Azalea Deane was a much befamilied young woman, who was leaving “mile
30” behind so rapidly that it was already quite blurred in the distance.
Ahead, there stretched a bleak and desolate roadway, leading right into
the heart of that repository for the husks of men—Beechwood—and at the
best of times, she found her journey wearisome and uninspiriting.
She did not cavil at her fate. No one ever heard Azalea complain—of
poverty, obscurity, dullness or villenage. She accepted her destiny with
a fine stoicism, which reflected itself in well-feigned indifference and
enabled her to proceed along the same monotonous route at the same
monotonous speed, with the same monotonous companions month after month,
and year after year, without developing gangrene of the soul or breaking
into open revolt.
“Oh, God,” she prayed each morning, before descending to the agitated
atmosphere of the breakfast table, “keep me from being difficult to live
with!”
And Heaven heard her prayer.
No one really knew Azalea—least of all, her family. Perhaps, no one
ever really knows anyone else, a phase of ignorance which, personally, I
am not inclined to deplore. Souls should be clad no less than bodies.
They should be gowned with decency, and in so far as possible,
loveliness; and if, now and again, the garment slips or wears thin, then
should the beholder turn his eyes away, nor seek to pry into anything
that may be so terrible or so sublime.
Outwardly, as Lady Denby had said, Azalea was a plain little person. She
should have been dainty of form, but through some irreparable
miscalculation, the Creator had dowered her with the large features,
hands and feet designed for some much more ample person. Therefore, she
gave no pleasure to the sensitive, artistic eye, and this was an acute
grievance to her who possessed a deep and pagan love for Beauty. She was
a toneless girl, with thin, straight, dun-coloured hair which she could
not afford to keep marcelled. Her eyes were unarresting, as a rule; too
sharp to be appealing and not lustrous enough to sparkle. Her skin had a
sandy cast and usually shone. Even when rouge and the ubiquitous
lip-stick assumed the respectability of universal usage, Azalea’s
appearance was scarcely improved, for the former would not blend, and
lay like a definite glaze upon her cheeks, while the latter only
accentuated the flatness of her too-ample mouth, and made one wish that
she had not tampered with it at all.
Her wardrobe was an appalling miscellany of discarded grandeur. Ladies
whose clothes were too passé for their own adornment, bestowed them upon
Azalea with the remark,
“You can see, my dear, that these are scarcely worn, and anyway, they
are not the sort of things one could give the servants!”
She had learned to smother the hot rebellion that flared up in her
heart, to thank them prettily, and to convey huge, unwieldy bundles
through the streets and hold her tongue when her family commented upon
the generosity of Lady This or Mrs. That. But she often wondered that
her father never divined that Lady Elton’s cloth-of-gold dinner gown
remodelled by her impatient and unskilled fingers, caused abrasions upon
her spirit deeper than sackcloth could have produced, and blithely would
she have consigned every stitch that she owned to the flames, for the
joy of buying the most ordinary, commonplace, inexpensive frock at a
bargain sale.
The future of the Deanes stretched behind them. The best of the family
lay underground. Mr. Grenville Harrison Deane was the sole male survivor
of an illustrious line that could be traced (so he declared) with an
occasional hiatus, back to Alfred the Great! It was never clear to the
upstarts whose genealogical tree took root in England about the time of
the Conquest, or thereafter, how he arrived at his conclusion, but if
antiquity of ideas was anything of a proof, then they were forced to
admit that there was justification in his contention, for his views of
life antedated those of Britain’s noble King.
Aloofness from fatiguing toil had rewarded him with an erectness that
was impressive, and a complexion that a flapper might have envied. A
Dundreary of silver gossamer caressed his cheeks, and his clear,
lustrous eyes looked out from an unfurrowed setting. His chief
characteristics were piety and an Eumenidean temper. The former, which
should have been broad, was constricted to the dimensions of a number
ten needle, and the latter, which should have been narrow, expanded to
encompass impartially every one who held views divergent from his own.
Particularly, was it directed against the blistering injustice of the
Civil Service.
The Civil Service had served him faithfully for thirty-five years,
despite his eternal villification of it. Recently, his incompetence had
been recompensed by superannuation and the payment of seven-tenths of
his salary—shall it be said, seven times as much as he was worth? But
Mr. Deane had always fancied himself in the Premier’s place, or at least
in a Ministerial capacity. Failing that, a Trade Commissionership, or
even a Deputy’s post would have appeased him. Therefore, to be
superannuated after thirty-five years’ inconspicuous hampering of the
postal service, appeared to him as a blot upon the integrity of the
Nation.
