It was force of habit chiefly that caused Lorraine, as a rule, to sleep
long and late on Sunday mornings; and it was greatly to her advantage
that for so many months, and even years, no mental anxiety had robbed
her of a splendid capacity to rest. She seemed to have a faculty for
limiting her worrying hours to the daylight, and being able to lay them
aside, like her correspondence, at night.
Yet on the following Sunday morning she found herself early awake, with
a brain only too ready to begin probing restlessly, and having little
of the calm friendliness she intended it should have towards her guest
of the evening.
To add to her unrest, her mother paid her an early visit, of a sort
that had been growing too frequent of late. It was not enough that
Lorraine paid her rent, and gave her a handsome allowance; when there
chanced to be no one else to pay her debts, these came upon Lorraine’s
shoulders also.
T-day it was a long, rambling tale of a hard-hearted dressmaker who,
having had a new frock back for alteration, had taken upon herself to
return the skirt, without the bodice, with an intimation that she was
retaining the delayed portion until her long account was settled. Hence
Mrs. Vivian found herself with what she called a most important
engagement, without the equally important new frock to go in.
Lorraine lay under the bedclothes, with only her head showing, and
watched her a little coldly, as she moved restlessly about the room
airing her woes. She had promised Madame Luce, over and over again, to
settle in a week or two; and who would have believed the odious woman
would serve her such a trick?
Never again, if she had to go naked, would she order a garment from her
of any description whatever. And the friends she had sent to her as
customers! Why, half the woman’s trade was owing to her introduction.
“Perhaps the friends don’t pay their bills,” Lorraine suggested in a
tired voice.
Mrs. Vivian drew herself up a little haughtily.
“I do not think there is any occasion to cast reflections on my
friends, even if you do not choose to be sociable to them,” which
remark was intended as a dignified hit at Lorraine’s invincible
determination to maintain friendly relations with her mother, without
having anything whatever to do with her mother’s friends.
As many previous hits, it fell quite harmlessly; it was doubtful if
Lorraine even heard it, half hidden there in the bedclothes with her
tired eyes.
“I suppose it isn’t any use reminding you that your personal
expenditure exceeds mine?” she hinted, “and that you have already far
overstepped the allowance we stipulated?”
“You do not have time to go about as much as I do, and it makes a great
difference not having hosts of friends.”
“You don’t seem to get much pleasure out of them,” Lorraine could not
resist saying, knowing as she did how much of her salary went into the
pockets of these so-called friends, in order to buy their adherence.
“Do I get much pleasure out of anything?” irritably. “My only child is
one of the first actresses in London, and what is it to me? Do I have
the pleasure of going about with her? or living with her? or taking any
part in her success?”
“I suppose it isn’t such a small thing to live by her. If I were not
successful, we could certainly not live here. It might have been
Islington and omnibuses,” and she smiled.
“As if that were all. Probably, as real companions we might have been
even happier in Islington.”
Lorraine stiffened. “Companions!… Ah, I, with whom else ever dancing
attendance, and changing in identity every few months?”
But she made no comment, for the days of her hot-headed, deep-hearted
judging were over; and from behind inscrutable eyes she looked upon the
things that one sees without seeming to see them, and accepted facts
that hurt her very soul, with a callous, cynical air that defied the
keenest shafts of probing.
It was her armour in an envious, merciless world, that would have
rejoiced before her eyes if it could have driven in a barbed arrow even
through her mother.
More than once a jealous enemy had tried and failed, routed utterly by
Lorraine’s cynical, cool treatment of a fact that she knew no
persuasion nor arguing could have helped her to refute. She did not
even weep about it now in secret.
It was as though she had shed all the tears she had to shed during that
year of utter revulsion spent in the Italian Riviera, companied by the
passionless solitudes of snowtopped mountains. Something of a great
patience and a great gentleness had come to her then, helping her to
hide the loathing she could not crush, and place the fact of motherhood
first of all.
As her mother, she had taken Mrs. Vivian back into her heart, and given
her generously of what worldly possessions she had. And she had done it
with a wondrous quiet and absence of all ostentation either outwardly
or inwardly. It had never occured to Lorraine that, whether it was a
duty or not, after what had passed it was certainly a fine act upon her
part.
She had not questioned about it at all. To her mother’s apologetic gush
she had merely turned calm eyes and a strong face.
“It isn’t worth while to remember the past at all,” she had said; “we
will just begin again on rather different lines. I’ll always let you
have as much money as I can spare.”
