Mrs. Bradley and her daughter-in-law sat together in the drawing-room.
They sat opposite each other on the two chintz chesterfields placed at
right angles to the pleasantly blazing fire, the chintz curtains drawn
against a rainy evening. It was a long, low room, with panelled walls;
and, like Mrs. Bradley’s head, it had an air at once majestic,
decorated, and old-fashioned. It was a rather crowded room, with many
deep chairs and large couches, many tables with lamps and books and
photographs upon them, many porcelains, prints, and pots of growing
flowers. Mrs. Bradley, her tea-table before her, was in her evening
black silk; lace ruffles rose about her throat; she wore her accustomed
necklace of old enamel, blue, black, and white, set with small diamonds,
and the enamel locket that had within it Jack’s face on one side and his
father’s on the other; her white hands, moving gently among the teacups,
showed an ancient cluster of diamonds above the slender wedding-ring.
From time to time she lifted her eyes and smiled quietly over at her
daughter-in-law. It was the first time that she had really seen Dollie,
that is, in any sense that meant contemplative observation. Dollie had
spent her first week at Dorrington in bed, sodden with fatigue rather
than ill. “What you need,” Mrs. Bradley had said, “is to go to sleep for
a fortnight”; and Dollie had almost literally carried out the
prescription.
Stealing carefully into the darkened room, with its flowers and open
windows and steadily glowing fire, Mrs. Bradley had stood and looked for
long moments at all that she could see of her daughter-in-law,--a
flushed, almost babyish face lying on the pillow between thick golden
braids, sleeping so deeply, so unconsciously,--her sleep making her
mother-in-law think of a little boat gliding slowly yet steadily on and
on, between new shores; so that, when she was to awake and look about
her, it would be as if, with no bewilderment or readjustment, she found
herself transformed, a denizen of an altered world. That was what Mrs.
Bradley wanted, that Dollie should become an inmate of Dorrington with
as little effort or consciousness for any of them as possible, and the
drowsy days and nights of infantine slumbers seemed indeed to have
brought her very near.
She and Pickering, the admirable woman who filled so skilfully the
combined positions of lady’s maid and parlourmaid in her little
establishment, had braided Dollie’s thick tresses, one on either
side,--Mrs. Bradley laughing a little and both older women touched,
almost happy in their sense of something so young and helpless to take
care of. Pickering understood, nearly as well as Jack’s mother, that
Master Jack, as he had remained to her, had married very much beneath
him; but at this time of tragic issues and primitive values, she, nearly
as much as Jack’s mother, felt only the claim, the pathos of youth and
helplessness. It was as if they had a singularly appealing case of a
refugee to take care of; social and even moral appraisals were
inapplicable to such a case, and Mrs. Bradley felt that she had never so
admired Pickering as when seeing that for her, too, they were in
abeyance. It was a comfort to feel so fond of Pickering at a time when
one was in need of any comfort one could get; and to feel that,
creature of codes and discriminations as she was, to a degree that had
made her mistress sometimes think of her as a sort of Samurai of
service, a function rather than a person, she was even more
fundamentally a kind and Christian woman. Between them, cook
intelligently sustaining them from below and the housemaids helpful in
their degree, they fed and tended and nursed Dollie, and by that eighth
day she was more than ready to get up and go down and investigate her
new surroundings.
She sat there now, in the pretty tea-gown her mother-in-law had bought
for her, leaning back against her cushions, one arm lying along the back
of the couch and one foot in its patent-leather shoe, with its sparkling
buckle and alarming heel, thrusting forward a carefully arched instep.
The attitude made one realize, however completely tenderer
preoccupations held the foreground of one’s consciousness, how often and
successfully she must have sat to theatrical photographers. Her way of
smiling, too, very softly, yet with the effect of a calculated and
dazzling display of pearly teeth, was impersonal, and directed, as it
were, to the public _via_ the camera rather than to any individual
interlocutor. Mrs. Bradley even imagined, unversed as she was in the
methods of Dollie’s world, that of allurement in its conscious and
determined sense she was almost innocent. She placed herself, she
adjusted her arm and her foot, and she smiled gently; intention hardly
went further than that wish to look her best.
Pink and white and gold as she was, and draped there on the chesterfield
in a profusion of youth and a frivolity that was yet all passivity, she
made her mother-in-law think, and with a certain sinking of the heart,
of a Dorothy Perkins rose, a flower she had never cared for; and Dollie
carried on the analogy in the sense she gave that there were such
myriads more just like her. On almost every page of every illustrated
weekly paper, one saw the ingenuous, limpid eyes, the display of
eyelash, the lips, their outline emphasized by just that touch of rouge,
those copious waves of hair. Like the Dorothy Perkins roses on their
pergolas, so these pretty faces seemed--looped, draped, festooned--to
climb over all the available spaces of the modern press.
