By the time Gillian got back to the Club she had walked herself out of
love to literature, and there, on a happy well-known path, she was
herself again. No need to give William second sand, after all. But she’d
do it, for a treat, for William’s treat, and he should walk up and down
outside the window of her bedroom on the street side while she did it,
and address the children on their way home from school at half-past
four, a performance he, and they, enjoyed vastly.
But when she turned into the courtyard she was met by an excited crowd
headed by Mrs. Gordon and superintended from the window of her
ground-floor flat by Mrs. Barraclough herself. Club members, some of
whom Gillian had never seen before, were visible at windows or present
on the gravel under the laburnum-tree, and a first glance informed
Gillian that V.V. was not among them. But the Countess, in hat, veil,
gloves, parasol, and a fan, was conspicuous; as was Mrs. Middleton,
whose hair was coming down and who had buttoned the blouse she had
donned in haste in most of the wrong holes.
And over the noise of the mob, drowning it in a torrent of excruciating
protest, flooding the sky with clamour, the voice of William shrieked
from the open window of the book-room under the roof.
“Oh, Miss!” cried Mrs. Gordon, trundling towards Gillian as she emerged
from the archway. “’Ere you are at last. ’E’s been goin’ on like this
for a _h_our or more, and none of us can’t get anywhere near ’im to
pacify of ’im.”
“Oh, dear,” said Gillian, “but haven’t you my duplicate key?”
“No, Miss, that I ’aven’t.” Mrs. Gordon was righteousness under outrage.
“That Miss Vanderleyden come and borrowed it off me to take ’im a piece
of groundsel, and she’ve gone off with it and ’ere we are.”
“And groundsel isn’t a bit good for him,” said Mrs. Middleton, “we all
know that. Do you think dear William is dying in agony?”
“No,” said Gillian, “he’s evidently perfectly well. Only cross. I’m so
very sorry. I’ll go straight up and scold him.”
Up she went, accompanied by Mrs. Middleton, who loved William with
passion, and followed at a speaking distance by the Countess, who made
no mystery of her feelings towards “this savage bird.”
And, even as she ran, listening to the sympathetic bleat of Mrs.
Middleton at her side and pursued by the blistering invective of the
Countess behind her, Gillian was conscious that Mrs. Gordon’s pardonable
rancour against Miss Vanderleyden was shared by her fellow members. And
it was not because she had locked a screaming William in and disturbed
them all over their tea that they were angry with V.V. She felt that in
a way they were glad to have this excuse for saying, “So _very_
peculiar. A little officious. Members should _never_ borrow the
duplicate key.”
William, it turned out, had a real grievance. Touched by one of those
synchronizing impulses which it was her queer gift to receive and act
upon, V.V. had herself come over and had given William fresh seed, fresh
sand, and fresh water, as well as the bunch of groundsel which now lay,
severely mauled but uneaten, on the bottom of his cage. But not content
with these ministrations, she had, with a zeal commensurate to the
protest it had evoked, polished the whole of the cage, bar by bar, wire
by wire, with Bluebell. It stood there glittering in the afternoon sun,
the brass ring by which it was carried from room to room a perfect blaze
of reflected light. The room reeked of the polish, and it was against
this smell quite as much as in disapproval of the unwonted scintillation
of his home, that William’s voice was still most devastatingly raised.
It was not until she had quieted the bird that Gillian caught sight of a
three-cornered note, stuck in the back of the old settee and addressed
to her in V.V.’s black, curly handwriting, out of which the tops of the
t’s and d’s stuck like pins in an untidy pincushion:
“Belovedest” (V.V. had an expansive epistolary style), “I’ve
polished up Cocky’s cage for a s’prize and I’m going to the
concert with Hinerik, so don’t look me up till I get in. A
thousand kisses—V.V.”
Gillian sat with William rubbing his beak against her ear and clucking,
“Pretty Cocky! Pretty Cocky! S’rimps for tea,” and tore the note into
tiny fragments, wondering why V.V.’s letters moved her to nothing but
dismay, when V.V.’s presence had in it the power to fill her with
transporting joy. The soft, thick, gilt-edged paper on which the note
was written tore without sound into pieces, each of which showed at the
furred indefinite edges little glistering filaments of the pulp from
which it had been dried. Almost like blotting-paper, she thought,
remembering how sore her middle finger had been for days when she had
sliced it against the sharp, hard corner of the note-paper on which she
used to imitate the Bottomley signature from Knightsbridge.
Presently, to her surprise, Larry knocked at the door.
