RUPERT lay in bed morosely contemplating the first fact about
Leave--its brutal elasticity. If he did not know, on the one hand, what
he had done to deserve the acquaintanceship of Mary Arden, he did not
know, on the other, that he deserved that dark intrusion on brief London
days, the Staithley visit. Fortune first smiled, then apishly grimaced,
but he threw off peevishness with the bed-clothes and the tang of cold
water. Soberly, if intrusion was in question, then it was Mary who
intruded and if he hadn’t learned, by now, to take things as they came,
he had wasted his time in France.
He must go to Staithley, he must attend the conclave of the
Hepplestalls, but he need not then and there make his protest
articulate. Would it, indeed, be decent, coming as he would straight
from his first reverent visit to his father’s grave, to fling defiance
at his uncles? If they cared to read consent into an attitude studiously
noncommittal, why, they must; but he wouldn’t in so many words announce
his irrevocable decision never to be bondsman to Hepplestall’s; he
wouldn’t by any sign of his invite a tedium of disputation which might
keep him, heaven knew how long, from London and his Mary.
His Mary! That was thought which outran discretion, truth and even hope.
The most he sanguinely expected of her was that she would consent, for
the period of his leave, to “play” with him and, of course, there was a
matter, trivial but annoying, to be set right first. That introduction
under his nickname bothered him: his silence suggested that he was
ashamed to acknowledge himself at the moment of being presented to an
actress, and the suggestion was insulting to her. So far, and so far as
the invitation to lunch went, she had accepted him as her companion
“on his face,” and it might have been romantic enterprise to see if
she would continue to consort with a Fairy, a man cursed with a name as
grotesque as Cyrano’s nose, but he took Mary too seriously to put their
playtime in jeopardy by keeping up a masquerade. The last thing he would
do was to traffic on his title, but the first was to let her know that
he wasn’t a Fairy! By telling a waiter to address him as Sir Rupert?
He didn’t like that way. The way of an intriguer. No, he must face
his dilemma, hoping to find means to bring out the truth without (God
forbid!) advertising it, and in the first moments of their meeting, too.
What prevented him from telling her when she came into the restaurant
and held out her hand with an “Ah, Captain Fairy,” was her disconcerting
frock. It was not an unusual frock except that it was a fashionable and
supreme frock and Mary had torn off two other fashionable frocks before
she decided that this was an occasion for a supreme frock. It was an
occasion, she admitted by stages marked by the change of frock, for her
best defenses. She had welcomed medicinally the purge to pride he had
unconsciously administered but he must not make a habit of it and
from head to foot, within and without, she wrapped herself in
dress-assurance.
“You’re stunning,” he said at sight of her, stupidly and truthfully,
missing the finer excellences of her frock, disconcerted by it simply
because it was a frock. Idiot, he called himself, did he expect her to
come to the Carlton in a white silk dressing-gown with her hair down her
shoulders? But neither on the stage nor in her dressing-room had he seen
her with her hair up and he hadn’t, in that particular, been imaginative
about her. He saw her now a well-dressed woman, superbly a woman, but
so different from the Mary of stage-costume or of dishabille, so
wonderfully more mysterious, that his illusion of knowing her very soul
dropped from him and left him bankrupt of confidence in the presence of
a lady charming but unknown.
They were at a table and Mary had the conversation under control long
before he realized that she was still addressing him as Captain Fairy.
Perhaps, after all, his assertion of himself would go best with the
coffee: he resolved very firmly that he wouldn’t let it slide beyond the
coffee. He became aware of subtle oppositions between them, of pleasant
undercurrents in action and reaction making an electricity of their own;
he sensed her evident desire to lead the conversation. Well, she would
naturally play first fiddle to a Fairy, but perhaps there was something
else and, if so, he could put that right without embarrassing himself.
She had said last night, as if pointedly, “I’m a London actress,”
thinking of him, no doubt, as a provincial.
He said, “By the way, Carton mentioned last night that I come from
Lancashire. His point was, I suppose, that it would interest you because
you happen to be playing a Lancashire part. I’m Lancashire by the
accident of birth, but I hope I’ve outlived it in my life.”