Mrs. Vivian had been a little taken aback by the new Lorraine who
returned from Italy; and not a little afraid before the calm,
inscrutable eyes; so that she had secretly rejoiced at the arrangement
which gave her a separate establishment of her own; but none the less,
in bursts of righteous indignation supposed to emanate from her
outraged feelings as a mother, she usually chose to make it her pet
grievance.
And still Lorraine only smiled the tired smile, and glanced carelessly
aside with the inscrutable eyes until the tirade was over, the coveted
cheque made out, and her own little sanctum once again in peaceful
possession.
Only just occasionally, if the interview had been specially trying, she
might have been seen afterwards to glance whimsically across to the
picture, recently enlarged from an old photograph, of a fine-looking
man in full hunting-rig standing beside a favourite hunter.
“Poor old dad,” she murmured once; “I don’t wonder you couldn’t keep up
the old place. I don’t know how you got along at all without my
salary.”
Once when she was feeling the drag of it all a little keenly she told
the man in the picture: “Mother is splendidly handsome, and I daresay I
owe her a good deal; but thank God you were there with your fine old
name and family to give me the things that matter most. It sometimes
seems as if we had got each other still, dad, and, for the rest, some
are frail in one way and some another, and fretting doesn’t help any
one.” The fine eyes had grown more whimsically wistful looking into the
face of the huntsman as she finished: “Anyhow, the last favourite is
second cousin to a duke, and she pointed out to me, he might have been
only a butcher.”
How much Hal knew of her mother’s life Lorraine had never been able to
gauge, but she had reason to think she knew something and was sporting
enough to pretend otherwise. If so, she blessed her for it, feeling
that by that generous non-acknowledgment she rendered a service both to
her and her dead father.
Yet it seemed strange that any one so young and fresh as Hal should be
able to act thus, instead of suffering a violent repulsion. Was it the
depth of her splendid friendship; or was it a naturally adaptable,
common-sense nature; or was it non-comprehension?
As time passed and she grew to know Hal yet better, she felt
instinctively it was the first of these, coupled with that true
sportsman-spirit which was one of her strongest attributes.
Lorraine was not the only one who felt that whether Hal had any
religion or not, or any faith, through good and ill, by easy paths and
difficult, one might be absolutely sure that she would “play the game.”
It made her feel herself richer with her one friend than with her
mother’s admitted hosts, and though she seemed to hesitate and reason
on that Sunday morning, both knew the cheque would finally be written,
and the coveted garment rescued in time for the important lunch.
Only, afterwards, a shadow seemed to linger today that heretofore would
have vanished with the departing figure. The sunshine crept through the
drawn curtains, lying like a shaft of hope across the gloom, but it
brought no answering gleam into the beautiful eyes, with their tired,
far-off gaze.
It was all very well for Hal to be a main feature in her life, blessing
it with her friendship, while she turned kindly, unseeing eyes away
from the corners where the murky shadows lay: Hal, who knew about the
mad, discreditable marriage and its violent termination, and probably
also of her mother’s insatiable thirst for admiration and excitement at
any cost.
There was something about Hal in herself that was as a shining armour,
against which unkind barbs fell harmlessly, and enabled her to go on
her serene and joyful way in blissful non-attention.
But could it be the same with this treasured only son, who was
doubtless destined for a high place in the world by doting parents, and
other proud bearers of the same old name? Of course he might sup and
trifle with certain denizens of the theatrical world galore; it would
only be part of his education, and a thing to wink at, but she already
doubted whether such a slight companionship would have any attraction.
In spite of his youthfulness, there was something in him that would
naturally and quickly respond to the fine shades in herself, and grow
into a friendship that had no part with the casual, gay
acquaintanceships of the theatre and the world.
In a sense he was like Hal, and she knew that just as she attracted
Hal’s devotion in spite of all disparity of years and circumstances,
so, if she chose, she could make this young giant more or less her
slave.
But was it worht it?
What did she, on her high pedestal, want with his young admiration?
What did she want with a companion so undeveloped that she herself must
awaken his strongest forces?
Through the gloom, unheeding the shaft of sunlight, she saw him again,
towering up there on her hearth, with his young splendour, so
extraordinarily unspoilt as yet; and she knew that, reasonable or
unreasonable, she was attracted far beyond her wont.
And then she thought of his easy-going temperament, his lack of
ambition, his half-sleepy attitude towards life.
What if the wheels ran so smoothly for him that the latent forces were
never aroused, and little achieved of all that might be?