“I’ve come to tell you,” he said, pushing his hair back from his eyes as
he subsided into the chesterfield, “I’ve come to tell you that I’m sorry
I let fly at Jane as I did. It was a rotten thing to do, anyway, and
with you there”—he flicked a fragment of the torn letter away from the
back of the couch with his hand as if disposing of himself and his
behaviour for a while.
“I didn’t like that figure myself,” Gillian conceded, “but Jane seemed
to think you deserved it.”
“So I do.” said Larry moodily. “I’m a rotter.”
“That’s silly,” said Gillian. “It was rather rotten of Jane, you know,
as well—to sell it, I mean.”
“Oh, Jane’s got to get her own back. Besides, she didn’t make it to sell
it. She made it because she thinks I ought to do one thing at once.
She’s afraid of my atavistic impulses. In a way she’s right. But life’s
a great thing in so many ways. And Jane’ll only hear of me having it in
one.”
“Well, one thing at a time is the only way if you’re going to do
anything great.”
“Who wants to do anything great? It’s like being a non-drinker, a
non-smoker, and a Nonconformist like an old gardener of ours, because he
wanted to be sure of living a long time in this world and missing
hell-fire in the next. The great object of life is living—not saving
life up to do things with. I’d rather die of life at thirty than hang on
‘doing.’”
“Jane believes in doing things.”
“I ought to know what Jane believes by this time.”
“Larry, are you in love with Jane?”
“No. Not now. That’s the trouble.”
“I don’t think,” said Gillian slowly, “I don’t really suppose that I
quite understand about being in love.”
“Your state is the more gracious.”
“Well. It’s supposed to bring happiness.”
“It’s the devil. It has the primal, eldest curse upon it.”
“Oh, Larry—that was murder, not love.”
“It wasn’t. You’re a shallow, superficial child, and you’re talking like
a parrot—like that William of yours.”
“But the King in _Hamlet_ had killed his brother, that’s what his
offence was rank about.”
“What had he done it for? Shakespeare was a subtler johnny than that.
Read your Bible. What is the eldest curse? Not Cain’s. Golly, no! His
was easy, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’—lots of us are that,
and like it. No, the primal, eldest curse is Adam’s: ‘I will put enmity
between thee and the woman.’ _Enmity_—‘It shall bruise thy head.’ That’s
love,” said Larry. And he thrust both hands deep into the pockets of his
flannel trousers—he was wearing a perfectly normal, grey flannel suit
that afternoon—and began to whistle, through his teeth, a tune which
Gillian recognized after a bar or two to be “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
But she was quite sure that Larry had no notion of what he was
whistling, and she didn’t tell him.
CHAPTER FIVE.
ILLUSION
I
Larry went to Germany. He said he knew a place in the Bavarian Tyrol
where in the third week in June the hay was all flowers and no grass and
each separate flower had its butterfly coloured to match itself, and
that there was an inn, _Zur Goldenen Rose_, at a place called
Dinkelsbühl, on the way back, which hadn’t had a chair added to it since
the eighteenth century. And, why, when there were these things to be
inherited on the Earth, he or anyone should stay in a jerry-built studio
in Battersea Park Road——? Larry was in a difficult temper. Heinrich, who
couldn’t go with him, partly because his orchestra was active until
after the third week in June and partly because he hadn’t any clothes to
travel in, was very pensive about it both before and after Larry’s
departure from Waterloo in a crashing thunderstorm late one Sunday
evening.
Larry was going by Havre. It seemed a long way round and was not so
cheap as the other ways. But Larry was in the kind of temper which makes
people—and more especially men—go the longest, dearest way on purpose,
and gives them some interior satisfaction of the kind which arises from
being able to blame others for these self-inflicted aggravations of an
initial injury. Larry’s state of mind was in no sense Heinrich’s fault,
but Heinrich pined and wilted terribly after his departure.
“I shall have that Hinerik to tea to cheer him up a bit,” said V.V., and
Gillian, who admired nothing in V.V.’s rather featureless character so
ardently as her real kindliness, went off to Seaford, comforted by the
idea of the comfort these two apparently friendless beings would give
one another.
Gillian’s errand was not of her seeking. On the day of Larry’s departure
she had received a letter in an imitation less exact than her own of Old
Winona’s hand. It was dated, “Marine Hotel, Seaford,” and ran:
“MY DEAR GILLIAN,
Miss Macfarlane is very kindly acting as my amanuensis to-day,
and I am asking her to tell you that I have come down here on a
matter of important private business on which I should very much
appreciate the benefit of your advice.
The matter concerns a little gift which I mean to make to our
dear Lilac on her return from her wedding-journey in three
months’ time, and as time presses I shall be glad if you will
come down here for a week or two as soon as your classes at the
Polytechnicum are over.
