When, in the second year of the war, poor Tim and Frances, dusty, jaded,
nearly shattered, but appeased at last, were able to announce the
engagement of their daughter Rhoda to the unexceptionable Niel Quentyn,
Mrs. Delafield’s special function seemed ended; but, looking back over
her long intercourse with her niece, she knew that Rhoda had felt her a
relief rather than an influence; that she had made things easier rather
than more difficult to her; that, in short, she had always successfully
appealed to the girl’s intelligence rather than to what poor Tim and
Frances called her better self; and it was of Rhoda’s intelligence, and
of what possible pressure she might be able to bring to bear upon it,
that she thought finally, as she worked at her border and waited for the
fly that was to bring Rhoda’s baby and its nurse from the station.
She had not been able to rejoice with her brother and his wife over
Rhoda’s match. She who had measured, during her years of
acquaintanceship with her, her niece’s force, had measured accurately,
in her first glance at him, Niel’s insignificance. He was good-looking,
good-tempered, and very much in love; but caste, clothes, code, and the
emotion of his age and situation summed him up. He had money, too, and
could give Rhoda, together with a little handle to her name, the dim,
rich, startling drawing-room in which her taste at once expressed
itself, and a pleasant country house, where, as he confided to Mrs.
Delafield, he hoped to inspire her, when the war was over, with his own
ardour for hunting.
Rhoda was far too clever to quarrel with such excellent bread and
butter; but what could he give her more? for Rhoda would want more than
bread and butter; what food for excitement and adventure could he offer
her indolent yet eager mind and her nature, at once so greedy and so
fastidious? Mrs. Delafield asked herself the question, even while she
watched Rhoda’s wonderful white form move up the nave at her splendid,
martial wedding; even while poor Frances wept for joy and “The Voice
that breathed o’er Eden” surged from the organ; and she feared that Niel
was getting far more than he had bargained for and Rhoda far less.
The first year, it was true, passed successfully. Poor Frances, who had,
fortunately, died at the end of it, had known no reason for abated
rejoicing. She lived long enough to see the baby, little Jane Amoret, as
Rhoda persisted in calling the child; and she had welcomed Niel home
once on leave--Niel as much infatuated as ever and trying to take an
intelligent interest in Picasso. It was since then, during the past
year, that Tim’s letters had expressed a growing presage and appeal.
Moved by the latter, and only a short time before her own grief had
overtaken her, she had gone up to London and stayed with him for a few
days, and had taken tea with Rhoda.
At Rhoda’s it had been exactly as she expected. The drawing-room was
worthy of its fame; so worthy that Mrs. Delafield wondered how Niel
afforded it--and in war-time, too. Rhoda, as she often announced, was
clever at picking up things, and many of the objects with which she had
surrounded herself were undoubted trophies of her resource and
knowledge. But all the taste and skill in the world didn’t give one that
air of pervading splendour, as of the setting for a Russian ballet, in
which the red lacquer and the Chinese screens, the blacks and golds and
rich, dim whites were, like Rhoda herself, sunken with her customary air
of gloomy mirth in the deepest cushions and surpassingly dressed, merged
in the soft, unstressed, yet magnificent atmosphere. It was the
practical side of matters--the depth of good, dull Niel’s purse measured
against the depth of Rhoda’s atmosphere--that alarmed Mrs. Delafield,
rather than Rhoda herself and Rhoda’s friends, of whom poor Tim had so
distressingly written.
There were many suave and merry young men, mainly in khaki, and various
ladies, acute or languorous, who had the air of being as carefully
selected as the chairs and china. There were tea and cigarettes, and an
abundance of wonderful talk that showed no sign of mitigation on account
of her mid-Victorian presence; though, as Mrs. Delafield reflected,
musing on the young people about her, no one could say, except their
clever selves, how much mitigation there might not be. Like Rhoda, no
doubt, they felt her reality through her mid-Victorianism. Her small
black bonnet with its velvet strings, and her long, loose jacket trimmed
with fringe, would not restrain them beyond a certain point. Yet she
suspected that they had a point, and she wondered, though the question
did not alarm her, where it could be placed.
They talked, at all events, and she listened; at times she even smiled;
and since by no possibility could her smiles be taken as complicities,
she was willing that they should be taken as comprehensions. Rhoda’s
friends, though so young, were chill and arid, and the enthusiasms they
allowed themselves had the ring of provocation rather than of ardour.
Yet she did not dislike them; they were none of them like Mr. Dell;
and, though so withered by sophistication, they had at moments flashes
of an uncanny, almost an ingenuous wisdom.
The occasion had not alarmed her, and she had found but one moment
oppressive, that of the appearance--the displayal, as of a Chinese idol,
indeed, or a Pekinese spaniel (Rhoda had three of these)--of poor little
Jane Amoret. She rarely disliked her niece, even when feeling her most
naughty; but she found herself disliking her calculated maternity, with
its kisses, embraces and reiterated “darlings.” Jane Amoret had eyed her
gravely and, as gravely, had held out her arms to her nurse to be taken
back when the spectacle was over. Jane Amoret’s attire was quite as
strange as her mother’s drawing-room, and Rhoda had contrived to make
her look like a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley and a gorgeous,
dressed-up doll Madonna in a Spanish cathedral.
