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THE
VANITY GIRL
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE VANITY GIRL
POOR RELATIONS
SYLVIA & MICHAEL
PLASHERS MEAD
SYLVIA SCARLETT
Harper & Brothers
_Publishers_
THE VANITY GIRL
_By COMPTON MACKENZIE_
_Author of_ "POOR RELATIONS" "SYLVIA SCARLETT" "SYLVIA & MICHAEL"
[Illustration: colophon]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
THE VANITY GIRL
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1920
_TO FAY COMPTON_
_My dear Fay._
_For several reasons I am anxious to inscribe this book to you. Unless
somehow or other I safeguard you publicly, you are liable to be accused
by gossip of having written it, an accusation that both you and I might
be justified in resenting. Many people suppose that you wrote an earlier
novel of mine called_ Carnival, _which, were it true, would make you out
to be considerably older than you are, since I take it that even your
precocity, though it did run to marriage at the age of seventeen (or was
it sixteen?), would hardly have allowed you to write_ Carnival _at the
same age. One day, if Mr. Matheson Lang will allow me to use my own
title--at present he is using it for a play that he and somebody else
have adapted from an Italian original--you may act the part of Jenny
Pearl; but that is as near as you will ever get to her creation. Then
lately a young gentleman wrote to ask me if I would inform him whether
the generally accepted theory that you had written the first two
chapters of_ Sinister Street _had any existence in fact. So you see, I
do not exaggerate when I say that you are liable to be credited with_
The Vanity Girl. _Equally I should not like gossip to pretend that the
heroine if not drawn by you was certainly drawn from you; and though any
friend of yours or mine would laugh at such a suggestion, it is just as
well to kill the cacklers before they lay their eggs. But the chief
reason for inscribing this book to you is my desire to record, however
inadequately, what pleasure and pride, dear Fay, your charm, your
talents, your beauty, and success have given to_
_Your affectionate brother,_
_Compton Mackenzie._
_Capri_, August 4, 1919.
THE
VANITY GIRL
_The Vanity Girl_
CHAPTER I
I
West Kensington relies for romance more upon the eccentricities of
individual residents than upon any variety or suggestiveness in the
scenery of its streets, which indeed are mostly mere lines of uniform
gray or red houses drearily elongated by constriction. Yet the suburb is
too near to London for some relics of a former rusticity not to have
survived; and it is refreshing for the casual observer of a city's
growth to find here and there a row of old cottages, here and there a
Georgian house rising from sooty flower-gardens and shadowed by rusty
cedars, occasionally even an open space of building land, among the
weeds of which ragged hedgerows and patches of degenerate oats still
endure.
How Lonsdale Road, where the Caffyns lived, should have come to obtrude
itself upon the flimsy architecture of the neighborhood is not so
obvious. Situated near what used to be the western terminus of the old
brown-and-blue horse-omnibuses, it is a comparatively wide road of
detached, double-fronted, three-storied, square houses (so square that
after the rows of emaciated residences close by they seem positively
squat), built at least thirty years before anybody thought of following
the District Railway out here. Each front door is overhung by a heavy
portico, the stout pillars of which, painted over and over again
according to the purse and fancy of the owner, vary in color from shades
of glossy blue and green to drabs and buffs and dingy ivories. The
steps, set some ten yards back from the pavement, are flanked by
well-grown shrubs; the ground floor is partially below the level of the
street, but there are no areas, and only a side entrance marked
"Tradesmen" seems to acknowledge the existence of a more humble world.
There are thirty-six houses in Lonsdale Road, not one of which makes any
sharper claim for distinction than is conferred by the number plainly
marked upon the gas-lamp suspended from the ceiling of its portico. Here
are no "Bellevues" or "Ben Lomonds" to set the neighborhood off upon the
follies of competitive nomenclature; and although at the back of each
house a large oblong garden contains a much better selection of trees
and flowering shrubs than the average suburban garden, not even the mild
pretentiousness of an appropriate arboreal name is tolerated. Away from
the traffic of the main street with its toy dairies and dolls' shops,
its omnibuses and helter-skelter of insignificant pedestrians, Lonsdale
Road comes to an abrupt end before a tumble-down tarred fence that
guards some allotments beside the railway, on the other side of which a
high rampart with the outline of cumulus marks the reverse of the
panoramic boundary of Earl's Court Exhibition. The road is a
thoroughfare for hawkers, policemen, and lovers, because a narrow lane
follows the line of the tumble-down fence, leading on one side to the
hinterland of West Kensington railway station and on the other gradually
widening into a terrace of small red-brick houses, the outworks of
similar terraces beyond. Why anybody at least fifty years ago should
have built in what must then have been open country or nursery gardens
along the North End Road these thirty-six porticoed houses remains
inexplicable. Whoever it was may fairly be honored as one of the
founders of West Kensington, perhaps second only to the one who divined
that by getting it called West Kensington instead of East Fulham or
South Hammersmith, and so maintaining in the minds of the professional
classes a consciousness of their gentility, he was doing as much for the
British Empire as if he had exploited their physique in a new colony.
With whatever romance one might be tempted to embellish the origin of
Lonsdale Road on account of an architectural superiority to the streets
around, it would be fanciful merely for that to endow it with any
influence upon the character of the people who live there. Apart from a
house where the drains are bad, that has achieved the reputation of
being haunted, because the landlord prefers to let it stay empty rather
than spend money on putting the drains in order, Lonsdale Road possesses
as unromantic a lot of residences as the most banal of West Kensington
streets. The nearest approach to a scandal is the way human beings and
cats go courting in the lane at the end; but since the former do not
live in Lonsdale Road and the latter are not amenable to any ethical
code administered by the police, the residents do not feel the burden of
a moral responsibility for their behavior.
Such a dignified road within seven minutes of the railway station had in
the year 1881 made a strong appeal to Mr. Gilbert Caffyn, who, having
just been appointed assistant secretary to the Church of England Purity
Society at the early age of twenty-six, with a salary of L150 a year,
was emboldened by his father's death and the inheritance of another L200
a year in brewery shares to persuade Miss Charlotte Doyle that their
marriage was immediately feasible. Mr. Caffyn had been all the more
anxious to press for a happy conclusion of a two years' engagement
because Mrs. Doyle was showing every sign of imminent decease, an event
which would eliminate a traditionally unsatisfactory relationship and
enrich her daughter with L300 a year of her own. Mr. Caffyn therefore
sold a quarter of his shares, purchased a ninety-nine years' lease of
17 Lonsdale Road, the last house on the right-hand side away from the
growing traffic of West Kensington, and got married. If No. 17 was
nearest the railway, it was also rather larger than the other houses, an
important consideration for the assistant secretary of the Church of
England Purity Society, who was bound to expect at least as many
children as a clergyman. Still, for all its extra windows, it was not a
very large house; and when in the year 1902 Mr. Caffyn, now secretary of
the Church of England Purity Society, with a salary of L400 a year,
looked at his wife, his nine children, his two servants, and himself, he
wondered how they all managed to squeeze in. He hoped that his wife, who
had been mercifully fallow for seven years, would not have any more
children, though it might almost be easier to have more children than to
provide for the rapid growing up of those he had already. Why, his
eldest son Roland was twenty. The question of his moving into cheap
rooms to suit his position as the earner of a guinea a week at a branch
bank had been mooted several times already, and Mr. Caffyn had been
compelled to turn his study (which he never used) into a bedroom for him
and his brother Cecil, now a lanky schoolboy of fifteen, rather than
expose himself to the likelihood of having to supplement the bank
clerk's salary from his own. Then there was Norah, who was eighteen ...
but at this moment Mr. Caffyn realized that he had only eight minutes to
catch his train up to Blackfriars, and the problem of Norah was put
aside. It was a hot morning in late September, and he had long ceased to
enjoy running to catch a train.
The departure of the head of the house shortly after his eldest son was
followed by Cecil's hulking off to St. James's with half a dozen books
under his arm, then by Agnes's and Edna's chattering down the road like
a pair of wagtails to their school, and last of all by Vincent's
apprehensive scamper to his school. In comparison with the noise during
breakfast, the house was quiet; but Dorothy, the second girl, was
fussing in the pantry, and Mrs. Caffyn was fussing in the dining-room,
while Gladys and Marjorie, two very pretty children of eight and seven,
were reiterating appeals to be allowed to play in the front garden. All
these noises, added to the noises made by the servants about their
household duties, seemed an indication to Norah Caffyn that she ought to
take advantage of such glorious weather to wash her hair. She withdrew
to the room shared with Dorothy and, having promised her mother to keep
an eye on the children, devoted all her attention to herself. She set
about the business of washing her hair with the efficiency she applied
to everything personal; it used to annoy her second sister that, while
she showed herself so practical in self-adornment, she would always be
so wantonly obtuse about household affairs.
"I believe you make muddles on purpose," her sister used to declare.
"I don't want to be domestic, if that's what you mean," Norah would
reply.
"Wasting your time always in front of a glass!"
"Sour grapes, my dear! If your hair waved like mine you'd look at
yourself often enough."
But this morning Dorothy was making a cake, and Norah was able to linger
affectionately over the shampoo, safe from her jealous sneers. When she
had dried away with a towel enough of the unbecoming lankness she went
over to the open window to recapture from the rich September sun the
gold that should flash among her fawn-soft hair. Down below among the
laurels and privets of the front garden her two youngest sisters were
engaged upon some grubby and laborious task which, though they looked
like two fat white rabbits, did not involve, so far as Norah could see,
without leaning out of the window, any actual burrowing; and she was
much too pleasantly occupied with her own thoughts to take the risk of
having to interfere. She had propped against the frame of the wide-open
window a looking-glass in which she was admiring herself; but the mirror
was not enough, and she often glanced over with a toss of her head to
the houses opposite, whence the retired colonel in No. 18 or the young
heir of No. 16 might perhaps be able to admire her, too. But Norah was
not only occupied in contemplating the beauty of her light-brown hair;
she was equally engaged with her heart's desire. For the ninth time in
two years she was deep in love, this time so deep indeed that she was
trying to bring her mind to bear seriously upon the future and the
problem of convincing her father that the affection she had for Wilfred
Curlew was something far beyond the capacity of a schoolgirl presented
itself anew for urgent solution. Yesterday, when her suitor had joined
the family in the dining-room after supper, her father had looked at him
with an expression of most discouraging surprise; if he should visit
them again to-night, as he probably would, her father might pass from
discouraging glances to disagreeable remarks, and might even attempt,
when Wilfred was gone, to declare positively that he visited Lonsdale
Road too often. Intolerable though it was that she at eighteen should
still be exposed to the caprice of paternal taboos, it was obvious that
until she made the effort to cut herself free from these antiquated
leading-strings she should remain in subjection.