I enclose a small cheque to cover the necessary expenses, and
remain,
Yours, affectionately,
WINONA BOTTOMLEY.
P.S.—The car will meet you at Lewes.”
“Goodness!” said Gillian when she had read this epistle through twice,
“what ever _can_ she be doing? She can’t have gone down to Seaford to
knit a shawl for Lilac, and I’ve never known her make anything else. I
wonder if she’s mad. The Macfarlane in office has evidently not been
able to persuade her that I’m going to her own revered de Stormonts’,
which goes on for ever like that dreadful brook, and has no terms. I
think I’d better go at once.”
So she telegraphed to the Marine Hotel, called on Jane and excused
herself from an engagement to sit to her for that portrait of the
Changeling which Larry had never painted and which Jane was now going to
attempt, and with the zealous aid of V.V., who washed and ironed odds
and ends of ribbon and lace and packed them for her with the utmost
delicacy and precision, got herself started for Seaford within
twenty-four hours of receiving the summons.
The car met her at Lewes. This simple phrase but poorly conveys the
experience of being met by Old Winona’s car. It began on the platform,
where two startlingly liveried menials flanked a bowing stationmaster,
drawn up, unfortunately, in front of the Pullman in which Gillian had
not thought it necessary to travel, although the cheque for expenses had
allowed margins in every possible direction. It continued, in
processional splendour, with Tompkins bearing her ticket and umbrella
before, and Wilkins carrying her reasonably new suit-case and her quite
unreasonably battered hat-box behind, and it ended, much to the delight
of an admiring crowd, when the car, a Rolls-Royce of the largest size,
mistook the road and, with three men to direct and prevent its ways, had
to back down one steep and cobbled hill and up another before it could
find a space sufficient to turn round in. The ways out of Lewes from the
railway station are almost as difficult as if they had been expressly
planned for the bewilderment of haughty and companioned chauffeurs.
Miss Macfarlane, a new one, met her in the hall. She was a thin and
serious girl who had not done very well at Newnham and was finding
private-secretaryship more remunerative but less straightforward than
the scholastic career for which Nature had planned and Education had
almost fitted her. On the way up to Lady Bottomley’s private suite
Gillian gathered that things were in a bad way. “And I am afraid,” said
the Miss Macfarlane with depression, “that the fault is partly mine. I
had hoped to inspire Lady Bottomley with a wish to visit the châteaux of
the Loire herself. Instead of which we are having frightful trouble down
here.”
Some of the trouble, it appeared, had been due to the presence at the
Marine Hotel of another Belfast baronet’s widow, a lady on a visit of
supervision to an only son in a preparatory school who had broken a
quantity of bones in a riding accident. This lady, in virtue of her
sorrows, had claimed the suite, the best suite on the first floor, for
which Lady Bottomley had negotiated.
The air was still surcharged with the fury of the storm which had raged
over the claims. Finally, Old Winona had won, on a point of precedence.
“Ours is the earlier creation,” she had announced. Sir John had been
raised to the title in 1906. And Lady Eaton, whose husband had had to
wait until 1908 before his merits had been formally acknowledged by a
dilatory government, had admitted her just defeat. The other matter,
however, was more serious.
The glories of Chenonceaux and Blois, the architectural resplendency of
Amboise, the marvels of Tours for which the mild young secretary had a
deep enthusiasm, had been displayed before her employer in so many
photographs, diagrams, and literary panegyrics that they had gone to the
poor lady’s head.
“She wants,” said Miss Macfarlane, “to have bits of them copied into a
kind of composite villa here, and Sir Edwin Lutyens has just refused to
do it for her. She will tell you the rest herself.”
Gillian did not hear the rest at once, for she had been assigned a suite
of her own, bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room, on the second floor,
and, having a horror of lifts in descent, had wandered for some time
along unfamiliar corridors all carpeted in the same monstrous pattern
before she found the rooms Lady Bottomley now triumphantly occupied.
“My dear,” said Old Winona, who, by way of emphasizing the difference
between an hotel and her own home, was wearing an imposing bonnet
although she had not been out that day, “I am glad you have been able to
get away so soon. Do you know anything of architecture?”
“Very little,” said Gillian.
“Socially, I mean,” said Old Winona.
This was difficult, but Gillian was able to gather that what was
required of her was information about architects of a more docile
temperament than those of riper years or wider fame were proving
themselves to possess. Young men, willing to carry out the plans which a
lavish and devoted mother was making for her children’s dwelling;
impecunious young men, in short, were what the lady sought.
