[60]
G.J. fought against the incredible fact of death.
"But he only went out six days ago! They haven't been married three weeks."
The central hardness of the other disclosed itself as he said:
"What's that got to do with it? What does it matter if he went out six days ago or six weeks ago? He's killed."
"Well—"
"Of course you must go. Indicate a rumour. Tell her it's probably false, but you thought you owed it to her to warn her. Only for God's sake don't mention me. We're not supposed to say anything, you know."
G.J. seemed to see his mission, and it challenged him.
[61]
As soon as G.J. had been let into the abode by Concepcion's venerable parlour-maid, the voice of Concepcion came down to him from above:
"G.J., who is your oldest and dearest friend?"
He replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of cheerful abruptness:
"Difficult to say, off-hand."
"Not at all. It's your beard."
That was her greeting to him. He knew she was recalling an old declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard. The parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm Concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants. G.J. looked up the narrow well of the staircase. He could vaguely see Concepcion on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather fluffilly dressed, for her.
Concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the sale of grand pianos. Her front door was immediately at the top of a long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood one step higher than the person desiring entrance. Within the abode, which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up. "My motto is," she would say, "'One room,[62]one staircase.'" The life of the abode was on the busy stairs. She called it also her Alpine Club. She had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had therefore caused rents to rise. In the drawing-room she had hung a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in German gilt, and under it she had inscribed, "Presented to Miss Concepcion Iquist by the grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem and regard."
She was the only daughter of Iquist's brother, who had had a business and a palace at Lima. At the age of eighteen, her last surviving parent being dead, she had come to London and started to keep house for the bachelor Iquist, who at that very moment, owing to a fortunate change in the Ministry, had humorously entered the Cabinet. These two had immediately become "the most talked-of pair in London," London in this phrase signifying the few thousand people who do talk about the doings of other people unknown to them and being neither kings, princes, statesmen, artistes, artists, jockeys, nor poisoners. The Iquists had led the semi-intelligent, conscious-of-its-audience set which had ousted the old, quite unintelligent stately-homes-of-England set from the first place in the curiosity of the everlasting public. Concepcion had wit. It was stated that she furnished her uncle with the finest of hismots. When Iquist died, of course poor Concepcion had retired to the upper part, whence, though her position was naturally weakened, she still took a hand in leading the set.
[63]
G.J. had grown friendly and appreciative of her, for the simple reason that she had singled him out and always tried to please him, even when taking liberties with him. He liked her because she was different from her set. She had a masculine mind, whereas many even of the males of her set had a feminine mind. She was exceedingly well educated; she had ideas on everything; and she never failed in catching an allusion. She would criticise her set very honestly; her attitude to it and to herself seemed to be that of an impartial and yet indulgent philosopher; withal she could be intensely loyal to fools and worse who were friends. As for the public, she was apparently convinced of the sincerity of her scorn for it, while admitting that she enjoyed publicity, which had become indispensable to her as a drug may become indispensable. Moreover, there was her wit and her candid, queer respect for G.J.
Yes, he had greatly admired her for her qualities. He did not, however, greatly admire her physique. She was tall, with a head scarcely large enough for her body. She had a nice snub nose which in another woman might have been irresistible. She possessed very little physical charm, and showed very little taste in her neat, prim frocks. Not merely had she a masculine mind, but she was somewhat hard, a self-confessed egoist. She swore like the set, using about one "damn" or one "bloody" to every four cigarettes, of which she smoked, perhaps, fifty a day—including some in taxis. She discussed the sexual vagaries of her friends and her enemies with a[64]freedom and an apparent learning which were remarkable in a virgin.
In the end she had married Carlos Smith, and, characteristically, had received him into her own home instead of going to his; as a fact, he had none, having been a parent's close-kept darling. London had only just recovered from the excitations of the wedding. G.J. had regarded the marriage with benevolence, perhaps with relief.
"Anybody else coming to lunch?" he discreetly inquired of his familiar, the parlour-maid.
She breathed a negative.