Norah regarded the not very costly engagement-ring of intertwined
pansies bedewed with diminutive diamonds. In her own room this ring
always adorned the third finger of her left hand, and while she was
about the house during the day the third finger of her right hand; but
when her father came back from the city it had to be concealed, with old
letters and dance programs and moldering flowers, in a basket of girlish
keepsakes, the key of which was continually being left on her
dressing-table and causing her moments of acute anxiety in the middle
of supper. If it was not a valuable ring, it was much the prettiest she
had ever possessed, and it seemed to Norah monstrous that a father
should have the power to banish such a token of seniority from the
admiration of the world. What would happen if after supper to-night she
announced her engagement? Some time or other in the future of family
events one of the daughters would have to announce her engagement, and
who more suitable than herself, the eldest daughter? Was there, after
all, so much to be afraid of in her father? Was not this tradition of
his fierceness sedulously maintained by her mother for her own
protection? When she looked back at the past, Norah could see plainly
enough how all these years the mother had hoodwinked her children into
respecting the head of the family. He might not be conspicuously less
worthy of reverence than the fathers of many other families she knew,
but he was certainly not conspicuously more worthy of it. The romantic
devotion their mother exacted for him might have been accorded to a
parent who resembled George Alexander or Lewis Waller! But as he
was--rather short than tall (he was the same height as herself), fussy
(the daily paper must remain folded all day while he was at the office,
so that he could be helped first to the news as he was helped first to
everything else), mean (how could she possibly dress herself on an
allowance of L6 5s. a quarter?)--such a parent was not entitled to
dispose of his daughter; a daughter was not a newspaper to be kept
folded up for his gratification.
"For I am beautiful," she assured her reflection. "It's not conceit on
my part. Even my girl friends admit that I'm beautiful--yes, beautiful,
not just pretty. Father ought to be jolly grateful to have such a
beautiful daughter. I'm sure _he_ has no right to expect beautiful
children."
A figure moved like a shadow in the depths of one of the rooms in the
house opposite, and Norah leaned a little farther out of the window to
catch more sunbeams for her hair; but when the figure came into full
view she was disgusted to find it was only the servant, who flapped a
duster and withdrew without a glance at herself. "If father persists in
keeping me hidden away in West Kensington," she grumbled, "he can't
expect me to marry a duke. No, I'm eighteen, and I'll marry Wilfred--at
least I'll marry him when he can afford to be married, but meanwhile I
_will_ be engaged. I'm tired of all this deception." Norah was pondering
the virtue of frankness, when she heard a step behind her and, turning
round, saw her mother's wonted expression of anxiety and mild
disapproval.
"Oh well," said Norah, quickly, to anticipate the reproach on her lips,
"this is the only place I can dry my hair. And, mother, I can't wait any
longer to be engaged to Wilfred. I'm going to have it out with father
to-night."
Mrs. Caffyn looked frightened, which was what Norah intended, for she
felt in no mood to argue the propriety of sitting at an open window with
her hair down, and had deliberately introduced the larger issue.
"My dear child, I hope you will do nothing of the kind. Father has been
very worried during the last month by that horrid theater advertisement
which upset Canon Wilbraham so much, and he won't be at all in the right
mood."
Norah sighed patiently, avoided pouting, because she had been warned by
a girl friend whose opinion she valued against spoiling the shape of her
mouth, and with a shrug of her shoulders turned away and went on
brushing her hair.
"My dear child," Mrs. Caffyn began, deprecatingly.
"Oh well, I can't sit in any other room! Besides, the kids are playing
down below, and I can't keep an eye on them from anywhere else as well
as I can from here."
"Playing in the front garden?" repeated Mrs. Caffyn, anxiously.
Anything positive done by any of her children always made her anxious,
and she hurried across to the window to call down to them. The two
little girls had managed to smear themselves from head to foot with
grimy garden-mold, and most unreasonably Mrs. Caffyn could not see that
their grubbiness was of no importance compared with the question of
whether Norah's hair was not always exactly the color of mignonette
buds. She began to admonish them from the window, and they defended
themselves against her reproaches by calling upon their eldest sister to
testify that what they had done they had done with her acquiescence,
since she had not uttered a word against their behavior. Norah declared
that she could not possibly go down-stairs without undoing all the good
of her shampoo, and in the end Mrs. Caffyn, after ringing ineffectually
for her second daughter or one of the servants, had to go down herself
and rescue Gladys and Marjorie from the temptations of the front garden.
"Thank Heaven for a little peace," sighed Norah to herself. She sat
there in a delicious paradise of self-esteem and, looking at herself in
the glass, was so much thrilled in the contemplation of her own beauty
that she forgot all about her engagement, all about the lack of
spectators, all about everything except the way her features conformed
to what in women she most admired. She thought compassionately of her
mother's faded fairness, and wondered with a frown of esthetic concern
why her mother's face was so downy. If her own chin began to show signs
of fluffing over like that, she would spend her last halfpenny on
removing hairs that actually in some lights glistened like a smear of
honey; luckily there was nothing in her own face that she wanted to
change. Her mother must have been pretty once, but never more than
pretty, because she had blue eyes. How glad she was that with her light
hair went deep brown eyes instead of commonplace blue eyes, and that
her mouth instead of being rather full and indefinite was a firm bow
the beauty of which did not depend upon the freshness of youth. Not that
she need fear even the far-off formidable thirties with such a
complexion and such teeth. Apart from superfluous hairs her mother's
complexion was still good, and even her father had white teeth. Her own
nose, straight and small, was neither so straight nor so small as to be
insipid, and her chin, tapering exquisitely, was cleft, not dimpled.
Dimples seemed to Norah vulgar, and she could not imagine why they were
ever considered worthy of admiration. No, with all her perfection of
color and form she was mercifully free from the least suggestion of
"dolliness"; she was too tall, and had much too good a figure ever to
run any risk of that.
"I'm really more beautiful even than I thought, now that I'm looking at
myself very critically. And, of course, I shall get more beautiful,
especially when I've found out what way my hair suits me best. I shall
make all sorts of experiments with it. There's bound to be one way that
suits me better than others, if only it isn't too unfashionable. I
suppose father hopes secretly that I shall make a brilliant marriage,
because even he must realize that I am exceptionally beautiful."
She played condescendingly with the notion of being able to announce
that she was engaged to a viscount, and imagined with what awe the
family would receive the news.
"However, that's my affair," she decided. "It's not likely father will
bring back a viscount to supper. Besides, I'm not mercenary, and if I
choose to love a poor man I will. My looks were given to me, not to
father, and if he thinks he's going to get the benefit of them he's made
a great mistake."
Norah's meditations were suddenly interrupted by the entrance of her
sister Dorothy, a dark, pleasant, practical girl of sixteen, who was
already so much interested in household affairs that Norah feared her
indifference to dress was due to something more than immaturity, was
indeed the outcome of an ineradicable propensity toward dowdiness.
"I wish you wouldn't burst into rooms like that," she protested,
crossly.
But Dorothy only hummed round the room in search of what she was looking
for, and paid no more attention to her elder sister than a bee would
have done.
"And if you've got to come up-stairs to our room when you're in the
middle of cooking," Norah went on, "you might at least wipe your hands
and your arms first. You're covering everything with flour," she
grumbled.
"That's better than covering it with powder," retorted Dorothy.
"What a silly remark!"
"Is it, my dear? Sorry the cap fits so well."
Norah turned away from this obtrusive sister in disdain, asking herself
for perhaps the thousandth time what purpose in life she was possibly
intended to serve. Apart from the fact that she was dark and distinctly
not even good-looking, there seemed no excuse for Dorothy's existence,
and Norah made up her mind that she would not bother any more about
trying to make her dress with good taste; it simply was not worth while.
"Eureka!" cried Dorothy, triumphantly waving an egg-beater.
"What a disgusting thing to leave in a bedroom!" Norah exclaimed.
Her sister courtesied exasperatingly in the doorway for answer, and
before Norah could say another word was charging down the stairs three
at a time in a series of diminishing thuds.
Norah turned back, with a shudder for her sister's savagery, to the
contemplation of her own hair. In a revulsion against the indecency of
family life she resolved firmly that, whatever the fuss, she would be
engaged to Wilfred Curlew immediately, and that Wilfred himself must at
all costs quickly accumulate enough money to enable her to marry him and
escape from this den of sisters and brothers and parents.
"If father had only one child, or perhaps two, he might be entitled to
interference with our private lives; but when he's got nine, he must
expect us to look after ourselves. It's bad enough now when Cecil,
Agnes, Edna, and Vincent are all at school and out of the way, at any
rate for some of the time, but what will it be like in a few years?"
Norah shrank from the prospect of that overpopulated future for which
the temporary emptiness of Lonsdale Road was no consolation, and,
removing the mirror from the window-sill, she sat down at her
dressing-table and devoted herself to the adjustment of the arcuated pad
of mock hair that was an indispensable adjunct to the pompadour style
then in vogue.
Norah had just succeeded in achieving what was hitherto her most
successful effort with the pompadour when she heard somebody whistling
for her from the pavement; going to the window, she saw that it was her
friend, Lily Haden, whom she had known and hated at school two years
ago, but whom now, by one of those unaccountably abrupt changes of
feminine predilection, she liked very much. The new intimacy had only
lately been begotten out of a chance rencounter, and perhaps it would
never have been born if Roland, her eldest brother, had not condemned
Lily from the altitude of his twenty-year-old priggishness and found in
Dorothy a supporter of his point of view. That the brother and sister on
either side of her should be hostile to a friend of hers was enough to
make Norah fond of Lily, who belonged to a type of ethereal blonde that
she hoped did not compete too successfully with herself. Occasionally,
at the beginning of the new friendship, Norah was assailed by doubts
about this, which intensified her prejudice against blue eyes, not to
mention excessive slimness and immoderate length of neck. However,
though Lily was not really at all interesting, it was impossible to deny
that she was something more than pretty, and when, after a few carefully
observed walks, Norah discovered that the percentage of people who
looked twice at herself exceeded the percentage of those who looked
twice at Lily, she was almost inclined to admit that Lily was beautiful.
