III

“Will you,” said Lady Bottomley with majesty, “take down the following

letter:

“Winona, Lady Bottomley presents her compliments to Mrs. Archibald

Anstruther, and regrets that she cannot become a subscriber to the

Society for the Prevention of Photographing Private Persons in the Park

as she is already so fully occupied in signing cheques for the Societies

to which she belongs ... no, take out ‘already’ and put in ‘lately’ ...

to which she already belongs, that she cannot take the exercise

prescribed for her by her physician. They all tell me I ought to walk

for at least one hour a day before luncheon and for half an hour after

tea.”

“Does that last bit go in the letter?” asked Gillian.

“Surely, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley with a bitter smile, “you

must have noticed that the letter ended with the closure of the third

person.”

“Shall I write that one in my own writing or in yours?” asked Gillian.

“Third-person letters go in your own hand. It marks the distinction more

clearly,” pronounced the lady.

They were seated in the boudoir, an upholstered chamber overlooking the

Park. In spite of the heat of a mid-July forenoon the French windows

were closed and curtained as precaution against draughts, which, as Lady

Bottomley explained, “not only give me a cold in the head, but blow down

my precious photographs.”

The precious photographs stood in ranks on slippery tables in front of

the window and, in every variety of frame, clambered over the walls and

up every tier of the ornate overmantel. Some of them were of people and

were signed. Others were of places and were dated: none was without an

inscription. One or two had little memorial wreaths affixed to their

frames, and on a table placed before a life-size portrait in oils of the

first baronet dressed for his first levee, stood an array of silver

vases in which it was one of Gillian’s duties to arrange fresh flowers

every morning. On her second day she had suggested filling a pair of

very fine branched candlesticks which were doing nothing in the library

where she sat when imitating her employer’s handwriting after lunch, and

lighting candles to burn among the flowers.

“It would be lovely to have them of different colours. I know where you

can get green and red candles,” she urged.

“A very Popish notion,” said old Winona. “I beg, Miss Macfarlane, that

you will not speak of it again.”

But she was not angry with Gillian, and she was pleased that the girl

had noticed how fine the candlesticks were.

“Museum-pieces,” Gillian had called them, and Lady Bottomley adopted the

phrase and applied it indiscriminately to many of her treasures which

Gillian herself would have catalogued as pure Waring and Gillow, or

early _train-de-luxe_.

Gillian had grown accustomed to the daily shock of leaving the

colour-washed little flat in the Club with its open windows, plain

curtains and rush-seated wooden chairs for the fringed and patterned

seclusion of Knightsbridge, and had lost the inclination to giggle at

each fresh revelation of what unbridled wealth could do in the way of

making a house uninhabitable, before there was any sign that the third

baronet lived there himself.

One morning, however, she had nearly lost her self-control on

discovering that Lady Bottomley’s dressing-room was enriched by a bath

which was silver-plated and covered in by a padded lid of bright

rose-coloured velvet, buttoned with porcelain upholstery buttons, each

bearing the Bottomley crest in the proper heraldic colours with the

baronet’s hand very bloody and the Saracen’s eye looking, with its

spoked lashes quite like a bicycle-wheel, very blue, painted in the

centre.

“By hand, miss,” as Dashwood, Lady Bottomley’s obsequious and alarmingly

golden-haired maid had insisted when asking Gillian to wait in the

presence of this luxury while she ascertained whether her ladyship, who

was keeping out of draughts in bed that morning, were quite ready to

deal with her letters.

One of these letters was a post-card dated “Newmarket, Tuesday,” and

signed “Toby.” “Can you put up me and Stephen for Sandown?” it asked.

“Now,” said Gillian, as she read this missive and realized that Stephen

Glynde might come upon her any day, “I can’t possibly pretend to Stephen

that he doesn’t know his own bridesmaid. I do hope Lilac will be equal

to the crisis.”

Lady Bottomley, who thought she might have caught cold while driving

round Regent’s Park at Gillian’s instigation at six o’clock the previous

evening, took an extra dose of ammoniated quinine and decided that at

any risk she must entertain her son’s friend.

“We must send telegrams,” she pronounced as soon as she had realized the

import of her son’s request, “one to Sir Reginald Bottomley, Bart.,

Newmarket. That is sufficient address; the other to the Honourable

Stephen Glynde, who is, I presume, at Newmarket with my son.”

Gillian, who remembered that Sophie was at Glynde and had been there

since Ascot because the Eaton Square house was closed, bit the

information off the tip of her tongue and took down in her own writing

two long, delighted telegrams, one signed “Mother” and the other signed

“Winona Bottomley” and copied them out in her imitation of their

author’s writing without question, feeling that this attention was due

to the family and its friends.

Lilac was down at Glynde, so there was no need to disturb her with news

which Sophie, who was extraordinarily uninformed of her husband’s

movements for a quite reasonably happy wife, might very well not be able

to pass on to her.

Gillian was bidden to stay on and dine at Knightsbridge in order to help

Lady Bottomley through the unwonted labour of choosing which of the two

elaborate spare rooms should be filled with flowers and writing-paper

and sticks of scented sealing-wax, and have bath-salts and shaving-soap

disposed in its polished bathroom by the train of rubber-tyred

housemaids who, shepherded by kind and melancholy Atkinson, trooped into

the boudoir to receive her detailed instructions.