He was forever “taking up his case” with this or that influential
person. What his case was, Azalea had but a misty idea, and whether he
actually took it up or merely gloated over the notion of doing so, she
had no means of ascertaining. Anyway, the matter had long ago ceased to
interest her.
Mrs. Deane was the type of woman now happily becoming quite extinct, who
was born to be dominated, and ably fulfilled her destiny. The eldest and
most unattractive daughter of a rural English divine, she had won her
husband by a trick for which he never forgave her, though he realised
that she was in no way responsible. He had fallen fatuously in love with
Dorothea, her younger sister, and had received the parental sanction to
an engagement before setting sail for “Kenneda” and a post that his name
might dignify. Six months later, Dorothea, who had quite innocently
intrigued the affection of a visiting curate—a nephew of the Dean of
Torborough, no less—had been prodded weeping to the altar, while Fanny
was trundled on a steamer and shipped to Montreal to console the
palpitant bridegroom, who had not even been apprised of the fact that a
substitute had been forwarded.
The agony of that trip left its mark on Fanny Deane. A kindly lie would
have spared her so much—for a time, at least. But the Rev. Arthur
Somerset deemed suffering a salutory need, for others, and stated the
case to his first-born with unequivocal lucidity . . . One phase of a
woman’s duty is to grasp the opportunity for marriage and thus clear the
way for her younger sisters, who, also, must have husbands. The prospect
of fulfilling this duty in St. Ethelwyn’s was slender, and Fanny was no
longer young . . . Did she want to be a burden in her old age to her
family? . . . Dependent upon them for a home . . . Such inconsideration
in a daughter of his was unthinkable . . . And as for young Deane, the
Rev. Arthur waived his preference aside with a clerical gesture
calculated to display advantageously his well-kept hand . . . Any man
might be proud of a wife begotten and bred by Arthur Somerset, D.D.
“You must carry it off well, Fanny,” he adjured her, at the close of the
interview, “for otherwise, you will be stranded in a strange country
where . . .” the alternative was painted in no mean and unromantic
terms.
Fanny “carried it off” successfully enough, though by no fault or virtue
of her own. Too ill, almost, to stand, she crept down the gangway, and
cowered before the eager-eyed young man who did not even recognise her
when she addressed him.
Ah, if she had only been told that kindly little lie, and could have
raised a radiant face to his, whispering,
“Here I am, dear! It was too wonderful that you should have sent for
me!”
Instead, with ashen lips and shame-filled eyes, she muttered, “Mr.
Deane, they married Dorothea to a curate—she couldn’t help it—she
wanted you to know! Here is your ring . . . and . . . and . . . they
made me come . . . For God’s sake, don’t send me back! I’ll work for you
till I drop dead . . . I’ll be your servant—anything—only, for God’s
sake, don’t send me home!”
He stared at her while the devastating truth burst over him like an
engulfing flood. He shook with rage, with the anguish of blighted hopes
and his own impotence in escaping the net that had been spread for him,
while Fanny cringed beside him praying that God would strike her dead
. . .
And Heaven did not hear her prayer.
Speechless, they faced one another. After a bit, he took her roughly by
the arm.
“Come, girl,” he said, “we’ll get this rotten business over, quickly.
The license reads ‘Dorothea’—I suppose I’ll have to get another one.
There now, for God’s sake, don’t sniffle! People are looking at us.”
To give him credit, Grenville Harrison Deane never charged her with the
deception of her parents. He never referred to it in so many words. But
for two and forty years, Fanny lived in connubial torment, under the
shadow of this smothering humiliation, and the fear that he might some
day be led to speak of it. Often, there was that in his manner, that
threatened to burst into violent and comminatory reproach.
She tried to efface herself, to reduce herself to nothingness, and to
spare him the reminder of her substitution. She had a way of watching
him, endeavouring to divine his whims and moods, that was loathesome in
its humility. Her entire life was an apology for having failed to be her
sister.
Unfortunately, Fanny never suspected that the greatest need of her
overlord was association with a strong-minded tyrant, who, in the guise
of the clinging-vine—or any other—would have thrust upon him the
unexperienced pleasure of putting his shoulder to the wheel and hearing
it creak as he moved it. He would have been happy doing things, being
wheedled into service; but, as matters stood, Fanny Deane would have
breathed for him, had such been possible. She relieved him of every
burden and responsibility, and became a substitute not only for her
silly, simpering sister, but for a shabby armchair and a pair of carpet
slippers. Azalea, who was the youngest of five daughters, went so far as
to say that the tomb to which his mortal envelope must one day be
committed, would never equal in comfort the padded sepulchre her mother
provided him while living.