“I have,” said Old Winona, “already purchased the house, an admirable
one: south aspect, modern sanitation, large grounds, within easy, but
not too easy, reach of the sea. Children,” said Old Winona with a long,
prospective look through the closed windows and across the waters of the
Channel, “children have been known to escape from their nurses, however
numerous.”
“But Lilac——” Gillian began, intending to point out that Lilac, though
not yet of age, could swim quite well.
“Not yet—not quite yet, I dare say.” Lilac’s mother-in-law was evidently
hopeful, possibly even better informed of the future than Gillian. “But
though she has many years before her, there is no time to be lost.”
Dinner was coming up processionally, borne in courses by a staff visibly
awed by what had happened during the installation of the occupant of the
first-floor suite, before Gillian had heard the whole story. The house
intended as a surprise for Lilac and Toby was not to be destroyed. It
was a large, three-storied affair, gabled and balconied with terraces to
its garden, and Old Winona’s idea was to have replicas of as many of the
distinguishing features of the châteaux in question as could possibly be
crowded together affixed to the building, so that in none of its aspects
it should fail to remind the beholder of at least one, and often of
several of them. And, having been told by one famous architect that he
thanked her but that, praise God, he was not a reincarnation of
Viollet-le-Duc, and by another that nothing would induce him to consider
her project, she had applied, very feebly seconded by Miss Macfarlane,
to the local builders and found that they simply could not begin to
understand her idea. So, knowing that Gillian lived in Chelsea and was
therefore surrounded by people who drew and planned for the upper
classes, Old Winona had decided to leave the problem in her hands.
Gillian sat up for an hour with the Miss Macfarlane, after the old lady
had gone to bed, trying to think of a way to save Lilac from the
consequences of the secretary’s plot for foreign travel. Nothing, of
that Gillian was quite sure, nothing would induce Lilac to live at
Seaford for any part of her time, just as not even the occasion to
select her own models would have moved Old Winona abroad without
anything less than six months’ preparation.
“You might just as well have told her about Ludwig of Bavaria and gone
on touring round all those crazy castles next summer,” she said to Miss
Macfarlane, who was horrified, not caring for the idea of visiting any
places that were not known to be famous for good art and authenticated
history.
But, two days later, having seen the house, which had been originally
built as a school, and having interviewed the puzzled builder, Gillian
had an inspiration.
Jane would be quite equal to constructing a model of such a fantasia as
Old Winona desired; and superintending Jane might distract the old lady
for a time and would help to preserve the builder’s sanity which her
direction, supplemented by portfolios of photographs and engravings, had
severely shaken. And, so long as the house itself remained untouched
until Toby and Lilac returned to take up their own responsibilities, it
could be put into the market again; whereas, once improved according to
plan, it must remain for ever planted on the Bottomley family, only too
probably to be known, as other less comprehensive outrages had been
known in other places, as Bottomley’s Folly.
The idea pleased Old Winona, and it enchanted Jane, who came down for
two days and went back to London with a suit-case full of plans and
photographs.
Gillian stayed on at Seaford for another week, bathing and walking over
the cliffs towards Cuckmere Haven and up and down the Seven Sisters all
morning, and relieving Miss Macfarlane after tea, and going on to Glynde
when Lady Bottomley abandoned the Marine Hotel in order to open a bazaar
in Belfast in the first week in July.
When she got back to London she found Jane and Mr. Quist fully occupied
in modelling, painting, and varnishing such a doll’s-house as had never
been made in any studio. Gillian looked in at the workshop on her way
home for Victoria.
“Delirious, ain’t it?” said Jane, “and not a staircase, not a gargoyle
without documentary evidence of its origin in other brains than ours.
The colour I’ll admit is often my own. I’ve never faltered more or less
in my great task of happiness since I started this. What a peach, what a
queen, your divine Winona! How sumptuous in outlook! A ton of plasticine
in the yard and everything handsome about me. I’m having a
painting-blouse embroidered with bicycles to keep my mind from being
puffed up, and you’ve got to come and sit to me like a ghost at
twilight, to prevent my spirit from being snuffed out.”
“I shall have to sit with V.V. at twilight for a bit now,” said Gillian.
“I’ve been away for three weeks and she’ll expect me to make it up to
her at first.”
“You’ll find V.V. otherwise engaged,” said Jane darkly.
“Goodness!” said Gillian. “Engaged?”
“To the unfortunate being she will call Hinerik,” said Jane.
“But she must be years older.”
“She is. Ten at least. She would be.”
“What ever made them do it?” wondered Gillian.
“Hadn’t you better ask them?” said Jane. “It might be love, you know.”