It was extraordinary, thought Gillian, as she walked down Sloane Street

and past the Guards’ Barracks to the Embankment in the moonlight,

extraordinary and rather pathetic that this very kind and cumbered lady

should not have troops of friends on whom to lavish the overflow of her

incredible riches. She was, as her name suggested, Canadian by birth,

and her family had long since faded out of communication with their

relative who had married the first baronet in the days of his

experimental and impecunious youth. Some of the wonderful letters

Gillian was employed to transcribe, often from pencilled notes made in

her absence, were to cousins in Montreal. These were only sent when some

reference to the house of Bottomley appeared in the Press. Gillian had

to go through the post for Press-cuttings very carefully every morning.

On the days when any came in, Atkinson took a cab and went forth to buy

twenty copies of every paper in which they occurred. After the orgies of

the Bottomley Orphanage Bazaar at which Lady Bottomley had been

photographed in the very act of receiving the Royal Princess who had

opened it, the cab bearing the papers in which the picture appeared was

so crammed that Atkinson had been obliged to come back sitting with the

driver all the way from Fleet Street to Knightsbridge.

Gillian had enjoyed that day. Two cuttings of each notice, two cuttings

of every photograph (several versions had escaped into print) had to be

made and pasted into the two great leather-bound Press-cutting albums in

which the records of twenty years were garnered. The first baronet had

kept one for his own reading and another for his wife’s, and the

practice was continued in piety by his widow.

“I shall of course,” she had told Gillian with an even more than usually

majestic intonation, “I shall of course make over the late Sir John’s

volume to his grandchildren when they come of age.”

“I didn’t know he had any,” Gillian had spoken in the haste of surprise.

“Not yet, Miss Armstrong.” Lady Bottomley had begun to make use of the

right name from time to time, though still reverting to Macfarlane,

especially in the early morning.

And, then, when the cuttings had been pasted down, the crested

address-book was opened, and its scantily filled pages were gone through

until everybody named in it had been honoured with a copy of all the

papers duly marked in red with “See Page 7.” Gillian addressed the

wrappers in her own or her imitation writing according to old Winona’s

direction, and Atkinson bore them away and applied and gummed them down

to their contents in his pantry. It was all very ritualistic and unreal,

but Gillian enjoyed it.

“I suppose,” she went on, as she leaned over the parapet and watched the

river flowing at low tide towards Lambeth with a silver, moonlit edge on

the curve of each black ripple, “I suppose that’s why she’s so lonely.

Real people couldn’t bear to be near her and she couldn’t bear it

either. I can, because it keeps you far enough away from anyone to be

paid by them. It doesn’t matter if I do laugh at her a little so long as

I earn my wages. But you’d burst if you tried to be her friend.”

She let her mind float away along the river till it took her to another

summer night, six years ago, when she had watched another tide swim by

under the same moon. Then she had been with her father at Altona on that

sudden, miraculous journey he had taken, retracing some adventure of his

youth, just before he set out for Burma and his death.

The broad waters of the Elbe, brackish with the sea that moved within

them, and spangled with the lights of travelling ships, had carried his

memory back to a time in which she, who had been his friend ever since

she could remember, had no slightest share. He had spoken to her as to a

new-made friend, of a climax in his life to which no memory of hers

could even dimly reach.

“It was all over, the man to whom it happened was dead in me long before

you were born, before even I so much as knew of your mother’s existence.

The house behind the chestnut-tree in that lithograph we bought this

morning might be the house I left twenty years back, Gillian. Sun on the

yellow walls; closed white shutters, a flight of stone steps going up to

a glass door, and inside—Illusion. And I sat under the shadow of that

tree and looked up through the thick leaves and saw the tall spikes of

chestnut-blossom flaming like white wax candles in the heat, and it was

all no good. All that stillness and beauty were empty. I had come to the

end of my own deception. All the time I had known. All the time I had

heard the voice within saying, ‘This is not real. You are playing false

with yourself. Take it if you must, but do not try to pay for it because

you have not the coin in which such things are trafficked.’ And I had

tried to coin their coinage, because I had to pay; and I couldn’t go on.

I can’t tell you what it was. You need never know. I mean, child, it is

not necessary to salvation for a girl to know all things. ‘Its shadow

upon life enough for thee’—you remember Andromeda. But you’ll be safe so

long as you remember to wait until the inner voice agrees _after_ you’ve

tried. It’s no use hesitating before the Unknown. You must try for

yourself, but you must not go along a road you know is not your road

just because you’ve tried it. You must be able to turn back. You must be

able to say, ‘This road is closed.’ Don’t pay tolls at the wrong bar

twice. One day you’ll need all you’ve got. You’re the kind that pays for

everything, overpays always, but I’ve taught you to look for the lasting

values, and you’ll not pay for fakes without knowing what you’re about.

It’s the people who bank on fakes who leave their souls in Hell. Lilac

will pay for fakes in her time. But she’ll pay because she wants them,

and she won’t pay a penny more than they’re worth. It’s you, Gillian,

who may make bad bargains. Remember that, and wait till you’ve said,

“Das unbeschreibliche.

Hier ist’s gethan,”

before you go bankrupt.”

And then they had gone to supper with Hans Adler the painter, and had

laughed and eaten and sung the Mörike-lieder till they cried, and had

eaten again, and drunk extremely sweet and extremely luscious things,

some iced and some buttered, and had had an utterly ridiculous, truly

Germanic time.