Quite sincerely, therefore, she was able to call down that she was
awfully glad to see her friend; quite honestly, too, she was able to
admire her standing there on the sunny pavement below.
The fine autumn weather had allowed the young women of West Kensington
to prolong their summery charms with brightly tinted dresses, and in all
the dull decades of their existence the houses of Lonsdale Road, even in
their first lilac-scented May, had perhaps never beheld a truer picture
of spring than this autumnal picture now before them of that tall, slim
girl in her linen dress of powder-blue swaying gently as a fountain is
swayed by the wind, and above her, framed by dingy bricks that
intensified the brilliance of the subject, that other girl in a kimono
tea-rose hued from many washings, herself like a tea-rose of exquisite
color and form. Yet Mrs. Caffyn, when she hurried into Norah's room,
could deduce no more from this rebirth of spring in autumn than a cause
for the critical stares of neighbors, and begged her either to invite
her friend indoors or to come away from the window.
"I wanted to ask Lily to lunch," said Norah, fretfully.
Mrs. Caffyn was in despair at the notion.
"You have plenty of time to talk to her. It's not yet twelve o'clock,"
she urged, "and with the children coming home from school and having to
be got off again it _is_ so difficult to manage with extra people at
meals."
"Everything seems difficult to manage in this house."
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you must try to think of other people
a little."
"It would be difficult to think of anything else in Lonsdale Road,
mother dear. Lily," she called out from the window, "come up and talk to
me before the animals come roaring home to be fed."
"Norah dear, I'd rather you didn't refer to your brothers and sisters
like that," Mrs. Caffyn rebuked, with an attempt at authority that only
made her daughter laugh. It may not have been a pleasant laugh to hear,
and Mrs. Caffyn may have been right to leave the room with a shake of
the head; but Norah's teeth were so white and regular that it was a
delightful laugh to look at, and Norah was so intent on watching its
effect in the glass that she did not notice her mother had gone away in
vexation. Presently she and Lily were deep in the discussion of
pompadour pads, so enthralling a subject that when Norah wanted to talk
about her engagement it was nearly dinner-time, and she felt more than
ever the injustice of not being able to invite her friend to the family
meal.
"I must talk to you about Wilfred," she said. "We must have a long talk,
because I'm determined to have it settled."
At that moment, with swinging of satchels and banging of doors and much
noisy laughter, Agnes and Edna, getting on, respectively, for thirteen
and fourteen, arrived back from the school that not so long ago Norah
and Lily had themselves attended.
"But it's impossible to talk now," grumbled Norah; and as if to
accentuate the truth of this remark her brother Vincent, aged ten, came
tearing down the road, dribbling a tin can before him and intoxicated
with the news of having been chosen to play half-back for his class. In
another two years, he boasted, he would be in the Eleven.
"Why don't you come round to Shelley Mansions this evening?" Lily
suggested. "We've invited some friends in."
One of the stipulations made about Norah's friendship with Lily had been
that she should never visit the home of her friend, about whose mother
all sorts of queer stories were current in West Kensington. To challenge
family opinion on this point seemed to her an excellent preliminary to
challenging it more severely by insisting on being openly engaged to
Wilfred Curlew. She hesitated for a moment, and then announced that she
would come.
"To supper?" Lily asked.
After another moment's hesitation Norah promised firmly that she would,
and her friend hurried away just as Cecil, a loutish boy with sleeves
and trousers much too short for him, slouched back from St. James's. The
house which a little while ago had been gently murmurous with that
absorbing conversation about pompadour pads now reverberated with the
discordant cries of a large family; an overpowering smell of boiled
mutton and caper sauce ousted the perfumes from Norah's room; her eyes
flashed with resentment, and she went down-stairs to take her place at
table.
II
If Norah had been a journalist like her suitor, Wilfred Curlew, she
would have described the resolution she made on that September morning
as an epoch-making resolution, for since the effect of it was rapidly
and firmly to set her on the path of independence it certainly deserved
one of the great antediluvian epithets.
Some months ago the Hadens had moved from their house in Trelawney Road
because the landlord was so disobliging--as a matter of fact, he was
unwilling to wait any longer for the arrears of rent--and they were now
inhabiting Shelley Mansions, a gaunt block of flats built on the
frontier of West Kensington to withstand the vulgar hordes of Fulham,
and as such considered the ultimate outpost of gentility. Most of the
tenants, indeed, like the Foreign Legion, were recruited from people who
found that their native land was barred to them for various reasons; but
if Shelley Mansions lacked the conveniences of civilized flat-life, such
as lifts and hall-porters, they possessed one great convenience that was
peculiar in West Kensington--nobody bothered about his neighbor's
business. Mrs. Haden's elder daughter, Doris, was no longer at home,
having recently gone on the stage and almost immediately afterward
married; and the small flat, with two empty spare rooms so useful for
boxes, was comparatively much larger than the Caffyns' house in Lonsdale
Road, the respectability and solid charms of which were spoiled by
overcrowding.
Mr. Haden was supposed to be in Burma; but people in the secure heart of
West Kensington used to say that Mr. Haden had never existed, a topic
that Norah remembered being debated at school, to the great perplexity
of the younger girls, who could not imagine how, if there was no Mr.
Haden, there could possibly be a Doris and Lily Haden. Nowadays, with
years of added knowledge, Norah would have liked to ask her friend more
particularly about her absent father; but she was of a cautious
temperament, and decided it was easier to accept the Oriental interior
of the Shelley Mansions drawing-room as evidence of the truth of the
Burmese legend. Her instinct was always against too much intimacy with
anybody, and she rather dreaded the responsibility of a secret that
might interfere with the freedom of her relations with Lily. Whatever
the origins of the household, she decided it was a much more amusing
household than the one in Lonsdale Road, and if No. 17 could have
achieved the same atmosphere by banishing Mr. Caffyn to Burma, Norah
would willingly have packed him off by the next boat.
Mrs. Haden had a loud voice, an effusive manner, and a complexion like
a field of clover seen from the window of a passing train. Her coiffure
resembled in shape and texture a tinned pineapple; it was, too, almost
the same color, probably on account of experimenting with henna on top
of peroxide. Norah's inclination to be shocked at her hostess's
appearance was mitigated by the pleasure it gave her in demonstrating
that Lily's really golden hair was not more likely to prove permanent.
Mrs. Haden earned her living by teaching elocution and by reciting.
These recitations were mostly interruptions to the conversation of
afternoon parties in private houses; but once a year at the Bijou
Theater, Notting Hill, she gave a grand performance advertised in the
press, when her own recitations were supplemented by a couple of one-act
plays never acted before or since, for the production of which some
moderately well-known professional friends used to give their services
free in order to help Mrs. Haden and the authors. Notwithstanding her
energy, she found it very hard to make both ends meet. Norah distinctly
remembered that Doris and Lily Haden had left school on account of
unpaid fees, and some of the objections raised now to her friendship
with Lily were due to Mrs. Caffyn's knowledge that the tradesmen of West
Kensington would not allow even a week's credit to the residents of
Shelley Mansions. If Mrs. Haden could have overcome their prejudice, her
hospitality would doubtless have been illimitable; with all the
difficulties they made, it was extensive enough, and she need not have
bothered to consecrate a special day to it. But perhaps it pleased her
to think that she owned one of the days of the week, for she used to
refer to the fame of her Thursdays with as much pride as if they were
family jewels.
It was to one of these enslaved Thursdays that Lily had invited Norah,
who at first sat shyly back in a wicker chair within the shade of a
palm, afraid, so fiercely did Mrs. Haden fix her during a recitation of
"Jack Barrett Went to Quetta," that the creakings of her chair were
irritating the reciter. Gradually the general atmosphere of freedom and
jollity communicated itself to the strange guest, and when the room was
so full of tobacco smoke that it was impossible for anybody to recite or
to sing or to dance without being almost asphyxiated, she had no qualms
about obeying Mrs. Haden's deafening proclamation that everybody must
stay to supper. A young man with a long nose, a long neck, an
extravagantly V-shaped waistcoat like a medieval doublet, and a skin
like a Blue Dorset cheese attached himself to Norah and advised her to
sit close to him because he knew his way about the flat. Presumably the
advantage of knowing your way about the flat was that you sat still
while other people waited on you, and that you obtained second helpings
from dishes that did not go round once. Norah seldom resisted an
invitation that enabled her to keep quiet while others worked, not
because she was lazy, but because rushing about was inclined to heighten
her complexion unbecomingly; moreover, since the young man in the
V-shaped waistcoat was enough like her notion of a distinguished actor
to rouse a mild interest in him, and not sufficiently unlike a gentleman
to destroy that interest, she was ready to listen to the advice he was
anxious to give her about all sorts of things, but chiefly about the
stage.
"Are you studying with Mrs. Haden?" he asked; and when Norah shook her
head he turned to her gravely and said: "Oh, but you ought, you know.
They may tell you she's a bit old-fashioned, but don't you believe them.
Pearl Haden knows her job in and out, and if you've got any talent
she'll produce it. Look at me. I was going out with Ma Huntley this
autumn as her second walking gentleman, but she wouldn't offer more than
two ten, and, as I told her, I really didn't feel called upon to accept
less than three. After all, I can always get seven by waiting, and I
didn't see why Ma should have me for two ten, especially as she expected
me to find my own wigs and ruffles. No, you take my advice and study
with Pearl Haden."
"You really recommend her, do you?" asked Norah, condescendingly.
She had never until that moment thought of going on the stage or of
taking lessons in elocution from anybody, but the idea of being able to
patronize the mother of a friend appealed to her, and, though she was a
little doubtful of the way her brothers and sisters would accept her
rendering of "Jack Barrett Went to Quetta," she supposed that Wilfred
would admire it. One of the charms of being engaged was the security of
admiration it provided.