He had guessed it. Concepcion had meant to be alone with him. Having married for love, and her husband being rapt away by the war, she intended to resume her old, honest, quasi-sentimental relations with G.J. A reliable and experienced bachelor is always useful to a young grass-widow, and, moreover, the attendant hopeless adorer nourishes her hungry egotism as nobody else can. G.J. thought these thoughts, clearly and callously, in the same moment as, mounting the next flight of stairs, he absolutely trembled with sympathetic anguish for Concepcion. His errand was an impossible one; he feared, or rather he hoped, that the very look on his face might betray the dreadful news to that undeceivable intuition which women were supposed to possess. He hesitated on the stairs; he recoiled from the top step—(she had coquettishly withdrawn herself into the room)—he hadn't the slightest idea how to begin. Yes, the errand was an impossible one, and yet such errands had to be performed by somebody, were daily being performed by somebodies.[65]Then he had the idea of telephoning privily to fetch her cousin Sara. He would open by remarking casually to Concepcion:
"I say, can I use your telephone a minute?" He found a strange Concepcion in the drawing-room. This was his first sight of Mrs. Carlos Smith since the wedding. She wore a dress such as he had never seen on her: a tea-gown—and for lunch! It could be called neither neat nor prim, but it was voluptuous. Her complexion had bloomed; the curves of her face were softer, her gestures more abandoned, her gaze full of a bold and yet shamed self-consciousness, her dark hair looser. He stood close to her; he stood within the aura of her recently aroused temperament, and felt it. He thought, could not help thinking: "Perhaps she bears within her the legacy of new life." He could not help thinking of her name. He took her hot hand. She said nothing, but just looked at him. He then said jauntily:
"I say, can I use your telephone a minute?" Fortunately, the telephone was in the bedroom. He went farther upstairs and shut himself in the bedroom, and saw naught but the telephone surrounded by the mysterious influences of inanimate things in the gay, crowded room.
"Is that you, Mrs. Trevise? It's G.J. speaking. G.J.... Hoape. Yes. Listen. I'm at Concepcion's for lunch, and I want you to come over as quickly as you can. I've got very bad news indeed—the worst possible. Carlos has been killed at the Front. What? Yes, awful, isn't it? She doesn't know. I have the job of telling her."
[66]
Now that the words had been spoken in Concepcion's abode the reality of Carlos Smith's death seemed more horribly convincing than before. And G.J., speaker of the words, felt almost as guilty as though he himself were responsible for the death. When he had rung off he stood motionless in the room until the opening of the door startled him. Concepcion appeared.
"If you've done corrupting my innocent telephone ..." she said, "lunch is cooling."
He felt a murderer.
At the lunch-table she might have been a genuine South American. Nobody could be less like Christine than she was; and yet in those instants she incomprehensibly reminded him of Christine. Then she started to talk in her old manner of a professional and renowned talker. G.J. listened attentively. They ate. It was astounding that he could eat. And it was rather surprising that she did not cry out: "G.J. What the devil's the matter with you to-day?" But she went on talking evenly, and she made him recount his doings. He related the conversation at the club, and especially what Bob, the retired judge, had said about equilibrium on the Western Front. She did not want to hear anything as to the funeral.
"We'll have champagne," she said suddenly to the parlour-maid, who was about to offer some red wine. And while the parlour-maid was out of the room she said to G.J., "There isn't a country in Europe where champagne is not a symbol, and we must conform."
"A symbol of what?"
[67]
"Ah! The unusual."
"And what is there unusual to-day?" he almost asked, but did not ask. It would, of course, have been utterly monstrous to put such a question, knowing what he knew. He thought: I'm not a bit nearer telling her than I was when I came.
After the parlour-maid had poured out the champagne Concepcion picked up her glass and absently glanced through it and said:
"You know, G.J., I shouldn't be in the least surprised to hear that Carly was killed out there. I shouldn't, really."
In amazement G.J. ceased to eat.
"You needn't look at me like that," she said. "I'm quite serious. One may as well face the risks.Hedoes. Of course they're all heroes. There are millions of heroes. But I do honestly believe that my Carly would be braver than anyone. By the way, did I ever tell you he was considered the best shot in Cheshire?"
"No. But I knew," answered G.J. feebly. He would have expected her to be a little condescending towards Carlos, to whom in brains she was infinitely superior. But no! Carlos had mastered her, and she was grateful to him for mastering her. He had taught her in three weeks more than she had learnt on two continents in thirty years. She talked of him precisely as any wee wifie might have talked of the soldier-spouse. And she called him "Carly"!
