WHATBlaise Olifant told Olivia about his prospective co-inhabitant of The Towers, and what Rowington, the publisher, and one or two others knew about him, amounted to the following:
One morning a motor-car, having the second-hand air of a hiring garage and unoccupied save for the chauffeur, drew up before the door of a great London publishing house. The chauffeur stepped from his seat, collected a brown-paper package from the interior, and entered.
“Can I see a member of the firm?”
The clerk in the enquiry office looked surprised. Chauffeurs offering manuscripts on behalf of their employers were plentiful as blackberries in September; but chauffeurs demanding an interview with the august heads of the house were rare as blackberries in March.
“I’m afraid you can’t do that,” he replied civilly. “If you leave it here, it will be all right. I’ll give you a receipt which you can take back.”
“I want to explain,” said the chauffeur.
Scores of people weekly expressed the same desire. It was the business of the clerk to suppress explanations.
“It’s a manuscript to be submitted? Well, you must tell the author——”
“I am the author,” said the chauffeur.
“Oh!” said the clerk, and his subconscious hand pushed the manuscript a millimetre forward on the polished mahogany counter.
“The circumstances, you see, are exceptional.”
There being something exceptional in the voice and manner of the chauffeur, the clerk regarded him for the first time as a human being.
“I quite see,” said he; “but the rules of the firm are strict. If you will leave the manuscript, it will be read. Oh, I give you my word of honour,” he smiled. “Everything that comes in is read. We have a staff who do nothing else. Is your name and address on it?” He began to untie the string.
“The name, but not the address.”
On the slip of paper which the clerk pushed across to him he wrote:
Alexis Triona,c/o John Briggs.3 Cherbury Mews,Surrey Gardens, W.
Alexis Triona,c/o John Briggs.3 Cherbury Mews,Surrey Gardens, W.
Alexis Triona,c/o John Briggs.3 Cherbury Mews,Surrey Gardens, W.
Alexis Triona,
c/o John Briggs.
3 Cherbury Mews,
Surrey Gardens, W.
The clerk scribbled an acknowledgment, the chauffeur thrust it into his pocket, and, driving away, was lost in the traffic of London.
A fortnight afterwards, Alexis Triona, who, together with John Briggs, as one single and indissoluble chauffeur, inhabited a little room over the garage in Cherbury Mews, received a letter to the effect that the publishing house, being interested in the MS. “Through Blood and Snow,” which he had kindly submitted, would be glad if he would call, with a view to publication. The result was a second visit on the part of the chauffeur to the great firm. The clerk welcomed him with a bland smile, and showed him into a comfortably furnished room whose thick Turkey carpet signified the noiseless mystery of many discreet decades, and where a benevolent middle-aged man in gold spectacles stood with his back to the chimney-piece. He advanced with outstretched hand to meet the author.
“Mr. Triona? I’m glad to meet you. Won’t you sit down?”
He motioned to a chair by the tidy writing table, where he sat and pulled forward the manuscript, which had been placed there in readiness for the interview. He said pleasantly:
“Well. Let us get to business at once. We should like to publish your book.”
The slight quivering of sensitive nostrils alone betrayed the author’s emotion.
“I’m glad,” he replied. “I think it’s worth publishing.”
Mr. Rowington tapped the MS. in front of him with his forefinger. “Are these your own personal experiences?”
“They are,” said the chauffeur.
“Excuse my questioning you,” said the publisher. “Not that it would greatly matter. But one likes to know. We should be inclined to publish it, either as a work of fiction or a work of fact; but the handling of it—the method of publicity—would be different. Of course, you see,” he went on benevolently, “a thing may be absolutely true in essence, like lots of the brilliant little war stories that have been written the past few years, but not true in the actual historical sense. Now, your book would have more value if we could say that it is true in this actual historical sense, if we could say that it’s an authentic record of personal experiences.”
“You can say that,” answered Triona quietly.
The publisher leaned back in his chair.
“How a man could have gone through what you have and remained sane passes understanding.”
For the first time the young man’s set features relaxed into a smile.
“I shouldn’t like to swear that I am sane,” said he.
“I’ve heard ex-prisoners say,” Mr. Rowington remarked, “that six months’ solitary confinement under such conditions”—he patted the manuscript—“is as much as the human reason can stand.”
“As soon as hunting and killing vermin ceases to be a passionate interest in life,” said Triona.
They conversed for a while. Stimulated by the publisher’s question, Triona supplemented details in the book, described his final adventure, his landing penniless in London, his search for work. At last, said he, he had found a situation as chauffeur in the garage of a motor-hiring company. The publisher glanced at the slip pinned to the cover of the manuscript.
“And John Briggs?”
“A pseudonym. Briggs was my mother’s name. I am English on both sides, though my great-grandfather’s people were Maltese. My father, however, was a naturalized Russian. I’ve mentioned it in the book.”