If love came at his asking, and a sufficiency of success to satisfy an
easy-going nature, what would there ever be to stir depths which she
truly believed were worth stiring? Was it so small a thing to help a
fine soul forward to its best attainment?... was such an aim not worth
some going aside for both?
She felt there were things she could teach him, which without her he
might entirely miss; and if without her he were the better according to
a conventional standard, he might yet be far the poorer in the big,
deep things of life.
Well, no doubt circumstances would end by suiting themselves, with or
without her agency. In the meantime why worry, in a world that it would
seem worked out its own ends, sublimely indifferent to the individual?
They were going to dine together tonight anyhow; their first
tête-à-tête dinner and evening: time enough to probe and worry when she
was more sure a mutual attraction existed; wiser at present to seek a
counter attraction for her own sake, that she might not uselessly build
a castle without foundations.
Prompt as ever, she reached out for the receiver beside her bed and
rang up the Albany to know if Lord Denton were awake yet.
“I’m not awake,” came back a sleepy answer. “I am asleep, and dreaming
of Lorraine Vivian. If my man wakes me now, I shall curse him solidly
for half an hour.”
“Well, will you dream you are going to take her for a spin into the
country shortly? I happen to know she is fainting for the longing to
breathe country air.”
“In my dream I am already waiting at her door, with the Yellow Peril
spluttering its heart out with delight, and eagerness to be off. I have
even dreamt she managed to put a motor bonnet on in half-an-hour—is it
conceivable—or should it be half a day?”
“No, your dream is right. Be outside the door in half an hour, and you
will see.”
An hour later they were spinning out into Surrey at an alarming pace,
both silently revelling in the freshness and motion and the fact that
they were too old friends to need to trouble about conversation. When
they dived into the lanes he slowed down, remarking:
“I suppose we mustn’t risk scrunching any one up.”
Lorraine only smiled, remaining silent a little longer, and then she
suddenly asked him:
“When you feel yourself inclined to fall in love foolishly what do you
do?”
“Well… as a rule…” he began slowly and humorously, “I either cut and
run, or I hurry to see so much of her that I am bound to get bored.”
“The first plan sounds the safest, but would often be the most
difficult of execution. Supposing the second miscarries and you don’t
get bored?”
“Well, then I think—usually—there is an awful moment when I have to
tell her I can’t afford both a motor and a wife; and to be motorless
would kill me.”
A sudden little twitching at the corners made Lorraine’s mouth
dangerously fascinating.
“Evidently you have never fallen in love with me,” she said, “for you
have not been driven to either way of escape.”
He looked into her face with an answering humour, and a twinkle in his
eyes as alluring as her smilling lips.
“Because when I fell in love with you I did it sensibly, and not
foolishly,” was his answer; “instinct told me I couldn’t have you for
my wife however much I wished it, so I said myself: ‘Flip, old boy,
she’ll make a thundering good pal, you close with it,’ and I did.”
She made no comment, and he went on more seriously:
“You see, even if you became marriageable and I cut out the motor, you
wouldn’t be attracted to an ordinary sort of cove like me. I suit you
down to the ground as a pal, but it wouldn’t go any farther.”
“I wonder why you think that?”
“I don’t exactly _think_ it—thinking is too much bother—but it’s just
there, like a commonplace fact. You are all temperament, and
high-strung nerves, and soul, and enthusiasm, and that sort of thing,
which makes you a great actress. I’m just a two-legged, superior sort
of animal, who hasn’t much brain, but knows what he likes, and usually
does it without wasting time on pros and cons. Consequently, I’m just
as likely to end in prison as anywhere else, and take it without much
concern as all in the day’s work. You are more likely to end in a
nunnery, as the most devout of all the nuns.”
“What an odd idea! Why a nunnery?”
“Oh, because it’s an extreme of one sort or another, and you are made
for extremes. You’ll perhaps be very wicked first”—he smiled
delightfully—“after which, of course, you’d have to be very good. It’s
the way you’re made. I’m cut out on quite a different plan. I can’t be
‘very’ anything, unless it’s very drunk after the Oxford and Cambridge
at Lord’s.”
“Do you think I could be very wicked?” She asked the question with a
thoughtfulness that amused him greatly, and he answered at once:
“I haven’t a doubt of it. You are probably plotting the particular form
of wickedness at this very moment.”
She laughed, and he went on in the same serio-comic mood:
“I quite envy you. It must be very thrilling to think to oneself, ‘I’ve
dared to be desperately wicked.’ You cease to be a nonentity at once
and become a force. You get right to hand-grips with the big elemental
things. Of course that is interesting, but it usually means a
confounded lot of bother.”