Neither of them had touched the champagne. G.J. decided that he would postpone any attempt to tell her until her cousin arrived; her[68]cousin might arrive at any moment now.
While the parlour-maid presented potatoes Concepcion deliberately ignored her and said dryly to G.J.:
"I can't eat any more. I think I ought to run along to Debenham and Freebody's at once. You might come too, and be sure to bring your good taste with you."
He was alarmed by her tone.
"Debenham and Freebody's! What for?"
"To order mourning, of course. To have it ready, you know. A precaution, you know." She laughed.
He saw that she was becoming hysterical: the special liability of the war-bride for whom the curtain has been lifted and falls exasperatingly, enragingly, too soon.
"You think I'm a bit hysterical?" she questioned, half menacingly, and stood up.
"I think you'd better sit down, to begin with," he said firmly.
The parlour-maid, blushing slightly, left the room.
"Oh, all right!" Concepcion agreed carelessly, and sat down. "But you may as well read that."
She drew a telegram from the low neck of her gown and carefully unfolded it and placed it in front of him. It was a War Office telegram announcing that Carlos had been killed.
"It came ten minutes before you," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me at once?" he murmured, frightfully shocked. He was actually reproaching her!
She stood up again. She lived; her breast[69]rose and fell. Her gown had the same voluptuousness. Her temperament was still emanating the same aura. She was the same new Concepcion, strange and yet profoundly known to him. But ineffable tragedy had marked her down, and the sight of her parched the throat.
She said:
"Couldn't. Besides, I had to see if I could stand it. Because I've got to stand it, G.J.... And, moreover, in our set it's a sacred duty to be original."
She snatched the telegram, tore it in two, and pushed the pieces back into her gown.
"'Poor wounded name!'" she murmured, "'my bosom as a bed shall lodge thee.'"
The next moment she fell to the floor, at full length on her back. G.J. sprang to her, kneeling on her rich, outspread gown, and tried to lift her.
"No, no!" she protested faintly, dreamily, with a feeble frown on her pale forehead. "Let me lie. Equilibrium has been established on the Western Front."
This was her greatestmot.
[70]
When the Italian woman, having recognised him with a discreet smile, introduced G.J. into the drawing-room of the Cork Street flat, he saw Christine lying on the sofa by the fire. She too was in a tea-gown.
She said:
"Do not be vexed. I have my migraine—am good for nothing. But I gave the order that thou shouldst be admitted."
She lifted her arms, and the long sleeves fell away. G.J. bent down and kissed her. She joined her hands on the nape of his neck, and with this leverage raised her whole body for an instant, like a child, smiling; then dropped back with a fatigued sigh, also like a child. He found satisfaction in the fact that she was laid aside. It was providential. It set him right with himself. For, to put the thing crudely, he had left the tragic Concepcion to come to Christine, a woman picked up in a Promenade.
True, Sara Trevise had agreed with him that he could accomplish no good by staying at Concepcion's; Concepcion had withdrawn from the vision of men. True, it could make no difference to Concepcion whether he retired to his flat for the[71]rest of the day and saw no one, or whether, having changed his ceremonious clothes there, he went out again on his own affairs. True, he had promised Christine to see her that afternoon, and a promise was a promise, and Christine was a woman who had behaved well to him, and it would have been impossible for him to send her an excuse, since he did not know her surname. These apparently excellent arguments were specious and worthless. He would, anyhow, have gone to Christine. The call was imperious within him, and took no heed of grief, nor propriety, nor the secret decencies of sympathy. The primitive man in him would have gone to Christine.
He sat down with a profound and exquisite relief. The entrance to the house was nearly opposite the entrance to a prim but fashionable and expensive hotel. To ring (and ring the right bell) and wait at Christine's door almost under the eyes of the hotel was an ordeal.... The fat and untidy Italian had opened the door, and shut it again—quick! He was in another world, saved, safe! On the dark staircase the image of Concepcion with her temperament roused and condemned to everlasting hunger, the unconquerable Concepcion blasted in an instant of destiny—this image faded. She would re-marry.... She ought to re-marry.... And now he was in Christine's warm room, and Christine, temporary invalid, reclined before his eyes. The lights were turned on, the blinds drawn, the stove replenished, the fire replenished. He was enclosed with Christine in a little world with no law and no[72]conventions except its own, and no shames nor pretences. He was, as it were, in the East. And the immanence of a third person, the Italian, accepting naturally and completely the code of the little world, only added to the charm. The Italian was like a slave, from whom it is necessary to hide nothing and never to blush.