“Quite so,” said the publisher. “I only wanted to get things clear. And now as to terms. Have you any suggestion?”
Afterwards, Alexis Triona confessed to a wild impulse to ask for a hundred pounds—outright sale—and to a sudden lack of audacity which kept him silent. The terms which the publisher proposed, when the royalty system and the probabilities of such a book’s profits were explained to him, made him gasp with wonder. And when, in consideration, said the publisher, of his present impecunious position, he was offered an advance in respect of royalties exceeding the hundred pounds of his crazy promptings, his heart thumped until it became an all but intolerable pain.
“Do you think,” he asked, amazed that his work should have such market value, “that I could earn my living by writing?”
“Undoubtedly.” The publisher beamed on the new author. “You have the matter, you have the gift, the style, the humour, the touch. I’m sure I could place things for you. Indeed, it would be to our common advantage, pending publication. Only, of course, you mustn’t use any of the matter in the book. You quite understand?”
Alexis Triona understood. He went away dancing on air. Write? His brain seethed with ideas. That the written expression of them should open the gates of Fortune was a new conception. He had put together the glowing, vivid book impelled by strange, unknown forces. It was, as he had confidently declared, worth publishing. But the possible reward was beyond his dreams. And he could see more visions. . . .
So he went back to his garage and drove idle people to dinners and theatres, and in his scanty leisure wrote strange romances of love and war in Circassia and Tartary, and, through the agency of the powerful publishing house, sold them to solid periodicals, until the public mind became gradually familiarized with his name. It was only when the book was published, and, justifying the confidence of the great firm, blazed into popularity, that Triona discarded his livery and all that appertained to the mythical John Briggs and, arraying himself in the garb of ordinary citizenship, entered—to use, with a difference, the famous trope of a departed wit—a lion into the den of London’s Daniels. For, in their hundreds, they had come to judgment. But knowing very little of the Imperial Russian Secret Service in Turkestan, or the ways of the inhabitants of the Ural Mountains, or, at that time, of Bolshevik horrors in the remote confines of Asia, they tore each other to pieces, while the lion stepped, with serene modesty, in the midst of them.
It was at Oxford, whither the sudden wave of fame had drifted him, that he met Blaise Olifant, who was living in the house of his sister, the wife of a brilliant, undomesticated and somewhat dissolute professor of political economy. The Head of a College, interested in Russia, had asked him down to dine and sleep. There was a portentous dinner-party whose conglomerate brain paralyzed the salmon and refroze the imported lamb. They overwhelmed the guest of honour with their learning. They all were bent on probing beneath the surface of his thrilling personal adventures, which he narrated from time to time with attractive modesty. The episode of his reprieve when standing naked beside the steaming chaldron in which he was to be boiled alive caused a shuddering silence. Perhaps it was too realistic for a conventional dinner-party, but he had discounted its ghastliness by a smiling nonchalance, telling it as though it had been an amusing misadventure of travel. Very shortly afterwards Mrs. Head of College broke into a disquisition on the continuity of Russian literature from Sumakarov to Chekov. Triona, a profound student of the subject, at last lost interest in the academic socialist and threw up his hands.
“My dear lady,” said he, “there is a theory in the United States accounting for the continued sale ofUncle Tom’s Cabin. They say immigrants buy it to familiarize themselves with the negro question. Russian literature has just as much to do with the Russia of to-day. It’s as purely archæological as the literature of Ancient Assyria.”
Blaise Olifant, sitting opposite, sympathized with the man of actualities set down in this polite academy. Once he himself had regarded it as the ganglion of the Thought of the Universe; but having recently seen something of the said Universe he had modified his view. Why should these folk not be content with a plain human story of almost fantastic adventure, instead of worrying the unhappy Soldier of Fortune with sociological and metaphysical theories with which he had little time to concern himself? Why embroil him in a discussion on the League of Nations’ duty to Lithuania when he was anxious to give them interesting pictures of Kurdish family life? He looked round the table somewhat amusedly at the elderly intellectuals of both sexes, and, forgetting for a moment the intellectual years of quiet biological research to which he was about to devote his life, drew an unflattering contrast between the theorists and their alien guest.
He liked the man. He liked the boyish, clean-shaven face, the broad forehead marked by very thin horizontal lines, the thin brown hair, parted carelessly at the side, and left to do what it liked; the dark grey eyes that sometimes seemed so calm beneath the heavy lids, and yet were capable of sudden illumination; the pleasant, humorous mouth, and the grotesque dimple of a hole in the middle of a long chin. He pitied the man. He pitied him for the hollows in his temples, for the swift flash of furtive glances, for the great sinews that stood out in his lean nervous hands, for the general suggestion of shrunken muscularity in his figure. A stone, or two, thought he, below his normal weight. He liked his voice, its soft foreign intonation; he liked his modesty, his careless air of the slim young man of no account; he liked the courteous patience of his manner. He understood his little nervous trick of plucking at his lips.