"Though, of course," continued the gentleman in the V-shaped waistcoat,
"with your appearance you oughtn't to have to bother much about anything
else."
This was very gratifying to Norah; even if there should be trouble when
she got home, the evening would have been worth while for this assurance
that her looks were capable of making an impression upon artistic
society.
"You really think I ought to go on the stage?" she asked, assuming the
manner of a person who for a long while has been trying to make up her
mind on this very point.
"Everybody ought to go on the stage," the gentleman in the V-shaped
waistcoat enthusiastically announced; "at least, of course, not
everybody, but certainly everybody who is obviously cut out for the
profession like you. But don't be in a hurry to make up your mind," he
added. "You're very young." He must have been nearly twenty-five
himself. "There's no need to hurry. I was driven to it."
Norah appeared interested and sympathetic. She really was rather
interested, because the idea had passed through her mind that Wilfred
might go on the stage. If this young man could earn seven pounds a week,
surely Wilfred, who was much better looking, could earn ten pounds a
week, in which case they might be married at once.
"What drove you to it?" she asked, and then blushed in confusion; being
driven to anything was associated in Norah's mind with drink, and she
thought the young man might be embarrassed by her question.
"Oh, a woman!" he replied, in a lofty tone. "But don't let's talk about
things that are past and over. Let's eat and drink to-day, for
to-morrow--Did you ever read Omar Khayyam? A man in our crowd introduced
me to him last year. I tell you, after Omar Khayyam Kipling isn't in it.
I suppose you read a good deal of poetry?"
"A good deal," Norah admitted. "At least, I used to read a good deal."
This was true; she had read several volumes at school under the menaces
of the literature mistress.
"Well, if I may offer you some advice," said the young man, "go on
reading poetry. I may as well confess right out that poetry has been my
salvation. Have some more of this shape? It's a little soft, but the
flavor's excellent." After supper Norah took Lily aside and told her she
must go home at once.
"But, Norah," protested the daughter of the flat, without being able to
conceal a slight inflection of scorn, "the evening's only just
beginning. Lots of people come in after supper always."
Norah resented Lily's tone of superiority; but inasmuch as this was her
first experiment in open defiance, she decided not to go too far this
time, especially as she was not quite sure how far her father's
unreasonableness might not extend.
"Cyril Vavasour will see you home," said Lily. "He's awfully gone on
you. He told me you were one of the most beautiful girls he'd ever met."
Norah could not help feeling flattered by such a testimonial from one
whose experience among women had evidently been immense, and though she
might have expected a superlative without qualification from somebody
who met her in a West Kensington drawing-room, she realized that she
must expect a slight qualification from a world-wanderer like Mr.
Vavasour. A few minutes later Norah and her appreciative new
acquaintance descended the echoing steps of Shelley Mansions and were
soon safe from any suggestion of Fulham in the landscape and walking
slowly through the familiar streets of West Kensington, which in the
autumnal mistiness looked grave and imposing. The sky was clear above
them, and a fat, yellow moon was rolling along behind a battlement of
chimney-tops.
"O moon of my delight who know'st no wane!" quoted Mr. Vavasour, in a
devout apostrophe.
Perhaps it was because he imagined himself in a Persian garden much
farther away from West Kensington than even Fulham was that he allowed
himself to take Norah's arm; nor did she make any objection. After all,
he considered her one of the most beautiful girls he had ever met, and,
being engaged to be married, she could allow her arm to be taken without
danger or loss of dignity.
"And so you really advise me to go on the stage?" she asked, as if she
would insinuate that the taking of her arm was only a gesture of
interrogation.
"Absolutely," Mr. Vavasour replied.
"Yes, but of course my father's awfully old-fashioned, and he may think
I oughtn't to go on the stage."
"Too much exposed to temptation and all that, I suppose?" suggested Mr.
Vavasour.
"Oh no," said Norah, irritably, withdrawing her arm. "I didn't mean
that. I meant he might think the family wouldn't like it."
She had intended to give the impression of belonging to a poor but noble
family without giving the impression of being snobbish, and she was
rather annoyed with Mr. Vavasour for not understanding at once what she
meant.
"Oh, but people from the best families go on the stage nowadays," he
assured her.
"Yes, I suppose they do," Norah agreed.
"And of course you could always change your name," he added.
"Yes, of course I could do that," she admitted.
"I changed mine, for instance," he told her.
"I like the name Vavasour."
"Yes, I rather liked it myself," he said; but he did not volunteer his
own name, and she did not ask him to reveal what Howards or Montagus had
plucked him forever from their family tree. In any case this was not the
moment to embark on fresh confidences, for they were approaching the
main street and Norah was almost sure that the figure standing at the
corner of Lonsdale Road on the other side was her eldest brother,
Roland.
"Don't come any farther," she said. "Perhaps we'll meet again at Lily's
some day."
"We shall," Mr. Vavasour announced, with conviction. "Good night." He
swept his hat from his head with a flourish and Norah shook hands with
him. She had been rather afraid all the way back that he would try to
kiss her good night, but gentle blood and the bright arc-lamp under
which they were standing combined to deter him, and they parted as
ceremoniously as if his V-shaped waistcoat was really a medieval
doublet.
"Oh, it _was_ you," said Roland.
"How do you mean it _was_ me? Who did you think it was?"
"Do you know what the time is? Half past ten!"
"Thanks very much," said Norah, sarcastically. "The wrist-watch you gave
me at Christmas is not yet broken."
"Don't be silly, Norah," he protested. "Father's in an awful wax. I've
been hanging about here for the last half-hour, because I couldn't stand
it."
They were walking quickly down Lonsdale Road, and Norah was thinking how
clumsily he walked compared with Mr. Vavasour and yet how much better
looking he was.
"Did Wilfred come?" she asked.
Her brother nodded. "Yes, but I told him you weren't in, and he went off
in a bit of a gloom."
They had reached the gate of No. 17 by now, and the house seemed to
Norah unreasonably hushed for this hour of the evening. Beyond the
railway line the sky was lit up with the glare of the Exhibition, and
the music that the military band was playing--it was a selection from
"The Earl and the Girl"--was distinctly audible.
"Why should father object to my going out in the evening?" she asked,
turning to her brother sharply. "He used to object to your smoking."
Roland removed from his mouth the large pipe and thought ponderously for
a minute. It was quite true that only two years ago his father had
objected to his smoking, and that with great difficulty he had been able
to persuade him that bank clerks always smoked. Since that struggle his
father had yielded him a grudging admission that he was grown up. The
long years before he should be a bank manager rose like a huge array of
black clouds before his vision, and though he disapproved of sisters
acting on their own initiative, something in this autumnal
night--perhaps it was only the sound of the distant band--created in him
a sudden sympathy with any aspirations to freedom. Perhaps, if Norah had
encouraged him at that moment, he would have stood up for her
independence; but he felt that his company only irritated her and
without a word he led the way up the steps, dimly aware that he and she
had already set foot upon the diverging paths of their lives.
The dining-room had been cleared for action. Ordinarily at this hour the
room was full of young people playing billiards on the convertible
dining-table; but to-night the table had not been uncovered, the
children had all gone to bed, and Mr. Caffyn was reading the _Daily
Telegraph_, not as one might have supposed with enjoyment of the unusual
peace, but, on the contrary, in a vague annoyance that his perusal of
the leading article was not being interrupted by the butt-end of a cue
or the chronicle of London Day by Day being punctuated by billiard-balls
leaping into his lap. His patriarchal feelings had, in fact, been deeply
wounded by his daughter's behavior, and though for the first time in
months he had been able to put on his slippers without having to hold up
a noisy game while they were being looked for, he was not at all
grateful.
"I've had my supper," Norah informed him, brightly.
This really annoyed Mr. Caffyn extremely, for he had been looking
forward to telling his daughter that her supper had been kept waiting
until ten o'clock, when it had finally been removed in order to allow
the servants to go to bed. At this moment Mrs. Caffyn, who had hurried
down-stairs to the kitchen as soon as she heard Norah coming, arrived in
the dining-room with a tray.
"She's had her supper," said Mr. Caffyn, indignantly.
"Oh, I was afraid--" his wife began.
"Oh no, she's had her supper," said Mr. Caffyn. "Good Heavens! I don't
know what the world's coming to!"
Since her father was making a cosmic affair of her behavior in going out
to supper without leave, Norah decided to give him something to worry
about in earnest, and, seating herself in the arm-chair on the other
side of the fireplace, she prepared to argue with him. Mrs. Caffyn began
to murmur about going to bed and talking things over when father came
back from the office to-morrow, but Norah waved aside all
procrastination.
"I want to talk about my engagement," she began.
Roland, who had just reached the door, stopped. Wilfred Curlew was a
friend of his; in fact, it was he who had first brought him to the
house, and though he knew that anything in the nature of an engagement
between him and one of his sisters was ridiculous, he hoped that a
soothing testimony from him would prevent Wilfred's final exclusion from
the family circle.
"Norah, dear child, it isn't nice to begin playing jokes upon your
father at this hour, especially when he isn't very pleased with you,"
Mrs. Caffyn said, waving her eyes in the direction of the door.
"I'm not at all sleepy," said Norah, coldly. "And I'm not joking. I want
to know if father is going to let Wilfred and me be openly engaged?" she
persisted, holding up her left hand so that the gaslight illuminated the
ring upon the third finger.
"And who may Wilfred be?" demanded Mr. Caffyn.
This seemed to Roland a suitable moment for his intervention, and,
though he had for some time been aware that his father was growing
impatient of their habitual visitor, he pretended to accept this
attitude of Olympian ignorance and reminded him that Wilfred was a
friend who sometimes came in during the evening.
"You said once, if you remember, that he was rather a clever fellow. As
a matter of fact he's doing well, you know, considering that he's not
long gone in for journalism. He's just been taken on the staff of the
_Evening Herald_. He's been doing that murder in Kentish Town."
Mr. Caffyn rose from his chair and with an elaborate assumption of irony
inquired if his daughter proposed to engage herself on the strength of a
murder in Kentish Town. Norah had got up when her father did and was
listening with a contemptuous expression while he dilated on the folly
of long engagements.
"Yes, but I don't intend it to be a long engagement," Norah proclaimed,
when he paused for a moment to chew his heavy mustache. "I intend to get
married."