A stuffy little world with a perceptible odour! Ordinarily he had the common insular appetite for ventilation, but now stuffiness appealed to him; he scented it almost voluptuously. The ugliness of the wallpaper, of the furniture, of everything in the room was naught. Christine's profession was naught. Who could positively say that her profession was on her face, in her gestures, in her talk? Admirable as was his knowledge of French, it was not enough to enable him to criticise her speech. Her gestures were delightful. Her face—her face was soft; her puckered brow was touching in its ingenuousness. She had a kind and a trustful eye; it was a lewd eye, indicative of her incomparable endowment; but had he not encountered the lewd eye in the very arcana of the respectability of the world outside? On the sofa, open and leaves downward, lay a book with a glistening coloured cover, entitledFantomas. It was the seventh volume of an interminable romance which for years had had a tremendous vogue among the concierges, the workgirls, the clerks, and thecocottesof Paris. An unreadable affair, not even indecent, which nevertheless had enchanted a whole generation. To be able to enjoy it was an absolute demonstration of lack of taste; but did not some of his best[73]friends enjoy books no better? And could he not any day in any drawing-room see martyred books dropped open and leaves downwards in a manner to raise the gorge of a person of any bookish sensibility?
"Thou wilt play for me?" she suggested.
"But the headache?"
"It will do me good. I adore music, such music as thou playest."
He was flattered. The draped piano was close to him. Stretching out his hand he took a little pile of music from the top of it.
"But you play, then!" he exclaimed, pleased.
"No, no! I tap—only. And very little."
He glanced through the pieces of music. They were all, without exception, waltzes, by the once popular waltz-kings of Paris and Vienna, including several by the king of kings, Berger. He seated himself at the piano and opened the first waltz that came.
"Oh! I adore the waltzes of Berger," she murmured. "There is only he. You don't think so?"
He said he had never heard any of this music. Then he played every piece for her. He tried to see what it was in this music that so pleased the simple; and he saw it, or he thought he saw it. He abandoned himself to the music, yielding to it, accepting its ideals, interpreting it as though it moved him, until in the end it did produce in him a sort of factitious emotion. After all, it was no worse than much of the music he was forced to hear in very refined circles.
She said, ravished:
"You decipher music like an angel."
[74]
And hummed a fragment of the waltz fromThe Rosenkavalierwhich he had played for her two evenings earlier. He glanced round sharply. Had she, then, real taste?
"It is like that, isn't it?" she questioned, and hummed it again, flattered by the look on his face.
While, at her invitation, he repeated the waltz on the piano, whose strings might have been made of zinc, he heard a ring at the outer door and then the muffled sound of a colloquy between a male voice and the voice of the Italian. "Of course," he admitted philosophically, "she has other clients already." Such a woman was bound to have other clients. He felt no jealousy, nor even discomfort, from the fact that she lent herself to any male with sufficient money and a respectable appearance. The colloquy expired.
"Ring, please," she requested, after thanking him. He hoped that she was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence. Surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness! Still, women without imagination—and the majority of women were without imagination—did do the most astounding things.
There was no immediate answer to the bell; but in a few minutes the Italian entered with a tea-tray. Christine sat up.
"I will pour the tea," said she, and to the Italian: "Marthe, where is the evening paper?" And when Marthe returned with a newspaper damp from the press, Christine said: "To Monsieur...."
Not a word of curiosity as to the unknown visitor!
G.J. was amply confirmed in his original[75]opinion of Christine. She was one in a hundred. To provide the evening paper.... It was nothing, but it was enormous.
"Sit by my side," she said. She made just a little space for him on the sofa—barely enough so that he had to squeeze in. The afternoon tea was correct, save for the extraordinary thickness of the bread-and-butter. But G.J. said to himself that the French did not understand bread-and-butter, and the Italians still less. To compensate for the defects of the bread-and-butter there was a box of fine chocolates.