In the drawing-room after dinner Mrs. Head of College said to him:
“A most interesting man—but I do wish he would look you in the face when he speaks to you.”
Blaise Olifant suppressed a sigh. These good people were hopeless. They knew nothing. They did not even recognize the unmistakable brand of the prisoner who has suffered agony of body and degradation of soul. No man who has been a tortured slave regains, for years, command of his eyes. Hundreds of such men had Olifant seen, and the sight of them still made his heart ache. He explained politely. And with a polite air of unconvinced assent, the lady received his explanation.
He asked Triona to lunch the next day, and under the warmth of his kindly sympathy Triona expanded. He spoke of his boyhood in Moscow, where his father, a naturalized Russian, carried on business as a stockbroker; of his travels in England and France with his English mother; of his English tutor; of his promising start in life in a great Russian motor firm—an experience that guaranteed his livelihood during his late refuge months in London; of his military service; of his early war days as a Russian officer; of the twists of circumstance that sent him into the Imperial Secret Service; of incredible wanderings to the frontiers of Thibet; of the Revolution; of the murder of father and mother and the disappearance of his fortune like a wisp of cloud evaporated by the sun; of many strange and woeful things related in his book; of his escape through Russia; of his creeping as a stowaway into a Swedish timber boat; of his torpedoing by a German submarine and his rescue by a British destroyer; of his landing naked save for shirt and trousers, sans money, sans papers, sans everything of value save his English speech; of the Russian Society in London’s benevolent aid; of the burning desire, an irresistible flame, to set down on paper all that he had gone through; of the intense nights spent over the book in his tiny ramshackle room over the garage; and, lastly, of the astounding luck that had been dealt him by the capricious Wheel of Fortune.
In the presence of a sympathetic audience he threw aside the previous evening’s cloak of modest impersonality. He talked with a vivid picturesqueness that held Olifant spellbound. The furtive look in his eyes disappeared. They gleamed like compelling stars. His face lost its ruggedness, transfigured by the born narrator’s inspiration. Olifant’s sister, Mrs. Woolcombe, a gentle and unassuming woman on whom the learning of Oxford had weighed as heavily as the abominable conduct of her husband, listened with the rapt attention of a modern Desdemona. She gazed at him open eyed, half stupefied as she had gazed lately at a great cinematograph film which had held all London breathless.
When he had gone she turned to her brother, still under the spell.
“The boy’s a magician.”
Blaise Olifant smiled. “The boy’s a man,” said he.
Chance threw them together a while later in London. There they met frequently, became friends. The quiet sincerity of the soldier-scholar that was Blaise Olifant seemed to strike some chord of soothing in the heart of the young magician. Fundamentally ignorant of every geological fact, Triona brought to Olifant’s banquet of fossil solvents of the mystery of existence an insatiable appetite for knowledge. He listened to reluctant lectures on elementary phenomena such as ammonites, with the same rapt attention as Olifant listened to his tales of the old Empire of Prester John. The Freemasonry of war, with its common experiences of peril and mutilation—once Triona slipped off pump and sock and showed a foot from which three toes had been shot away and an ankle seared with the fester of fetters—formed a primary bond of brotherhood. By the Freemasonry of intellect they found themselves members of a Higher Chapter.
“London is wonderful,” said Triona one day. “London’s appreciation of the poor thing I have done is enough to turn anyone’s head. But while my head is being turned, in the most delightful way in the world, I can’t find time to do any work. And I must write in order to live. Do you know a little quiet spot where I could stay for the winter and write this precious novel of mine?”
Blaise Olifant reflected for a moment.
“I myself am looking for a sort of hermitage. In fact, I’ve heard of one in Shropshire which I’m going to look at next week. I want a biggish house,” he explained, with a smile—“I’ve had enough of dug-outs and billets in a farmhouse with a hole through the roof to last me my natural life. So there would be room for a guest. If you would care to come and stay with me, wherever I pitch my comfortable tent, and carry on your job while I carry on mine, you would be more than welcome.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Triona, impulsively thrusting out both hands to be shaken, “this is unheard-of generosity. It means my soul’s salvation. Only the horrible dread of loneliness—you know the old solitary prisoner’s dread—has kept me from running down to some little out-of-the-way place—say in Cornwall. I’ve shrunk from it. But London is different. In my chauffeur’s days it was different. I had always associates, fares, the multitudinous sights and sounds of the vast city. But solitude in a village! Frankly, I funked it. I’ve lived so much alone that now I must talk. If I didn’t talk I should go mad. Or rather I must feel that I can talk if I want to. I keep hold of myself, however. If I bored you with my loquacity you wouldn’t have made me your delightful proposal.”
