GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
‘In two words, you have amused yourself, my dear.’ Under cover of the
friendly twilight, Gaston Arbuthnot pressed his wife’s hand as it
rested, a little shyly, on his arm. ‘A good sign for the future. You
must enter into the world more, Dinah. You must cultivate this faculty
for being amused; I desire nothing better.’
Though fog-banks and disaster might lie in ambush about the Race of
Alderney, nothing could be tranquiller than the fair summer evening
here, on the coast of France.
After an excellent dinner, vraie cuisine Normande, served in the
quaint, red-tiled salle of the Hôtel Chateaubriand, the collected
yachting party were now progressing along the pleasant sweep of road
that leads to Luc. Luc alone, among this group of villages, has a
jetty, and off Luc the _Princess_ lay moored. Daylight’s last flicker
was dying from the sky. Already deep fissures of shade intersected
the white sand dunes bordering the shore. The sea lay motionless, a
vague iridescence far away, northward, the only foreboding of coming
change. Cassandra Tighe, a bold spot of colour in the gloaming, had
exchanged her dredging net for some amphibious structure of green gauze
and whalebone. She flitted hither and thither among the bushes that
skirted the path, moth-hunting. The younger members of the expedition,
in groups of two, loitered slowly along their way, for it was an hour
when girlish faces look their fairest, when men’s voices are apt to
soften, involuntarily!
Dinah Arbuthnot, after a good deal of strategy, had contrived not
merely to get possession of her husband, but to hold him, strongly
guarded, and at safe distance from the rest. Linda Thorne herself (and
Linda had, at will, a longer or a shorter sight than other people)
could scarce do more than guess at the outlines of the two figures.
The little lover-like fact that this sober couple, this Darby and Joan
of four years’ standing, walked arm in arm, could be known only to
themselves.
‘Yes, Gaston, I was amused at sea, for you were there. And I was
amused differently by Miss Bartrand. I wish you had been with us at La
Delivrande. It was the first time I ever went inside a Popish church,’
said Dinah, gravely. ‘And yet, Popish though it was, I could scarce
help saying my prayers as we stood before the altar. The tears came in
my eyes as I remembered--I mean as I looked at the heap of offerings,
and thought of the sad hearts that had brought their troubles there.’
‘Was the smell very detestable--a smell one could sketch? Had you
beggars? Had the beggars wounds? Of course, votive churches and such
things have to be done, in one’s youth. I am too old,’ said Mr.
Arbuthnot; ‘my digestion is too touchy for me to run the risk of
physical horrors of my own free will.’
‘I thought an artist should seek out every kind of experience.’
Gaston had so often insisted upon the duty of pursuing inspiration
among all sorts and conditions of men--still more of women--that the
remark from Dinah’s lips had a savour of mischief.
‘Every sort of agreeable experience, my dear child. The disgusting
is for the great masters. Mine is pocket art--a branch that the
critics discreetly label as decadent, although lucrative. Besides,’
said Gaston, ‘I have sold my soul to the dealers. And the dealers
have sold theirs, if they have any, to a puerility-loving public. An
honest manufacturer of paper weights and clock stands needs nothing
but prettiness,--I won’t say beauty,--the prettiness of a Parisian,
masquerading as a fisher-girl!’
‘Or of Parisian children dancing at an afternoon ball. Mrs. Thorne told
me about your meeting with some old student acquaintance, and how his
daughters led you away captive.’
‘Small tyrants! I had to dance four dances with each of them, and then
be told I was “un Monsieur très paresseux” for my reward. And so Mrs.
Thorne and you are becoming better friends,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot,
looking hard through the veil of twilight at his wife’s reluctant
face. ‘She is a dear good soul, is she not? So bright, so spontaneous!
Really, I think that is Mrs. Thorne’s crowning charm--her spontaneity.’
‘I am no friend of hers.’ Dinah’s voice had become cold. ‘I did not
like Mrs. Thorne at first. I dislike her now.’
‘Impossible, Dinah--impossible. A woman with your face should dislike
no created thing.’
‘I dislike her because her words sting even when they sound softest,
because she will never look at one straight. I dislike her,’ said
Dinah, feeling her cheeks burn with shame and indignation, ‘because she
calls you “Gaston” when she speaks of you.’