"I perfect my English," she said. Tea was finished; they were smoking, theEvening Newsspread between them over the tea-things. She articulated with a strong French accent the words of some of the headings. "Mistair Carlos Smith keeled at the front," she read out. "Who is it, that woman there? She must be celebrated."
There was a portrait of the illustrious Concepcion, together with some sympathetic remarks about her, remarks conceived very differently from the usual semi-ironic, semi-worshipping journalistic references to the stars of Concepcion's set. G.J. answered vaguely.
"I do not like too much these society women. They are worse than us, and they cost you more. Ah! If the truth were known—" Christine spoke with a queer, restrained, surprising bitterness. Then she added, softly relenting: "However, it is sad for her.... Who was he, this monsieur?"
G.J. replied that he was nobody in particular, so far as his knowledge went.
[76]
"Ah! One of those who are husbands of their wives!" said Christine acidly.
The disturbing intuition of women!
A little later he said that he must depart.
"But why? I feel better."
"I have a committee."
"A committee?"
"It is a work of charity—for the French wounded."
"Ah! In that case.... But, beloved!"
"Yes?"
She lowered her voice.
"How dost thou call thyself?"
"Gilbert."
"Thou knowest—I have a fancy for thee."
Her tone was delicious, its sincerity absolutely convincing.
"Too amiable."
"No, no. It is true. Say! Return. Return after thy committee. Take me out to dinner—some gentle little restaurant, discreet. There must be many of them in a city like London. It is a city so romantic. Oh! The little corners of London!"
"But—of course. I should be enchanted—"
"Well, then."
He was standing. She raised her smiling, seductive face. She was young—younger than Concepcion; less battered by the world's contacts than Concepcion. She had the inexpressible virtue and power of youth. He was nearing fifty. And she, perhaps half his age, had confessed his charm.
"And say! My Gilbert. Bring me a few flowers. I have not been able to go out to-day.[77]Something very simple. I detest that one should squander money on flowers for me."
"Seven-thirty, then!" said he. "And you will be ready?"
"I shall be very exact. Thou wilt tell me all that concerns thy committee. That interests me. The English are extraordinary."
[78]
Within the hotel the glowing Gold Hall, whose Lincrusta Walton panels dated it, was nearly empty. Of the hundred small round tables only one was occupied; a bald head and a large green hat were almost meeting over the top of this table, but there was nothing on it except an ashtray. A waiter wandered about amid the thick plushy silence and the stagnant pools of electric light, meditating upon the curse which had befallen the world of hotels. The red lips beneath the green hat discernibly moved, but no faintest murmur therefrom reached the entrance. The hot, still place seemed to be enchanted.
The sight of the hotel flower-stall recessed on the left reminded G.J. of Christine's desire. Forty thousand skilled women had been put out of work in England because luxury was scared by the sudden vista of war, but the black-garbed girl, entrenched in her mahogany bower, was still earning some sort of a livelihood. In a moment, wakened out of her terrible boredom into an alert smile, she had sold to G.J. a bunch of expensive chrysanthemums whose yellow petals were like long curly locks. Thoughtless, he had meant to have the flowers delivered at once to Christine's[79]flat. It would not do; it would be indiscreet. And somehow, in the absence of Braiding, it would be equally indiscreet to have them delivered at his own flat.
"I shall be leaving the hotel in about an hour; I'll take them away myself then," he said, and inquired for the headquarters of the Lechford French Hospitals Committee.
"Committee?" repeated the girl vaguely. "I expect the Onyx Hall's what you want." She pointed up a corridor, and gave change.
G.J. discovered the Onyx Hall, which had its own entrance from the street, and which in other days had been a café lounge. The precious pavement was now half hidden by wooden trestles, wooden cubicles, and cheap chairs. Temporary flexes brought down electric light from a stained glass dome to illuminate card-indexes and pigeon-holes and piles of letters. Notices in French and Flemish were suspended from the ornate onyx pilasters. Old countrywomen and children in rough foreign clothes, smart officers in strange uniforms, privates in shabby blue, gentlemen in morning coats and spats, and untidy Englishwomen with eyes romantic, hard, or wistful, were mixed together in the Onyx Hall, where there was no enchantment and little order, save that good French seemed to be regularly spoken on one side of the trestles and regularly assassinated on the other. G.J., mystified, caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful expression.
"And you?" she inquired perfunctorily.
He demanded, with hesitation:
"Is this the Lechford Committee?"
[80]
"The what Committee?"
"The Lechford Committee headquarters." He thought she might be rather an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party.
She gave him a sardonic look and answered, not rudely, but with large tolerance:
"Can't you read?"
By means of gesture scarcely perceptible she directed his attention to an immense linen sign stretched across the back of the big room, and he saw that he was in the ant-heap of some Belgian Committee.
"So sorry to have troubled you!" he apologised. "I suppose you don't happen to know where the Lechford Committee sits?"
"Never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. Then she smiled and he smiled. "You know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but this is the biggest by a long way. They can't let their rooms, so it costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes."
He liked the chit.
Presently, with a page-boy, he was ascending in a lift through storey after storey of silent carpeted desert. Light alternated with darkness, winking like a succession of days and nights as seen by a god. The infant showed him into a private parlour furnished and decorated in almost precisely the same taste as Christine's sitting-room, where a number of men and women sat close together at a long deal table, whose pale, classic simplicity clashed with the rest of the apartment. A thin, dark, middle-aged man of austere visage bowed to him from the head of the[81]table. Somebody else indicated a chair, which, with a hideous, noisy scraping over the bare floor, he modestly insinuated between two occupied chairs. A third person offered a typewritten sheet containing the agenda of the meeting. A blonde girl was reading in earnest, timid tones the minutes of the previous meeting. The affair had just begun. As soon as the minutes had been passed the austere chairman turned and said evenly:
"I am sure I am expressing the feelings of the committee in welcoming among us Mr. Hoape, who has so kindly consented to join us and give us the benefit of his help and advice in our labours."
Sympathetic murmurs converged upon G.J. from the four sides of the table, and G.J. nervously murmured a few incomprehensible words, feeling both foolish and pleased. He had never sat on a committee; and as his war-conscience troubled him more and more daily, he was extremely anxious to start work which might placate it. Indeed, he had seized upon the request to join the committee as a swimmer in difficulties clasps the gunwale of a dinghy.
A man who kept his gaze steadily on the table cleared his throat and said:
"The matter is not in order, Mr. Chairman, but I am sure I am expressing the feelings of the committee in proposing a vote of condolence to yourself on the terrible loss which you have sustained in the death of your son at the Front."
"I beg to second that," said a lady quickly.
"Our chairman has given his only son—"
Tears came into her eyes; she seemed to appeal[82]for help. There were "Hear, hears," and more sympathetic murmurs.
The proposer, with his gaze still steadily fixed on the table, said:
"I beg to put the resolution to the meeting."
"Yes," said the chairman with calm self-control in the course of his acknowledgment. "And if I had ten sons I would willingly give them all—for the cause." And his firm, hard glance appeared to challenge any member of the committee to assert that this profession of parental and patriotic generosity of heart was not utterly sincere. However, nobody had the air of doubting that if the chairman had had ten sons, or as many sons as Solomon, he would have sacrificed them all with the most admirable and eager heroism.
The agenda was opened. G.J. had little but newspaper knowledge of the enterprises of the committee, and it would not have been proper to waste the time of so numerous a company in enlightening him. The common-sense custom evidently was that new members should "pick up the threads as they went along." G.J. honestly tried to do so. But he was preoccupied with the personalities of the committee. He soon saw that the whole body was effectively divided into two classes—the chairmen of the various sub-committees, and the rest. Few members were interested in any particular subject. Those who were not interested either stared at the walls or at the agenda paper, or laboriously drew intricate and meaningless designs on the agenda paper, or folded up the agenda paper into fantastic shapes until, when someone in authority brought out[83]the formula, "I think the view of the committee will be—" a resolution was put and the issue settled by the mechanical raising of hands on the fulcrum of the elbow. And at each raising of hands everybody felt that something positive had indeed been accomplished.
