Another month of outlawry went by.
The dahlias in Hyde Park died, cut down by the frost; and with the death of them there came over Aliette that keen longing for the countryside in winter-time which only English hunting people know. She used to dream about hunting; about Miracle, striding full gallop across hedged fields, steadying himself for his leap, flying his fence, landing, galloping on.
But Miracle--Hector's gift--was lost to her, as hunting was lost, and nearly every social amenity which made up existence before she met Ronnie. Between a hunting-season and a hunting-season, she had "dropped out of things"; had become one of those illegally-mated women whom our church neglects, our law despises, and our press dares only ignore.
The Aliettes of England! The women whose sole excuse for illegal matehood is love! There are half a million such in Great Britain to-day: women whose only crime is that, craving happiness, they have taken their happiness in defiance of some male.
They are of all classes, our Aliettes. You will find them alike in our West End and in our slums, in little lost cottages beneath whose windows the sea moans all day long, and in prim suburban villas where the milk-cart clatters on asphalt roads and cap-and-aproned servants gossip of a morning under the peeky laburnum. You will find them--and always with them, the one man, the mate they have chosen--in Chelsea studios, on Cornish farms and Yorkshire moorlands, in Glasgow and in Ramsgate, in a thousand stuffy apartments of Inner London, and in a hundred unsuspicious boarding-houses of that middle fringe which is neither Inner London nor Suburbia.
These women--who crave neither "free love" nor the "right to motherhood" but only the right to married happiness--are the bond-slaves of our national hypocrisy. Sometimes their own strength, sometimes death, sometimes money, sometimes the clemency of their legal owners sets them free. But, for the most part, they live, year after year, in outlawry; live uncomplaining, faithful to that mate they have taken, bringing up with loving care and a wise tenderness those children whom--even should their parents ultimately marry--our law stamps "bastard" from birth to death.
Meanwhile our priests, our politicians, our lawgivers, and all the self-righteous Pharisees who have never known the hells of unhappy marriage, harden their smug hearts; and neither man nor woman in England may claim release from a drunkard, from a lunatic, from a criminal, or from any of those thousand and one miseries which wreck the human soul.
Powolney Mansions--four impossible Victorian dwelling-places, converted into one impossible Georgian boarding-house of that middle fringe which is neither Inner London nor Outer Suburbia--front a quiet road half-way between the Baron's Court and West Kensington Stations.
"Queen's" being the limit of Aliette's London, it was natural enough that her deliberate mind, casting about for some less expensive abode than their hotel near the park, should remember the neighborhood, and search it for a hiding-place.
Natural enough, too, was that instinct for a hiding-place, in a woman who had no desire to parade her unmated self before the herd, and no craving for unnecessary martyrdom.
At the Mansions, six guineas a week (and three extra for Caroline Staley) provided a bed-sitting-room, complete with a double-bedstead of squeaking brass, a hard sofa, two harder chairs, a so-called armchair, a writing-table, three steel engravings of the eighteen-eighties, and a shilling-in-the-slot gas-stove. The six guineas also provided meals, served by dingily uniformed waitresses in a crowded communal dining-room--and "congenial society."
This "congenial society" did not--as the society to which Aliette had been accustomed--shift its habitat with the seasons; except for an occasional fortnight in Margate or Clacton, it clung limpet-like to the Mansions.
Moreover, as the pair discovered within three days, it was eclectic as well as cliquey--containing gentlefolk and ungentle-folk; workers and idlers; bounders and the unbounding. Of the first were two pathetic spinsters who knitted all day before the untended fire in the vast untended drawing-room, remembering, as lost souls might remember paradise, the bygone millennium of cheap eggs and cheap income-tax. Of the last were an Anglo-Indian family, looking for, and never finding, "a nice easily-run flat." Item, were three foreigners, vague creatures from vague places, who never seemed to have anything to do, and never seemed to go to bed; one prosperous commercial traveler who "liked the sociability"; one ruined squire who had furnished his own room and hoarded the remnants of a pre-war cellar in its undusted cupboard; and three mothers of no known social position, whose daughters, dingy at breakfast, grew demure by lunch-time, and--communal tea included--sallied forth with mysterious "dancing-partners" to return mouse-footed in the early dawn. An understrapper from the Belgian consulate, and a plantation overseer on leave from the Federated Malay States completed the tally of "Monsieur Mayer's guests.
"A fine gossipy lot, Miss Aliette," judged Caroline Staley, her loyalty a little strained by, though proof against, her surroundings. "While as for they maids----"
But the "congenial society" of Powolney Mansions gossiped--the aloof Aliette knew--neither more nor less than the society she had abandoned. For--try as one would to hide one's self--awkward meetings were inevitable.
Never a woman of easy friendships, Hector Brunton's wife before her elopement had possessed three distinct sets of cordial acquaintances--the "Moor Park lot," the "London lot," and the "Clyst Fullerford lot," as she phrased them. Of these, the "Clyst Fullerford lot" and the "Moor Park lot" (barring Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., who, apparently untouched by gossip, greeted her, at walk with Ronnie down St. James's Street, in his cheeriest voice as "dear Mrs. Brunton") might, except for an occasional letter forwarded from Lancaster Gate via Mollie, have inhabited the moon.