At this terrible climax Mr. Arbuthnot laughed, so heartily that the
quiet undulating sandhills echoed again. Far ahead Mrs. Linda might
perhaps have caught the ring of his voice, have marvelled what subject
people who had been married four mortal years could find to laugh about.
‘This is a black accusation. Happily, whatever her sins in my absence,
Mrs. Thorne does not call me “Gaston” to my face.’
Dinah was silent. Gaston’s assurances had never carried the same weight
with her since Saturday’s rose-show, the occasion when she learned of
midnight adjournments to Dr. Thorne’s house, and of the singing of
French songs after a certain mess dinner. Her own conscience was rigid.
To suppress a truth was, according to Dinah’s code, precisely the same
as to utter an untruth. She allowed no margin for her husband’s offhand
histories--as a woman of larger mind would possibly have done. She
could not see that carelessness, a quick imagination, and an intense
love of peace, were factors sufficiently strong to account for any
little inconsistencies that might now and again creep into Gaston
Arbuthnot’s domestic confidences.
‘Of that I cannot judge. I suppose I ought not to care what Mrs. Thorne
does or says in _my_ absence.’
‘Of course you ought not. The speech is worthy of your thorough
common-sense, Dinah.’
‘But Mrs. Thorne calls you “Gaston” to me, and I think it a very
wretched, unkind thing to do. I think it mean.’
‘You ought not to think of it at all. Artist people are called by the
first name that comes to hand.’
‘Mrs. Thorne is not an artist.’
‘She remembers me, in the old days when I knew Camors, as a budding
one.’
‘And she corrects herself with over-care. Having once said “Gaston,” it
would be better not to go back to “Mr. Arbuthnot.”’
‘Ah, there, my dear girl, you are too strong. If Linda Thorne
excuses she accuses herself, although I must confess I don’t see the
heinousness of her crime. You are becoming a casuist, Dinah.’
‘Am I? It seems to me that I am remaining what I always was.’
They walked on, after this, mutually taciturn. The interest seemed
to have gone from their talk. At last, just as they neared the first
lights of Luc village, Dinah’s fingers closed with significant
tightness on her husband’s arm.
‘I have an important word to say to you, Gaston. All through our walk I
have been wishing to bring it out, but I had not the courage.’
‘Some one else calls me by my Christian name, perhaps? Or are we only
to discuss more enormities of Linda Thorne’s?’
There was a threat of impatience in Gaston Arbuthnot’s voice. This
little running accompaniment of domesticity gave a quite new character,
he decided, to picnics, viewed as a means of social pleasure.
‘I was not thinking of Linda Thorne. I wanted to ask--Gaston, forgive
me--if you would keep nearer to me till we get back to Guernsey?’
‘_Nearer!_ Will not everybody be near everybody else on board the
steamer? Don’t, I beg, ask me to do anything absurd,’ he added, with
emphasis. ‘You have no idea how ready one’s best friends are to laugh
at one under given circumstances.’
‘But if you were just to stop at my side on board--I mean, so that no
one else could come near me.’
‘I will do nothing of the kind. You have no perception of the
ridiculous, Dinah. It is a want in your nature. A woman with the
slightest sense of humour would never wish her husband to be
demonstrative before an audience.’
‘Demonstrative?’
‘Jealous might be nearer the mark. A variety of reasons could be given
as to the miserable wretch’s motives in such a position. Jealous--of
little Rex Basire, probably!’
Gaston Arbuthnot laughed. This time his laughter had no very hearty
sound.
‘You must learn to be self-reliant,’ he went on presently. ‘Your first
lesson in worldliness was to be taken to-day, remember. Well, you must
go through with it! I was not especially anxious for you to join the
party.’
‘You were not. I came to please myself only.’
‘And you have pleased yourself and me. You are the most charming
woman present; and let me tell you these handsome Guernsey girls are
formidable rivals. I am proud of you. The opening page of the lesson is
a success. Don’t spoil it, Dinah, by picking a childish quarrel with me
now.’
‘I am proud of you!’ The unexpected praise sent a thrill through
Dinah’s heart.
Her petition to Gaston to keep near her was made in a very different
spirit to that of childish quarrelling. On the road back from La
Delivrande to Langrune it had come to pass that the walking party,
following a natural law, broke up into couples, and that Dinah,
unprotected by Marjorie or by Geff, found herself alone with Lord Rex
Basire. Being, for his age, a very thorough man of the world, Lord Rex
uttered no word at which Mrs. Arbuthnot, or any sensible woman, could
take umbrage. But his manner, his tones, his looks, were eloquent with
a feeling which, to her straightforward, rustic perception of things,
constituted an offence.