“Well, you’ll come, if I can get the right kind of house?”
“With all the gratitude in life,” cried Triona, his eyes sparkling. “But not as your guest. Some daily, weekly, monthly arrangement, so that we shall both be free—you to kick me out—I to go——”
“Just as you like,” laughed Olifant. “I only should be pleased to have your company.”
“And God knows,” cried Triona, “what yours would be to me.”
JOHN FREKEwas one of the most highly respected men in Medlow. A great leader in municipal affairs, he had twice been Mayor of the town and was Chairman of the local hospital, President of clubs and associations innumerable, and held Provincial Masonic rank. But as John Freke persisted in walking about the draper’s shop in Old Street, established by his grandfather, his family consorted, not with the gentry of the neighbourhood, but with the “homely folk” such as the Trivetts and the Gales. His daughter, Lydia, and Olivia had been friends in the far-off days, although Lydia was five years older. She was tall and creamy and massive and capable, and had a rich contralto voice; and Olivia, very young and eager, had, for a brief period, sat adoring at her feet. Then Lydia had married a young officer of Territorials who had been billeted on her father, and Olivia had seen her no more. As a young war-wife she pursued all kinds of interesting avocations remote from Medlow, and, as a young war-widow, had set up a hat shop in Maddox Street. Rumour had it that she prospered. The best of relations apparently existed between herself and old John Freke, who put up the capital for her venture, and desultory correspondence had kept her in touch with Olivia. The fine frenzy of girlish worship had been cured long ago by Lydia’s cruel lack of confidence during her courtship. The announcement of the engagement had been a shock; the engagement itself a revelation of selfish preoccupation. A plain young sister had been sole bridesmaid at the wedding, and the only sign of Lydia’s life during the honeymoon had been a picture postcard on the correspondence space of which was scrawled “This is a heavenly place. Lydia Dawlish.” Then had followed the years of sorrow and stress, during which Olivia’s hurt at the other’s gracelessness had passed, like a childish thing, away.
Lydia’s succeeding letters, mainly of condolence, had, however, kept unbroken the fragile thread of friendship. The last, especially, written after Mrs. Gale’s death, gave evidence of sincere feeling, and emboldened Olivia, who knew no other mortal soul in London—the real London, which did not embrace the Clapham aunt and uncle—to seek her practical advice. In the voluminous response she recognized the old capable Lydia. Letter followed letter until, with Mr. Trivett’s professional assistance, she found herself the lucky tenant of a little suite in a set of service flats in Victoria Street.
She entered into possession a fortnight after her interview with Blaise Olifant, who was to take up residence at “The Towers” the following day. Mr. Trivett and his wife, Mr. Fenmarch and Mr. Freke, and the elder Miss Freke, who kept house for her father, saw her off at the station, covering her with their protective wings to the last moment. Each elderly gentleman drew her aside, and, with wagging of benevolent head, offered help in time of trouble. They all seemed to think she was making for disaster.
But their solicitude touched her deeply. The lump that had arisen in her throat when she had passed out across the threshold of her old home swelled uncomfortably, and, when the train moved off and she responded to waving hands and hats on the platform, tears stood in her eyes. Presently she recovered.
“Why should things so dear be so dismal?”
Myra, exhibiting no symptoms of exhilaration, did not reply. As they approached London, Olivia’s spirits rose. At last the dream of the past weeks was about to be realized. When she stepped out of the train at Paddington, it was with the throb of the conqueror setting foot, for the first time on coveted territory. She devoured with her eyes, through the taxi windows, the shops and sights and the movement of the great thoroughfares through which they passed on their way to Victoria Mansions, where her fifth-floor eyrie was situated. Once there, Myra, accustomed to the spacious family house, sniffed at the exiguous accommodation and sarcastically remarked that it would have been better if air were laid on like gas. But Olivia paid little heed to her immediate surroundings. The cramped flat was but the campaigner’s tent. Her sphere of action lay limitless beyond the conventional walls. The walls, however, bounded the sphere of Myra, who had no conception of glorious adventure. The rapidly ascending lift had caused qualms in an unaccustomed stomach, and she felt uneasy at living at such a height above the ground. Why Olivia could not have carried on for indefinite years in the comfort and security of “The Towers” she was at a loss to imagine. Why give up the ease of a big house for poky lodgings halfway up to the sky. A sitting-room, a bedroom, a slip with a bed in it for herself, a bathroom—Myra thanked goodness both of them were slim—and that was the London of Olivia’s promise. She sighed. At last put down Olivia’s aberration to the war. The war, in those days, explained everything.