The new member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem as it was presented—the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, the relations with the French civil authorities and the French military authorities, the appointment of a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses—each problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that men and women were toiling therein, and that French soldiers in grave need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. And it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising hands....
G.J.'s attention wandered. He could not keep his mind off the thought that he should soon[84]be seeing Christine again. Sitting at the table with a mien of intelligent interest, he had a waking dream of Christine. He saw her just as she was—ingenuous, and ignorant if you like—except that she was pure. Her purity, though, had not cooled her temperament, and thus she combined in herself the characteristics of at least two different women, both of whom were necessary to his happiness. And she was his wife, and they lived in a roomy house in Hyde Park Gardens, and the war was over. And she adored him and he was passionately fond of her. And she was always having children; she enjoyed having children; she demanded children; she had a child every year and there was never any trouble. And he never admired her more poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born, when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the French Renaissance Virgin in marble that stood on a console in his drawing-room at the Albany.... Such was G.J.'s dream as he assisted in the control of the Lechford Hospitals. Emerging from it he looked along the table. Quite half the members were dreaming too, and he wondered what thoughts were moving secretly within them. But the chairman was not dreaming. He never loosed his grasp of the matter in hand. Nor did the earnest young blonde by the chairman's side who took down in stenography the decisions of the committee.
[85]
Then Lady Queenie Paulle entered rather hurriedly, filling the room with a distinguished scent. All the men rose in haste, and there was a frightful scraping of chair-legs on the floor. Lady Queenie cheerfully apologised for being late, and, begging no one to disturb himself, took a modest place between the chairman and the secretary and a little behind them.
Lady Queenie obviously had what is called "race". The renown of her family went back far, far beyond its special Victorian vogue, which had transformed an earldom into a marquisate and which, incidentally, was responsible for the new family Christian name that Queenie herself bore. She was young, tall, slim and pale, and dressed with the utmost smartness in black—her half-brother having gloriously lost his life in September. She nodded to the secretary, who blushed with pleasure, and she nodded to several members, including G.J. Being accustomed to publicity and to seeing herself nearly every week in eitherThe TatlerorThe Sketch, she was perfectly at ease in the room, and the fact that nearly the whole company turned to her as plants to the sun did not in the least disturb her.
[86]
The attention which she received was her due, for she had few rivals as a war-worker. She was connected with the Queen's Work for Women Fund, Queen Mary's Needlework Guild, the Three Arts Fund, the Women's Emergency Corps, and many minor organisations. She had joined a Women's Suffrage Society because such societies were being utilised by the Government. She had had ten lessons in First Aid in ten days, had donned the Red Cross, and gone to France with two motor-cars and a staff and a French maid in order to help in the great national work of nursing wounded heroes; and she might still have been in France had not an unsympathetic and audacious colonel of the R.A.M.C. insisted on her being shipped back to England. She had done practically everything that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight. It was from her mother that she had inherited the passion for public service. The Marchioness of Lechford had been the cause of more philanthropic work in others than any woman in the whole history of philanthropy. Lady Lechford had said, "Let there be Lechford Hospitals in France," and lo! there were Lechford Hospitals in France. When troublesome complications arose Lady Lechford had, with true self-effacement, surrendered the establishments to a thoroughly competent committee, and while retaining a seat on the committee for herself and another for Queenie, had curved tirelessly away to the inauguration of fresh and more exciting schemes.
[87]
"Mamma was very sorry she couldn't come this afternoon," said Lady Queenie, addressing the chairman.
The formula of those with authority in deciding now became:
"I don't know exactly what Lady Lechford's view is, but I venture to think—"
Then suddenly the demeanour of every member of the committee was quickened, everybody listened intently to everything that was said; a couple of members would speak together; pattern-designing and the manufacture of paper ships, chains, and flowers ceased; it was as though a tonic had been mysteriously administered to each individual in the enervating room. The cause of the change was a recommendation from the hospitals management sub-committee that it be an instruction to the new matron of the smaller hospital to forbid any nurse and any doctor to go out alone together in the evening. Scandal was insinuated; nothing really wrong, but a bad impression produced upon the civilians of the tiny town, who could not be expected to understand the holy innocence which underlies the superficial license of Anglo-Saxon manners. The personal characters and strange idiosyncrasies of every doctor and every nurse were discussed; broad principles of conduct were enunciated, together with the advantages and disadvantages of those opposite poles, discipline and freedom. The argument continually expanded, branching forth like the timber of a great oak-tree from the trunk, and the minds of the committee ran about the tree like monkeys. The interest was endless. A[88]quiet delegate who had just returned from a visit to the tiny town completely blasted one part of the argument by asserting that the hospital bore a blameless reputation among the citizens; but new arguments were instantly constructed by the adherents of the idea of discipline. The committee had plainly split into two even parties. G.J. began to resent the harshness of the disciplinarians.