Azalea’s earliest remembrance centred round a very common
occurrence—her mother kneeling in the midst of broken toys and howling
children, pleading,
“Don’t cry, my darlings! We will mend them! Sh-sh-sh—_Please_ be quiet!
_Don’t_ irritate your father.”
She lived in constant dread of irritating a man who would have kept his
temper had he really been vouchsafed anything to be irritated about; and
her life was one which no self-respecting dog would have endured.
No one was more surprised than Fanny Deane when her four elder girls
found husbands. Naturally, perhaps, she regarded marriage as a difficult
and sordid undertaking—for parents, that is to say. Many a night, as
she sat beside a moaning baby, the thought that one day she might have
to engineer her children into the State of Holy Wedlock was like a
deadly stricture about her heart. However, Hannah, Flossie, Tottie and
May all married without any fuss or flurry, in a satisfactory,
chronological fashion, the Civil Service yielding up its living dead to
provide their sustenance. They became the Mrs. Polduggans and Mrs.
Crogganthorpes of Ottawa; that large, uneasy, imitigable
body—scrabbling, straining, jostling, niggling, fighting for the power
to give rather than receive—snubs!—and living largely in the hope of
supplanting their superiors and lifting themselves out of the ruck
composed of other women, whose husbands, like their own, were merely
“something in the Government”.
But Azalea was different. Marriage, in her opinion, was neither the
subliminal pinnacle of feminine felicity, as her father claimed to
conceive it, nor the Open Door to Independence, as her sisters averred.
Shrewd observation led her to the conclusion that of independence there
was little, and feminine felicity there was none. Always interested in
the dark side of life, e.g., the married side, Azalea divided the women
of her acquaintance into two classes—the parasites, who slyly or
seductively tapped their husbands and appropriated their material and
spiritual substance without suffering the smallest compensatory impulse,
and the antithetical order, who resigned themselves to a stronger will
and found matrimony a state of reluctant vassalage.
Azalea dreamed sometimes of an ideal companionship, or perhaps, a
companionable ideal, but the paradigmatic young men whom her sisters
(with the patronage of the successful angler who has already gaffed his
fish and offers to instruct the novice how to bait a hook, and cast)
enticed for her selection, inflamed her disgust rather than her
romanticism.
Her greatest hunger was for economic independence, and this was
summarily denied her.
Mr. Deane, drenched in archaic theories, confused idleness with
refinement, and work with degradation. Moreover, he would have felt a
sense of incompetence, mute reproach, even contempt, had he permitted
his daughters to join the restless ranks of the employed. By such a
measure, would he have confessed his inability to support them as
befitted women of gentle breeding, and to provide them with all the
amenities that their natures craved. That one of them should possess a
bank account of her own and feel at liberty to spend money without the
humiliating necessity of applying to him, was a condition that smacked
of positive shamelessness. It was characteristic of him that although he
never wished to perform any useful task unaided by the members of his
household, he never allowed them to perform the task alone.
He had a genuine horror of the modern business woman who could look him
unflinching in the eye, without that sweet deference which testified to
his superiority. All business women were, in his opinion, coarse;
besides, economic independence resulted in their getting “out of hand”,
and a woman who got out of hand, was, in Mr. Deane’s judgment, a very
dangerous proposition. Therefore, he refused Azalea the freedom she
craved. He immolated her self-respect (and that of the community for
her, in a measure) on the altar of his vanity, and condemned her to a
life of servitude far more degrading than anything she would have
chosen. She was depressed under the burden of obligations that gave her
little benefit and no pleasure, and she secretly despised herself for
being forced to accept them.
“Do let me go away and work,” she used to entreat, “I could teach.
That’s a lady’s profession.”
But her mother made vague gestures of distress that said,
“Don’t bring up this dreadful subject again! Please, my dear, be careful
or you will irritate your father!”
And father, giving every promise of fulfilling this prophecy, would
reply,
“So long as I live, I hope that no daughter of mine will be forced from
the shelter of her home, and out amongst the ravening wolves of
commerce. When I am gone . . .” he left an eloquent pause “. . . But in
the meantime . . .”