And with the "London lot" one never quite knew how one stood. Bachelor barristers inevitably lifted the hat and smiled. Hugh Spillcroft, meeting one alone at Harrods, invited one to tea with him and proffered a tentative sympathy which one gently but firmly rebuffed. Mrs. Needham, also encountered on a shopping expedition, pretended the most tactful ignorance, but forbore to inquire after one's husband. Sir Siegfried and Lady Moss, passing in their Rolls-Royce, looked politically the other way. Hector's particular friends one, of course, avoided; and, since she made no overture, one also avoided--a little hurt, perhaps, at the ingratitude--Mary O'Riordan.
Taking it all round--as Julia Cavendish put it on one of those frequent afternoons when, always preannounced by telephone, the lovers came to tea with her--the situation held "little hope and less comfort."
"And it'll get worse," said that indomitable old woman; "it's bound to get worse if you persist in hiding yourselves, if you go on refusing to meet anybody. Don't you see, my dear," she turned on Aliette with a little of her former brusquerie, "that you're playing right into your husband's hands? Don't make any mistake abouthim. He knowsexactlywhere you are; and, so long as there's no open scandal, so long as you remain tucked away in that abominable boarding-house, he'll leave you there. Whereas, if you'll onlymakethe scandal an open one, public opinion will force him to act. Take it from me, the only thing to be done is to flaunt yourselves."
"Flaunt?" said Aliette.
"Yes! Flaunt yourselves!" repeated Ronnie's mother, rather pleased with the literary expression.
"I rather agree," said Ronnie. "That's the way Belfield broke Carrington. Dash it, we can't go on lying doggo forever. It isn't fair to Alie."
Since their move to Powolney Mansions, Ronnie had begun to realize the exact difference in the world's treatment of a man's "lapse" and a woman's "adultery"; to perceive that he apparently was to be allowed to go on with his avocation, scanty though the emoluments of that avocation were becoming, as though nothing had happened; that his clubs and almost every house he had visited while a bachelor were still open to him as an unmarried husband, so long as the world, officially, knew nothing of his "unmarried wife."
"Never mind me, I'm quite"--Aliette glanced round the comfortable drawing-room, so unlike the spinster-haunted wilderness of the Mansions--"resigned to my temporary fate."
"Rubbish!" retorted Julia; and went on to elaborate the plan that they should move from Baron's Court as soon as ever they could find some residence, the more expensive the better, in Inner London.
"You must be seen everywhere," she went on. "You must entertain and be entertained. In a word, Aliette--like Mrs. Carrington--mustafficherherself as Mrs. Cavendish. Never mind what it costs. I'll finance you."
But Aliette's whole nature recoiled from Julia's scheme.
She, had it not been for Ronnie's career, would have been more than content to wait a year, two years, a whole lifetime for freedom. Her idea--she told them--was to take some little cottage, not too far removed from London; so that "Ronnie could come down every week-end."
Nevertheless, since any hope of freedom was tantalizing, because now, always and always stronger, there mounted in her the conviction that one day she would have a child by Ronnie, Aliette so far weakened from her resolution against "the flaunting policy" as to accept Julia's invitation, telephoned next day, to share her box for the first night of Patrick O'Riordan's "Khorassan."
Ronnie's "wife," though too proud to make the first move, often wondered why Mary O'Riordan, eager enough to accept her championing in a similar situation, should have taken so little trouble to reciprocate, now that reciprocation was so obviously indicated: but, dressing for the theater in the unkindly bedroom whose harsh lights made her needlessly afraid of the mirror, she decided that sheer delicacy alone had restrained her old school-friend from getting into touch; and anticipated their inevitable meeting without a qualm. It would be nervous work, displaying one's self in Julia Cavendish's box before a "first-night" audience (unwise work, thought Aliette, unwise of Ronnie and his mother to have been so persistent); but Mary's presence would at least furnish a guarantee against complete ostracism. Whatever other people might do, she could rely on Mary's visiting their box in theentr'acte, on Mary's going out of her way to demonstrate sympathy.
"Looking forward to it, darling?" interrupted Ronnie, entering with the usual perfunctory knock from the bathroom, where he had been doing his best to shave, for the second time that day, in lukewarm water.
"Not exactly." Aliette dismissed her maid.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know. It seems all wrong, somehow or other. And suppose"--she hesitated--"suppose people are nasty?"
"They won't be," assured Ronnie, through the shirt into which he was struggling. "You're too sensitive about the whole thing. One or two people may snub us. But what's a snub or so, if only we can force H. B. to move?"
"But"--she hesitated again--"snubs hurt, man." Thinking of various slights already endured, her eyes suffused, and she had difficulty in keeping back the tears.
"Nobody shall hurtyou." He came quickly across the room; put his arms round her; and kissed, very tenderly, the smooth skin behind her ears, her bared shoulders.
"Oh, yes, they will. Not even you can prevent that. Women in my position are bound to get hurt. All the time! But it doesn't hurt much"--she looked up into his eyes, and smiled away the tears from her own;--"it doesn't really hurt at all so long as I've got you."
Nevertheless, as they raced through their execrable meal in the empty dining-room, Aliette knew herself face to face with an ordeal. And the ordeal waxed more and more terrible in anticipation as the electric brougham, which Julia had insisted on sending to Baron's Court for them, rolled toward Bruton Street.
She sat wordlessly, her hand clasped in Ronnie's, staring wide-eyed at the buses, the taxicabs, and the private cars which passed or overtook them. It was as though every soul in London, all the people in those buses, those taxicabs, and those private cars, were hostile to her; as though she were a woman apart from all other women, outcast indeed. She wanted to say to her man: "Must we do this unwise thing? Must we? Can't we turn back? Can't we go on hiding ourselves?" But she said nothing, only clung the closer to his responsive hand.
