When Hal came back from America and heard about Lorraine’s marriage, it
was a great shock to her. At first she could hardly bring herself to
believe it at all. Nothing thoroughly convinced her until she stood in
the pretty Kensington house and beheld Mrs. Vivian’s pronounced air of
triumph, and Lorraine’s somewhat forced attempts at joyousness.
It was one of the few occasions in her life when Lorraine was nervous.
She did not want Hal to know the sordid facts; and she did not believe
she would be able to hide them from her.
When Hal, from a mass of somewhat jerky, contradictory information, had
gleaned that the new leading part at the London theatre had been gained
through the middle-aged bridegroom’s influence, her comment was
sufficiently direct.
“Oh, that’s why you did it, is it? Well, I only hope you don’t hate the
sight of him already.”
“How absurd you are, Hal!... Of course I don’t hate the sight of him.
He’s a dear. He gives me everything in the world I want, if he possibly
can.”
“How dull. It’s much more fun getting a few things for oneself. And
when the only thing in all the world you want is your freedom, do you
imagine he’ll give you that?”
Lorraine got up suddenly, thrusting her hands out before her, as if to
ward off some vague fear.
“Hal, you are brutal today. What is the use of talking like that
now?... Why did you go to America?... Perhaps if you hadn’t gone—”
“Give me a cigarette,” said Hal, with a little catch in her voice, “I
want soothing. At the present moment you’re a greater strain than
Dudley talking down at me from a pyramid of worn-out prejudices. I
don’t know why my two Best-Belovèds should both be cast in a mould to
weigh so heavily on my shoulders.”
Sitting on the table as usual, she puffed vigorously at her cigarette,
blowing clouds of smoke, through which Lorraine could not see that her
eyes were dim with tears. For Hal’s unerring instinct told her that, at
a critical moment, Lorraine had taken a wrong path.
Lorraine, however, was not looking in Hal’s direction. She had moved to
the window, and stood with her back to the room, gazing across the
Park, hiding likewise misty, tell-tale eyes.
Suddenly, as Hal continued silent, she turned to her with a swift
movement of half-expressed protest.
“Hal! you shan’t condemn me, you shan’t even judge me. Probably you
can’t understand, because your life is so different—always has been so
different; but at least you can try to be the same. What difference has
it made between you and me anyhow?... What difference need it make? I
have got my chance now, and I am going to be a brilliant success,
instead of a struggling beginner. What does the rest matter between you
and me?”
“It doesn’t matter between you and me. But it matters to you. I feel
I’d give my right hand if you hadn’t done it.”
“How could I help doing it? Oh, I can’t explain; it’s no use. We all
have to fight our own battles in the long run—friends or no friends.
Only the friends worth having stick to one, even when it has been a
nasty, unpleasant sort of battle.”
That hard look, with the hopelessness behind it, was coming back into
Lorraine’s eyes. She was too loyal to tell even Hal what her mother had
been like the last few months before the critical moment came, and at
the critical moment itself. She could not explain just how many
difficulties her marriage had seemed a way out from.
There had been other men who had not proposed marriage. There had been
insistent creditors—her mother’s as well as her own. There had been
that deep hunger for something approaching a real home, and for a sense
of security, in a life necessarily full of insecurities.
Obdurate, difficult theatre managers, powerful, jealous
fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck! Behind the glamour and the
glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness,
meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to
do battle with.
And now, if only her husband proved amenable, proved livable with, how
different everything would be? But in any case Hal must be there.
Somehow nothing of all this showed in her face as she fronted the
smoker, still blowing clouds of smoke before her eyes.
“What has become of Rod?” Hal asked suddenly.
Lorraine winced a little, but held her ground steadily.
“Rod had to go. What could Rod and I have done with £500 a year?”
“My own”—from the blunt-speaking one—“it surely seems as if you might
have thought of that before you allowed Rod to run all over the country
after you, and get ‘gated’, and very nearly ‘sent down’, and spend a
year or two’s income ahead in trying to give you pleasure.”
Lorraine flung herself down on the sofa with a callous air, and beat
her foot on the ground impatiently. The parting with Rod was another
thing she did not propose to describe to Hal. It had hurt too badly,
for one thing.
“When you moralise, Hal, you are detestable. Besides, it’s so cheap.
Any one can sit on a table and hurl sarcasm about. I daresay in my
place you would have married Rod, from a sense of duty or something,
and ruined all the rest of his life. Or perhaps, after gently breaking
the news, you’d have let him come dangling round to be ‘mothered’.
Well, I don’t say I haven’t been a bit of a brute to him; but anyhow I
tried to do the square thing in the end. I cut the whole affair dead
off. I told him I would not see him nor write to him again. I’ve since
sent two letters back unopened, and though you mightn’t think it, I was
just eating my heart out for a sight of him. But what’s the good! He’s
got to follow in the footsteps of whole centuries of highly
respectable, complacent, fat old bankers. His father and mother would
have a fit if he didn’t develop into the traditional fat old banker
himself, and beget another of the same ilk to follow on.
“I daresay with me he would have developed a little more soul, and a
little less stomach—but what of it?” with a graceful shrug. “For the
good of his country it is written that he shall acquire weight and
stolidity, instead of an ideal soul, and for the benefit of posterity I
sentenced him to speedy rotundity, and dull respectability, and the
begetting of future bankers. He will presently marry some one named
Alice or Annie, and invite me to the first christening in a spirit of
Christian forgiveness.”
Hal smiled more soberly than was her wont.
“And what of you?”
“What of me?... Oh, I don’t come into that sort of scheme. I never
ought to have been there at all. Still, I’m glad I showed him he’d got
something in himself beside the stale accumulations of many banker
ancestors; if it’s only for the sake of the next little banker, who may
want to lay claim to an individual soul.”
“But it hurt, Lorraine?... don’t tell me it didn’t hurt after...
after—”
“Oh yes, it hurt,” with a low, bitter laugh; “but what of that either?
It’s generally the woman who gets hurt; but I suppose I knew I was
riding for a fall.”
“I don’t suppose you are any more hurt than he is. You know he
worshipped you.”
“Yes; only presently it will be easy for him to get back into the old,
orthodox groove with ‘Alice’, and persuade himself that I was only a
youthful infatuation, whereas I— Oh, what does it matter, Hal! Come out
of that ‘great-aunt’ mood, and let’s be jolly while we can. I’ll ring
for coffee and liqueurs, and then we’ll make lots of ripping plans to
see everything in England worth seeing—until I can find time to go
abroad.”
Hal sprang off her table.
“Oh, very well,” she rejoined, “Let’s get rowdy and sing the song ‘Love
may go hang.’ When I’ve got it over with Dudley, we’ll just go straight
on, keeping a good look out for the next fence. You’d better tell me
something about this paternal husband of yours, just to prepare me for
our meeting. He doesn’t put his knife in his mouth, and that sort of
thing, does he?”
“No; not quite so bad. His worst offence at present, I think, is to
call me ‘wifey’.”
“Wifey!” in accents of horror. “Lorraine, how awful!”
“Yes; but I’m breaking him of it by degrees: that and his fondness for
a soft felt hat.”
They sat on chatting together with apparent gayness, but Hal’s heart
was no lighter after she had duly been presented to the paternal
husband, as she called him, and she journeyed solemnly home on a bus,
feeling rather as if she had been to a funeral. She tried at first to
hide her feelings from Dudley—no difficult matter at all, since he
usually contributed little but a slightly absent “yes” and “no” to the
conversation, and if the conversation languished he took small notice.
However, he had to be told, and Hal rarely troubled to do much beating
about the bush, so, in order to rouse him speedily and thoroughly, just
as he was settling down to his newspaper she hurled the news at his
head without any preliminary preparation.
“What do you think Lorraine has done now? Been and gone and married a
man old enough to be her father!”
“Married!... Lorraine Vivian married!”
Dudley’s newspaper went down suddenly on to his knee.
Hal had squatted on the hearthrug, tailor fashion, before the fire, and
she gave a little swaying movement backward and forward, to signify the
affirmative. He looked at her a moment as if to make sure she was not
joking, and then said, with sarcastic lips:
“A man old enough to be her father?... then it isn’t even Rod Burrell!”
“No; it isn’t even Rod Burrell.”
“Some one with more money and influence, I suppose? Well, I don’t know
that Burrell needs any one’s condolences.”
“He does, badly.”
“He won’t for long. The Burrells are a sensible lot, and no sensible
man frets over a heartless woman.”
“Lorraine is not a heartless woman. She has too much heart.”
“She is certainly very generous with it.”
“I don’t know which is the more detestable, a sarcastic man or a
sensible one.” Hal shut her lips tightly, and stared at the fire.
“I imagine you hardly expect any sort of man to admire Miss Vivian’s
action.”
“It doesn’t matter in the least what ‘any sort of man’ thinks. I am
only concerned with the possibility that she will weary of matrimony
quickly and be miserable. I told you, because I wanted you to hear it
from me instead of from a newspaper.”
Dudley suddenly grew more serious, as he realised how it must in a
measure affect Hal also.
“Who is he?”
“He is a stockbroker, named Frank Raynor, aged fifty.”
“And of course she married him for his money?”
“I suppose so. Also he partly owns the Greenway Theatre.”
“Pshaw . . . it’s a mere bargain.”
Hal was silent. She had rested her chin on her hands, and was now
gazing steadily at the embers.
“Of course if he is not a gentleman, you will have to leave off seeing
so much of her.”
“Not at all. She would need me all the more.”
“That is quite possible,” drily; “but you owe something to yourself and
me.”
“I couldn’t owe failing a friend to any one. But he is a gentleman
almost—a self-made one, and he doesn’t let you forget it.”
“Then you’ve seen him?”
“Yes, today.” Her lips suddenly twitched with irresistible humour. “He
called me ‘Hal’ and Lorraine ‘wifey.’ We bore it bravely.”
“What business had he to call you by your Christian name?”
“None. I suppose he just felt like it. He also alluded to my new hat as
a bonnet. Also he used to be an office-boy or something. He seemed
inordinately proud of it.”
“I loathe a self-made man who is always cramming it down one’s throat.
I don’t see how you can have much in common with either of them any
more.”
Hal got up, as if she did not want to pursue the subject.
“It won’t make the smallest difference to Lorraine and me,” she said.
Dudley knit his forehead in vexation and perplexity, remarking:
“Of course you mean to be obstinate about it.”
“No,” with a little laugh; “only firm.” She came round to his chair and
leant over the back it.
“Dear old long-face, don’t look so worried. None of the dreadful things
have happened yet that you expected to come of my friendship with
Lorraine. The nearest approach to them was the celebrated young author
I interviewed, who asked me to go to Paris with him for a fortnight,
and he was a clergyman’s son who hadn’t even heard of Lorraine. Next, I
think, was the old gentleman who offered to take me to the White City.
I don’t seem much the worse for either encounter, do I? and it’s silly
to meet trouble halfway.”
She bent her head and kissed him on the forehead.
“Dudley,” she finished mischievously, “what are you going to give
Lorraine for a wedding-present?”
“I might buy her the book, ‘How to be Happy though Married,’” he said
dilly, “or write her a new one and call it ‘Words of Warning for
Wifey.’”
“We’ll give her something together,” Hal exclaimed triumphantly,
knowing that, as usual, she had won the day.
Then she went off to bed, feigning a light-heartedness she was far from
feeling, and dreading, with vague misgivings, what the future might
bring forth.