In the matter of admiration, Dinah, as I have said, was neither prude
nor Puritan. She knew the greatness of her gift. It was an everyday
experience to see heads turn wherever she walked upon the earth, and,
being a quite natural and single-hearted daughter of the common Mother,
such acknowledgment of her beauty had never yet been repugnant to her.
But the admiration covertly expressed by Rex Basire as they sauntered
slowly through chequered light and shadow back to Langrune, was of
another nature. Instinct warned Dinah that, if she were an unmarried
girl, she might well read on this foolish young man’s face and in his
manner signs of love.
And the warning, to Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife, was, in itself, a
humiliation.
She was unacquainted with the weapons by means of which differently
nurtured women parry equivocal attention. Save from Linda Thorne’s
lips to-night she had never heard the term ‘Platonic.’ Geoffrey was
her only friend. Of men like Lord Rex Basire she knew nothing. To gaze
and hint and sigh after this tormenting fashion might, she thought,
be a received habit among young officers of his rank. And the torment
would soon be over--if Gaston would only keep near her on board the
_Princess_! Once safely back in Guernsey, and Dinah felt she could
take absolute care of herself for the future. There should be no more
lingering afternoon visits, no more instruction in wool-work for Lord
Rex Basire. Of the lesson learnt to-day, one paragraph, at least, was
clear, should be reduced to practice before another twenty-four hours
went by. If Gaston would only keep near her in the interval!
But at Gaston’s praise she forgot everything. In the sweetness of that
unlooked-for avowal, ‘_I am proud of you_,’ all dread of the future,
all unpleasant recollections of the past, were swept clean away out of
Dinah’s brain. She would not risk the moment’s happiness by another
word. Her hand trembled, as though they had gone back to the old
romantic days at Lesser Cheriton, as it rested on Gaston’s arm.
‘Proud of me! Ah, my love,’ she whispered, ‘I hope that you and I will
never have a worse quarrel than this while we live.’
And when the pair of married sweethearts emerged into the glare of
lamps outside Luc Casino, Dinah’s face was radiant. Lord Rex, devotedly
attentive at the moment to pretty Rosie Verschoyle, saw, and felt
mystified. Decidedly, the Methodistic heart, like the Methodistic
conscience, was a book wherein Rex Basire might not read.
Linda Thorne approached at once; a tall figure, diaphanous, graceful,
in the lamplight. An Indian shawl was on Linda’s arm, one of those
exquisite dull-hued cachemires capable of investing the plainest woman
with ephemeral poetry. Her hand held a bunch of wild flowers; a long
trail of bindweed was twined, by fingers not unversed in millinery,
round her hat.
‘I hope you approve my ball attire?’ She asked this with a little
curtsey, her eyes addressing Gaston rather than Gaston’s wife. ‘Our
hosts tell us that we have all free entrance to the Casino, the result,
I suspect, of some liberal bribe to the Administration. Really, the
way our subalterns have preconcerted every detail of their picnic has
quite a Monte Christo flavour. You are engaged to me, remember, Mr.
Arbuthnot, for your first waltz.’
‘There will be neither first nor last, Mrs. Thorne. I exhausted the
very small dancing power that is in me on Hortense and Eulalie this
afternoon. I have not waltzed with a partner over seven for years,’
added Gaston. ‘My step dates from the days of Louis Philippe.’
Nevertheless he moved away from Dinah; he followed whithersoever Mrs.
Thorne might choose to lead.
She chose the Luc dunes--that broad belt of wind-blown sand, held
together by coarse grasses or sea thistles, which stretches the entire
length of the straggling village, and forms a welcome contrast to the
burnt-up turf terrace, with burnt-up geraniums, mildewed urns, and
peeling stucco goddesses of loftier watering-places.
This evening Luc was merry-making. There were fireworks, there was a
procession of torches--one of those ever-recurring processions by which
the hearts of Parisian children, big and little, are gladdened at the
seaside. Tiny figures marched, two and two, with Chinese lamps along
the village causeway. A band of small boys evoked martial melody from
drum and fife. Catherine-wheels rotated, rockets scurried up into
space. By and by an artfully constructed bonfire of colza stalks flared
up in the centre of the plage. Hand linked in hand the children danced
around it.