Meanwhile Olivia had thrown up the sash of the sitting-room window and was gazing down at the ceaseless traffic in the street far below—gazing down on the roofs of the taxis and automobiles which sped like swift flat beetles, on the dwarfed yet monstrous insects that were the motor-buses, on the foreshortened dots of the hurrying ant-like swarms of pedestrians. It was gathering dusk, and already a few lights gleamed from the masses of buildings across the way. Soon the street lamps sprang into successive points of illumination. She stood fascinated, watching the rapid change from December day into December night, until at last the distant road seemed but a fantastic medley of ever-dying, ever-recurring sounds and flashes of white and red. Yet it was not fantastic chaos—her heart leapt at the thought—it was pregnant with significance. All that rumble and hooting and darting light proclaimed human purpose and endeavour, mysterious, breath-catching in its unknown and vast corporate intensity. Shivers of ecstasy ran through her. At last she herself was a unit in this eager life of London. She would have her place in the absorbing yet perplexing drama into the midst of which she had stepped with no key to its meaning. But she would pick up the threads, learn what had gone before—of that she felt certain—and then—she laughed—she would play her part with the best of them. To-morrow she would be scurrying about among them, with her definite human aims. Why not to-night? Delirious thought! She was free. She could walk out into the throbbing thoroughfares and who could say her nay? She put her hand to her bosom and felt the crackle of ten five-pound notes. To emotional girlhood the feel of money, money not to hoard and make-do for weeks and weeks with the spectre of want ever in attendance, but money to fling recklessly about, has its barbaric thrill. Suppose she let slip from her fingers one of the notes and it swayed and fluttered down, down, down, until at last it reached the pavement, and suppose a poor starving girl picked it up and carried it home to her invalid mother. . . . But, on the other hand, suppose—and her profound and cynical knowledge of human chances assured her that it would be a thousand to one probability—supposing it fell on the silk hat of a corpulent profiteer! No. She was not going to shower promiscuous five-pound notes over London. But still the crackling wad meant power. She was free to go forth there and then and purchase all the joys, for herself and others, hovering over there in that luminous haze over the Westminster towers of the magical city of dreams.
She withdrew from the window and stood in the dark room, a light in her eyes, and clenched her hands. Yes. She would go out, now, and walk and walk, and fill her soul with the wonder of it all.
And then practical memory administered a prosaic jog to her aspiring spirit. Lydia Dawlish was coming to dine with her in the common dining-room or restaurant downstairs. Shivering with cold, she shut the window, turned on the light and sat by the fire, and ordered tea in the most matter-of-fact way in the world.
Lydia Dawlish appeared a couple of hours afterwards—fair, plump, and prosperous, attired in one of her own dashing creations of hats set at a rakish angle on her blond hair, and a vast coat of dark fur. Olivia, in her simple black semi-evening frock run up by an agitated Medlow dressmaker, felt a poor little dot of a thing before this regal personage. And when the guest threw off the coat, the flowered silk lining of which was a dazing joy to starved feminine eyes, and revealed the slate-blue dinner gown from which creamy neck and shapely arms emerged insolent, Olivia could do nothing but stare open-mouthed, until power came to gasp her wonder and admiration.
“It’s only an old thing,” said Lydia. “I had to put on a compromise between downstairs and Percy’s.”
“Percy’s?”
“Yes—don’t you know? The night club. I’m going on afterwards.”
Olivia’s face fell. “I thought you were going to spend the evening with me.”
“Of course I am, silly child. Night clubs don’t begin till eleven. A man, Sydney Rooke, is calling for me. Well. How are you? And what are your plans now you’ve got here?”
She radiated health and vigour. Also proclaimed sex defiant, vaguely disquieting to the country bred girl. Olivia felt suddenly shy.
“It will take me a few days to turn round.”
“Also to find clothes to turn round in,” said Lydia, with a good-humoured yet comprehensive glance at the funny little black frock. “I hope you haven’t been laying in a stock of things like that.”
Olivia smiled. This was but a makeshift. She had been saving up for London. Perhaps Lydia would advise her. She had heard of a good place—what did they call it?—an enormous shop in Oxford Street. Lydia threw up her white arms.
“My dear child, you’re not going to be a fashionable beauty at subscription dances and whist-drives at Upper Tooting! You’re going to live in London. Good God! You can’t get clothes in Oxford Street.”
“Where shall I get them, then?” asked Olivia.
From the illustrated papers she had become aware of the existence of Pacotille and Luquin and other mongers of celestial fripperies; but she had also heard of the Stock Exchange and the Court of St. James’s and the Stepney Board of Guardians; and they all seemed equally remote from her sphere of being.
“I’ll take you about with me to-morrow,” Lydia declared grandly, “and put you in the way of things. I dare say I can find you a hat or two chez Lydia—that’s me—at cost price.” She laughed and put a patronizing arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “We’ll make a woman of you yet.”