But this, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was to see Dollie with a dry, hard
eye, was to see her superficially, from the social rather than from the
human point of view. Under the photographic creature must lie the young,
young girl,--so young, so harmless that it would be very possible to
mould her, with all discretion, all tenderness, into some suitability as
Jack’s wife. Dollie, from the moment that she had found her, a sodden,
battered rose indeed, in the London lodging-house, had shown herself
grateful, even humble, and endlessly acquiescent. She had not shown
herself at all abashed or apologetic, and that had been a relief; had
counted for her, indeed, in her mother-in-law’s eyes, as a sort of
innocence, a sort of dignity. But if Dollie were contented with her new
mother-in-law, and very grateful to her, she was also contented with
herself; Mrs. Bradley had been aware of this at once; and she knew now
that if she were being carefully and commendingly watched while she
poured out the tea, this concentration did not imply unqualified
approval. Dollie was the type of young woman to whom she herself stood
as the type of the “perfect lady”; but with the appreciation went the
proviso of the sharp little London mind,--versed in the whole ritual of
smartness as it displayed itself at theatre or restaurant,--that she was
a rather dowdy one. She was a lady, perfect but not smart, while, at the
same time, the quality of her defect was, she imagined, a little
bewildering and therefore a little impressive. Actually to awe Dollie
and to make her shy, it would be necessary to be smart; but it was far
more pleasant and perhaps as efficacious merely to impress her, and it
was as well that Dollie should be impressed; for anything in the nature
of an advantage that she could recognize would make it easier to direct,
protect, and mould her.
She asked her a good many leisurely and unstressed questions on this
first evening, and drew Dollie to ask her others in return; and she saw
herself stooping thoughtfully over a flourishing young plant that yet
needed transplanting, softly moving the soil about its roots, softly
finding out if there were any very deep tap-root that would have to be
dealt with. But Dollie, so far as tastes and ideas went, hardly seemed
to have any roots at all; so few that it was a question if any change of
soil could affect a creature so shallow. She smiled, she was at ease;
she showed her complete assurance that a young lady so lavishly endowed
with all the most significant gifts, need not occupy herself with mental
adornments.
“You’re a great one for books, I see,” she commented, looking about the
room; “I suppose you do a great deal of reading down here to keep from
feeling too dull”; and she added that she herself, if there was
“nothing doing,” liked a good novel, especially if she had a box of
sweets to eat while she read it.
“You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow,” Mrs. Bradley told her, “with
or without the novel, as you like.”
And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain
lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully
hoping that “poor old Jack” wasn’t in those horrid trenches. “I think
war’s a wicked thing, don’t you, Mrs. Bradley?” she added.
When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her
mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely
the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack,
that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of
Jack’s mother. But she soon passed from the theme of Jack and his
danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano,
remarking that there was one thing she _could_ do. “Poor mother used to
always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could
pick out anything on the piano.” And placing herself, pressing down the
patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as
foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy
was equalled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with
alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether
the easy mastery of a music-hall _artiste_: “It’s a lovely thing--one of
my favourites. I’ll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is
nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart.” And,
whole-heartedly, indeed, she accompanied the melody by a passionate
humming.
The piano was Jack’s and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was
he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie,
after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day,--so many
and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut
herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the
front of the house and had the morning sun.
It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly
disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons, and when her
mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skilful mistress to
come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and
dulness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she
possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober
pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said,
had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest
sense of a privilege, a joy, unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that
Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments that meant all her
future and all Jack’s. The baby seemed already more hers than Dollie’s.
Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would
emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her
borders. The sight amused and surprised but hardly interested her, and
she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels that
Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banishing. And
sometimes, when the piano again resounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave her
borders and retreat to the hazel-copse, where, as she sat on the stone
bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running water,
hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie’s waltzes; and
where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could find
a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie,--the thick,
sweet, penetrating scent that was always to be indelibly associated in
her mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of growing
hopelessness.
In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and
then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie
had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so
unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to
write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no
hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write
hopefully, as every day hope grew less.
Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the
affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was
difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole
among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was
she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie
care about any of the things she cared about?
She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good
deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people
were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could
depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she
asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham
she had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if
others thought so they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees,
to make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighbourly
gatherings. She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow; anything
so feeble and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under
the little dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed
herself to be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs.
Bradley essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity,--as to
heels, as to scents, as to touches of rouge.
“Oh, but I’m as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!” Dollie
protested. “I can’t walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I’ve a
very high instep and it needs support.” She was genuinely amazed that
any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge
unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed
by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her
for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning
as she sobbed, “It’s nothing--really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I’m sure you
mean to be kind. Only--it’s rather quiet and lonely here. I’ve always
been used to so many people,--to having everything so bright and jolly.”
She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept
respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the
contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air
only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in
the pages of those same illustrated weeklies with which her
mother-in-law associated her, the face of some former companion. One of
these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. “She _is_ in
luck, Floss,” said Dollie. “We always thought it would come to that.
He’s been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.”
Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking
her “horrid”; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of
her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss
had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar’s office,
and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and
present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only
if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could
only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life
behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely
shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was
Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight
on her heart. She could never be of Jack’s life; yet here she was, in
it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by
hers,--in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.
And the contrast between what Jack’s life might have been and what it
now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Graham
came down to stay from a Saturday to Monday; Frances in her black, tired
and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend
knew, than dear Toppie’s death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed
cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much
tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most
charming of girls--but for Jack’s wretched stumble into “fairyland” last
summer, destined obviously to be his wife,--could any presence have
shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had
done for himself? She watched the two together that evening, Frances
with her thick crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry,
steady eyes, leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and
Dollie, poor Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness,
aware, swiftly and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type
that young men married when they did not “do for themselves.” There was
now no gulf of age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She
answered shortly, with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and,
getting up at last, she went to the piano and loudly played.
“He couldn’t have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,”
Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her
recognition of Jack’s plight, but she was staunch.
“I wouldn’t have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,”
said the mother. “If he comes back it will ruin his life.”
“No, no,” said Frances, looking at the flames. “Why should it? A man
doesn’t depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.”
“Yes. He has his career. A career isn’t a life.”
“Isn’t it?” The girl gazed down. “But it’s what so many people have to
put up with. And so many haven’t even a career.” Something came into her
voice and she turned from it quickly. “He’s crippled, in a sense, of
course. But you are here. He will have you to come back to always.”
“I shall soon be old, dear, and she will always be here. That’s
inevitable. Some day I shall have to leave her to Jack to bear with
alone.”
“She may become more of a companion.”
“No; no, she won’t.” The bitterness of the mother’s heart expressed
itself in the dry, light utterance. It was a comfort to express
bitterness, for once, to somebody.
“She is a harmless little thing,” Frances offered after a moment.
“Harmless?” Mrs. Bradley turned it over drily and lightly. “I can’t feel
her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep
her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie.
And then there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the
child, Frances.”
Frances understood that.
Dollie, as the winter wore on, kept remarkably well. She had felt it the
proper thing to allude to Jack and his danger; and so, now, she more and
more frequently felt it the proper thing to allude, humorously if with a
touch of melancholy, to “baby.” Her main interest in baby, Mrs. Bradley
felt, was an alarmed one. She was a good deal frightened, poor little
soul, and in need of constant reassurances; and it was when one need
only pet and pity Dollie that she was easier to deal with. Mrs. Bradley
tried to interest her in plans for the baby; what it should be named,
and how its hair should be done if it were a little girl,--for only on
this assumption could Dollie’s interest be at all vividly roused; and
Mrs. Bradley more than ever hoped for a boy when she found Dollie’s
idle yet stubborn thoughts fixed on the name of Gloria.
She was able to evade discussion of this point, and when the baby came,
fortunately and robustly, into the world on a fine March morning, she
could feel it as a minor but very real cause for thanksgiving that
Dollie need now never know what she thought of Gloria as a name. The
baby was a boy, and now that he was here Dollie seemed as well pleased
that he should be a commonplace Jack, and that there should be no
question of tying his hair with cockades of ribbon over each ear.
Smiling and rosy and languid, she lay in her charming room, not at all
more maternal--though she showed a bland satisfaction in her child and
noted that his eyes were just like Jack’s--yet subtly more wifely. Baby,
she no doubt felt, with the dim instinct that did duty for thought with
her, placed and rooted her and gave her final rights. She referred now
to Jack with the pensive but open affection of their shared complacency,
and made her mother-in-law think, as she lay there, of a soft and sleepy
and tenacious creeper, fixing tentacle after tentacle in the walls of
Jack’s house of life.
If only one could feel that she had furnished it with a treasure!
Gravely, with a sad fondness, the grandmother studied the little face,
so unfamiliar, for signs of Jack. She was a helplessly clear-sighted
woman, and remembrance was poignantly vivid in her of Jack’s face at a
week old. Already she loved the baby since its eyes, indubitably, were
his; but she could find no other trace of him. It was not a Bradley
baby; and in the dreamy, foreboding flickers of individuality that pass
uncannily across an infant’s features, her melancholy and steady
discernment could see only the Watson ancestry.
She was to do all she could for the baby; to save him, so far as might
be, from his Watson ancestry and to keep him, so far as might be, Jack’s
and hers. That was to be her task. But with all the moulding that could,
mercifully, be applied from the very beginning, she could not bring
herself to believe that this was ever to be a very significant human
being.
She sent Jack his wire: “A son. Dollie doing splendidly.” And she had
his answer: “Best thanks. Love to Dollie.” It was curious, indeed, this
strange new fact they had now, always, to deal with; this light little
“Dollie” that must be passed between them. The baby might have made Jack
happy, but it had not solved the problem of his future.