Literary folk can be peculiarly childish; which is perhaps the reason why great authors are usually little men.
One part of Julia's mind--as she waited for Ronnie and Aliette to fetch her--positively grinned with mischief in anticipation of the new adventure, "defying Society." That part of her felt very much the heroine, a female knight-errant about to do lusty tilt against the dragon "Convention." But, in the main, her mood was retrospective.
"Curious," she thought, looking back at her dead self; "curious how entirely my views have changed." And she remembered the reactionary stubbornness of her anti-divorce article for "The Contemplatory," her delight at the stir which that article had created, her delusions that it might "help to stem the flood of post-war immorality."
Now even the closing sentence, "Until humanity learns to discipline the sentimental impulse, there can be no hope of matrimonial reconstruction," rang false in the auditorium of experience. She yearned suddenly to rewrite that sentence, to substitute "the lustful impulse" for "the sentimental impulse." But the written word, alas, could not be revoked.
Then, vaguely she visioned herself writing a new article--perhaps a new book--some pronouncement, anyway, which should contradict and counteract her old doctrine. And from that, her creative mind--as though linking story to moral--started in to examine the individual case of her son and Aliette.
The front door-bell rang; and Julia heard Ronnie's voice in the hall.
"Where's Aliette?" she asked, as he entered.
"Waiting in the brougham. By Jove, mater, you look like a stage duchess."
"Do I?" She blushed a little at his chaff, knowing it merited by the super-splendor of her attire; by the sable-and-brocade opera-cloak and the black velvet thereunder, by the coronal of diamond wheat-ears which banded her graying hair, and the Louis Seize buckles on her elegant shoes. Once more the heroine of an adventure, she picked her long white gloves and her bejeweled hand-bag from the dining-room table; and followed her son, through the front door which Kate held open for them, into the brougham.
Aliette, she greeted with a rare pressure of the hand and the still rarer compliment, "You're looking radiant to-night, my dear."
Kate closed the door on the three of them; and the electric brougham rolled off through Bruton Street into Bond Street; through Bond Street into Piccadilly. Julia did not appear in the least nervous. She began to talk of Patrick O'Riordan--a little contemptuously, as was her wont when dealing with stage-folk, against whom she cherished a prejudice almost puritanical.
"Patrick O'Riordan," opined Julia, "was a poorish play-wright; but of course he had money to play with. Not his own money. Naturally. People in the theater never did speculate with their own money. Lord Letchingbury was behind the show. Dot said Letchingbury had put up ten thousand." Followed a Rabelaisian reference to Letchingbury's penchant for Mary O'Riordan, which horrified Aliette, who had always imagined Mary, except for her one lapse, virtuous; and landed them in the queue of vehicles making for the illuminated portico of the Capitol Theater.
As the brougham crawled near and nearer to the lights which blazed their one word "Khorassan," it seemed to Aliette that she was about to plunge into a stream of icy water. Her heart contracted at mere sight of the furred opera-cloaks, of the smoothly-coiffured heads and the shiny top-hats under the portico. For a moment, fear had its way with her; the impulse to flight overwhelmed her courage. Then she looked at Ronnie; and saw that his face was set, that his chin protruded ever so slightly for sign of determination. Julia Cavendish, the wheat-ears glimmering like a crown in her hair, sat bolt upright, unflinching.
All said and done--thought Aliette--the risk, the big social risk, was Julia's. If, for her sake, Julia Cavendish could dare to jeopardize her entire circle, she, Aliette, must not prove unworthy of the offering. Her red lips pursed--even as they had pursed long ago when she and Ronnie waited for hounds to give tongue beyond Parson's Brook; and, head equally high, she followed the diamond wheat-ears out of the brougham, through the crowd under the portico, and into the theater.
Passing the box-office, she saw Julia smile at an old man with drooping gray mustaches and a reddish face, blue-lined above a bulging shirt-front.
Dot Fancourt shambled hesitantly across the few feet of carpet; shook hands; whispered "Surely this is very unwise"; and vanished downstairs toward the stalls.
"Old coward!" thought Julia; and her thirty-year-old friendship for the editor of "The Contemplatory" exploded in a red puff of rage.
Ronnie, noticing Dot's evasion, felt his color heighten. He handed their ticket to an attendant, and took Aliette's arm protectively as the three of them passed round the circular corridor into their box.
"You sit there, dear." Julia indicated the most conspicuous seat. "And I'll sit beside you."
Aliette, throwing the opera-cloak back from her shoulders, looked down across the house. To her imagination, the whole auditorium was a blur of eyes; hostile eyes, thousands upon thousands of them, some furtively upturned, some staring unabashed, some taking cover behind the gleam of opera-glasses.
Julia, too, looked downward; but her eyes saw every face, every dress, every gesture of every personage in the crowded stalls and in the opposite boxes, clear-cut and sharp as a photograph. Obviously the appearance of her party had created a sensation. Lady Cynthia Barberus and Miss Elizabeth Cattistock, making a conspicuous and loud-voiced entrance down the center gangway, stopped in mid-career blocking the Ellersons, Paul Flower, and Sir Siegfried with his fat Lady Moss. Lady Cynthia did not smile; Elizabeth Cattistock did--maliciously. Paul Flower gave an astounded grin; and nudged Dot Fancourt, who was already seated next to that inveterate first-nighter, Sir Peter Wilberforce. Dot whispered something to Sir Peter, who kept his attention rigidly on the curtain.
Various other people whom Julia knew more or less intimately, after one swift glance at the box, also kept their attention on that curtain; talking together, low-voiced.