"I think we should remember," he said in his modest voice, "I think we should remember that we are dealing with adult men and women."
The libertarians at once took him for their own. The disciplinarians gave him to understand with their eyes that it might have been better if he, as a new member attending his first meeting, had kept silence. The discussion was inflamed. One or two people glanced surreptitiously at their watches. The hour had long passed six thirty. G.J. grew anxious about his rendezvous with Christine. He had enjoined exactitude upon Christine. But the main body of the excited and happy committee had no thought of the flight of time. The amusements of the tiny town came up for review. As a fact, there was only one amusement, the cinema. The whole town went to the cinema. Cinemas were always darkened; human nature was human nature.... G.J. had an extraordinarily realistic vision of the hospital staff slaving through its long and heavy day and its everlasting week and preparing in sections to amuse itself on certain evenings, and thinking with pleasant anticipation of the ecstasies of the cinema, and pathetically unsuspicious that its fate was[89]being decided by a council of omnipotent deities in the heaven of a London hotel.
"Mamma has never mentioned the subject to me," said Lady Queenie in response to a question, looking at her rich muff.
"This is a question of principle," said somebody sharply, implying that at last individual consciences were involved and that the opinions of the Marchioness of Lechford had ceased to weigh.
"I'm afraid it's getting late," said the impassive chairman. "We must come to some decision."
In the voting Lady Queenie, after hesitation, raised her hand with the disciplinarians. By one vote the libertarians were defeated, and the dalliance of the hospital staff in leisure hours received a severe check.
"Shewould—of course!" breathed a sharp-nosed little woman in the chair next but one to G.J., gazing inimically at the lax mouth and cynical eyes of Lady Queenie, who for four years had been the subject of universal whispering, and some shouting, and one or two ferocious battles in London.
Chair-legs scraped. People rose here and there to go as they rise in a music hall after the Scottish comedian has retired, bowing, from his final encore. They protested urgent appointments elsewhere. The chairman remarked that other important decisions yet remained to be taken; but his voice had no insistence because he had already settled the decisions in his own mind. G.J. seized the occasion to depart.
"Mr. Hoape," the chairman detained him a moment. "The committee hope you will allow yourself to be nominated to the accounts sub-committee.[90]We understand that you are by way of being an expert. The sub-committee meets on Wednesday mornings at eleven—doesn't it, Sir Charles?"
"Half-past," said Sir Charles.
"Oh! Half-past."
G.J., somewhat surprised to learn of his expertise in accountancy, consented to the suggestion, which renewed his resolution, impaired somewhat by the experience of the meeting, to be of service in the world.
"You will receive the notice, of course," said the chairman.
Down below, just as G.J. was getting away with Christine's chrysanthemums in their tissue paper, Lady Queenie darted out of the lift opposite. It was she who, at Concepcion's instigation, had had him put in the committee.
"I say, Queen," he said with a casual air—on account of the flowers, "who's been telling 'em I know about accounts?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"Why?" she said maliciously. "Don't you keep an account of every penny you spend?" (It was true.)
Here was a fair example of her sardonic and unscrupulous humour—a humour not of words but of acts. G.J. simply tossed his head, aware of the futility of expostulation.
She went on in a different tone:
"You were the first to see Connie?"
"Yes," he said sadly.
"She has lain in my arms all afternoon," Lady[91]Queenie burst out, her voice liquid. "And now I'm going straight back to her." She looked at him with the strangest triumphant expression. Then her large, equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amusement full of mischievous implications. She ran off without another word. The glazed entrance doors revolved, and he saw her nip into an electric brougham, which, before he had time to button his overcoat, vanished like an apparition in the rainy mist.