The words, not to mention the gesture that accompanied them, implied
somehow that caravans of voluptuous commodities assembled by his protean
labours, should continue to arrive at their very door.
He was unctuously proud of her friends, and actually toadied to her in
deference to her association with the aristocracy of the Capital. So did
her sisters, and their husbands, and the “char”, and the tradespeople,
all of whom knew that she enjoyed sufficient intimacy with Lady Elton to
assist at a luncheon or dinner-party—assist, that is to say, in the
kitchen. And the splendid thing about this kind of assistance was that
she received no honorarium for her services. That was where she took
conspicuous precedence over Mrs. Wiggin, the char, and Ellen Petrie, who
“waited on all the exclusive affairs of the city”. To work without
salary was Mr. Deane’s conception of a lady’s highest calling, and a
means whereby she might be kept from getting out of hand.
He was supported in this attitude by one of the foremost ladies in the
land, who argued that “no woman engaged in earning her own living should
be presented at the Drawing Room!”
The Dillings struck a new note in the monotone of Azalea’s existence.
She had never seen their like, and was profoundly touched by their
genuineness, their simplicity. For the first time in her life she felt
that she had come into contact with people to whom friendship is dearer
than the advantageous acquaintanceship that travesties it; for the first
time in her life she could show an honest affection without being
suspected of having an ulterior motive. At that time, Azalea had nothing
to gain from the Dillings. On the contrary, she had something to
give—an ineffably joyous experience—and she delighted in the sensation
of being for once the comet instead of the tail; instead of the trailer,
the cart.
Towards Raymond Dilling, she was conscious of an intense maternalism.
Mentally, she acknowledged him her master, but in every other respect,
he was an utter child—hard, undemonstrative, cold, but, despite that, a
very appealing child. And she saw with her native shrewdness that mere
mentality would never gain for him the success which he deserved.
Ottawa, she knew, was thronged with brilliant people whose gifts were
lost to the City—to the Dominion—because they lacked the empty
artifices and consequent social standing which enabled them to get a
hearing. No strolling mummer in the Middle Ages needed ducal patron more
sorely than does a mere genius in the Capital of Canada.
And Dilling liked Azalea. She was a new and interesting type to him who
had never considered feminine psychology a topic that was worth
pursuing. His wife’s friends in Pinto Plains were, he realised,
estimable creatures running to fat and porcelain teeth at middle age.
They were conscientious mothers, faithful to their husbands and earnest
seekers after a broader knowledge than that provided by their homely
tasks. But they wearied him. Whenever he encountered a group of them,
his dominant wish was to escape, and he rarely failed to gratify this
desire by excusing himself with some such remark as,
“I’ll just slip off and leave you ladies free to discuss the three D’s”,
by which he implied (with some degree of justification, doubtless) that
the conversation of women is restricted to the topics of Dress,
Domestics and Disease. He hated women’s chatter.
Azalea Deane was the only woman he had ever known who possessed what he
later termed a bi-sexual mind. He was never irritably conscious, as was
the case with Marjorie’s other friends, of the fact that she was a
woman. Even when she discussed the three D’s, there was a broad
impersonality, a pleasing and quizzical tang to her remarks that he
chose to arrogate to the mind of man. Before he had known her any length
of time, he discovered that, unlike Marjorie she not only understood
what he said, but that in some startling and inexplicable manner she
divined thoughts which he had expressly refrained from putting into
words.
For him, she was a novel experience, whose flavour he enjoyed rather
more intensely than he was aware. Not that his emotions were even
remotely touched by the personality of the girl. No! She was a mental
adventure which he followed with frank curiosity and a diminishing
display of patronage. Her mind was full of exhilarating surprises, and
he was astounded to discover how easily she ornamented arid facts with
garlands plucked from her rich imagination. She had a neat twist in the
handling of them which Dilling was not slow to see and imitate. She
guided him into many a pungent domain of thought, where he lost himself
completely in an exciting pursuit after some winking little light, that
led to the very middle of an icy stream into which he fell, spluttering,
only to find Azalea calm and dry, on the opposite shore, laughing at
him. He contracted the habit of reading extracts from his speeches to
her, and presently, he tried the effect of an entire discourse. Now and
again, he sounded her as to what he considered saying, and discovered
that her enthusiastic understanding was like an extra filter to his
already well-clarified intention.
He stored up particularly smart bits of political repartee to tell her,
while his own triumphs of wit were laid at her feet rather than those of
his bewildered wife. And all this time, the prevailing fancy that
overlaid his subconscious mind, was,
“Quite a good sort, that girl! Pity she isn’t a man!”