And suddenly Julia grew aware that the white-gloved fingers of the woman beside her were gripping the ledge of their box as though it had been the arm of a dentist's chair, that the eyes of the woman beside her were focused as the eyes of a sleep-walker on the third row of the stalls. Instinctively, her own glance followed the line; and following, envisaged Aliette's husband.
To Julia, the female knight-errant a-tilt against the dragon "Convention," the presence of the Brunton family--for they were all there, Sir Simeon with his ambassadress, Rear-Admiral Billy, two of Sir Simeon's daughters by his first wife, and Hector--should have been the crown of her adventure; but to Julia Cavendish, society-woman, the happening was rather a shock. For the society-woman in her could not quite prevent herself from sympathizing with the peculiar position of Sir Simeon and Lady Brunton. Sympathy, however, turned to rage when they deliberately looked up at the box, and, with equal deliberation, looked away.
The two daughters did not look up; and the admiral gave no sign either of recognition or of partizanship. But Hector, at a word from his uncle, stared and continued to stare across the house.
Ronnie, perceiving the stare, deliberately drew his chair closer to Aliette's; and the momentary panic stilled in her mind. Her fingers loosened their grip on the velvet ledge; her eyes were no longer the vacant eyes of a sleep-walker. Coolly now she faced her husband's ill-mannered stare; coolly she forced a smile to her lips, and, pretending to examine her program, managed an aimless remark.
The pretense of nonchalance deceived even Hector. Hector turned to his cousin Moira and tried to talk with her. But hardly a word came to his lips. His heart thudded under the stiff of his shirt-front. He felt himself surrounded, pent in a cage, pent to sitting-posture. He wanted to heave himself upright, to smash the cage, to scatter the people surrounding him.
"Confound them!" he thought, "they all know. All these first-nighters know. Of set purpose, she has done me this shame."
Once again he saw himself as the lone bull, the lone bull before the scornful herd. He wanted to gore with his horns, to lash out with his hoofs; for his eyes--averted from the box--still held their picture: the two disdainful women, the tall disdainful man between them.
"Pretty bad form,Ithink," said Moira sympathetically.
"Curse her sympathy!" thought Hector.
The preliminary music neared its ending; and the first part of Aliette's ordeal, even more terrible than she had anticipated, was almost over by the time that Mary O'Riordan billowed her imposing way to the front of the stage-box. Other people followed, but Mary's hoydenish bulk, draped in the gold and scarlet of some super-Wagnerian goddess, dwarfed them to the insignificance of pygmies.
Aliette's heart, still numb from its effort at self-control, gave one pleasurable beat at sight of her friend. She smiled across the house at Mary. Their eyes met, clashed. And in that moment, the house darkled.
The curtain had been up a full three minutes before Aliette realized that those blue eyes of Mary's intended the cut direct. Realizing, every nerve in her tense body throbbed with resentment at the ingratitude. Mary to cut her! Mary of all people! Mary, by whose side she had stood stanch through a year of trouble! Mary, whose affair with Letchingbury provided the very money which sent up the curtain, which bought the scenery and paid the actors of "Khorassan"!
Gradually, the first throbs of Aliette's resentment subsided, leaving her every nerve a living pain. Mary's ingratitude hurt, hurt. "Most women are awful rotters"; Mollie's words, uttered long ago at Moor Park, came back to her.
She tried to distract her mind with the play; but O'Riordan's play--poor, thinly-poetic stuff, indifferently mouthed by mummers whose sole claim to their salary was their supping-acquaintance with the fringe of Society--failed to hold her thoughts. Her thoughts hovered between the enemy audience, blur of heads below, and the two friends, her only friends in a hostile world, on either side.
Thinking of their loyalty, Aliette no longer shrank from her ordeal. Her heart swelled, resolute against all hostility. It became two hearts: the one, warm and throbbing with partizanship for the stark old lady beside her, the old lady who had never turned a hair since they entered the theater, and for the "old lady's" son, for the man whose love was a rock: the other, icy-cold, almost beatless, frozen to contempt.
What a farce was this social game! As if the world's hostility mattered! One played one's little part on the stage of life, played it as best one might to the prompting of conscience, till the curtain fell, as it was falling now to a subdued rattle of perfunctory applause and the usual "snatched" calls.
Aliette felt Ronnie's fingers tighten on her own, relax. The house lights went up.
"Letchingbury will lose his money," remarked Julia calmly. "O'Riordan's poetic drama is merely an excuse for bad poetry and no drama. By the way, thatisLetchingbury, isn't it?" She looked across at the stage-box; and Ronnie, looking with her, saw a young man, blond, with a receding chin and a receding forehead.
"Yes. That's Letchingbury all right," he said. "And, by the way, Alie, isn't that your friend, Mrs. O'Riordan?"
"I should hardly call her my friend," answered Aliette, a little bitterly; and steeled herself to look down at the stalls. Hector's was already empty. The remainder of the Brunton party sat perfectly rigid. Sir Peter Wilberforce, remembering himself one of Julia Cavendish's executors, managed a surreptitious nod. Dot Fancourt, like Hector, had escaped. Various dramatic critics, sidling their way out of the stalls toward the bar, bowed to Julia as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Mary O'Riordan retired ostentatiously to the back of her box.
Aliette panicked again. Suppose Ronnie left her? Suppose Ronnie and Hector met--in public? But Ronnie, for all his obtuser mind, divined that his women-folk were under fire; and that duty forbade him to desert. He whispered to her:
"Not so bad as you anticipated, eh? Of course one can't expect the Bruntons to be exactly cordial."
"I wish they hadn't been here," whispered back Aliette. "It makes things so much worse."
"Rubbish!" interrupted Julia. "It's the best thing that could possibly have happened. He'll have to bring his action after this, or be the laughing-stock of Mayfair."
While the auditorium emptied and filled again, Julia, her head erect, her hands quiet, talked on--as though the lack of Dot's usual visit to her box were of no moment. Ronnie, every fiber in him furious, played up to her. But Aliette could not speak. In her, social instincts were at war with conscience. Feeling herself definitely in the wrong toward society, yet definitely in the right toward her own soul, feeling terribly afraid, yet terribly courageous, striving desperately to wrench out the iron of resentment from her mind, striving piteously to forget the hurt of the wound which Mary O'Riordan had dealt her, she played her game in dumb show. And furtively, fearfully, as the music for the second act began, she watched for Hector's return.
But Hector did not return. Even when the house lights went out and the curtain rose again, Aliette could see that his stall remained empty. Subconsciously she knew that he had fled the theater.
The second act of "Khorassan" dragged to its undramatic climax. Once again those three faced the eyes of the audience. Now, more than ever, it seemed to Aliette, still sitting rigid in the forefront of Julia's box, as though all eyes were hostile, as though the entire house, and with it her entire social world, had decided to ostracize them.
All through that overlongentr'acte, she sat speechless; her brown pupils hard and bright; her white shoulders squared above the black sequined dress; her pale face, her red lips set to an almost sullen determination. And, as theentr'acteended, those hard brown pupils fell to devisaging Mary O'Riordan. Till, visibly ill at ease, the cow-eyes under Mary's mop of gold hair turned away.
But it gave Aliette no pleasure to realize that, hurt, she had retaliated.
Everybody in front of the curtain and everybody behind the curtain knew--as it fell--that Patrick O'Riordan's poetic drama, "Khorassan," was a proved failure. Nevertheless, the audience, as is the polite custom of first-night audiences, applauded; and called on the author, white-faced in the glare of the footlights, for a speech.
"And in the morning," thought Julia Cavendish satirically, "we shall read of the great service rendered by Patrick O'Riordan via Letchingbury's bank-account, to art; and of the pressing need for more revivals of the poetic drama."
Julia could not help being a little pleased at the play's failure; in a way it mitigated her own. For thatshehad failed, lamentably, in her adventure, Ronnie's mother realized even better than Aliette. Hold her head high as she might, this consciousness of disaster persisted all through O'Riordan's overlong speech. The literary childishness went out of her, leaving the woman of the world conscious that she had done the foolish thing, that she had flaunted her son and her son's mistress before that little section of society which is a London first-night. Society, of course, had averted its face! Remained, therefore, only the assurance that Aliette's husband had seen the flaunting, and so must surely be forced into action.
"Poor Aliette," thought Julia. "Poor Ronnie." Her mind was all a weakness toward them, all a strength against the world. For herself, she needed no comforting; but them she wanted to take in her arms, to mother.
O'Riordan's speech ended. The house clapped, and emptied. The three left their box; and Ronnie--reluctantly leaving Julia and Aliette in the foyer--went off in search of the electric brougham.
Waiting in the crowd, both women knew themselves on show, the dual cynosure of a hundred furtive glances. People seemed anxious to escape without the need for recognizing them. The few smiles were frigid, standoffish--all for Julia, none for her companion. Hector's aunt, jostling by, cut the pair dead.
Aliette tried to think, "It doesn't matter; it doesn't matter a bit"; she tried to hold herself upright, to cut rather than be cut, to preserve--outwardly at least--the semblance of a dignity. But inwardly she knew herself all one tremble of undignified panic. If only one person, just one person in that jostling mob, would be really decent! If only Ronnie would be quicker with their carriage!
Then simultaneously both women grew aware that a face, one kindly face, was smiling at them, was making its way toward them through the crowd. Simultaneously they recognized the face--Hermione Ellerson's.
"My dear, I've been trying to catch your eye all the evening," called Hermione to Aliette. "But you wouldn't look at me. Why don't you come and see us? I want you to see our new house. Curzon Street, 24. In the telephone-book."
Hermione was swept away before Aliette could collect her wits for reply: and a moment afterward they saw, beyond the crowd, Ronnie signaling the arrival of their brougham.
"Itwasdecent of Hermione, frightfully decent, especially as she's a kind of relation of Hector's. All the same, I don't think I'll go and see her."
Aliette, disrobed, sat staring into the gas-fire of their Powolney Mansions bedroom.
"Why not?" asked a shirt-sleeved Ronnie.
She turned to him, and her face showed very pale.
"Man, it's all so hopeless."
"It isn't. It isn't a bit hopeless. The mater's right. H. B.mustact now."
"He won't, and even if he does--Oh, don't you see that I've--that I've ruined you! I've ruined your career. I've ruined you both."
"Rubbish!" There was something of his mother's brusquerie in the man's tone.
"It isn't rubbish." The woman was deadly in her calm. "It's the absolute truth. Don't let us deceive ourselves."
He tried to take her in his arms; but she rose, eluding him. "Don't, Ronnie! Let's be sensible; it's high time. We--you and I and your mother--have made a mistake. A mistake that's almost irretrievable. There's only one thing to be done now----"
"And that is?" He had never known her in this mood. She seemed utterly different from the sensitive Aliette of a few hours since; almost unloving, hard, purposeful, resolute.
"And that is?" he repeated.