“Oh!” said Mary, thinking of a photograph of Staithley Edge which hung
on the wall of her flat almost with the significance of the ikon in a
Russian peasant’s room, “oh, are you ashamed of Lancashire?”
“I’m going there this afternoon, as a matter of fact, probably for the
last time. I don’t think the word is ‘ashamed,’ though. I’ve outgrown
Lancashire. I shall settle in London after the war. Look here, may
I tell you about it? Theoretically, I was supposed to go back to
Lancashire some day, after I’d finished at Cambridge. To go back on
terms I loathed, and I didn’t mean to go back. I was reading pretty hard
at Cambridge, not for fun, but to get a degree--a decent degree; to have
something to wave in their faces as a fairly solid reason for not going
back. I thought of going to the bar, just by way of being something
reasonable, but I don’t know that it matters now. I mean after the war
they can’t possibly expect the things of a man that they thought it was
possible, and I didn’t, to expect before. My father’s dead, too, since
then. And that makes a lot of difference. I’m awfully sorry he died,
but I can’t help seeing that his death liberates me. I shan’t go back to
Lancashire at any price.”
He had the earnest fluency of a man talking about himself to a woman.
How well she knew it! And how old, how wise, how much more experienced
than the oldest war-scarred veteran of them all did she not feel when
her young men poured out their simple histories to her! But she was used
to the form of consultation. They put it to her, as a rule, that they
sought her advice and though she knew quite well that their object
was to flatter, it piqued her now that Rupert did not ask advice. He
reasoned, perhaps, and his assertion was not of what he would do after
the war but of what he positively would not. He was not going back to
Lancashire and, “You do pay compliments,” she said a little tartly. “You
bring out to lunch an actress who’s doing a Lancashire part and you tell
her that Lancashire’s not good enough for you.”
“But that’s your art,” he cried, “to be so wonderfully not yourself.
Seriously, Miss Arden, for you, a London actress, to be absolutely
a Lancashire girl on the stage is sheer miracle. But that’s not the
question and between us two, is Lancashire a place fit to live in?” So
he bracketed them together, people of the great world.
“I won’t commit myself,” she said. It was not her art, it was herself,
but she couldn’t answer back his candor with candor of her own and felt
again at disadvantage with him. He attacked and she could not defend.
She said, “Oh, I expect you’ll get what you want. You look the sort that
does.” She was almost vicious about it.
“I hope I shall,” he said, gazing ingenuous admiration at her. “For
instance--”
She moved sharply as if she dodged a blow. Men did queer things on
leave; she had had proposals from them though she knew them as little as
she knew Rupert. “For instance,” he went on imperviously, “shall I get
this? Shall I get your promise to have lunch with me here on Thursday? I
shall be back from Lancashire by then.”
“Yes, I’ll lunch,” she said convulsively, calling herself a fool to have
misjudged him and a soppy fool, like the soppiest fool of a girl at the
theater, to be so apt to think of marriage. Yet Mary thought much of
marriage, not as the “soppy fools” thought, hopefully, but defensively.
Marriage did not march with her dream in stone and the thought of Mary
Ellen Bradshaw on Staithley Edge. She fought always for that idea, and
refusals were the trophies she had won in her campaigns for it, usually
easy victories, but once or twice she had not found it easy to refuse.
Did Rupert jeopardize the dream? She couldn’t say and, thank God, she
needn’t say. He hadn’t asked her, but she admitted apprehension, she
confessed that he belonged with those very few who had made her dream
appear a bleak and empty thing. This man disturbed her: she was right to
be on her guard, to bristle in defense of her dream at the least sign
of passion in him. But she despised herself for bristling unnecessarily,
for imagining a sign which wasn’t there. He had, confoundedly, the habit
of making her despise herself.
Then it happened, not what she had feared would happen but something
even more disturbing.
“Ah,” he said gayly, “then that’s a bet. That’s something to look
forward to while I’m at Staithley.”
Staithley! Staithley! It rang in her brain. Stammering she spoke it.
“Staithley!”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a Lancashire town. I don’t suppose you’ve ever
heard of it, but my people, well, we’re rather big pots up there.”
“In Staithley?” she repeated.