“You are as bad as Hal Pritchard. She announced the other day she would
rather have a dishonest purpose than no purpose at all.”
“It’s the same idea, only Miss Pritchard lives up to her creed by being
full of energy and purpose; whereas I can’t be anything but a mediocre
waster. I’ve neither the pluck to be wicked, not the energy to be good,
nor enough purpose to regret it. I believe I’m best described as an
aristocratic ‘stiff’, a ‘stiff’ being a person who spends his life
trying to avoid having to do things.
“I fill a niche all the same,” he finished, “because I make such an
excellent foil for the other chaps, who like to pride themselves on
their superiority and hard work. It’s nice for them to be able to say
contemptuously, ‘Look at Denton,’ and it’s nice for me to be able to
feel I’m of some use, without the bother of making an effort.”
“You are certainly quite incorrigible as an idler, if that can be
called a purpose, and, Flip, don’t change; I love you for it; you are
one of the most restful things I have ever known.”
He glanced into her face with a keenness that somewhat belied his
professed incapacity to be in earnest, and remarked with seeming
lightness:
“Feeling a bit down on your luck, eh? Are you thinking of falling in
love foolishly?”
“I’m thinking of trying to guard against doing so.”
“You ought not to find it difficult. Crowd him out with other
admirers.”
“It seems as if he were going to do the crowding out.”
“Why, is he so big?” jocularly.
“There’s six foot five-and-a-half of him.”
“Whew! And thin as a lathe, I suppose; a sort of animated telegraph
pole.”
“No; broad in proportion, cut to measure absolutely.”
“Then he is a fine fellow,” with conviction.
Lorraine felt a swift glow of pride, and then inwardly admonished
herself for being silly. What, after all, was size? As Hal had
trenchantly remarked, plenty of London policemen were just as big and
fine. Half in self-defence she added:
“He has brains as well, and he is as handsome as Apollo.”
“Then run,” was the laconic response; “don’t stop to buy a ticket; pay
the other end.”
She smiled, but grew suddenly serious. Leaning forward with eyes
straining hard to the horizon, she said: “Flip, I’ve had a hard life,
in spite of the success. Shall I run?... or... shall I stay, and snatch
joy, while there is still time?”
He looked at her with a growing interest.
“If I were you I should run,” he said; “but, all the same, I think
you’ll stay.”
“No; I don’t think I shall. There are other reasons. He is a good deal
younger than I—and—well, I’ve a fair amount on my soul already.”
The tired shadow was coming back to her eyes, but she laughed suddenly
with an attempt at gaiety.
“You ought to have heard Hal Pritchard on the subject. She remarked
there were plenty of London policemen just as big, and suggested if I
wanted a fine young animal to play with, I should be safer with a polar
bear from the Zoo.”
“Well done, Hal. We ought to have brought her. Where is she today?”
“Careering across England in a haphazard fashion with her cousin Dick
Bruce. Do you mind turning towards home now? I’m dining out, and have
some letters to write.”
“Who’s the happy man tonight?... I thought of course I was to have the
whole day.”
“With a view to getting wholesomely bored! No, Flip, I don’t propose to
let you find that way out just yet.”
“I should have found it for myself long ago if it were possible. As it
is, I have grown resigned, and accept what crumbs fall to my portion.”
He paused a moment and then asked, “Is it Goliath tonight?”
“It is.”
“Rash woman; and just when I have advised you to run.”
“But it is not in the least serious yet. I only asked you in view of it
becoming so.”
“Which means you will try and start to run, _after_ you are firmly in
the trap.”
“Not at all. I won’t go near the trap. I’ll tell him I’m old enough to
be his mother, and talk down to him from years of detestable common
sense and sagacity.”
“Which sounds as if it would be even duller than dining with me.”
“Oh no. It holds novelty anyway. You are never dull, but likewise you
are no longer novel.”
They made for the high roads again, and spun along mostly in silence
until the car once more came to a standstill at Lorraine’s door.
“Come in,” she said, “I’ve lots of time.”
“No,” with a little smile. “I’ve had my crumbs for the day. I’m going
to have a good solid crust now to keep the balance. Do you know Lottie
Bird?… Fourteen stone, if she’s an ounce, and a tongue like a
sixty-horse-power motor. There are times when she’s so damned practical
and overpowering she does me good. This is one of them. Good-bye. Don’t
kill the giant with a glance; and don’t be silly enough to get hurt
yourself.”
“All right. I’ll go in full armour,” and she nodded gaily enough as he
moved off down the street.