"DO YOU REMEMBER----?"
[_To LESLIE HARTLEY_]
There are so many delightful things about being a bride besides actual
happiness, little peaks of pleasure that gradually sink into the level
of existence, unimportant, all-important things that never come again.
To begin with, there is your wedding ring which keeps glistening up at
you, unexpectedly making such an absurd difference, not only to the look
of your hand but to everything else, as well. And there are your trunks,
shiny and untravelled, with glaring new initials almost shouting at you,
so very unlike other people's battered luggage with half obliterated
labels sprawling over it.
And trousseau clothes are quite unlike other clothes--not prettier,
often uglier--but different. Your shoes and stockings match, not yet
having begun that uneven race which, starting from the same mole, ends
with a fawn-colored shoe and a grey blue stocking. Your hats go with
your dresses and your sunshades with both. You have an appropriate
garment for all occasions, instead of always being--as you once were
and soon will become again--short of something. Altogether, there is no
other word for it--you are equipped.
And then you feel exhilarated and responsible--your jewels are still new
and so is the strange, beautifully embroidered monogram on your
handkerchiefs and underclothes. Also, for the first time in your life,
you have a jet evening dress with a train and your maid calls you
"Madam."
Lucy was extremely pleased about all of these things. She was pleased,
too, to have married a foreigner, to be sailing away into a new milieu,
where she would be surrounded by the strange exciting faces of her
husband's friends. It would be delightful to have nothing to do, but
make yourself liked, to be automatically disentangled from all of your
own complicated, complicating relationships with nothing around you but
a new world to conquer. And how thrilled and curious every one must be
about her. What sort of a woman had succeeded in catching dear old Tony!
Tony, who was so delightfully, so essentially, a man's man. There had
been Vivian, of course, but no one quite knew the rights and the wrongs
of that and it was over anyway. Tony was so deuced unsusceptible (Lucy
prided herself on being able to think in English), unsophisticated, too,
about women, but with a sense of self-preservation like an animal's. And
now he had gone and married an American and a Bostonian. Americans, one
knew, were heiresses and Bostonians were blue-stockings. The lady, it
appeared, was not very rich, but of course, Tony would never have
married for money. It was all very puzzling.
And then, Lucy imagined herself walking into a room full of strange,
curious faces and some one murmured, "That is Tony's wife," and every
one looked up. She was wearing a shimmering, silvery blue dress and she
was looking her very, very best. An old lady told her that she ought
still to be in school and a young man told her that she was a jolly
lucky woman and Tony a jolly lucky man, by Jove.
Lucy was sure that that was the way Englishmen talked.
And on their way home, people agreed that they could understand any
man's falling in love with her. Tony talked a lot about his men friends.
Women meant nothing to him. He had, Lucy knew, once been engaged to a
woman--Vivian, she had been called--rumour had woven a pattern of
legends about it, but he had never seemed anxious to discuss it. People
said he had behaved badly--but how was one to tell? Those things were
always so complicated. Usually, every one ended by behaving badly. At
any rate, the girl had made a brilliant marriage, which might or might
not mean a broken heart. It was, Lucy thought tenderly, so
characteristic of Tony to have sown such legitimate wild oats. An
engagement contracted and broken off in gusty fits of honour.
"You look very lovely," he smiled at her.
She was shimmering in silvery blue, her eyes like cloudy star sapphires,
her hair like primroses and ashes.
In the motor she leant against him, a discreet gentle pressure. She
always gave you a feeling of delicately intertwined reticencies and
avowals, a faint New England flavouring which she had never lost.
"I do hope they'll like me," she murmured.
Dinner was a great success. Lucy loved her neighbours and her neighbours
loved her, while secretly congratulating themselves on having always
been right about Boston (which they had never visited and of which they
knew nothing).
After dinner a few guests trickled in for the tiny dance that was to
follow. It was all very much as Lucy had imagined it, old ladies
delighted by her youth, old men delighted by her prettiness. Every one
saying that she was very un-American (by which they meant unlike the
Americans they had known).
Then, suddenly, a hushed silence grabbed hold of all the various
conversations. Tony got up. His hostess was saying, "I want to present
Mrs. Everill." Some one in a corner gave a little suppressed laugh,
Lucy looked.
She saw a thin, dark woman with charming irregular features and a figure
which looked as if it had been put into her black velvet dress with a
shoehorn, and she heard her say in a low voice which somehow seemed to
creep inside shut parts of you, "Tony and I are very old friends." They
were coming straight to her and then, next thing she knew was that voice
again, saying, "Mrs. Everill, you must forgive me if I say that, for the
moment, you are to me, just Tony's wife. But, of course, I know that to
be that you must be a great many other things besides."
Lucy knew that every one was looking at them, not at her, Lucy, the
bride (and she had been so proud and happy--childishly happy--to be a
bride), not at Tony, not even at Lady Dynevor, but at _them_, at the
situation. It seemed to Lucy so indecent, so vulgar.
"You will love Lucy, Vivian," Tony said quietly, and Lucy looked up at
the charming, gracious apparition so dominant, with her beautifully
friendly manner. Her eyes looked as if she could never find the bottom,
as if tears were just going to well up and drown them.
"Of course I shall," she said, and there was a little edge on her voice,
as if it were going to break. That was the feeling she gave you, Lucy
thought, of being on the brink of something, a tenseness like the moment
when the conductor's baton is raised before you have been released by
the music.
"How ill you look," Tony was saying. Vivian laughed,
"You always said that, do you remember----?"
Conversation was buzzing again. Lucy turned to her neighbour. Through
what he was saying, she could hear Tony--"your white velvet dress--do
you remember...?"
She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she stood
quite still.
"Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was
saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings--and brides,"
he added, smiling.
Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa. As she passed, she
heard Vivian laugh, "Do you remember?"
The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony was very good. He did his
duty very nobly, dancing with every one, even his wife.
At half-past one they went home.
"How charming Lady Dynevor is," Lucy murmured.
"Charming?" Tony looked puzzled. "Vivian?"
It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant, inadequate
word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him, "She is a
wonderful woman, loyal, faithful, a real friend."
"She is very pretty," Lucy said.
"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it
were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with
Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.
"You're not _jealous_, sweetheart, are you?"
"No," she lied.
"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And Lucy
knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she had
used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to him
equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love with
his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving,
teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.
She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre
hair--shadows shot with sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her
shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered
a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely snapshots, full
of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and expressions. They
might, she thought, have been taken by a loving detective.
Tony came in.
"Do you remember," she said--and then, suddenly, with a wave of misery,
she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.
V