"I must leave you."
At her words Ronnie's heart stopped beating as though some giant had put a finger on it. For one fraction of a second, love vanished utterly; almost, he hated her.
"Yes," went on Aliette, "I must leave you. It's the only way, I'll take a little cottage. Somewhere not too far from London. And you--you must go and live with your mother."
His heart began beating again, faintly.
"But why?" he managed. "Why?"
"Because that's the only way to stop people from talking. If they know that you're at Bruton Street, that I'm not at Bruton Street, then," she was faltering now, faltering in her firm purpose, and she knew that she must not falter; "then they'll think that your mother didn't know anything when she invited us to-night."
He came toward her: and she felt her momentary determination weaken; felt herself powerless to do the right. He put his hands on her shoulders, and looked her deep in the eyes. Then he smiled, the quaint, whimsical smile she loved best.
"You're not serious, Alie?"
"I am," she faltered, "desperately serious. You'll let me have my cottage, won't you?"
"You know I won't." He had her in his arms now. "You know that I won't consent to anything so absurd." He bent to kiss her. "Darling, don't let's lose our pluck. It's been a rotten evening for you. Rotten! I know that."
"It's not of myself that I'm thinking."
"I know that, too. I'm not thinking for myself, either. I'm trying to think for both of us, for all three of us. We've got to see this thing through. Together."
"Together!" The word weakened her still further.
"Yes, together." He followed up his advantage. "Life's a fight. A hard fight. You mustn't desert."
"And you"--her voice, as she lay motionless in his arms, was almost inaudible--"you think I'm worth fighting for?"
"More than anything in the world. But I wish"--a little he, too, faltered, his fears for her sake making him afraid--"I wish that people didn't hurt you so."
She stirred in his arms; and her face upturned to his.
"Man," she said, her eyes shining, "I'm not afraid of anything people can do tome. Nobody except you could everreallyhurt me. I--I didn't mean to desert; only just to efface myself. Won't you let me efface myself? Until--until Hector divorces me. It's the right thing--the best thing. Really it is."
"Right or wrong," said Ronnie, "we'll see this business through--see it through together--even if it lasts all our lives."
Aliette, seeing the fighting-fire in those blue eyes, seeing the stubborn set of that protruded jaw, knew her momentary determination beaten to the ground.
Within one week of its first launching, "Khorassan" sank, leaving hardly a ripple, into the deep pool of theatrical failures. But for weeks and weeks thereafter, that shallow pool which is West End society rippled furiously to the stone which Julia Cavendish had thrown into it when she attended Patrick O'Riordan's first-night accompanied by her son and Aliette.
Some of the consequences of that stone-throwing were explained to Ronnie's "wife" when--overpersuaded from her decision not to visit Hermione--she called at the little black-carpeted, Chinese-papered, orange-curtained box of a house in Curzon Street.
Hermione, her willowy figure supine on an enormous sofa, her dark eyes glinting with a sympathetic curiosity not entirely bereft of humor, extended one ringless hand with a laughed "Well, my dear, you really have put your foot into it this time. Your in-laws are perfectly furious."
Aliette laughed in reply (no one ever took Hermione quite seriously); possessed herself of a luxurious chair before the luxurious fire, and admitted:
"It was rather a faux pas, wasn't it?"
"I'm not so sure of that." Hermione's smooth brows crinkled in thought. "I'm not at all so sure of that. It's quite on the cards,Ithink, that it'll lead to something. Sir Simeon told me, only last night, how perfectly impossible it was for such a state of affairs to go on."
She rose from the sofa; and, coming over to the fire, took the vast pouffe in front of it. "Poor darling! It's rotten for you."
Aliette stiffened at the suggestion of sympathy. "I'm quite happy, thank you."
"Are you? I'm so glad." Hermione edged the pouffe closer. "My dear, you have surprised the clan. None of us imaginedyoucapable of a really-truly love-affair. Why, you're the last person in the world----"
"Please, Hermione, don't let's discuss me."
"But I want to discuss you. I think you're perfectly marvelous. How on earth you ever had the nerve. And from a husband like Hector!" Ellerson's wife paused to warm her expressive hands at the fire. "I never did like Hector. Strong, silent men always bore me to distraction. But Ronnie Cavendish is a perfect dear."
It was the first time that any one except his mother had been personal about Ronnie, and Aliette felt herself blushing at the mere mention of his name. She wanted to shoo Hermione away from the topic; but Hermione, like some obstinate butterfly, returned always to the forbidden flower. Hermione wanted "to know everything." Hermione hinted herself more than ready to be profuse in sympathy--if only the other would be profuse in confidences. Even the presence of an exiguous Belgian butler, carrying exiguous French tea-cups on an exiguous Russian silver tray, failed to distract Hermione from her purpose.
Ellerson's wife had been discussingl'affaire Aliettewith Lady Cynthia Barberus, with Miss Elizabeth Cattistock, with many another mannequin of the "Ritz crowd"; and they had jointly come to the conclusion that it was abominable, "perfectly abominable," "a return to feminine slavery" for any man to behave as Hector Brunton was behaving. If only "dear Alie" would tell them how they could help her!
Aliette, however--who, in her safety, had always rather despised Lady Cynthia and Lady Cynthia's associates,--could not bring herself to seek alliance with them in her danger. Her fastidiousness resented the "Ritz crowd's" partizanship. Trying her best to be grateful, she could not stifle the instinct that Hermione's "sympathy" was the sympathy of an idle, over-sexed woman, inspired rather by sensational and illicit novelty than by reasoned understanding.
But even oversensitive Aliette could not misjudge the real understanding, the real sympathy of Hermione's husband.
That tall, casually-groomed, blond-haired youth came in just as the guest was perpending departure; offered her a large hand; and said nothing whatever to complicate a difficult situation. My Lord Arthur merely opined that he was sorry to be late for tea, that he hoped Aliette would come and see them again, that she must dine and do a show with them as soon as ever they got back from the Riviera, and that she must bring--he said this with extraordinary tact--anybody she liked to make a fourth at the party. Lord Arthur, in fact, without mentioning Ronnie's name, made it quite clear on which side of the social fence both he and his wife purposed to sit.
For by now the various sections of that complicated community which is social London had grown conscious of the Cavendish-Brunton fence. People had begun to comprehend thatl'affaire Aliettewas serious, and that one would have to sit either on Aliette's side, on Hector's side, or on the fence itself. So that if Aliette had been less old-fashioned, in the best sense of that much-abused word; if Aliette's lover had been less shy, less reticent, less aloof from his kind; and if Julia Cavendish had only been a little less certain, that victory was already won--there is little doubt that other houses besides 24 Curzon Street would have opened their doors.
Social London, you see, was in a state of moral flux. Cadogan Square, Belgravia, and Knightsbridge still clung rigidly to the tenets of the Victorian past. But for Mayfair, parts of Kensington, and the more artistic suburbs, matrimonial issues had assumed a new aspect since the war. Actually, a tide of freer thinking on the sex question had begun to sweep over the whole of England. Happiness had not yet come to be acknowledged the only possible basis of monogamy, but divorce reform was no longer only in the air--it was more or less on the table of the House.
And to divorce reformers Hector Brunton's attitude appeared almost as indefensible as it did to those who, not yet in revolt against the old tenets of indissoluble matrimony, found it hard to stomach a man's permitting his wife to live unsued in open adultery.
Julia Cavendish tried to explain these post-war matrimonial issues to Dot Fancourt, when he called at Bruton Street to remonstrate with her about "the very serious blunder" she had committed. But Dot, willing enough to open his columns in "The Contemplatory" for an intellectual threshing out of such issues, could not face them in real life. A social cowardliness, essentially editorial, obsessed his failing mentality.
"My dear," he argued, "it isn't as if you were a nobody. Nobodies can afford experiments. You can't. You're a Cavendish. You have a position, an eminent position in the scholastic world, in the world of society, and in the world of letters. Therefore you, of all people, have least right, especially in times like the present, to countenance matrimonial bolshevism."
Julia Cavendish put down her embroidery-frame, and faced her quondam friend squarely. Ever since their meeting in the foyer of the Capitol Theater, she had been seeing him with new eyes, seeing only his weakness, the insufficiency and the inefficiency of him. That he meant his advice kindly and for the best, she knew. Nevertheless, he had wrecked their friendship; failed her when she most needed him. The disloyalty stung her to bitterness.
"The fact that I married a Cavendish," she said, "is neither here nor there. My position, such as it is, is one which I attained for myself. If, by siding with my own son, I jeopardize it----"
"But, my dear, why jeopardize it at all? You're being so unwise. You won't do your son any good by quarreling with your friends."
"Apparently I have no friends." The Biblical phrase about the broken reed crossed Julia's mind. "If I had friends, they would stand by me and mine; not try to avoid us in public."
"You're very unfair." Dot rose irritably, and began shambling up and down the room. "Terribly unfair. Can't you understand how I hated seeing you--messed up in this sort of thing?"
She fired up at that. "One defends one's own, Dot."
And for an hour after Dot had gone, the words rang in Julia's mind. "One defends one's own--at all costs--however hard the battle."
For her, battle grew harder as the days went by. One by one she argued out the issue with her protesting friends, convincing few, antagonizing many. Her family, however--always a little jealous of "the immaculate Ronald"--Julia met not with argument but with shock tactics.
Clementina, calling, breasted and bustled for fray, accompanied by Sir John, in his best Bank of England blacks, who admitted that "they had heard things" and pressed to know if there was any truth in "the things they had heard," received a direct "My dear Clementina, if your husband means that you've been informed of my son's running away with Hector Brunton's wife, and that Hector Brunton is going to divorce her, you've been informed correctly"; while Alice, writing a dutiful letter from Cheltenham, received a typescript reply--to the same effect--which cut her Anglo-Indian sense of etiquette to the quick.
As for May who, relinquishing the expensive good works and still more expensive garden of her house in Abbey Road, called unattended and found Julia alone;shereturned to St. John's Wood with the firm conviction that her "poor dear sister" must have been "got at by some of those dreadful writing people," and bombarded her, for nearly a week, with pamphlets on "The Sin of Divorce."
Meanwhile, regular callers at Bruton Street grew rarer and rarer; until Paul Flower, busy rewriting some of his earlier books for American admirers and utterly unable to discuss anything else, almost monopolized the once-crowded drawing-room. Paul, engrossed with pre-war literature, became in those days Julia's best refuge from post-war life. He succeeded--sometimes for hours together--in stimulating her creative imagination.
And since, to a literary craftswoman, the creative imagination is only as the first nip to a confirmed toper, Paul Flower soon succeeded in more than this--in arousing the actual creative instinct: so that the creative instinct awoke and demanded work.
Gradually Julia grew hungry for the pen, for the long and lonely hours when the creative mind is as God, fashioning puppets for His pleasure. But always, when Paul Flower had left her, her imagination switched back from literature to life.