The lift carried them down to the restaurant floor. They dined, not too badly, at a side table from which they could view the small crowded room. Olivia felt disappointed. Only a few people were in evening dress. It was rather a dowdy assembly, very much like that in the boarding-house at Llandudno, her father’s summer holiday resort for years before the war. Her inexperience had expected the glitter and joy of London. Hospitably she offered wine, champagne, as her father, a lover of celebrations, would have done; but Lydia drank nothing with her meals—the only way not to get fat, which she dreaded. Olivia drank water. The feast seemed tame, and the imported mutton tough. She reproached herself for inadequate entertainment of her resplendent friend.
They talked; chiefly Lydia, after she had received Olivia’s report on her family’s welfare and contemporary Medlow affairs; and Olivia listened contentedly, absorbing every minute strange esoteric knowledge of the great London world of which the pulsating centre appeared to be Lydia, Ltd., in Maddox Street. There Duchesses bought hats which their Dukes did not pay for. There Cabinet Ministers’ wives, in the hope of getting on the right financial side of Lydia, whispered confidential Cabinet secrets, while Ministers wondered how the deuce things got into the papers. There romantic engagements were brought from inception to maturity. There also, had she chosen to keep a record, she could have accumulated enough evidence to bring about the divorces of half the aristocracy of England. She rattled off the names like a machine-gun. She impressed Olivia with the fact that Lydia, Ltd., was not a mere hat shop, but a social institution of which Lydia Dawlish was the creating and inspiring personality. Lydia, it appeared, weekended at great houses. “You see, my dear, my husband was the son of an Honourable and the grandson of an Earl. He hadn’t much money, poor darling, but still he had the connection, most useful to me nowadays. The family buy their hats from me, and spread the glad tidings.” She commanded a legion of men who had vowed that she should live, free of charge, on the fat of the land, and should travel whithersoever she desired in swift and luxurious motor-cars.
“Of course, my dear,” she said, “it’s rather a strain. Men will cart about a stylish, good-looking woman for a certain time, just out of vanity. But if she’s a dull damn fool, they’re either bored to tears and chuck her, or they’ll want to—well—well—— Anyhow, you’ve got to keep your wits about you and amuse them. You’ve got to pay for everything in this life—or work for the means of paying—which comes to the same thing. And I work. I don’t say it isn’t pleasant work—but it’s hard work. You go out with a man to dinner, theatre and a night club, and dismiss him at your front door at two o’clock in the morning with the perfectly contented feeling that he has had a perfectly good time and would be an ass to spoil things by hinting at anything different—and you’ve jolly well earned your comfortable, innocent night’s rest.”
This explosion of the whole philosophy of modern conscientious woman came at the end of dinner. Olivia toyed absently with her coffee, watching successive spoonfuls of tepid light-amber coloured liquid fall into her cup.
“But—all these men—” she said in a low voice—the position was so baffling and so disconcerting. “You are a beautiful and clever woman. Don’t they sometimes want to—to make love to you?”
“They all do. What do you think? I, an unattached widow and, as you say, not unattractive. But because I’m clever, I head them off. That’s the whole point of what I’ve been telling you.”
“But, suppose,” replied Olivia, still intent on the yellowish water, “suppose you fell in love with one of these men. Women do fall in love, I believe.”
“Why then, I’d marry him the next day,” cried Lydia, with a laugh. “But,” she added, “that’s not the type of man a sensible woman falls in love with.”
Olivia’s eyes sought the tablecloth. She was conscious of disturbance and, at the same time, virginal resentment.
“As far as my limited experience goes—a woman isn’t always sensible.”
“She has to learn sense. That’s the great advantage of modern life. It gives her every opportunity of acquiring it from the moment she goes out into the world.”
“And what kind of man does the sensible woman fall in love with?”
“Somebody comfortable,” replied Lydia. “My ideal would be a young, rather lazy and very broad-minded bishop.”
Olivia shook her head. The only time she had seen a bishop was at her confirmation. The encounter did not encourage dreams of romance in episcopal circles.
“But these men who take you out,” Olivia persisted thoughtfully “and do all these wonderful things for you—it must cost them a dreadful lot of money—what kind of people are they?”
“All sorts. Some are of the very best—the backbone of the nation. They go off and marry nice girls who don’t frequent night clubs and settle down for the rest of their lives.”
They drank their coffee and went upstairs, where questions of more immediate practical interest occupied their minds. Olivia’s wardrobe was passed in review, while Myra stood impassive like a sergeant at kit inspection.
“My poor child,” said Lydia, “you’ve not a single article, inside or outside, that is fit to wear. I’ll send you a second-hand clothes man who’ll buy up the whole lot as it stands and give you a good price for it. I don’t know yet quite what you’re thinking of doing—but at any rate you can’t do it in these things.”
