newcomer, easily. “Yes, there are two of us—no relation. She’s the good-looking Mrs. Hotchkiss. I’m the other one!”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Marjorie, magenta-colour with embarrassment. “Have you had—I mean, won’t you have your tea?”
“Mrs. Plantagenet Promyss,” blared Hawkins, as though impatient to get Mrs. Hotchkiss out of the way.
A small, untidy woman plunged into the room.
“How d’y do?” she said, not only to Marjorie, but all who were within hearing distance. “I hope I’m not too late for a nice hot cup of tea! There’s nothing so depressing to me as a third lukewarm steeping . . . and that’s what a good many sessional hostesses give one, my dear!” Then catching sight of Mrs. Long, “I’ve just come from a meeting of the Little Learning League, where Lady Elton read a perfectly delightful paper called ‘Good Buys in Old By-town’. You know, she’s so clever at bargaining and that sort of thing . . . eh? The Little Learning League, my dear Mrs. Dilling, is the only organization of its kind in the Capital. It concentrates once a fortnight, the essence—absolutely the essence—of feminine culture and intelligence. Mrs. Lauderdale Terrace is our president. You probably haven’t met her . . . yet,” she added, kindly.
As a rule, Mrs. Promyss found the literary afternoons very wearisome. She possessed a pretty gift for modelling in soap, and was eager to instruct her fellow-members in the use of this charming and ductile medium. So skillful was she that her copy of the famous Rogers’ group, “You Dirty Boy” was once mistaken for the original. Indeed, she was so intrigued by its artistic quality, that she was disposed to argue that soap should be used for no other purpose, whatsoever!
Lady Elton’s personal title, however, combined with the smart caption of her paper, had quite enchanted the sculptor, and she was in high good humour. “You must come to see me in my studio,” she called, as one of the Misses McDermott led her away to the dining-room and a hot cup of tea.
Marjorie smiled and shook hands until faces, like great expressionless balloons, wavered in the air. She lost all power to distinguish what was being said to her, and had no idea what she replied. Now and again phrases tumbled against her ear out of the general uproar but they seemed to have very little sense.
“. . . very proud of his children,” shouted a richly-dressed person on her right.
“. . . me, too,” came from a group on her left, “only we fry ours in butter.”
From the direction of her leatherette divan drifted a remarkable statement—“. . . and she learned to swim . . .” “with a floating kidney . . .” “. . . and came ashore at Quebec in a Mandarin’s coat!”
Mechanically, she took the tea Azalea brought her, and approached a group of Cabinet ladies.
“Appalling,” one of them was saying. “Like something in a nightmare!”
“Do you think she’ll ever learn?” murmured another. “He’s really clever.”
They turned suddenly.
“We were just admiring your house,” exclaimed Mrs. Carewe. “This room . . .”
“Oh, I’m so glad you like it!” Marjorie’s voice trembled with happiness. “I feel very small in such grandeur, but we’re not using the top floor at all, and that helps a little. It was fortunate that our furniture was dark, wasn’t it? I used to think there was nothing more gorgeous than a gold drawing-room suite, but even if I could have it, it wouldn’t do at all in here, would it?”
“Positively not!” agreed the ladies, heartily.
At the other end of the room, a group of Ottawa’s youthful Smart Set sought to extract a modicum of enjoyment from what they termed a dee-dee party.
“They’re getting damnder and duller,” sighed one.
“I thought nothing could beat Lady Denby’s, but this has it skinned to a finish!”
“Can’t any one think of a funny stunt?” asked another. “I’m so bored, I could lie down on the floor and sing hymns.”
“Do it,” dared Mona Carmichael, obviously the leader of the group. “Go on, Zoe . . . I’ll bet my new pink knickers, you haven’t the nerve!”
“Nerve’s my middle name,” declared Zoe, with a toss of her head. “But the trouble with me is Mother. She’s prowling about somewhere in the festal chamber, and she never appreciates my originality.”
“Let’s eat,” suggested Elsa Carmichael, the Minister’s second daughter. “That always fills up time.”
“My time’s stuffed full,” observed Mona. “Had an awfully late lunch.”
Their shrieks of laughter sounded above the din.
“Sh—sh—sh—!” warned Zoe. “Little Nell from Pinto Plains is looking at us.”
“Well, let’s dosomething,” insisted the first speaker. “Couldn’t we go upstairs and hide things?”
Mona objected that this form of recreation was stale.
“We might smear their tooth brushes with cold cream,” suggested Elsa.
“Perhaps they don’t use them,” Zoe returned.
“I say,” cried Mona, suddenly alive to a new thought, “how many olives can you hold in your mouth at once?”
Nobody had ever tried.
“Let’s do it now,” they agreed with one accord.
“Me first,” said Mona. “It was my idea.”
They seized a plate from the table, surrounded the experimentator, and watched half a dozen large, green olives disappear.
“My word,” breathed Elsa, “she’s swallowing them whole!”
“Eight,” counted Dolly Wentworth, her cousin. “Nine, ten—my Sunday hat, doesn’t she look like a chipmunk?”
This was too much for Mona. She gulped, grabbed the plate now almost empty, and shot explosively, ten whole olives into it.
Screams of delight rewarded her.
“Look,” panted Zoe, “she hasn’t even bitten them!”