"The man Brunton," said imagination, "isnotbeaten. He'll bring no action. He is working, working secretly, to ruin your boy's career."
And indeed, during those few days which preceded the close of the autumn sessions, it did not require his mother's imagination to perceive that some curious and sinister influence must be at work against Ronald Cavendish in the quiet quadrangles and the gray-pinnacled courts either side the Griffin.
From the unwigged Mr. Justice Mallory, sipping the port of midday adjournment in his private room behind King's Bench Seven, to melancholious Benjamin Bunce, perusing his "Law Times" at Groom's coffee-shop in Fleet Street, the whole "legal world" was aware that "H. B. meant to make trouble." Alike in Middle and in Inner Temple halls, in robing-rooms, in chambers, in corridors, and in offices, wheresoever and whensoever barristers or solicitors foregathered to talk "shop," one heard the buzz of dignified curiosity, rumors of instant citation, of citation delayed.
Meanwhile Ronnie, growing less and less inclined to intimacy with his fellow-lawyers as he grew more and more conscious of their interest in him, visited Pump Court with a regularity which held more of bravado than of necessity. The flow of his briefs, never broad, had dwindled to the tiniest trickle. Barring the work he still did for Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, he foresaw almost complete idleness at the Hilary sessions.
The foresight, financially, frightened him. Never a spendthrift, his own needs, small though they were, had to be met. His savings and the Jermyn Street rent, paid six months in advance, were almost exhausted. The idea of borrowing from his mother did not appeal; and to let Aliette bear her part in the "family" expenses was unthinkable.
But even Ronnie failed to realize the full extent of his financial shipwreck until that afternoon just before Christmas when James Wilberforce, preannounced by telephone, strode into the duck's-egg-green paneled chambers, and, having made certain that they could not be overheard, plumped his long bulk into the dilapidated armchair with a diffident, "Old chap, I've come on a devilish unpleasant mission."
The barrister did not answer; and after a constrained pause the solicitor went on, picking each word as though fearful of its giving offense: "Pater would have come and seen you himself. But he thought, you and me being pals, that perhaps I'd better be the one. You see, being your mother's executor, and, so to speak, a friend of the family, pater's always tried to do everything he could for you----"
"You needn't say any more," interrupted Ronnie. "I quite understand. You've come to tell me I'm not to expect any further briefs from Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright."
"Hardly that," prevaricated Jimmy. "But the fact is--you know how I hate beating about the bush--pater's afraid of offending Brunton. We've got the big Furlmere divorce case coming on fairly soon. 'Bout the end of January, I expect. We're pretty high up on the list. Furlmere insisted on H. B. leading for us. We sent round the brief to him in the usual way, and of course he had to accept it. But when he took our retainer, his clerk, that fellow Patterson, hinted--mind you, he only hinted--that if there were any question of 'a certain gentleman' acting as junior to him, 'Mr. Brunton' would not appear in court when the case came on."
"But surely you had no idea----"
"Of briefing you as junior? Of course not. I shouldn't be such an incredible ass. Still, straws show which way the wind blows. And we simply can't afford to quarrel with H. B. Not till the Furlmere case is over, anyway."
The friends looked at each other for one silent minute. Outside, a thin rain had begun to patter on the flagstones. Within the room darkled. Ronnie clicked on the table-lamp, and began to scrawl with vagrant pencil on the blotting-paper.
"I'm not quarreling with your position, Jimmy," he said at last. "Tell your pater I'd do the same if I were he."
Jimmy's voice softened. "Old man, I don't want to interfere. But I do wish you'd arrange for some mutual friend to see Brunton. Take it from me, he's going on playing dog-in-the-manger. And he can do you a hell of a lot of harm."
"Let him!" Ronnie's jaw set. "If this is going to be a fight between us, it may as well be a fight to a finish. I don't propose asking favors, even by proxy. If he thinks he's going to succeed in driving me out of the bar----"
"No one's suggested your leaving the bar. In fact"--Jimmy began to stammer, as a man making offer of a gift which is almost certain to be refused--"another thing I came round to see you about was----"
The sentence refused to complete itself: and Jimmy started a new one. "As you know, our partners, the Cartwrights, do quite a lot of work that never comes into the High Court at all; criminal stuff, county courts, and all that sort of thing. If you'd care to accept their briefs----"
Again the sentence refused to complete itself; again the two friends looked at one another in silence. Then the barrister said:
"A bit of a come-down, isn't it? Almost as bad as 'taking soup.'"
This allusion to the practice of young and briefless barristers, who sit all day long in the criminal courts waiting their chance to defend any prisoners that may be allotted to them, made Ronnie's friend squirm.
"Hang it all, it isn't as bad as that. John Cartwright's quite a good sort. And a big criminal case brings other work. Anyway, think it over, and let me know." Jimmy rose to go. "And by the way, will you give my regards to the little lady? Tell her how sorry I am about the whole thing and that I'm sure it'll all come out right in the long run."
At the door, James Wilberforce turned; and, coming back, extended a hand. "Buck up, old boy," he mumbled rather shamefacedly.
Left alone, Ronnie sat for a long while, scrawling on the blotting-pad.
"After all," he thought, "it was pretty decent of Jimmy to send Alie that message. I wonder why he did it. I wonder whether he's still keen on Mollie. Jolly rough luck on him if he is. Curse that fellow Brunton! He's stirred up a pretty kettle of fish."
And from that he fell to evil-tempered rumination--in which his newly-aroused ambition for legal success played no small rôle--finally deciding,faute de mieux, to accept the work offered.