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés.’
Their shrill voices rang across the dunes. Gaston Arbuthnot could
descry his friends, Hortense and Eulalie, wildly circling around the
red flames with the rest. As he did so, he thought involuntarily of his
sketch-book, forgotten from the moment when the children laid violent
hands upon him, hours ago, until this instant.
‘Oh, I know! Your sketch-book is gone,’ cried Linda, as he felt in
pocket after pocket. ‘This is the Nemesis that falls on creatures of
impulse, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘But it is no joking matter. Every memorandum I have made during the
last month--gone!’
For once Gaston’s voice was tragic. He knew full well the market value
of those rough notes of his.
‘Every memorandum--from your first bit of Sarnian still life, an old
market-woman dozing, knitting-pins in hand, at her stall, down to
our fisher-girl of the Boulevards. Taking into account the studies
of Rahnee and of myself, there must be literally scores of valuable
jottings in that book.’
‘You are laughing at me? No, I divine! You have taken care of my book,
Mrs. Thorne, like the dear good----’
Fortunately, Gaston Arbuthnot broke off. Would Mrs. Thorne, would
any woman, still conscious of youth and charm, forgive the man who,
in exuberance of gratitude, should say to her, ‘like the dear good
creature I know you to be’?
‘I have taken care of your sketches,’ she answered, drawing the book
forth from beneath her cachemire. ‘I have done more. You ask sometimes
why I always carry a housewife in my pocket. You shall see the part
my housewife has played to-day. While I sat quietly with Robbie and
Mrs. Verschoyle (the young people, _very rightly_, enjoying themselves
elsewhere) I sewed all your ragged leaves together for you--thus.’
Linda Thorne was a notably clever worker. Perhaps the length of her
stitches, the breadth of her hems, were not always in accordance
with the orthodox feminine standard. She could effect things with
her needle--such as fine-drawing a rent in cloth, or improvising an
anchorage for a buttonless collar--which might be the despair of many a
mistress of the craft. She did her stitching with brains.
At an out-of-the way Indian station, so the legend ran, Mrs. Linda,
under stress of some unlooked-for gaiety, once manufactured an evening
waistcoat for her Robbie, and a pair of neat white satin boots for
herself at a sitting.
‘This is capital!’ cried Arbuthnot, joyfully recovering possession of
his sketches. ‘Each page hinged on with a splendid contrivance of red
silk to the dislocated remains of back. I have often wanted Dinah to
devise some sort of surgery for my veteran sketch-books. She must take
a lesson by this.’
‘Oh, no, no! Mrs. Arbuthnot is a far better needlewoman than I am.
When I sew anything tolerably,’ said Linda, ‘it is by accident. I
must have a motive for what I do. If I lived with--I mean, now, if
dear Robbie were an artist, it would be my passion to help him in all
the mechanical part of his work. If I were staying with you--and Mrs.
Arbuthnot--you would discover that I can, really, in my way be useful.
Michael Angelo himself must have had a poor obscure some one to grind
his paints for him.’
The pathetic image of Robbie as an artist made Gaston laugh inwardly.
He was not struck by the humour of hearing his own name coupled with
Michael Angelo’s. Nay, it might be well, he thought, if Dinah felt
this passion of unselfish helpfulness; well, if Dinah occasionally
gave him the kind of praise he got from Linda Thorne. For Dinah never
flattered. Her words of encouragement, unlettered country girl though
she was, were full of soundest criticism. There was no honey in them.
True love has its intuitions. Dinah knew that to feed this man on
constantly sugared words was to poison him. She would gladly have
seen in Gaston a noble discontent, gladly have listened to less frank
avowals that he had found his level, and got on pretty well, there!
Dinah, in short, was not a delightful acquaintance, but a steadfast,
loyal wife. And her praise, in common with that of other steadfast
wives, was apt to take the wholesome bitterness, the slightly sub-acid
flavour of a tonic.
‘Michael Angelo! My dear Mrs. Thorne, how much, how very much you
over-estimate me! If you spoke of me as imitating, from afar, the
little affected prettinesses of a Greuze, the compliment would be too
high.’
‘I fixed my standard for you, years ago, Mr. Arbuthnot. In the days
when you used to thank me--_me_, a governess--for playing dance-music
at Madame Benjamin’s, I had my convictions as to the place you would
one day occupy in Art.’