On returning to Tim, Mrs. Delafield found that she could not completely
reassure him, but she laid stress, knowing it would be, comparatively, a
comfort, on Rhoda’s extravagance, eliciting from him a groan of “I
know!--I know!--Poor Niel’s been writing to me about it!--Dances;
dinners; gowns. One would say she had no conscience at all--and at a
time like this!” But he went on, “That’s nothing, though. That can be
managed when Niel gets back--if he ever does, poor fellow!--and can put
his foot down on the spot. You didn’t see him, then? He wasn’t
there--the young man?”
Tim had never before spoken definitely of a young man.
“The young man?” she questioned. “There were a dozen of them. Of
course, she’ll have a special one: that’s part of the convention. Rhoda
may cultivate--like all the rest of them--every appearance of lawless
attachment; but you may be sure, dear Tim, that it’s only a pose, a
formula, like the painted lips and dyed hair, which doesn’t in the least
mean they are demi-mondaines.”
“Painted lips? Dyed hair? Demi-mondaines?” Tim had wanly echoed. “Do you
really mean, Isabel, that Rhoda paints and dyes?”
“Not her hair. It’s too lovely to be dyed. But her lips,--why, haven’t
you seen it?--ever since she was eighteen. It is all, as I say, a pose;
a formula. They are all afraid of nothing so much as of seeming
respectable. I imagine that there’s just as much marital virtue at large
in the world nowadays as when we were young.--Who is the young man?” she
had, nevertheless, ended.
“My dear, don’t ask me!” Tim had moaned, blanched and battered in his
invalid’s chair. (Why wouldn’t he come down and live with her? Why,
indeed, except that, since Frances’s death, he had felt that he must
stand by, in London, and watch over Rhoda.) “I only know what I’ve
heard. Amy has talked and talked. And everybody else is talking,
according to her.” Amy was Frances’s sister, a well-meaning, but
disturbing woman, with a large family of well-conducted, well-married,
unpainted, and unfashionable daughters. “She is here every day about it.
They are always together. He is always there. The poet--the new young
poet. He has a heart or a chest or a stomach--something that has sent
him home and that keeps him safe at Whitehall, while poor Niel fights in
France. Surely, Isabel, you’ve heard of Christopher Darley? Wasn’t he
there? Young. Younger than Rhoda. Black hair. Big eyes. Silent.”
Silent.--Yes, there had been, beside Jane Amoret, one silent person in
Rhoda’s drawing-room. And she had been aware of him constantly, though,
till now, unconsciously. Very young; very pale; aloof, near a window,
with an uncalculated aloofness. She reconstructed an impression that
became deeper the further she went into it. Thick backward locks that
had given his forehead a wind-blown look, and a gaze now and then
directed on herself, a gaze grave, withdrawing, yet scrutinizing, too.
“Yes; I think, now that you describe him, I must have seen him,” she
murmured; while a curious alarm mounted in her, an alarm that none of
Rhoda’s more characteristic circle had aroused. “He wasn’t living by a
formula of freedom,” she reflected. “And he wasn’t arid.” Aloud she
said, “He looked a nice young creature, I remember.”
“He writes horrible poems, Amy says; blasphemous. There they are. I
can’t understand them. He casts down everything; has no beliefs of any
kind. Nice? I should think that’s the last adjective that would describe
him.”
She had picked up the unobtrusive volume and found herself arrested; not
as she had been by the memory of the young man’s gaze, nor yet in the
manner that Tim’s account indicated; but still arrested. Very young--but
austere, dignified, and strange, genuinely and effortlessly strange. So
a young priest might have written, seeking in close-pressed metaphysical
analogies to find expression for spiritual passion. She stood, puzzled
and absorbed.
“No, it isn’t blasphemous,” she said presently. “And he has beliefs.
But surely, Tim dear, surely this young man can’t care for Rhoda.”
How could a young man who wrote like that about the mystic vision care
for Rhoda?
“Not care for Rhoda!” Tim’s voice had now the quaintest ring of paternal
resentment. “The most beautiful young woman in London! Why, he’s head
over heels in love with her. And the worst of it is that, from what Amy
sees and hears, she cares for him.”
“It’s curious,” Mrs. Delafield said, laying down the book. “I shouldn’t
have thought he’d care about beautiful young women.”
And now Tim’s letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had
gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in
her heart, as she worked and pondered, to wish that her dear Tim had
followed Frances before this catastrophe overtook him.
“Good heavens!” she heard herself muttering, “if only she’d been meaner,
more cowardly, and stayed and lied--as women of her kind are supposed to
do. If only she’d let him die in peace; he can’t have many years.”
But no: it had been done with _le beau geste_. Tim had known nothing,
and poor Niel, home for his first peace leave, had come to him,
bewildered and aghast, with the news. He had found a letter waiting for
him, sent from the country. Tim copied the letter for her:--