“You beast,” said Elsa, “now we can’t tell t’other from which.”
“Sorry,” replied her sister, “but you know I can’t eat them. They make me disgustingly sick.”
“You’ve got to eat them,” cried Dolly. “If you don’t, they’ll be served up at the next party.”
The thought threw them into agonising spasms of mirth. Oh, this was wonderful . . . priceless . . .mervellus. . . the very best ever! They really expected to expire . . .
“Slip them back on the table,” commanded Mona, as she saw Marjorie approaching.
“Not a minute too soon,” whispered Dolly. “Now then, girls, your best Augusta Evans smile . . .”
“Have you had tea?” asked Marjorie, finding something about their hilarity that was as incomprehensible as the sombreness of the other groups who appeared to be too bored for words. She had little time for reflection, but there flashed through her mind a comparison between this and a tea in Pinto Plains, where a friendly atmosphere was inter-penetrating and a hostess wasn’t ignored by her guests.
They turned to her with the insolence of people who felt they had graced her home by their presence. Mona Carmichael answering for her friends, replied, “Quarts . . . thanks.”
As that seemed to be productive of no further conversation, Marjorie moved away, suddenly conscious that there was a slight commotion at the door. A late guest was arriving. To her amazement, she recognised Mrs. Augustus Pratt, coarctated in a sapphire velvet, whose fashionable slit skirt revealed a length of limb that fascinated, while it unutterably shocked her.
“Mrs. Pratt,” confided the lady to Hawkins.
“Parding?”
“Mrs. Pratt,” she repeated, bending a shade nearer.
“Missus Spratt!” he relayed, resentfully.
Hawkins knew Mrs. Pratt. He knew that she was marching round the golden circle seeking a weak spot through which she might force an entrance, and he felt it an insult to his position that he should have to deal with any one outside the charmed enclosure. He hated Mrs. Pratt.
Mrs. Pratt bore down upon Marjorie, and in her wake followed a girl who was obviously a relative.
“I came because I knew you must be expecting me. I said to Mod ‘. . . something has happened to that invitation, and your father would never forgive me if I didn’t make a particular effort to get down to Mrs. Dilling’s this afternoon’. This is Mod, Mrs. Dilling. I suppose she’s a little older than your children?”
Marjorie was unequal to the occasion. She was surprised that Azalea had asked Mrs. Pratt. Azalea was surprised, herself, although she took in the situation at a glance, knowing that it was not unusual for persons of Mrs. Pratt’s calibre to attend functions at Government House—and elsewhere—with a sublime disregard for the necessity of an invitation.
Maude was impaled upon the group of smart young ladies who stared disapprovingly at her, while her mother wandered about for half an hour with the intention of having everyone in the room know that she was there. Later, that night, she took the precaution to telephone Miss Ludlow, society reporter ofThe Dial, and, with cunning innocence, offered the item about Mrs. Dilling’s tea as a means of helping the girl to fill up her column—or colyum, in Mrs. Pratt’s phraseology. She believed in helping women, and she realised how difficult a task confronted the reporters. At any time, she would always be willing to confide information, and advised Miss Ludlow (who listened with her tongue in her cheek) not to hesitate to call upon her.
As the crowd thinned, a chic little motor drove up to the Dilling’s door, and, after a tired glance in the direction of the bright chintz curtains, the driver settled back to await the pleasure of his lady.
He was discovered almost immediately by the group standing in the dining-room.
“What slavery,” murmured Mrs. Long. “I wonder if it’s worth it.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t mind,” suggested Mrs. Blaine.
“Oh, I should say it’s part of the day’s routine,” said Miss de Latour. “He calls somewhere for her every afternoon. One can grow accustomed to anything.”
“They say she’s writing a novel,” confided Mrs. Long, “an acrimonious tale about all of us in the Capital.”
“How delicious,” cried Miss de Latour. “Dante will be jealous, I fear!”
“But it isn’t a novel,” Mrs. Blaine informed the group. “At least, that’s not what she calls it.”
“What is it, then?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Blaine, “I’ve never seen it—nor any of the other literary productions of which she is guilty, but she told me that it was a sort of allegory, a child’s story, called “The Fable of the Fairy Ferry-boat” . . . and she’s having it multigraphed for free distribution among the children of the English peerage.”
“Be careful,” cautioned Pamela de Latour, “here she is!”
Mrs. Hudson fluttered to the window in response to the summons of Azalea Deane. She waved a sprightly hand in the direction of the waiting car, and mouthed,
“Coming, directly, darling!” as though speaking to a young and inexperienced lip-reader.
“Isn’t it absurd?” she cooed coquettishly to the others. “But hewillcome! One would think we were bride and groom,” and she made an ineffectual effort to blush.
“Some men are lovers always,” sighed Mrs. Blaine.
“That’s Bob to the life,” cried Mrs. Hudson. “No wonder I’m so spoiled.”
“You certainly look exceptionally well,” remarked Mrs. Long. “Such a becoming hat . . .” the fibs trickled fluently from her lips “. . . such an artistic blending of gay colours . . . I like bright colours on any one who can wear them. And your hair has grown so beautifully white . . . not a dark strand to be seen anywhere . . .” Her eyes wandered to the patient car “. . . And Mr. Hudson looks like a perfect boy . . .”