At other times--on the morning, for instance, when we first saw the
Arbuthnot trio in the garden of Miller’s Hotel--Linda remembered her
aspirations as to the place her friend would, one day, hold in the
House of Commons. But Gaston, if he noted the discrepancy, passed it
generously over. Hard for a man to believe a charming woman insincere
simply because she a little over-estimates his own genius!
‘Those light-hearted salad days! When I was with de Camors this
afternoon----’
‘The effusive little Frenchman who so nearly kissed you?’
‘As long as I forgot the children, and the twelve stone of mamma, and
the fact that de Camors himself is growing bald, I could have believed
he and I were six-and-thirty again. Six-and-thirty used to be the sum
of our joint ages.’
‘Do not talk of age. It is a subject about which a man may jest, while
a woman just breaks her heart.’
And Linda extended towards him her thin adroit hands, clasped in a pose
that she had studied, not unsuccessfully, as one of pained entreaty.
‘Women are younger, relatively, than men,’ answered Gaston, with the
sincerity of his sex. ‘When I was two-and-twenty, Dinah’s age, I knew
more of the world than I know now. Whereas my wife----’
‘Ah! your wife,’ interrupted Linda Thorne, the mask for a moment
dropping, the voice hardening. ‘I was thinking of living, palpitating,
flesh-and-blood women--inhabitants of a world where nothing is
faultless save over-faultless perfection. I--I mean,’ she went on,
rapidly recovering her self-control, ‘that at thirty (and I am past
thirty, alas! who looks at me under broad daylight but must see
it?)--at thirty a man is scarcely in the noonday sun--a woman already
feels the breath of evening. Her one chill hope is--to grow old
gracefully. Mrs. Arbuthnot is a girl still.’
‘And you--were a child when I first knew you in Paris,’ observed
Gaston, cleverly quitting the dangerous territory across whose borders
he has been betrayed. ‘How natural it seems, Mrs. Thorne, that we
should be walking together, you and I, in the old country, with the old
language round us again! Do you hear what the children are singing down
on the sands yonder?’
Linda set herself to listen, her expressive hands clasped, her face
bowed.
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés’--
shouted the shrill young Gallican voices in the distance.
Mr. Arbuthnot repeated the nursery rhyme as Murger wove it into his
delightful ‘Letter to a Cousin.’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.
Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
The lady at his side bowed her face lower, and believed, in all
integrity, that she was about to be overtaken by tears. Mrs. Linda, to
do her justice, was not of a lachrymose temperament. At the zenith of
their boy and girl flirtation, years ago, she had never shed a tear for
Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot; until he appeared with his beautiful wife, had,
indeed, clean forgotten her youthful weakness and his existence. But
she possessed considerable imagination, a gloss of surface sentiment.
She was also an insatiate novel reader, and had fallen into the habit
of perennial strong emotion, leading nowhere. She could realise how a
woman who had loved ought to feel, as she recalled past happiness with
the lover of the past--both married, and one, alas! fast nearing an age
when the most pathetic drama turns, without help from the burlesque
writers, into parody.
Linda Thorne believed herself to be on the brink of tears. Gaston
Arbuthnot believed so, too, and his heart could not but soften over
the poor thing’s impressibility. So widely different in effect are
tears shed in bitter earnest by one’s wife, and tears shed in pretty
make-believe by the wife of another man.
‘Do you hear, Mr. Arbuthnot--the dancers have changed their tune?’ She
asked this as the children, eddying like spirit-figures in an opera
scene round the fire, broke into a new measure, ‘_Marie, soak thy
bread in wine!_’--universal refrain of all French children from the
Pyrenees to the Channel. ‘“_Marie, soak thy bread!_” How that foolish
rhyme brings back the Benjamins’ salon, and my place behind the piano,
and you, Mr. Arbuthnot, handing round refreshments with the small
slave-driver, Moïse! “Marie, soak thy bread”.... Alas!’--Mrs. Thorne’s
utterances grew mystic--‘We women have to soak our bread in sour
enough wine, have we not?’
‘The Benjamin refreshments--sugar-water, orgeat,’ mused Gaston
Arbuthnot, keeping safely to the practical. ‘Yes, those were charming
evenings, especially when Papa Moïse did not sing. I remember, as
though ’twere yesterday, how my poor mother used to suspect Madame
Benjamin of putting bad almonds in the orgeat.’