Olivia looked wistfully at the home-made garments which Lydia cast with scorn across the bed. They, at least, had seemed quite dainty and appropriate.
“Well,” she said, with a sigh, “you know best, Lydia.”
These all-important matters held their attention till a quarter past eleven, when Mr. Sydney Rooke was announced. He was an elderly young man in evening dress, with crisp black hair parted in the middle and thinning at the temples. A little military moustache gave him an air of youth which was belied by deep lines in his sallow face. His dark eyes were rather tired and his mouth hard. But his manners were perfect. He gave them both to understand that though Lydia was, naturally, the lady of his evening’s devotion yet his heart was filled with a sense of Olivia’s graciousness. Half a dozen words and a bow did it. In a polite phrase, a bow and a gesture he indicated that if Miss Gale would join them, his cup of happiness would overflow. Olivia pleaded fatigue. Then another evening? With Mrs. Dawlish. A pleasant little party, in fact. He would be enchanted.
“We’ll fix it up for about a fortnight hence,” said Lydia significantly. “To-morrow, then, dear, at eleven.”
When they had gone Olivia, who had accompanied them to the flat door, threw herself on the sofa and, putting her hands behind her head stared over the edge of her own world into a new one, strange and bewildering.
Myra entered.
“Are you ever going to bed?”
“I suppose I must,” said Olivia.
“Are dressed-up men like that often coming here?”
“God knows,” said Olivia, “who are coming here. I don’t.”
THEOdyssey or the Argonautic, or whatever you like to call the epic of the first wild adventure of a young woman into the Infinite of Clothes, has yet to be written. It would need not only a poet, but a master of psychology, to record the myriad vibrations of the soul as it reacts to temptations, yieldings, tremulous thrills of the flesh, exquisite apprehensions, fluttering joys, and each last voluptuous plenitude of content. It is an adventure which absorbs every faculty of the will; which ignores hunger and thirst, weariness of limb and ache of head; which makes the day a dream of reality and the night the reality of a dream. Hardened women of the world with frock-worn minds are caught at times by the lure of the adventure, even when it is a question of a dress or two and a poor half a dozen hats. But how manifold more potent the spell in the case of one who starts with her young body in Nymph-like innocence and is called upon to clothe it again and again in infinite variety, from toe to head, from innermost secret daintiness to outward splendour of bravery!
Such a record would explain Olivia, not only to the world, but to herself during that first fortnight in London. Her hours could be reckoned by gasps of wonder. She lost count of time, of money, of human values. Things that had never before entered into her philosophy, such as the subtle shade of silk stockings which would make or mar a costume, loomed paramount in importance. The after-use scarcely occurred to her. Sufficient for the day was the chiffon thereof; also the gradual transformation of herself from the prim slip of a girl with just the pretension (in her own mind) to good looks, into a radiant and somewhat distinguished dark-haired little personage.
Her shrinkings, her arguments with Lydia Dawlish, her defeats, went all into the melting-pot of her delight. “No bath salts, my dear?” cried Lydia. “Whoever heard of a woman not using bath salts?” So bath salts were ordered. And—horrified: “My dear, you don’t mean to say you wash your face in soap and water. What will become of your skin?” So Olivia was put under the orders of a West End specialist, who stocked her dressing-table with delectable creams and oils. It was all so new, so unheard of, so wonderful to the girl, an experience worth the living through, even though all thousands at deposit at the bank should vanish at the end of it. Merely to sit in a sensuously furnished room and have beautiful women parade before her, clad in dreams of loveliness—any one of which was hers for a scribble on a bit of pink paper—evoked within her strange and almost spiritual emotions. Medlow was countless leagues away; this transcended the London even of her most foolish visions.
Afterwards Olivia, when, sense of values being restored she looked back on this phantasmagoria of dressmakers, milliners, lingerie makers and furriers, said to Lydia Dawlish:
“It’s funny, but the fact that there might be a man or so in the world never entered my head.”
And the wise Lydia answered: “You were too busy turning yourself into a woman.”
Twice or thrice during this chrysalis period she stole out of nights with Myra to the dress circle of a theatre, where, besides ingenuous joy in the drama, she found unconfessed consolation in the company of homely folk like herself—girls in clean blouses or simple little frocks like her own, and young men either in well-worn khaki or morning dress. On these occasions she wondered very much what she was about to do in the other galley—that of the expensively furred and jewelled haughtinesses and impudences whom she shouldered in the vestibule crush and whom she saw drive away in luxurious limousines. These flashing personalities frightened her with their implied suggestions of worlds beyond her ken. One woman made especial impression on her—a woman tall, serene, with a clear-cut face, vaguely familiar, and a beautiful voice; she overheard a commonplace phrase or two addressed to the escorting man. She brushed Olivia’s arm and turned with a smile and a word of gracious apology and passed on. Olivia caught a whisper behind her. “That’s the Marchioness of Aintree. Isn’t she lovely?” But she did not need to be told that she had been in contact with a great lady. And she went home doubting exceedingly whether, for all her flourish of social trumpets, Lydia Dawlish’s galley was that of Lady Aintree.