Mr. Caffyn swung round upon his heels and faced his daughter.
"This, I suppose, is the result of the education I've given you.
Insolence and defiance! Don't say another word or you'll make me lose my
temper. Not another word. Norah, I insist on silence. Do you hear me?
You have grievously disappointed my fondest hopes. I have not been a
strict father. Indeed, I have been too indulgent. But I never imagined
_my_ daughter capable of a folly like this. If I'd thought, twenty-one
years ago, when I bought this house with the idea of creating a happy
home for you all, that I should be repaid like this I would have.... I
would have...."
But Mr. Caffyn's apodosis was never divulged, because, seized with an
access of rage, he turned out the gas and hurried from the room. In the
hall he shouted back to know if his wife was going to sit up all night.
Mrs. Caffyn hurried after her husband as fast as she was able across the
darkened room.
"I'm coming, dear, now. Yes, dear, I'm coming now. Ouch! My knee!... I'm
sure Norah will be more sensible in the morning," she was heard
murmuring on her way up-stairs.
"I suppose he thinks I shall go on living with him forever," exclaimed
Norah, savagely throwing herself down into her father's arm-chair. "In
my opinion most parents are fit to be only children. Light the gas
again, Roland; I want to write a note to Wilfred."
III
By the time morning was come Norah had decided that she would rather go
on the stage than be engaged to Wilfred Curlew. The extraordinary thing
was that she should never have realized, before her conversation with
Mr. Vavasour, how obviously the stage was indicated as the right career
for her. It was true that she had never until now seriously contemplated
a career, and the mild way she had accepted herself merely as the most
important member of a large family was sufficient answer to the silly
accusations made by her father last night. Perhaps he would begin to
appreciate her now when he was on the point of losing her; perhaps he
would regret that he had ever suggested she was indifferent to the
claims of family life; in future she should take care to be indifferent
to everybody's feelings except her own; she would teach her father a
lesson. It never entered Norah's head that there would be any difficulty
about going on the stage apart from paternal opposition, and she
wondered how many famous people had owed their careers to a fortuitous
event like her meeting with Mr. Vavasour. At any rate, it would not be
more difficult to obtain her father's permission to embark on this
suddenly conceived adventure than it would be to obtain his permission
to wear on the third finger of her left hand the rather cheap ring that
was the outward sign of her intention to marry Wilfred. Confronted by
the two alternatives--success in the theater and matrimony with
Wilfred--she felt that success was much the less remote of the two; in
fact, the more she thought about it the farther away receded matrimony
and the more clearly defined became success. "I don't want to be a great
actress," she explained to herself; "I want to be a successful actress."
She half made up her mind to go out and talk to Lily about the new
project, but on second thoughts she decided not to alarm her parents by
any prospect so definite as would be implied in availing herself of the
practical assistance that Lily and her mother could afford her in
carrying out her plan. It would be more tactful to present as
alternatives the definite fact of being engaged to Wilfred or the
indefinite idea of being able some time or other in the future to adopt
the stage as a profession. The more Norah thought about Wilfred the less
in love with him she felt, and the less in love with him she felt the
easier would be her task to-night. In her note she had told him to come
in after supper, as usual, but she had not said a word about her
intention to precipitate their affair. Would it impress her father if
she and Wilfred were to meet him at the station and approach the subject
before supper? No, on the whole, she decided, it would be more prudent
to provoke the final scene otherwise, and her heart quickened slightly
at the thought of the surprise she was going to spring upon the family
that evening.
Norah was unusually pleasant to everybody all day: she gave Vincent some
sweets that she did not like herself; she offered to take Gladys and
Marjorie for a walk in Kensington Gardens, because a rumor had reached
her of a wonderful display of hats in one of the big shops in Kensington
High Street. She noticed that when her father came back from the office
he seemed to have forgotten about the scene of last night, and she saw
her mother's spirits rising at the prospect of an undisturbed evening.
After supper Mr. Caffyn sat down as usual in his arm-chair; Gladys and
Marjorie, tired after their long walk and exhausted with the
contemplation of shop-windows in which they had perceived nothing to
interest themselves, went off to bed without trying for a moment's
grace. The upper leaves of the dining-table were removed, and a party of
billiards was made up with Norah and Cecil matched against Roland and
Dorothy; Vincent was allowed to chalk the tips of the cues, Agnes and
Edna to quarrel over the marking. Mrs. Caffyn, with a sigh of relief for
the comfortable wheels on which the evening was running, took the
arm-chair opposite her husband and read with unusual concentration what
she imagined was yesterday's morning paper, but which, as a matter of
fact, was the morning paper of a month ago. Soon the front-door bell
rang, and a friend of Roland's, called Arthur Drake, with whom Norah had
been in love for a week about a year ago and of whom Dorothy was
slightly enamoured at the present, came in full of a new round game for
the billiard-table that he had just learned in another house. Cecil went
off to his home-work and left Arthur to explain the new game--a
complicated invention in which five small skittles, a cork, and a bell
suspended from the gas-bracket each played a part. Mr. Caffyn fended
off the butt-ends of the cues that were continually bumping into him
amid a great deal of shouting and laughter; Agnes trod on her mother's
corn; Vincent grazed his knuckles in fielding a billiard-ball that was
bound for his father's head.
"And where's old Wilfred?" Arthur Drake suddenly inquired.
Another ring at the front door answered his question and Norah's suitor
came in. He was a loose-jointed young man of about twenty-two, with
tumbled wavy hair, bright gray eyes, and a trick, when he was feeling
shy, of supporting with one arm the small of his back. His long,
dogmatic chin was balanced by an irregular and humorous mouth; his
personality was attractive, and if he had earned five times as much as
he earned as reporter on the staff of the _Evening Herald_, or even if
he had been paid for the fierce and satirical articles he wrote on the
condition of modern society for a socialist weekly called _The Red
Lamp_, he might not have been considered an unsuitable mate for Norah.
As it was, Mr. Caffyn looked up at him with as much abhorrence as he
would have betrayed at the entrance into his dining-room of the dog that
his children were always threatening to procure and the purchase of
which he was constantly forbidding. Wilfred tried hard to lose himself
in the round game, and whenever he was called upon to make a shot from
the corner where Mr. Caffyn was sitting he did so with such
unwillingness to disturb Mr. Caffyn that he always missed it. Every time
he found an opportunity to pass Norah in the narrow gangway between the
wall and the table he tried to squeeze her hand; and he did his best by
bribing Vincent with some horse-chestnuts he had collected that morning
at Kew, where his work had taken him to investigate an alleged outrage
in the Temperate House, to inspire Vincent with an unquenchable desire
to play Up Jenkins. Norah, however, had a plan of her own that made the
notion of occasionally clasping Wilfred's hand under the table during
Up Jenkins seem colorless, and Wilfred, who in his most optimistic
prevision of the evening had not counted upon more than two or three
kisses snatched by ruse, suddenly found himself invited by her to
abandon the game and come into the drawing-room next door.
The drawing-room of No. 17 was invested every Wednesday afternoon by a
quantity of punctilious ladies who came to call on Mrs. Caffyn. Owing to
the number of its ornaments and the flimsiness of its furniture, it was
not considered a suitable room for general use; moreover, as secretary
of the Church of England Purity Society, it occasionally fell to Mr.
Caffyn's lot to interview various clergymen there on confidential
matters, and in a house like 17 Lonsdale Road, worn and torn by
children, it was essential to preserve one room in a condition of gelid
perfection. So rarely was the room used that the over-worked servants
had not bothered to draw the curtains at dusk, and when Wilfred and
Norah retired into its seclusion the chilly gloom was accentuated by the
street-lamps gleaming through the bare lime-trees at the end of the
garden. Norah told her lover to light the gas, and not even the sickly
green incandescence availed to make her appear less beautiful to him in
this desert of ugly knickknacks.
"No, don't pull the curtains," she said, quickly, "and don't kiss me
here, because people might see you from the street. I didn't ask you to
come in here to make love."
Perhaps a sense of the theater had always been dormant in Norah, for she
went on as if she were making a set speech; but Wilfred was much too
deep in love to let the cynicism upon which he plumed himself apply to
her, and he listened humbly.
"We can't go on like this forever," she wound up. "We must be engaged
openly. I told father that last night, but he won't hear of it, so what
are we to do?"
"Darling, I'm ready to do anything."
"Oh, anything!" she repeated, petulantly. "What is anything? He'll be
here in a minute, and you've got to tell him that unless he consents to
our being engaged you'll persuade me to elope."
"Do you think he'd give way then?" Wilfred asked, doubtfully. He was
very much in love with Norah, but he could not help remembering that he,
too, had a father who, after an argument every Sunday evening, still
allowed him ten shillings a week for pocket-money. If he were to elope,
he should not only be certain to lose that supplement to his own
earnings, but he should also involve in deeper discredit the profession
he had adopted instead of the law, which Mr. Curlew, senior, had
designed him to enter by way of the office of an old friend who was a
solicitor.
Norah wished that her father would come in and interrupt what should
have been a passionate scene, but which was in reality as cold as the
room where it was being played. She watched herself and Wilfred, whom
the incandescent gas did not set off to advantage, in the large mirror
that formed the over-mantel of the fireplace, and she realized now, as
she had never realized before in her life, how amazingly she stood out
from her surroundings.
"You haven't kissed me once this evening," Wilfred began; but she shook
herself free from his tentative embrace, and with one eye on the door
for her father's entrance and the other on the mirror, or rather with
both eyes at one moment on the door and immediately afterward on the
mirror--a movement which displayed their brilliancy and depth--she went
on enumerating to her suitor the material difficulties that made their
engagement so hopeless.
"But I'm getting on," he insisted. "The editor was very pleased with the
way I handled that Kentish Town murder. They don't consider me at all a
dud in Fleet Street. I'm sure I give everybody in this house quite a
wrong impression of myself because I feel nervous and awkward when I'm
here; but I don't think there's really much doubt that in another couple
of years I shall be in quite a different position financially. Besides,
I hope to do original work, and if a friend of mine can raise the money
to start this new weekly--"
"Oh, if, if, if!" interrupted Norah, impatiently.
"Norah, don't you love me any more?"
"Of course I love you," she said. "Don't be so stupid."
"You seem different to-night."
"You wouldn't like me to be always the same, would you?"
"No, but--" He broke off, and turned away with a sigh to regard the
melancholy street-lamps twinkling through the lime-trees at the end of
the garden.
"I think it's I who ought to be angry, not you," said Norah. "I offered
to marry you at once, and you instantly began to make excuses."
"Norah!" protested the young man.
"Oh, how I hate everything!" she burst out, looking round her with a
sharper consciousness than she had ever experienced before of the
drawing-room's ugliness and life's banality. At this moment Mrs. Caffyn
put her head timidly round the door.
"You'd better come back to the dining-room, dear," she advised. "I think
father's just noticed you're not there."
"That's exactly what I meant him to do."
"Norah!" exclaimed her mother, in a shocked voice. "What has come over
you these last two days?"
Wilfred was supporting the small of his back in an unsuccessful effort
to look at ease, and Norah was wondering more than ever how she could
ever have fancied herself in love with him. How awkward he appeared
standing there, almost--she hesitated a moment before she allowed
herself to think the worst it was possible to think of anybody--almost
common! She looked half apprehensively at Wilfred to see if he had
divined her unspoken thought. She would not like him to know that she
was thinking him--almost common; he might never get over it. She was
sure he was particularly sensitive on that point because in _The Red
Lamp_ he was always declaiming against snobbery.
Suddenly they heard the dining-room door open, and Mrs. Caffyn had
barely time to breathe an agonized, "Oh, dear, what did I tell you would
happen?" before the head of the house came in. Upon the dining-room an
appalled silence must have fallen when Mr. Caffyn rose from his chair,
and one could fancy the frightened players, cues in hands, huddled
against the wall in dread of the imminent catastrophe. The whole house
was electric as before an impending storm, and above the stillness the
mutter of a passing omnibus sounded like remote thunder. With so much
atmospheric help Mr. Caffyn ought to have been able to achieve something
more impressive than his, "Oh, you're in here, are you? I wish you
wouldn't light the gas in the drawing-room when there's no need for it."
"I thought you wouldn't like us to sit in the dark," Norah murmured,
primly.
"Don't deliberately misunderstand me. You know perfectly well what I
mean. Moreover, I don't think it's nice for the children; it may put all
sorts of ideas into their young heads."
Inasmuch as Mr. Caffyn was secretary of the Church of England Purity
Society with private means of his own, while his daughter's suitor was
an agnostic journalist who had never yet earned more than thirty-five
shillings in one week, it is perhaps not astonishing that the young man
should have begun to apologize for lighting the gas needlessly. To
Norah, however, these apologies sounded infinitely pusillanimous; from
having been very much in love yesterday morning she had already reached
indifference, and this final exhibition of cowardice brought her to the
point of positively disliking Wilfred. Nevertheless, she managed somehow
to impress her father with her intention to die rather than give him up,
and after an argument of about ten minutes, in the course of which Norah
did all the talking, her father all the shouting, and her mother and
suitor all the fidgeting, Mr. Caffyn was at last sufficiently
exasperated and ordered Wilfred Curlew to leave the house immediately.
In spite of Mrs. Caffyn's entreaties the pitch of her husband's voice
had been so piercing that he had probably managed not merely to put
ideas into the heads of the children still in the dining-room, but even
to corrupt the dreams of the sleeping innocents up-stairs.
"Gilbert dear," his wife besought. "The servants!"
"I pay my servants to attend to me, not to my affairs," said Mr. Caffyn,
majestically. His wife might have replied that under the terms of their
marriage contract it was she who paid the servants out of her own money;
but having been married twenty-one years she had long ceased to derive
any satisfaction from putting herself in the right. Poor Wilfred,
finding that he must either say something to break the silence which had
succeeded Mr. Caffyn's denunciation of his behavior or retire, preferred
to retire, and with one arm firmly wedged into the small of his back he
stumbled awkwardly down the hall to the front door. Norah made no
attempt to alleviate the discomfiture of his exit; but Arthur Drake,
with a chivalry, or, to put it at its lowest valuation, with a social
tact that amazed her, covered Wilfred's retreat by such a display of
farewell courtesies as made even the practical Dorothy pause and
consider if there might not be something in love, after all.
"Bolt the door," Mr. Caffyn commanded. "And be sure that the chain is
properly fastened."
Then rather at a loss how to maintain the level of his majesty and
wrath, he luckily discovered that Vincent had not yet gone to bed, and
exhorted the assembled family to tell him if he paid L8 a term to Mr.
Randell for Vincent to grow up into a pot-boy or a billiard-marker.
Cecil, the recent winner of a senior scholarship at St. James's, had
been grinding at his home-work in the bedroom, and he came out into the
hall at this moment to plead pathetically for a few doors to be shut.
His father improved the occasion by holding up Cecil as a moral example
to the rest of the family, who were made to feel that if Gilbert Caffyn
had not produced Cecil Caffyn, Gilbert Caffyn's life would have been
wasted. The more he descanted upon Cecil's diligence and dutifulness the
more sheepish Cecil himself became, so that with every fresh encomium
his sleeves revealed another inch of ink-stained cuff. The only way to
stop Mr. Caffyn and restore Cecil to the algebraical problem from which
he had been raped by the noise outside his room seemed to be for
everybody to go to bed. Agnes and Edna, their heads stuffed full of new
ideas, went giggling up-stairs, whither Dorothy, yawning very
elaborately, followed them. Roland decided that Cecil groaning over an
algebra problem would be more endurable than having to listen to a
renewal of the argument between Norah and his father, and he, too,
retired. The gradual melting away of the audience quieted Mr. Caffyn,
who, when he had lowered or extinguished all the gas-jets except those
in the dining-room, felt that he had shown himself master of his own
house, and returned to his arm-chair with the intention of nodding over
the minor news in the paper until he was ready for bed himself. Norah,
however, in spite of her mother's prods and whispered protests, brought
him sharply back to the matter in dispute.
"Suppose I insist on being engaged to Wilfred?" she began.
"Good Heavens!" cried Mr. Caffyn. "Am I never to be allowed a little bit
of peace? Here am I working all day to keep you clothed and fed, and
every night of my life is made a burden to me. You don't appreciate
what it is to have a father like me." His wife patted him soothingly and
flatteringly upon the shoulder as if she would assure him that they all
really appreciated the quality of his fatherhood very much. "Why, I know
fathers," went on Mr. Caffyn, indignantly, "who spend every evening at
their clubs, and upon my soul, I don't blame them. I was talking to the
Bishop of Chelsea to-day. He came into the office to consult me about
the scandalous language used at the whelk-stalls in Walham Road on
Saturday nights--we're taking up the question with the municipal
authorities. He told me I looked tired out. 'You look tired out, Mr.
Caffyn,' he said. 'I am tired out, my lord,' I answered. And _he_ was
very sympathetic."
"You hear that, Norah dear?" said Mrs. Caffyn, twitching her fingers
with nervousness. "Now don't worry your father any more."
"As soon as he answers my question I sha'n't worry him any more. Suppose
I insist on being engaged to Wilfred Curlew? Suppose I run away and get
married to him?"
"Have you any conception what marriage means?" demanded Mr. Caffyn. "Do
you realize that I waited two years to marry your mother, and that I
didn't propose to her until it was quite evident that my poor father
must soon die? I suppose you don't want me to die, do you? Don't imagine
that my death will make any difference, please."
"Gilbert, Gilbert!" begged his wife.
"Well, really, nowadays children behave in such an extraordinary fashion
that it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear Norah was counting on my
death."
"Gilbert, Gilbert!" she repeated, and looked in agony at the gas, as if
she expected it to turn blue at such a horrible suggestion.
"If I don't marry Wilfred," Norah went on, "I must earn my own living."
"How?" inquired her father, with an assumption of blustering
incredulity.
"By going on the stage."
"On the stage?" he repeated. "Do you realize that only yesterday I had
to deal with the question of our attitude toward the posters of several
theaters?"
"That wouldn't have anything to do with me," said Norah.
"But how are you going on the stage?" her father continued.
"I should try to get an engagement."
"Oh, would you, indeed? Ha-ha! Your mind seems to be running on
engagements, my child. However, this engagement is even more visionary
and improbable than the other one," said Mr. Caffyn, with a laugh. "I'm
afraid you think it's easier than it is, my dear girl. I have a little
experience of the stage--I regret to say chiefly of its worst side--and
I can assure you that it's not at all easy, really."
"But if I can get an engagement?" persisted Norah.
"Why, in that case we'll talk about it," said her father. "Yes, yes,
there'll be plenty of time to talk about that later on. And now if you
have no objection I should like to read what Mr. Balfour is saying about
Protection. It's a pity you don't try to take some interest in the
affairs of your country instead of-- However, I suppose that's _too_ much
to expect from the younger generation."
"I must have your promise," Norah insisted. "If I write to Wilfred
to-night and tell him he mustn't come to the house any more, will you
let me go on the stage?"
"We'll see about it," parried Mr. Caffyn.
"No, I must have a definite promise."
"Must, Norah? Do, dear child, remember that you're speaking to your
father," murmured her mother.
"Oh, that's the modern way we bring up our children," said Mr. Caffyn.
"Before I know where I am I shall have Vincent ordering me up to bed."
His wife laughed with such conjugal enthusiasm at his joke that the last
vestige of Mr. Caffyn's ill humor disappeared, and, being suddenly
struck with the extreme beauty of his eldest daughter as she waited
there bright-eyed in expectation of his answer, he promised her that if
she would break off all communication with that confounded young Curlew
and could obtain an engagement for herself, he would probably not create
any difficulties. Her face lit up with satisfaction and, bending over,
she kissed her father on the forehead with as much good will as a young
woman kisses an elderly lover who has promised her some diamonds she has
long desired.
IV
Norah kept her word and wrote a letter to Wilfred Curlew in which she
pointed out the impossibility of embarking on a prolonged and quite
indefinite engagement, wished him good luck for the future, and made it
clear that she did not intend to have anything more to do with him. The
portion of the letter on which she most prided herself was the
postscript: "_Don't think that I bear you any ill will. I don't._" The
peace that had lately fallen over South Africa left Wilfred no
opportunity of putting his despair at the service of his country; but
Norah's behavior benefited the young journalist in the long run by
teaching him to mistrust human nature as much as God, a useful lesson
for a democrat. Norah, having disembarrassed herself of her suitor, set
out in earnest to get on the stage and confided her ambition to Lily.
Mrs. Haden's advice was asked, and Norah as a friend of her daughter was
given lessons in elocution and deportment without being charged a penny.
Mrs. Haden demonstrated to her that she stood very little chance of
getting on the stage until she could recite "Jack Barrett Went to
Quetta" or "Soldier, Soldier, Come from the Wars" with what she called
as much intention as herself; in other words, until the story of Jack
Barrett was awarded as much pomp of utterance as the Messenger's speech
in Hippolytus and the demobilized soldier greeted with Ophelia's
driveling whine. Mrs. Haden would not allow that her pupil's looks were
nearly as important as her ability to mouth Rudyard Kipling--perhaps,
the pupil thought, because her mistress had a pretty daughter of her
own. September deepened to October, October dimmed to November while
Norah was wrestling with her dread of seeming ridiculous and was
acquiring the unnatural diction that was to be of such value to her
first appearance. The lessons came to an abrupt end soon after Mrs.
Haden had begun upon her deportment, which to Norah seemed to consist of
holding her hands as if she were waiting to rinse them after eating
bread and treacle, and of sitting down on a chair as if she had burst
one suspender and expected the other to go every minute. One morning
when she arrived at Shelley Mansions for her lesson Lily came to the
door of the flat and with fearful backward glances cried out that her
mother was lying dead in bed.
"Dead?" echoed Norah, irritably. She was always irritated by a sudden
alarm. "I wish you wouldn't--" She was going to say "play jokes," but
she saw that Lily was speaking the truth, and, having been taught by
Mrs. Haden how to suit the action to the word, the expression to the
emotion, she contrived to look sympathetic.
"She must have died of heart, the doctor says. I went to see why she
didn't ring for her tea and she didn't answer, and when I thought she
was asleep she was really dead."
Norah shuddered.
"I'm awfully sorry I've disturbed you in the middle of all this," she
murmured.
"But I'm glad you've come," said Lily.
"It's awfully sweet of you, my dear, to be glad; but I wouldn't dream of
worrying you at such a moment. And don't stand there shivering in your
nightgown. Take my advice and dress yourself. It will distract your mind
from other things. You must come round and see me this afternoon, and
I'll try to cheer you up. I shall stay in for you. Don't forget."
Norah hurried away from Shelley Mansions, thinking while she walked home
how easily this untoward event in the Haden household might hasten the
achievement of her own ambition. Lily would obviously have to do
something at once, and it would be nice for her to have a companion with
whom she could start her career upon the stage. Norah had not intended
to take any definite steps until her nineteenth birthday in March, but
she was anxious to show her sympathy with Lily, and it was much kinder,
really, to make useful plans for the future than to hang about the
stricken flat, getting in everybody's light. If Lily came this afternoon
they would be able to discuss ways and means; it would be splendid for
Lily to be taken right out of herself; it would be nice to invite her
after the funeral to come and stay in Lonsdale Road, so that they could
talk over things comfortably without always having to go out in this wet
weather; yet such an excellent suggestion would be opposed by the family
on the ground that there was no room for a stranger. How intolerable
that the existence of so many brothers and sisters should interfere with
the claims of friendship! Perhaps she could persuade Dorothy to sleep
with Gladys and Marjorie for a week or two. She and Lily should have so
much to talk over, and if Dorothy were in the room with them it would be
an awful bore. Full of schemes for Lily's benefit, she approached her
sister on the subject of giving up her bed.
"Anything more you'd like?" asked Dorothy, indignantly.
"I think," said Norah, "that you are without exception the most selfish
girl I ever met in all my life."
Dorothy grunted at this accusation, but she refused to surrender her
bed, and Norah soon gave up talking in general terms about people who
were afraid to expose themselves to a little inconvenience for the sake
of doing a kind action, because Lily arrived next day with the news that
her sister had obtained leave to be "off" for a week and was advising
her to do everything she could to get an engagement as soon as possible.
There were problems of arrears of rent and unpaid bills from the
solution of which it would be advantageous for Lily to escape by going
on tour. The few personal possessions of their mother the sisters would
divide between them, and the undertaker was to be satisfied at the
expense of a fishmonger who, being new to West Kensington, had let Mrs.
Haden run an account.
"And your father?" Norah could not help asking; but Lily avoided a
reply, and Norah, who had been too well brought up to ask twice, formed
her own conclusions.
"Anyway, my dear," she assured her friend, "you can count on me. I
hadn't intended to do anything definite until I was nineteen, but of
course I'm not going to desert you. So we'll go and interview managers
together."
"Doris advises me to try Walter Keal," said Lily. "Dick--her
husband--has given me a letter for him which may be useful, he says."
"Who's Walter Keal?"
"Don't you know?" exclaimed Lily. "He sends out all the Vanity shows."
Norah bit her lips in mortification. She hated not to know things and
decided to avoid meeting Doris, who as a professional actress of at
least a year's standing would be likely to patronize her.
"You see," Lily went on, "he'll be sending out 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea'
at the end of December, and if we could get in the chorus we should be
all right till June."
"The chorus?" echoed Norah, disdainfully. "I never thought of joining
the chorus of a musical comedy."
"It might only be for a few months, and when you're with Walter Keal
there's always the chance of getting to the Vanity."
"A Vanity girl!" repeated Norah, scornfully. "For everybody to look at!"
Lily told her friend that it was better to be looked at as a Vanity girl
than to spend her life looking at other people from a window in West
Kensington.
"But I can't sing," Norah objected.
"Sing! Who ever heard of a chorus-girl that could sing?"
The lowly position of a Vanity girl was not proof against the alchemy of
Norah's self-esteem; she made up her mind to renounce Pinero and all his
works and go into musical comedy.
When the two friends reached the small street off Leicester Square and
saw extending up the steps of the building in which the offices of Mr.
Walter Keal were situated an endless queue of girls waiting to interview
the manager, Norah was discouraged.
"Oh, he has lots of companies," Lily explained. Then she addressed
herself to a dirty-faced man with a collar much too large for him who
was in charge of the entrance.
"You give me your letter, and it'll be all right."
"But it's for Mr. Keal himself," Lily protested.
"That's all right, my dear; your turn'll come."
The women immediately in front looked round indignantly at Lily, and
Norah, who was beginning to feel self-conscious, begged her not to make
a fuss. This was advice Lily always found easy to take, and, the
introduction from her brother-in-law stowed away in the dirty-faced
man's pocket, she and Norah took their places in the queue. Every ten
minutes or so a good-looking girl, obviously well pleased with herself,
would descend briskly from the glooms above; but mostly at intervals of
about thirty seconds depressed women, powdering their noses as
nonchalantly as possible, came down more slowly. Foot by foot Norah and
Lily, who by now had a trail of women behind them, struggled higher up
the steps. There was a continuous murmur of sibilant talk punctuated by
shrill laughter, and the atmosphere, thickly flavored with cheap scent,
perspiration, damp, clothes, and cigarette smoke, grew more oppressive
with each step of the ascent. At last they turned the corner of the
first landing and saw ahead of them a shorter flight; half-way up this,
another landing crowded with girls came into view, the three doors
opening on which were inscribed "Walter Keal's Touring Companies" in
white paint; a muffled sound of typewriting seemed auspiciously
business-like amid this babbling, bedraggled, powdered mass of anxious
women. By the central door another dirty-faced man was ushering in the
aspirants one at a time.
"We ought to have given my letter to him," said Lily.
"Well, don't go back for it now," Norah begged, looking in dismay at the
throng behind.
They must have been waiting over two hours when at last they found
themselves face to face with the janitor. A bell tinkled as a bright
figure emerged from the door on the left and hurried away down the steps
without regarding the envious glances of the unadmitted; immediately
afterward the door in front of them opened, and they passed through to
the office.
"One at a time," the janitor called; but Norah quickly shut the door
behind them, and she and Lily were simultaneously presented for the
inspection of Mr. Walter Keal.
The office was furnished with a large roll-top desk, three chairs, and a
table littered with papers which a dowdy woman in pince-nez was trying
to put in some kind of order. The walls were hung with playbills; the
room was heavy with cigar smoke. Mr. Walter Keal, a florid, clean-shaven
man with a diamond pin in his cravat, a Malmaison carnation in his
buttonhole, and a silk hat on the back of his head, was bending over the
desk without paying the least attention to the new-comers. Standing
behind him in an attitude that combined deference toward Mr. Keal with
insolence toward the rest of the world was a young man of Jewish
appearance who stared critically at the two girls.
"You don't remember me, Mr. Keal," began Lily, timidly. "I was
introduced to you once in the Strand by my brother-in-law, Richard
Granville."
"I'm sure you were," interrupted Mr. Keal, curtly; but when he looked up
and saw that Lily was pretty he changed his tone. "That's all right;
don't be frightened. I've met so many girls in my time. Well, what can I
do for you?"
"I had a letter of introduction from my brother-in-law, Mr. Granville,"
Lily began again.
"Never heard of the gentleman," said Mr. Keal.
Norah, feeling that she and Lily stood once more on an equality, came
forward with assurance.
"We thought you were choosing girls for the chorus in 'Miss Elsie of
Chelsea.'"
"Full up," the manager snapped.
The Jewish young man bent over and whispered something to his master,
who took a long look at the girls.
"However, I might find you two extra places. What experience have you
had? None, eh? Can you sing? You think so. Um--yes--all girls think they
can sing. Well, I'll give you a chance, but I can't offer more than a
guinea a week of seven performances. If you don't like to take that,
there are plenty who will and be grateful. It's my Number One company."
Norah did not wait for Lily, but accepted for both of them.
"Are they going to let us have the club in Lisle Street, Fitzmaurice?"
the manager turned to inquire of his assistant.
"Yes, Mr. Keal. The club has arranged to lend their concert-room every
morning and afternoon this week, but if you want any evening calls we
shall have to make other arrangements."
"But ---- it all," Mr. Keal exclaimed, "when are we going to get the
stage?"
"They won't be able to let us have it till the week before Christmas."
"That's a nice ruddy job," grumbled Mr. Keal. "All right, dears," he
said, "go in there and get your contracts." He pointed to the room
adjoining, where, amid an infernal rattle of typewriters, Lily and Norah
sold their untried talents to Mr. Keal for a guinea a week of seven
performances, extra matinees to be paid for at half rate, and a
fortnight's salary in lieu of notice to be considered just. When she
took up the pen to sign the contract Norah paused.
"You've put your own name, Lily," she said, doubtfully.
"Oh, I can't be bothered to think of a new name. Besides, my own is
quite a good one for the stage."
"Yes, but I ought to change mine. I think I shall call myself Dorothy
Lonsdale. Do you like that?"
"You've got a sister called Dorothy. Won't she be rather annoyed?"
Norah tried to think of another name, but she was confused by the noise
of the typewriters, and at last she ejaculated, impatiently:
"Oh, bother, I must be Dorothy! I've always known it would suit me much
better than her. I shouldn't mind if she called herself Norah. Besides,
I sha'n't be Dorothy Caffyn, so what does it matter?"
They were told that their contracts would be handed to them at the
rehearsal called for to-morrow morning at the Hungarian Artistes' Club,
Lisle Street, Leicester Square.
"How easy it is, really," said Norah, when she and Lily were going
down-stairs again, past the line of tired women still waiting to be
admitted. "Though I thought his language was rather disgusting. Didn't
you?"
"I didn't notice it," said Lily. "But you'll have to get used to bad
language on the stage."
"I shall never get used to it," Norah vowed, with a disdainful glance at
a particularly common-looking girl who, tossing the feathers in her hat
like a defiant savage, called out:
"God! Flo, look at Mrs. Walter Keal coming down-stairs."
The girls round her laughed, and Norah hurried past angrily. She had
been intending to patronize Lily; after that remark it was not so easy.
Just as they reached the foot of the first flight of steps the
dirty-faced janitor bawled over the balustrade, "Mr. Keal can't see any
more ladies to-day."
Sighs of disappointment and murmurs of indignation rose from the
actresses; then they turned wearily round and prepared to encounter the
December rain.
"You'd better come and call for me to-morrow," said Norah, "so that we
can go to the rehearsal together. Think of me to-night when I'm trying
to explain to father what I've done."
"Will he be very angry?"
"Yes, I expect he will, and though I know how to manage him it's always
a nuisance having to argue," said Norah. "You're lucky not to have a
father."
Lily looked at her friend quickly and suspiciously.
"I mean you're lucky to be quite on your own," she explained.
The moment Mr. Caffyn came home from the city that evening Norah
revealed to him that she had got an engagement in a touring company and
reminded him of his promise. As she had expected, he tried to go back on
his word, and even brought up the old objection to a daughter of his
going on the stage.
"Nobody will know that I'm your daughter," she said. "I shall change my
name, of course."
"But people are sure to hear about it," Mr. Caffyn argued.
Norah pulled him up suddenly.
"It's no good going on about it, father. I've got an engagement and I'm
going to accept it. If you try to prevent me I shall do something much
worse."
Mr. Caffyn's dislike of the stage may not have been as deep as he
pretended, or he may have thought that his daughter really intended to
do something desperate and that he might be called upon to support her
in married life, which would be more expensive than supporting her on
the stage. Moreover, she seemed so confident that perhaps he might never
have to support her on the stage, and what a delightful solution of her
future that would be! After all, she was the eldest of six girls, and
six girls rapidly growing up might become too much even for the
secretary of the Church of England Purity Society to control
successfully.
Mrs. Caffyn melted into tears at the idea of her eldest daughter's
earning her own living, and Norah decided to profit by maternal
weakness.
"The only thing, mother dear, is that I shall be very poor."
"Darling child!"
"You see, I don't like to ask father to make me a larger allowance than
he makes at present."
"Oh no," agreed Mrs. Caffyn, apprehensively. "I beg you won't ask him to
do that."
"So my idea was--" Norah began. She paused for a moment to think how she
could express herself most tactfully. "Mother, you have a certain amount
of money of your own, haven't you?"
"Yes, dear."
"And I suppose it's really you who makes me my allowance of twenty-five
pounds a year? What I thought was that perhaps you'd rather give me a
lump sum now when it would be more useful than go on paying me an
allowance. Another thing is that I should hate to feel I was coming into
money when you died, and, of course, if you gave me my money now I
shouldn't feel that."
"My dear child, how am I to find any large sum of money now? It's very
sweet of you to put it in that way, but you don't understand how
difficult these matters are."
"How much money have you got of your own?" asked Norah.
Mrs. Caffyn thought this was rather an improper question; but Norah was
looking so very grown up that she did not like to elude the answer as
she had been wont to elude many answers of many childish questions
through all these years of married life.
"Well, dear," she said, with the air of one who was revealing a
dangerous family secret, "I suppose you're old enough to hear these
things now. I have three hundred pounds a year of my own--at least, when
I say of my own, you mustn't think that means three hundred a year to
spend on myself. Your father is very just, and though he helps me as
much as he is able, all the money is taken up in household expenses."
"Well, twenty-five pounds a year," said Norah, "at five per cent. is the
interest on five hundred pounds."
"Is it, dear?" asked her mother, in a frightened voice.
"If you give me five hundred pounds now you wouldn't have to pay me
twenty-five pounds a year. And if you lived for another twenty-five
years you'd save one hundred and twenty-five pounds that way."
Mrs. Caffyn looked as if she would soon faint at these rapid
calculations.
"How am I to get five hundred pounds?" she asked, hopelessly.
"You must go and see the manager of your bank."
"But Roland is a clerk in my bank," Mrs. Caffyn objected. "And what
would _he_ say?"
"Roland!" repeated Norah, with scorn. "You don't suppose Roland knows
everything that goes on in the bank?"
"No, I suppose he doesn't," agreed Mrs. Caffyn, wonderingly.
"If you like _I'll_ go and see the bank manager," Norah offered. "He
took rather a fancy to me, I remember, when he came to supper with us
once."
"Norah, how recklessly you talk!" protested Mrs. Caffyn. But Norah was
firm and she did not rest until she had persuaded her mother to ask for
an interview with the manager, to whom she made herself so charming and
with whom she argued so convincingly that in the end she succeeded in
obtaining the L500.
"Though what your father will say I don't like to think, dear," said
Mrs. Caffyn, as she tremblingly mounted an omnibus to go home.
"I don't see why father should know anything about it, and if he does he
can't say anything. It's your money."
"Let's hope he'll never find out," Mrs. Caffyn sighed, though she had
little hope really of escaping from detection in what she felt was
something perilously like a clever bank robbery--the sort of thing one
read about in illustrated magazines.
Norah determined to be very cautious at rehearsals and she advised Lily
to be the same.
"Of course, we shall gradually make friends with the other girls, but
don't let's be in too much of a hurry, especially as we've got each
other. And if you take my advice you'll be very reserved with the men."
Since Norah had found how easy it was to get on the stage her opinion of
Mr. Vavasour had sunk, and since she had found how easy it was to get
out of love her opinion of men in general had sunk. On the other hand,
her opinion of herself as an actress and as a woman had risen
proportionately. Meanwhile the rehearsals proceeded as rehearsals do,
and the No. I company of "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" was harried from
club-room to club-room, from suburban theater to metropolitan theater,
until it was ready to charm the city of Manchester on Boxing Night.
On Christmas Eve, the last evening that Norah would spend at home for
some time, she decided in an access of honesty to tell Dorothy that she
had taken her name for purposes of the stage. Most unreasonably, Dorothy
protested loudly against this, and it transpired in the course of the
dispute that she had all her life resented being the only one of the
family who had not been given two names. Norah's own second name,
Charlotte, which was also her mother's, had never struck her before as
anything in the nature of an asset, but now with much generosity she
offered to lend it to Dorothy, who refused it as scornfully as she could
without hurting her mother's feelings.
"Why couldn't you have taken Lina or Florence or Amy or Maud?" Dorothy
demanded. These were the second names of the other sisters. "And,
anyway, what's the matter with your own name?"
"I don't know," said Norah. "Dorothy Lonsdale struck me as a good
combination, and the more I think of it the better I like it."
"Lonsdale," everybody repeated. "Are you going to call yourself
Lonsdale?"
"It's the family name," Norah reminded them.
This was quite true; Lonsdale had been the maiden name of Mrs. Caffyn's
mother, who, according to a family legend, had been a distant kinswoman
of Lord Cleveden. Indeed, before Mr. Caffyn was married he had often
used this connection to overcome his father's opposition to a long
engagement. When he had bought the house in Lonsdale Road he had liked
to think for a while that in a way he was doing something to restore the
prestige of a distant collateral branch; the transaction had possessed a
flavor of winning back an old estate. Naturally, as he grew older, he
ceased to attach the same importance to mere birth, especially when he
found that he did not require any self-assertion to get on perfectly
well with the bishops who came to consult him about diocesan scandals.
Therefore he was inclined to take his eldest daughter's part and
applaud her choice of a stage name.
"But suppose I wanted to go on the stage myself?" Dorothy insisted. "I
might want to use my own name."
"Well, so you could," Norah urged. "You could be Miss Dorothy Caffyn.
But you won't go on the stage, so what's the good of arguing like that?
Anyway, I've signed the contract as Dorothy Lonsdale, so there's nothing
to be done. _I_ can't change."
"I do think it's mean of you," expostulated the real Dorothy, bursting
into tears.
Norah would not allow anybody to come and see her off at Euston on
Christmas morning, and Mr. Caffyn, who did not at all like the idea of a
four-wheeler's waiting outside his house on such a day, helped his
daughter's plans by marshaling the whole family for church half an hour
earlier than usual, so that the farewells were said indoors. Lily had
left the flat a fortnight ago and, having been staying in some
Bloomsbury lodgings recommended by her sister, was to meet her friend at
the station. At a quarter to eleven, amid the clangor of church bells,
the cab of Norah Caffyn turned out of Lonsdale Road into the main street
of West Kensington, and at noon on the platform at Euston Miss Lily
Haden wished a Merry Christmas to Miss Dorothy Lonsdale.