It will be remembered, perhaps, that an occasion has already occured
when Hal had cause to congratulate herself upon the possession of a
cousin, named Dick, who acted as an antidote to a brother who sometimes
resembled a great-aunt.
Dick, or to give him his full name, Richard Alastair Bruce, was indeed
her best friend and boon companion next to Lorraine. He was her
earliest playmate, and likewise her latest. For many months together
they had been companions in the wildest of wild escapades as children,
at Dick’s country home; and now that they were both responsible members
of the community, in the world’s greatest city, they were equally
attached.
If Hal was down on her luck, she telephoned Dick to come instantly to
the rescue, and if it was humanly possible he came. If Dick wanted a
sympathetic or gay companion, either to go out with him or to listen to
his latest inspirations, he telephoned to Hal, and little short of an
urgent, important engagement would delay her.
At the time he becomes of any importance in this narrative he was
established in a flat in the Cromwell Road, as one of a trio sometimes
known as the Three Graces. The other two were Harold St. Quintin and
Alymer Hermon.
The appellation was first given to them when they were freshmen at New
College, Oxford; partly because they were inseparable, partly because
they were a particularly good-looking trio, and partly because they all
three came up from Winchester with great cricket reputations. Within
two years they were all playing for the ‘Varsity’ and one of them was
made captain.
Three years from the term of their leaving, after each had gone his own
way for a season, they gravitated together again, and finally became
established in the Cromwell Road flat, once more on the old
affectionate terms.
Dick Bruce was following a literary career, of a somewhat ambiguous
nature. He wrote weird articles for weird papers, under weird
pseudonyms, verses, under a woman’s name, for women’s papers, usually
of the _Home Dressmaker_ type; occasional lines to advertise some
patent medicine or soap; one or two Salvation Army hymns of a
particularly rousing nature: and sometimes a weighty, brilliant article
for a first-class paper, duly signed in his own name.
Besides all this he visited a publisher’s office most days, where he
was supposed to be meditating the acquirement of a partnership. Hal was
very apt at terse, concise definitions, and she was quite up to her
best form when she described him as “the maddest of a mad clan run
amok.”
Harold St. Quintin, or Quin, as every one called him, was idealist,
etherealist, and dreamer. His original intention had been to enter the
Church, but having gone down into East London to give six months to
slum work, he had remained two years without showing any inclination to
give it up. Sometimes he lived at the flat, and sometimes he was lost
for a week at a time somewhere east of St. Paul’s, where one might as
well have looked for him as for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Alymer Hermon, after a sojourn on the continent to study languages, was
now established with a barrister, waiting, it must be confessed,
without much concern, for his first brief.
Of the three he was the most striking. Dick Bruce was only ordinarily
good-looking, with a very white skin, a fine forehead, and an arresting
pair of eyes—eyes that were like an index to a brain that held volumes
of original observations and whimsicalities, and revealed only just as
much or little as the author chose.
Harold St. Quintin was small and rather delicate, with never-failing
cheerfulness on his lips, and eyes that seemed always to have behind
them the recollection of the pitiful scenes among which he voluntarily
moved.
Alymer Hermon was Adonis returned to earth. He stood six foot five and
a half inches in his socks, and was as perfectly proportioned as a man
may be; with a head and face any sculptor might have been proud to copy
line by line for a statue of masculine beauty.
When he was captain of the Oxford Eleven, people spoke of his beauty
more than his cricket, although the latter was quite sufficiently
striking in itself. There were others who had sweepstakes on his
height, before the score he would make, or the men he would bowl.
The ‘Varsity’ was proud of him, as they had never been proud of a
captain before, because he upheld every tradition of manliness and
manhood at its best. And they only liked him the better that so far his
attitude to his own comeliness was rather that of boredom than anything
else. Certainly it weighed as nothing in the balance against the joy of
scoring a century and achieving a good average with his bowling.
He was equally bored with the young girls who gazed at him in
adoration, and the women who petted him, and it was a considerable
source of worry to him that he might appear effeminate, because of his
blue eyes and golden hair, and fresh, clear complexion, when in reality
he was as manly as the plainest of hard-sinewed warriors, though the
indulgence of a slightly aesthetic manner and way of speech, learnt at
the University, increased rather than counteracted the suggestion of
effeminacy.
But, taking all things into consideration, he was singularly unspoilt
and unassuming; and sometimes blended with an old-fashioned, paternal
air a boyishness and power of enjoyment that could not fail to charm.
The first time that Lorraine met the trio was when Hal took her to
spend the evening at the flat one Sunday, by arrangement with her
cousin. She herself knew all three well, having been to the flat many
times, but it had taken some little persuasion to get Lorraine to go
with her.
“Of course they are just boys,” said grandiloquent twenty-five, “but
they are quite amusing, and they will be proud of it all their lives if
they can say they once had Lorraine Vivian at the flat as a guest.”
“What do you call boys?” asked Lorraine, looking amused; “I thought you
said they had all left college,”
“So they have, but that’s nothing. Dick is only twenty-five, and the
others are about twenty-four.”
“A much more irritating age than mere boyhood as a rule.”
“Decidedly; but they really are a little exceptional. Dick, of course,
is quite mad—that’s what makes him interesting. Alymer Hermon is a
giant with a great cricket reputation, and Harold St. Quintin is a sort
of modern Francis Assisi with a sense of humour.”
“The giant sounds the dullest. I hope he doesn’t want to talk cricket
all the time, because I don’t know anything about it, except that if a
man stands before the wicket he is out, and if he stands behind it he
is not in.”
“Oh no; he doesn’t talk cricket. He mostly talks drivel with Dick, and
St. Quintin laughs.”
“Dick sounds quite the best, in spite of his madness. A cricketer who
talks drivel, and a future clergyman working in the East End, don’t
suggest anything that appeals to me in the least.”
Nevertheless, when Lorraine, looking very lovely, entered the small
sitting-room of her three hosts, her second glance, in spite of
herself, strayed back to the young giant on the hearth-rug. He was
looking at Hal sideways, with a quizzical air; and she heard him say:
“It may be new, but it’s not the very latest fashion, because it
doesn’t stick out far enough at the back, and it doesn’t cover up
enough of your face.”
“Oh well!” said Hal jauntily, “if I had as much time as you to study
the fashions, I daresay I should know as much about them. But I have to
_work_ for my living,” with satirical emphasis.
“What a nuisance for you,” with a delightful smile. “I only pretend to
work for mine.”
“We all know that. You sit on a stool, and look nice, and wait for a
brief to come along and beg to be taken up.”
“It’s a chair. I’m not one of the clerks. And I shouldn’t get a brief
any quicker if I went and shouted on the housetops that I wanted one.”
“Besides, you don’t want one. You know you wouldn’t know what to do
with it if you got it. Well, how’s East London?…” and Hall crossed to
the slum-worker, with a show of interest she evidently did not feel for
the embryo barrister. Lorraine smiled at him, however, and he moved
leisurely forward to take the vacant seat beside her on the sofa.
“Is Hal trying to sharpen her wit at your expense?” she asked him, in a
friendly, natural way.
“Yes; but it’s a very blunt weapon at the best. People who always think
they are the only ones to work are very tiring; don’t you think so?”
“Decidedly; and I don’t suppose she does half s much as you and I in
reality.”
“Oh well, I could hardly belie myself so far as to assert that. You
see, it takes a long time to make people understand what a good
barrister you would be if you got the chance to prove it.”
Hal could not resist a timely shot.
“Personally, I shoud advise you to try and prove it without the chance.
The chance might undo the proving, you see.”
“What a rotten, mixed-up, meaningless remark!” he retorted. “Is it
because you find I am so dull, you still have to talk to me?”
“Quin is never dull, he is only depressing. Dick, do hurry up and begin
supper. I always feel horribly hungry here, because I know Quin has
just come away from some starving family or other, and I have to try
and eat to forget.”
Lorraine leant across to the dreamy-eyed first-class circketer,
voluntarily giving his life to the slums.
“Why do you do it?” she asked with sudden interest. “It seems, somehow,
unnatural in a—” she hesitated, then finished a little lamely, “a man
like you.”
“Oh no, not at all,” he hastened to assure her. “It’s the most
fascinating work in the world. It’s full of novelty and surprises for
one thing.”
She shuddered a little.
“But the misery and want and starvation. The … the… utter hopelessness
of it all.”
“But it isn’t hopeless at all. Nothing is hopeless. And then, knowing
the misery is there, and doing nothing, is far worse than seeing it and
doing what one can.”
“Oh no, because one can forget so often.”
“Some can. I can’t. Therefore I can only choose to go and wrestle with
it.”
“Of course it is heroic of you, but still!—”
Harold St. Quintin gave a gay laugh.
“It is not a bit more heroic than your work on the stage to give people
pleasure. I get as much satisfaction in return as you do; and that is
the main point. Slum humanity is seething with interest, and it is by
no means all sad, nor all discouraging. There is probably more humour
and heroism there per square mile than anywhere else.”
“And no doubt more animal life also,” put in Dick Bruce. “It’s the
superfluous things that put me off, not the want of anything.”
“It’s feeling such an ass puts me off,” added Hermon; “they’re all so
busy and alert about one thing or another down there, they make me feel
a mere cumberer of the earth. A woman manages a husband, and a family,
and some sort of a home, and does the breadwinning as well. The
children try to earn pennies in their playtime; and the men work at
trying to get work.”
“Whereas you?…” suggested Hal with a twinkle, “work at trying not to
get work.”
“Come to supper, and don’t be so personal, Hal,” said her cousin. “I
wrote a poem on you last week, and called it ‘Why Men Die Young.’ It is
in a rag called _The Woman’s Own Newspaper_. It is also in _The Youth’s
Journal_, with the pronouns altered, and a different title; but I
forget what.”
“What a waste of time—writing such drivel,” Hal flung at him. “Why
don’t you compose a masterpiece, and scale Olympus?”
“Too commonplace. Lots of men have done that. Very few are positive
geniuses at writing drivel. I claim to be in the front rank.”
They sat down to a lively repast, and Lorraine found herself, instead
of an awe-inspiring, distinguished guest, treated with a frank
camaraderie that was both amusing and refreshing. They all made a butt
of Hal, who was quite equal to the three of them; and when the giant
paraphrased one of her (Lorraine’s) most tragic utterances on the stage
into a serio-comic dissertation on a fruit salad they were eating,
lacking in wine, she laughed as gaily as any, and felt she had known
them for years.
Then Hal insisted upon playing a game she had that moment invented,
which consisted of each one confessing his or her greatest failing, and
the gaiety grew.
She led off by informing them that she found she always jumped eagerly
at any excuse to avoid her morning bath. Dick Bruce followed it up with
a confession that he found he was never satisfied with fewer than four
“best girls”, because he liked to compare notes between them, and write
silly verses on his observations; while Harold St. Quintin owned to an
objectionable fancy for bull’s-eye peppermints and blowing eggs.
Alymer Hermon confessed that he loved giving advice to people years
older than himself, concerning things he knew nothing whatever about.
Lorraine tried to cry off, but, hard pressed, she admitted that she
liked the excitement of spending money she had not got, and then having
to pawn something to satisfy her creditors. “Spending money you will
not miss,” she finished, “is very dull beside spending money you do not
possess.”
Alymer Hermon then suggested they should tell each other of besetting
faults, and at once informed Hal her colossal opinion of herself and
all she did was only equalled by its entire lack of foundation.
Hal hurled back at him that every inch in height after six feet
absorbed vitality from the brain, and that, though his dense stupidity
was most trying, the reason for it claimed their compassion.
“You pride yourself beyond all reason on your stature,” she said, “and
are too dense to perceive it is your undoing.”
Lorraine leant towards him and said:
“Inches give magnanimity: big men are always big-hearted; you can
afford to forgive her, and retaliate that too much brain-power sinks
individuality into mere machinery. I should say Hal’s besetting fault
was rapping every one on the knuckles, as if they were the keys of a
typewriting machine.”
“And yours, my dear Lorraine, is smiling into every one’s eyes, as if
the world held no others for you. Were I a man, and you smiled at me
so, I would strangle you before you had time to repeat the glance on
some one else.”
“And Dick’s besetting sin,” murmured St. Quintin plaintively, “is a
persistent fancy for other people’s ties and other people’s boots. I
have cause to bless the benign and other people’s boots. I have cause
to bless the benign providence who fashioned my shoulders sufficiently
smaller than his to prevent his wearing my coats.”
“And yours, Quin,” broke in Hermon, “is a fond and loathsome affection
for pipes so seasoned that the Board of Trade ought to prohibit their
use.”
“After all,” Hal rapped out at him, “that’s not so bad as love of a
looking-glass.”
“And love of a looking-glass is no worse than love of throwing stones
from glass houses,” he retorted.
“Of course it isn’t, Hal,” broke in her cousin, “and probably if you
had anything nice to look at in your glass—”
Hal stood up.
“The meeting is adjourned,” she announced solemnly, “and the honourable
member who was just spoken has the president’s leave to absent himself
on the occasion of the next gathering.”
“Excellent,” cried Quin, while Hermon in great glee rapped the table
with his knife handle and exclaimed, “Capital, Dick!... That drew
her... I think you might say it took the middle stump.”
“Oh, thank goodness he’s got on to cricket,” breathed Hal. “He does
know a little about that, and may possibly talk sense for ten minutes.
Come along, Lorraine, and don’t address Baby at present, for fear you
distract him from his game and start him off struggling to be clever
again. As it is Sunday night, perhaps Dick would like to read us his
latest effusions in the way of boisterous hymns!”
She led the way back to the bachelor sitting-room, and for some little
time Dick amused them greatly with his experiences over editors and
magazines, and then the two went off together to Lorraine’s flat.
At this time she was living at the bottom of Lower Sloane Street, with
windows looking over the river, and it was generally supposed that her
mother lived with her.
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Vivian only occupied the ground floor flat in
company with a friend. Lorraine give her an income on condition she
should live there, and so, in a sense, act as a sort of chaperone to
silence the tongues ever ready to find food for scandal in the fact of
brilliance and beauty living alone; but mother and daughter had never
again been on terms of cordiality.
So Hal was often Lorraine’s companion for several nights, coming and
going as she fancied, always sure of a welcome. To her the flat was a
constant delight, and in the evening she loved to sit on the verandah
and watch the gliding river—not to sentimentalise and dream, but
because she loved London with all her heart and soul and strength, and
to her the river was as the city’s pulsing heart.
The moist freshness of the air coming across from Battersea Park was
only the more refreshing after Bloomsbury, and the vicinity of several
well-known names in the world of art and letters appealed porwerfully
to her imagination. Lorraine usually sat just inside the long French
window, taking care of her voice, and listening contentedly to Hal’s
chatter.
They sat thus for a little while after their return from Cromwell Road,
and it was noticeable that Lorraine was even more silent than usual.
Hal told her something about each of their three hosts in turn, while
showing an unmistakable preference for the slum-worker and her cousin.
At last Lorraine interrupted her.
“Why do you say so little about Mr. Hermon?... you merely told me he
was a cricketer, which doesn’t, as a matter of fact, describe him at
all.”
Hal shrugged her shoulders.
“I suppose he doesn’t interest me except in that way.”
“But it is a mere side issue. If he weren’t a cricketer he would be
just as remarkable.”
“But he isn’t remarkable. He’s only exceptionally big.”
“He’s one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever seen, anyway.”
“Oh, nonsense, Lorraine. Besides, he is hardly a man yet. He’s only
twenty-four.”
“I can’t help that,” with a little laugh. “I’ve seen a great many men
in my life, but I’ve never seen any one before like Alymer Hermon.”
“Why in the world not? What do you mean?”
“Well, to begin with, he’s the most perfect specimen of manhood I’ve
ever beheld. He’s abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of
being either too big or awkward. He’s simply magnificent. Most men of
that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men
built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so
much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are
always expecting admiration. Alymer Hermon has the freshness of a
delightful boy, with the fine face and courtly manners of a charming
man. If you can’t see this, it’s because you don’t know men as well as
I do.”
Hal stepped over the window sill into the room.
“Pooh!” she said impatiently. “What in the world has happened to you?
He’s just a stuffed blue-and-gold Apollo.”
Lorraine got up also.
“He’s more than that. Some day you will see; unless... unless....”
“Well, unless what?”
“Oh, nothing, only a man like that can’t expect to escape being spoilt.
A certain type of woman will inevitably mark him down for her prey, and
ruin all his freshness.”
“Then you had better take him under your wing,” Hal laughed. “It would
be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society. Personally, stuffed
blue-and-gold Apollos don’t interest me in the least. Come along to
bed. I’m dead tired,” and she dragged Lorraine away.
But instead of sleeping, the actress lay silently watching a star that
shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man
nature had chosen to endow so bountifully. In a few weeks she would be
thirty-two and he was twenty-four.
Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his
splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it
might have been—what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a
golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess.
She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising
herself for her folly. After all, what had a beautiful, successful
woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played
foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know
his world? Of course he would bore her intolerably at a second
interview, and, closing her eyes resolutely, she drove his image from
her mind.