He voiced this latter sentiment to Azalea one evening shortly before
prorogation and his return for the summer to Pinto Plains. In their
sharp and peppery fashion, they had been discussing the Budget,
inflated, Azalea contended, beyond all reason by the conscienceless
demands of those picaresque buccaneers, Eastlake and Donahue, whose
issue of private enterprise was begotten in the womb of the public
treasury, when Dilling turned to her and cried,
“You’ve made out a good case, Miss Deane! You should have been a man!”
The girl’s cheeks burned a painful brick tint. But she laughed and
retorted,
“By which you tactfully imply my unsuitability for the state to which it
has pleased God to call me, and regret that physical limitations prevent
my choosing a more adequate sphere. I confess to you in strict
confidence, that frequently, I have deplored this condition, myself.”
“Come along into politics,” invited Dilling, a touch of seriousness
behind his banter.
“Right-o! Just so soon as you amend the B.N.A. and offer me a refuge in
the Senate,” she answered, and changed the subject.
Later that night, Marjorie hinted that he had hurt Azalea.
“Eh?” cried Dilling. “What are you talking about? Hurt her—how?”
“By what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“That she should have been a man.”
Dilling carefully twisted his collar free from the button. A violent
physical action of any kind was foreign to him. Running the curved band
between his fingers, he gave an abstracted thought to the possibility of
wearing it again on the morrow, even while he turned to contradict his
wife. “Nonsense, Marjorie, she liked it! All women like it; it’s a
tribute to their mentality, my dear. One often has to say some such
thing to a perfect ninny, but in this case I happen to be sincere and I
think Miss Deane knew it.”
Marjorie did not contest the point. She never argued with Raymond, but
once in a while she felt, as now, that his non-combatible correctness
covered an error in judgment. Of course, he was sincere in paying a
tribute to Azalea’s cleverness, and, of course, she knew he meant what
he said. But that was the very trouble—the very barb that pierced her
spirit!
In a strange and mysterious way (of which she was somewhat ashamed)
Marjorie often reached perfectly amazing conclusions that were directly
opposed to Raymond’s incontrovertible logic. And Azalea’s hurt was a
case in point. Just why the words had stung, it was beyond Marjorie
Dilling to explain. Orderly thinking and systematic juxtaposition of
facts found their substitute in flashes of intuition which, throughout
the ages, have stood for women in the place of reason. But she knew,
without knowing how she knew, that Azalea would rather have impressed
Raymond with her incomparable womanhood, than the fact that she was the
possessor of a brain that should have functioned in the body of a man.
As for Azalea, she was not conscious that Marjorie had heard the echo of
that discordant note, and she would have been inexpressibly surprised
had she suspected it. Years of rigid discipline had taught her to
conceal all the emotions she thought she had not strangled, and she was
accustomed to being treated as a man when not as a nonentity. Times
without number she had paid for an evening’s entertainment by escorting
timourous and penurious ladies safely home in the silent watches of the
night . . . a delicate assumption that she, herself, lacked sufficient
fascination to stimulate brute design. On other occasions, hostesses
frankly asked her to slip away quietly, “so that my husband won’t feel
obliged to take you home, dear.” And once, a particularly considerate
host glimpsing the blizzard that raged beyond his portal, had placed her
in the care of a diminutive messenger boy, of some nine years, who
struggled through the snowdrifts and sniffled that he had come from
Hewitt’s Service, and please where was the parcel?
So Dilling’s words cut without producing an unendurable pain. The spot
was well cocained and would ache long after the incision had been made.
Azalea listened to his defence of his leader, his Party, and Messrs.
Eastlake and Donahue, sensitive to a breath of discouragement beneath
his words.
“I came to Ottawa expecting to find co-operation, and in its place
fierce competition confronts me—competition,” he said, “within the very
ranks of the Party! It may strike you as being particularly naive, but I
confess that I had not expected to find this sort of friction. It puts a
different complexion on politics.”
This was a tremendous admission for him to make, and in one of those
flashing visions that supplemented her more leisured mental processes,
Azalea saw that just as Marjorie groped along her level, so Dilling
stumbled into pitfalls in his particular sphere, that a cumulus vapour
of disenchantment threatened the horizon of his career, and that even as
his wife bade fair to be a victim of the Social Juggernaut, so he would
be crushed beneath the wheels of the political machine.
And they thought that this was The Land of Afternoon!