“Yes. We’re called Hepplestall.” He looked at her guiltily. Mary’s
teeth were clenched and her bloodless hands gripped the table hard, but
actress twice over, woman and Mary Arden, and modern with cosmetics,
her face showed nothing of her inward storm. “That idiotic name Carton
called me by--they all do it,” he protested loyally. “It’s odds on that
they’ve forgotten what my real name is but I’m Rupert Hepplestall really
and... oh, as a matter of form, I’m Sir Rupert Hepplestall. I--I can’t
help it, you know.”
One didn’t make a scene in a restaurant. One didn’t scream in a
restaurant. One didn’t go into hysterics in a restaurant. That was all
she consciously thought, clutching the table till it seemed the veins in
her fingers must burst. Hepplestall--and she. And Mary Ellen Bradshaw.
Lunching together. Oh, it--but she was thinking and she must not think.
She must repeat, over and over again, “One does not make a scene, one--”
Immensely surprised she heard herself say, “No, you can’t help it,”
and as she saw him smile--the smile of a schoolboy who is “let off” a
peccadillo--she concluded that she must have smiled at him.
“I’m better now I’ve got that off my chest,” he said. “I had to do it
before we parted though, by George, I’ve cut it fine.” There are several
ways, besides the right way, of looking at a wrist-watch. She was
annoyed to find herself capable of noticing that Rupert’s was the right
way. “I shall have to dash for my train. Where can I put you down? I
must go now: I’ll apologize on Thursday for abruptness.”
“I’m going to the flat,” she said. “Baker Street.” He was paying the
bill, getting his cap and stick, urging pace on the taxi-driver, busy in
too many ways to be observant of Mary.
“Hepplestall,” she thought going up her stairs, “Hepplestall, and I’ve
to act to-night.” Her bed received her.
*****
Incongruous in youth and khaki he sat abashed amongst black-coated
elders of the service at the board of Hepplestall’s.
He wanted urgently to scoff, to feel that it all didn’t matter because
nothing mattered but the war, and they set the war in a perspective
new to him, as passing episode reacting certainly upon the permanency,
Hepple-stall’s, but reacting temporarily as the Cotton Famine had
reacted in the days of the American Civil War.
He did not fail to perceive the significance of old Horace, Sir Philip’s
uncle, who was seventy, with fifty years to his credit of leadership
in the Service, a living link with heaven knew what remote ancestors.
Perhaps old Horace in his youth had seen the Founder himself. It bridged
time, it was like shaking hands with a man who had been patted on the
head by Wellington, and, like Horace, Rupert was subjected to the fact
of being Hepplestall. The law of his people, the dour and stable law,
ran unchangeable by time.
Complacent he had not been as he bared his head before Sir Philip’s
grave, but he had kept his balance.
Death, that lay outside youth’s normal thought and entered it with
monstrousness, was Rupert’s known familiar and a father dead could
sadden, but could not startle, a soldier who had seen comrades killed
at his side. It touched him, quite unselfishly, to think that Sir Philip
had gone knowing him not as rebel, not as apostate of the Hepplestalls,
but as a son of whom he could be proud--Rupert the cricketer, the solid
schoolboy who developed, unexpectedly but satisfactorily, into a reading
man at Cambridge, and then the soldier; but he was stirred to other and
far deeper feelings by the references made at the board to Sir Philip.
They were not formal tributes, they were chatty reminiscences hitting
Rupert the shrewder because there was nothing conventional about them,
bringing home to the son how his father had seemed to other eyes than
his. How little he had known Sir Philip! How carelessly he’d failed in
his appreciations! And it was double-edged, because the very object of
this meeting was to salute him as heir to the chieftainship, implying
that in the son they saw a successor worthy of the father.
They even apologized to him for having, in his absence, appointed an
interim successor. Sir Philip’s death created a situation unprecedented
in the history of the firm because never before had the Head died with
his son unready to take the reins, and the war aggravated the situation.
Rupert’s training could not begin till the war ended; it would be many
years before he took his place at the head of the table, Chairman of the
Board.
Behind the training they underwent was the theory of the machine
with interchangeable parts; it was assumed that the general technical
knowledge they all acquired fitted each for any post to which the
Service might appoint him. They did not overrate mere technique but
they relied upon the quality of the Hepplestalls. If occasion called a
Hepplestall, he rose to it. This occasion, the occasion of a regency,
had called William Hepplestall, Sir Philip’s brother next in age to him.
William had not sought, but neither did he shirk, the burden of
responsibility. “I will do my duty,” he had said. “You know me. I am not
an imaginative man, and the times are difficult. But I will do my duty.”
It would, certainly, not have occurred to William in the first days of
the war to convert their Dye-House from, cotton dyeing to woolen: that
sort of march into foreign territory, so extraordinarily lucrative,
would have occurred to none but to Sir Philip, and they understood very
well that under William, or under any of them now, the control would
be prudent and uninspired. They looked to Rupert as inheritor cf the
Hepplestall tradition of inspiration in leadership. Calmly they made
the vast assumption not only that he was coming to them but that he was
coming to be, eventually, a leader to them as brilliant as Sir Philip
had been.
“I shall not see it,” said old Horace, “but I do not need to see. We
continue, we Hepplestalls; we serve.”
Amiably, implacably, with embarrassing deference to Sir Philip’s son,
they pinned him to his doom, and in France, when he had heard of
this meeting they arranged for him, he had thought of it as a comic
interlude, and of himself as one who would relax from great affairs
to watch these little men at play! He sat weighed down, in misery. In
London he had decided that he wouldn’t argue, but he hadn’t known that
he could not argue. He was oppressed to taciturnity, to speechless
sulking which they took, since Rupert did everything, even sulking,
pleasantly, to mean that he was overwhelmed by the renewal, through
their eulogies, of his personal grief for the loss of his father. They
spoke tactfully of the war, deferring to him as a soldier; they aimed
with family news in gossipy vein of this and that Hepplestall in and
out of the war, to put him at his ease, and soon the meeting ended.
They took it as natural that he wished to spend his leave in London. It
seemed they understood. They advised about trains.
Rupert escaped, miserable because he was not elated to leave that
torture-chamber. He hadn’t faced the music. But he couldn’t. Altogether
apart from his wish to get out of Staithley at the first possible
moment, he couldn’t face that music. Their expectations of him were so
massive, so serene, so sure, their line unbreakable.
In the train, he recurred to that thought of the Hepplestall line. No:
he could not break it, but there might be a way round. He was going
to London, where Mary was, and the point, surely the point about the
training of a Hepplestall was that they caught their Hepplestalls
young. They cozened them with the idea of service and sent them, willing
victims, to labor with their hands in Staithley Mills--because they
caught them young. Rupert was twenty-five. Cynically he “placed” that
meeting now: it was a super-cozening addressed to a Hepplestall who was
no longer a boy: it admitted his age and the intolerable indignities the
training held for a man of his age, for a captain who had a real chance
of becoming a major very soon. It was their effort, their demonstration,
and he saw his way to make an effort and a counter demonstration.
Clearly, they saw that it wasn’t reasonable to train a man of his
years to spinning and the rest of it; then they would see the absolute
impossibility of compelling a married man to undergo that training. A
man couldn’t leave his wife at some Godless early morning hour to go to
work with his hands, he couldn’t come home, work-stained, after a day’s
consorting with the operatives, to the lady who was Lady Hepplestall.
He realized, awed by his presumptuousness, that he was thinking of Mary
Arden as the lady who was Lady Hep-plestall.
He thought of her with awe because he was not seeing Mary Arden, musical
comedy actress, through the elderly eyes of his uncles, still less of
his aunts, but from the angle of our soldiers in France who made Mary a
romantic symbol of the girls they left behind them. To marry Mary Arden
would be an awfully big adventure.
*****
She had time, while he was at Staithley, to come to terms with his
disclosure. In the restaurant, when it came upon her suddenly, it had
sent her, certainly, heels over head, but, soberly considered, she began
to ask herself what there was in it that should disconcert her. She
was Bradshaw and he a Hepplestall and she believed that without effort,
merely by not discouraging him, she could make him marry her. What could
be neater? What revenge more exquisite upon the Hepplestalls than Mary
Ellen Bradshaw, Lady Hepplestall?
True--if she hated them. But her hatred, reexamined, seemed a visionary
thing; at the most it was romantic decoration to a fact and in this mood
of inquisition Mary sought facts without their trimmings. She sought her
hatred of the Hepplestalls and found she had no hatred in her.
She raised her eyes to the photograph of Staithley Edge. Yes, that was
authentic feeling, that passion for the Staithley hills, but she didn’t
want to go there in order to take the shine out of the Hepplestalls. She
had romanticized that feeling, she had made hatred the excuse for her
ambition, so arbitrary in an actress with a vogue, to go back to live
bleakly amongst smoke-tarnished moors. Rupert, for instance, was firmly
set against return.
It was deflating, like losing a diamond ring, and she did not humble
herself to the belief that the diamond had never been there. It had, in
the clan-hatred of the Bradshaws, but she had been stagey about it. She
had magnified a childish memory into a living vendetta and, scrutinized
to-day, she saw it as a tinsel wrapping, crumbling at exposure to
daylight, round her sane sweet passion for the hills: and the conclusion
was that Rupert Hepplestall meant no more to her than Rupert Fairy--or
little more. She had mischief enough in her to savor the thought of Mary
Ellen squired in London by Sir Rupert Hepplestall and decided that if
he wanted to take his orders from her for the period of his leave, she
would take particular pleasure in ordering him imperiously.
She calculated, she thought, with comprehensiveness, but missed two
factors, one (which she should have remembered) that Rupert had seemed
lovable, the other (which she could not guess) that he returned from
Staithley to begin his serious wooing. He laid siege before defenses
which she had deliberately weakened by her re-orientation of her facts.
One day, before he must go back to France, he spoke outright of love.
If he hadn’t, half a dozen times, declared himself, then he didn’t know
what mute announcement was, but leave was running out and addressing
silent questions to a sphinx left him a long way short of tangible
result.
“Oh, love!” she jeered. “What’s love?”
“I can tell you that,” he said, “better than I could ten days ago.
Love’s selfishness _à deux_. I’m one of the two and my idea of love is
finding comfort in your arms.”
She thought it a good answer, so good that it brought her to her feet
and to (they were in her flat) the drawer in her desk where she had
hidden a photograph. Holding it to him, “Do you recognize that?” she
asked. “The other day, when we were talking, I said I had no people
and--”
“Was that mattering before the war? I’m sure it doesn’t matter now,” he
said.
“And this photograph?”
He shook his head. “It might be any hill.”
“But it is Staithley Edge.”
For a moment he was radiant. “You got it,” he glowed, “because of me.”
“I got it because of me. Listen. I’m Mary Arden, actress. I’m
twenty-five years old and I’m about as high as any one can get in
musical comedy. I began in the chorus, but I’ve had a soft passage up
because I was pushed by an agent who believed in me. If you think I’m
more than that, you’re wrong. And I’m much less than that. I said I had
no people, and it isn’t true.”
“I don’t want to know about your people. We’re you and I. We’re Mary and
Rupert.”
“Yes. But we’re Mary Bradshaw and Rupert Hepplestall.”
With that, she thought, she slaughtered hope, not his alone but
something that grew in her, something she was thinking of as hope
because she dared not think of it as love. Now she need no longer think
of it at all; she had killed it; she had met his candor with her candor,
she had announced herself a Bradshaw. It was the death of hope.
Suffering herself but compassionate for the pain she must have given
him, she raised her eyes to his. And the response to a lady martyring
herself to truth was an indulgent smile and maddening misapprehension.
“Is there anything in that? Bradshaw instead of Arden? Surely it’s usual
to have a stage-name.”
“You haven’t understood. When I pretend to be Lancashire on the stage, I
don’t pretend. Is that clear?”
It irked him that he couldn’t say, “As mud.” She was too passionately in
earnest for him to dare the flippancies. He said, “Yes, that’s clear.”
“And Staithley in particular. I’m Staithley born and bred. Bred, I’m
telling you, in Staithley Streets. My name’s Bradshaw.”
He lashed his memory, aware dimly that Bradshaw had associations for him
other than the railway-guide. It was coming to him now. The Staithley
Bradshaws, that sixteenth birthday interview with his father, his own
disparaging of Tom Bradshaw and Sir Philip’s defense of him. His father
had been right, too. Tom was in some office under the Coalition, pulling
his weight like all the rest. The war had proved his sportsmanship,
as it had everybody’s. He hadn’t a doubt that any of the Staithley
Bradshaws who were in the army were splendid soldiers.
In the ranks, though.
One thought twice about marrying their sister. He wished she hadn’t
told him, and as he wished it she was emphasizing, “I’m from the Begging
Bradshaws.”
He forced a smile. “You’re a long way from them, then,” he said, and she
agreed on that.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I’m eight years from them. I don’t know them and
they don’t know me. I’m Mary Arden to every one but you: only when you
say your idea of love is finding comfort in my arms, I had to tell you
just whose arms they are. I’m Bradshaw and I’ve sung for pennies in the
Staithley Streets.”
Some of the implications he did not perceive at once, but he saw the
one that mattered. His sphinx had spoken now. She “had” to tell him, and
there were only two reasons why. The first was that she loved him, and
the second was that she was honest in her love--“Mary,” he said, “you’ll
marry me.”
“No.”
“If you want arguments about a thing that’s settled, I’ll give you
them,” he said. “You don’t know what a gift you’ve brought me. You don’t
know how magnificently it suits me that you’re Bradshaw.”
“Suits you!” she cried incredulously, and he told her why of all the
things she might have been she was the one which definitely wiped out
all possibility of his return to Staithley. They couldn’t force him
there with a Bradshaw for his wife, they would be the first to cry out
that it wouldn’t do: she was his master-card, Mary, whom he loved; she
was Mary Arden and tremendously a catch; she was Mary Bradshaw, his sure
defense against the rigid expectations of the Hepplestalls and... oh,
uncounted things besides. “And I apologize,” he said, “I apologize for
arguing, for dragging in the surrounding circumstance. But you tell me
you’re Bradshaw as if it unmade us and I tell you it’s the best touch in
the making of us.”
She wasn’t sure of that. She was idiosyncratic and peculiar herself in
wishing to go back to Staithley, but she felt that her dream, though she
had stripped it of romantic hate, yet stood for something sounder than
his mere obstinate refusal to return. He left himself in air; he was
a negative; rejecting Staithley, he had no plans of what he was to do
after the war.
But that was to prejudge him, it was certainly to calculate, and she had
calculated too much in her life. Caution be hanged! There was a place
for wildness.
They would say, of course, that she was marrying for position. Let them
say: she would, certainly, be Lady Hepplestall, but at what a discount!
To be Lady Hep-plestall and not to live in Lancashire, in the one place
where the significance of being Hepplestall was grasped in full! It was
like marrying a king in exile, it was like receiving a rope of pearls
upon condition that she never wore them. It excluded the pungent climax
of Mary Ellen as Mistress of Staithley Hall.
Her dream had set, indeed, in a painted sky, but she would not linger in
gaze upon its afterglow; she was not looking at sunset but at dawn, and
raised her eyes to his. She discovered that she was being kissed. She
had the sensation, ecstatic and poignant, surrendering and triumphant,
of being kissed by the man she loved.
She had not, hitherto, conceived a high opinion of kissing. On the stage
and off, it was a professional convention, fractionally more expressive
than a handshake. This was radically different; this was, tinglingly,
vividly, to feel, to be aware of herself and, through their lips, of
him. She had the exaltation of the giver who gives without reserve, and
from up there, bemused in happiness, star-high with Rupert’s kiss and
her renunciations, she fell through space when he unclasped her and
said with brisk assurance, “Engagement ring before lunch. License after
lundi. That’s a reasonable program, isn’t it?”
Perhaps it was reasonable to a time-pressed man whose leave could now
be counted by the hour. Perhaps she hadn’t seen that there is only one
first kiss. It came, and no matter what the sequel held, went lonely,
unmatched, unique. What passion-laden words could she expect from him to
lengthen a moment that was gone?
It wasn’t he who was failing’ her, it was herself who must, pat upon
their incomparable moment, be criticizing him because he was not
miraculous but practical. And this was thought, a sickly thing, when her
business was to feel, it was opposition when her business was surrender.
The wild thing was the right thing now. She purged herself of thought.
“Yes,” she said. She was to marry. Marry. And then he would go back to
France; but first he was to find comfort in her arms.