Criticism of Lydia, however, she put behind her as ingratitude, for Lydia made up royally for past negligence. Time and energy that ought to have been devoted to Lydia, Ltd., was diverted to the creation of Olivia.
“I don’t know why you’re so good to me,” she would say.
And the other, with a little mocking smile round her lips: “It’s worth it. I’m giving myself a new experience.”
The first occasion on which she went out into the great world was that of Sydney Rooke’s party. She knew that her low-cut, sleeveless, short-skirted gown of old gold tissue had material existence, but she felt herself half-ashamedly, half-deliciously clad in nothing but a bodily sensation. A faint blush lingered in her cheeks all the evening. Lydia, calling for her in Rooke’s car, which had been placed at her disposal, held her at arm’s length in sincere and noble admiration, moved by the artist’s joy in beholding the finished product of his toil, and embraced her fondly. Then she surveyed her again, from the little gold brocade slippers to the diamond butterfly (one of her mother’s bits of jewellery) in her dark wavy hair.
“You’re the daintiest elf in London,” she cried.
To the dinner at the Savoy Sydney Rooke had invited a white-moustached soldier, Major-General Wigram, whose blue undress uniform, to the bedazzlement of Olivia, gleamed with four long rows of multi-coloured ribbon; a vivacious middle-aged woman, Mrs. Fane Sylvester, who wrote novels, plays, books of travel, and fashion articles in a weekly periodical—Olivia learned all this in their first five-minute converse in the lounge; Sir Paul and Lady Barraclough, he a young baronet whose civilian evening dress could not proclaim hard-won distinctions, she a pretty, fair, fragile creature, both of them obviously reacting joyously to relaxation of tension; and, last, the Vicomte de Mauregard, of the French Embassy, young, good looking, who spoke polished English with a faultless accent. It was, socially, as correct a little party as the brooding, innocent spirit of Mrs. Gale could have desired for her about-to-be prodigal daughter. Olivia sat between her host and Mauregard. On her host’s right was Lady Barraclough; then the General, then Lydia, then Sir Paul, facing Rooke at the round table, then Mrs. Fane Sylvester, who was Mauregard’s left-hand neighbour. They were by the terrace windows, far from what Olivia, with her fresh mind playing on social phenomena, held then and ever afterwards, most rightly, to be the maddening and human intercourse-destroying band.
Not that her first entrance down the imposing broad staircase, into the lounge filled with mirifically vestured fellow-creatures, to the accompaniment of a clashing rag-time imbecility, did not set all her young nerves vibrating to the point of delicious agony. It was like a mad fanfare heralding her advent in a new world. But soon she found that the blare of the idiot music deadened all other senses. Before her eyes swayed black-and-white things whom at the back of her mind she recognized as men, and various forms all stark flesh, flashing jewels and a maze of colours, whom she knew to be women. The gathering group of her own party seemed but figures of a dream. Her unaccustomed ears could not catch a word of the conventional gambits of conversation opened, on introduction, by her fellow guests. It was only when they passed between the tables of the great restaurant and the horrible noise of the negroid, syncopated parody of tune grew fainter and fainter, and they reached the peace of the terrace side, that the maddening clatter faded from her ears and consciousness of her surroundings returned.
Then she surrendered herself to huge enjoyment. Both her neighbours had been all over the world and seen all sorts and conditions of men. They were vividly aware of current events. Pride would not allow her to betray the fact that often they spoke of matters far beyond her experience of men and things. Under their stimulus she began to regain the self that, for the past fortnight, the cardboard boxes of London had snowed under.
“It’s no use asking me,” she said to Mauregard, “whether I’ve been to Monte Carlo or Madagascar or Madame Tussaud’s, for I haven’t. I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve somehow existed at the back of Nowhere, and to-night I’ve come to life.”
“But where did you come from? The sea foam? Venus Anadyomene?”
“No, I’m of the other kind. I come from far inland. I believe they call it Shropshire. That oughtn’t to convey anything to you.”
“Indeed it does!” cried Mauregard. “Was I not at school at Shrewsbury?”
“No?”
“But yes. Three years. So I’m Shropshire, too.”
“That’s delightful,” she remarked; “but it does away with my little mystery of Nowhere.”
“No, no,” he protested, with a laugh. He was a fair, bright-eyed boy with a little curled-up moustache which gave him the air of a cherub playfully disguised. “It is the county of mystery. Doesn’t your poet say: