THE PRINCESS
Meantime, the Queen could not rest—for her happiness and her
wretchedness.
For to one highly happy a mote in the eye is a calamity! and a mouse in
one’s soup as huge as a mountain.
“But for that—that _one_ thing,” she sighed, “ah! how well would it be
with me to-day!”
The spot of drab looked black as soot; she hated; and on the day that
the Princess Elizabeth said to her: “Ah, Your Majesty, you have seen
yourself—there is a life between Teddy and me,” the Queen hurried to
the Newmarket Parlour, and scribbled in an agitation: “I must speak
with you. To-night at nine I will be at your house.”
But in order to “speak with” Sir Robert Barrington, it might have been
a possible thing to summon him to the palace, perhaps? The weathers and
well-springs of even a Queen’s inwards can be very queer.
Now, it happened that Sir Robert Barrington was at the Admiralty when
that note was handed in at his door; thence he drove to a club; and it
was only when dining there at seven-forty that the note caught him.
The Vice-Admiral was profoundly moved—filled with a thousand
wonderments: and after ten minutes deliberation in a brain of no little
strength and judgment, he rose sharply, wrote a note, and despatched it
post-haste to Marlborough House.
“I deeply regret to have to beg Your Royal Highness not to
go to my house to-night before ten. Your Royal Highness will
rightly surmise that only the very gravest reasons, etc.”
But the Prince of Wales, after an afternoon spent in inspecting
“Immediate Reserves,” was dining that night _en fils de famille_ at
Buckingham Palace; and it was not until twenty minutes past eight that
Sir Robert’s note came to his hand.
Whereupon he, for his part, despatched a note to St George’s Hospital,
saying: “Do not go to Barrington’s at nine: I shall be in a brougham
awaiting you opposite Crewe House at 9.30.”
But Eulalia had already then left the hospital, and was chatting in
her sister’s house in Wardour Street. So she duly made her way through
drizzle and misty streets to the rendezvous at Sir Robert Barrington’s
at nine.
And at one minute to nine a cloaked and hooded Queen passed alone
through the palace park-gate on foot; and at once was in Grosvenor
Place, walking fast.
Both she and Eulalia were punctual.
And the engineer, posted just inside his door, was listening like a
thief to the rolling of wheels, bidding his soul be still and bold,
when the two ladies met on his porch-steps.
Her Majesty, a step the higher, turned to look down at the other, on
whose face a lamplight shone, and she recognised, realised.... This was
why the Prince had been hurried and restive....
Strong indignation now agitated Her Majesty’s lip; and with a
brushing-away movement of her hand, she muttered: “_Miserable little
woman!—go_.”
Whereat Eulalia’s lips fell agape, as she gazed up, like a sylph
gazing in awe at a goddess, till it was suddenly suggested to her
consciousness that this was no one else than the Queen herself; and in
some moments more she found herself walking away in a new universe made
all of wounds and awe and mute amazement.
At the same time Sir Robert Barrington was profoundly bowed, with a
murmur of “Your Majesty,” and silently he led the Queen to a desert of
drawing-room with two hearths, and a file of drawn blinds, and gilt,
and moulding, and discreet chandeliers.
The Queen, for her part, was pretty short and haughty, and rather
pinched in her wind, and suspicious of shadows and corners, sitting by
a table on which was wine, the Vice-Admiral standing with firelight on
his square face of the village blacksmith, all clumps of muscle, a thin
spot showing now on his top; and his eyes smiled: for now that she was
actually there before him, he felt warmer, calmer, master of himself;
so that, in the reaction, the frolicsome thought crossed his mind: “How
much did her cloak cost the country?”
But her chin! its uplifted pitch. She was very resentful; and he, as
she spoke, very taken aback, and pained, and embarrassed.
What she had seen with her eyes she could even now hardly believe—that
_he_—Sir Robert Barrington—could lend himself—to countenance—to abet—in
his own house—the baneful influence over a young prince of a creature
who wore the livery of an honourable profession——
“Permit me, Ma’am,” the Vice-Admiral interrupted with some curtness,
“I have to say that the relations between the Prince of Wales and that
_lady_ are—innocent.”
A little bent, he eyed the fire, while her eyes and eyebrows played
incessantly upward upon him.
“Well!—you say that. Innocent. I confess that I have wondered what you
would discover to say, Sir Robert Barrington; but that you might say
_this_ did not occur to me. Let me tell you, if you do not know—His
Royal Highness has known this person since he was a boy at Brockweir:
I knew; I found out her address and family circumstances; I have
followed her career from a distance; I have known that he has seen her,
and have been uneasy—without ever conceiving—he has been brought up a
Nazarene, and no razor had come near his dear head”—here the Queen’s
tones lowered and broke a little in her throat, and Barrington rapidly,
quietly, poured wine, of which she drank a sip at the pretty lip below
the shadow’s tip that shadowed her nose.
He, in a muteness of sympathy too deep for speech, uttered nothing at
the moment, for there was a unison of emotional movement betwixt their
souls, afflicting him in her afflictions, and when her body danced, his
cut a caper; so she went on to say: “But the circumstances of his entry
here—the cab—a caress in it!—the key—no footman opened to them, Sir
Robert Barrington!—the creature’s ease——”
“That _lady_, Ma’am——” Sir Robert began to say.
“Oh, the days are past,” the Queen said testily, “when a light o’ love
is to have the title of a lady, just because she is the _amourette_ of
a Prince: it is an injustice to Sally in the alley. But I quite fail
to understand you! I am here to seek an explanation, and _this_ is
it—‘lady,’ ‘innocent’! Of course, you are sincere, since you say it,
but I am amazed. Pray say something, Sir Robert Barrington, to abate my
amazement.”
And she waited, her lids hanging on his profile, perpendicular like a
plumb-line, which he bent toward the blaze; and since his lips were
deeply sealed, like steel in pain the muscles of his face convulsed a
moment, and his teeth met.
“It is my belief,” he said at last, “that what I have stated is the
truth. And I think that the characters of the pair in question justify
that belief. This is my answer to the Queen.”
Now, the Queen, always, had a pretty free and formidable tongue:
and she said off-handedly: “Oh, well, then, I must confess myself
disappointed in either the acumen or the candour of Sir Robert
Barrington.”
Sir Robert bowed, turned a little, looked at her, and their eyes met
and communed; until hers suddenly dropped to her lap.
“At any rate,” she said—with the half of the half of a laugh!—“I cannot
share in your ideal view of things. I wish I was so beatified and
unworldly! So, this being so, I have next to consult you, since you are
said to be the closest friend of the young Prince, and are, apparently,
a friend of his friend”—she laughed!—“how are these two people to be
separated? There must be some way of getting the young woman out of the
country.”
Sharply on which Sir Robert Barrington was masterful, his finger
lifting. “I have to warn Your Majesty that there is _no_ such way!” And
now the Queen stood up, muttering to herself: “We’ll see about that”;
and aloud: “I’ll go”: and that ended it.
The rest of that night Sir Robert spent alone by the fire of that room
over an old diary and an old shirt-cuff, reading and rereading some
leaves that had old rose-leaves between them.
“After this third dance on that third night after her eighteenth
birthday we were together fifty minutes in the orangery.... I then said
to her, ‘Yes, this in me is love. It was during the night of Friday the
9th of June, while designing a dynamo for a mine, that it struck me
that it was so with me.’
“She then said to me: ‘Was the dynamo a success?’ to which I answered:
‘A perfect success.’
“She then said to me: ‘What is this thing, this love? What is its place
and source in Nature?’
“My reply was: ‘You define me _a pound_, and I’ll define you _love_.’
“‘_A pound_,’ she answered, ‘is the force of the earth’s attraction for
the mass in a certain bar of platinum deposited at the B.O.T. in Gwydyr
House.’
“‘But you speak of “_force_,”’ I said to her: ‘what is _a force_?’
“Her reply to this was: ‘Oh, but that’s not a fair question: force is
the Holy of Holies, the Real Presence, the +Thing+ Itself: no life in
any height of heaven can ever arrive at any notion what a force is; but
if you want the definition current among crickets and cricketers, then
“a force is +That Which+ tends to alter a body’s state of rest or of
uniform motion in a straight line.”’
“I now said to her: ‘Quite so: and now we have the required definition:
Love is +That Which+ alters a mortal body’s state of rest or of
uniform motion; and a horse-power-hour of it is that energy contained
in a standard mass deposited in the breast of one Robert Barrington,
impelling him toward one Minna Simmons.’
“She was pleased to laugh, as it were to herself, when I had said this;
and she next said to me: ‘Is Love a god, or is it a devil?’
“‘Every force,’ was my reply, ‘is (necessarily) Divine.’
“‘Nevertheless,’ said she, ‘I think I will call Love a devil.’
“‘And why will you do this?’ I asked her.
“‘Because,’ said she—not without some hesitation, I think—‘it seems to
be frequently tempting.’
“Promptly as a hammer’s stroke I was on her, saying: ‘If, now, you had
said _is_, and not _seems_, I should have felt myself a made man!’
“Upon which she became specially grave, gazing downward at her fingers.
I heard her say, ‘Rob Roy’; and she then said: ‘Robert, your will of
steel is scheming against my career, and means to wring its little
neck, I think.’
“At those words I inwardly exulted; but made haste to say, to console
her: ‘Well, love does alter a state of uniform motion, but is not
altogether incompatible with a girl’s career.’
“To this she made me no answer, but laughed strangely, as to herself,
and now with her programme-pencil wrote something on my left cuff. As
the moon was bright beyond the tree, I tried to rise to read, but she
restrained me, and then attempted to smudge out with her glove what she
had written. However, after we had parted, I contrived to decipher the
wildly written letters which I found to spell: ‘I always go the whole
hog.’ Her being electrifies mine like live wire....
“The stable clock was striking eleven when she said to me, ‘I expect it
will be like that,’ but that her definite answer would be on that day
eight months....”
The Engineer Vice-Admiral clicked the diary’s clasp, wrapped up the
old cuff, and sighed in asking himself: “Has she forgotten it all? Or
does memory straying in her head on her bed in the dead of night ever
remember, and make her sigh?”
“Anyway,” he added, with sudden energy, “I’m not going to permit
her shrewish tongue to touch the fair name of so fair a lady as the
Princess of Wales in my presence”—and he went off to bed.
At that hour that “Princess of Wales” herself lay on no bed of roses.
After “_going_” at Her Majesty’s command, she had wandered, pondering
upon “miserable little woman—go.” The mystery!—unless she had been
mistaken for someone? for that it was the Queen who had spoken she had
no doubt. And the fact that Her Majesty was at that house at all caused
to be born in her heart’s heart all a swarm of formless doubts, awed
questionings, too shadowy as yet to shape themselves into consciousness.
She only got back to her hospital at half-past nine, so only then got
the note: “Await you opposite Crewe House ...” and she was off, late,
covering the distance fleetly, love the motor in her feet.
Twenty yards off she could see the standing carriage through the thick
of Piccadilly traffic and mist; but all at once eagerness failed in her
legs, and she stopped agape to gaze. There at the carriage-door, as it
seemed to her, was a girl.
And she would have known that girl under many veils—that “Mademoiselle
Oyone,” in whose charming arms she had caught her Teddy dancing at
Chinnery’s....
In fact, though, Oyone was not at the carriage-door, but behind it:
and she was there because, since the North Sea Battle, instructions
had afresh come to her from Peking as to the Prince, and had found
her willing now. In those days, therefore, she was hovering upon the
Prince’s steps, patient as a shadow, watching for her perfect chance.
She waved to her chauffeur; and it looked to Eulalia like a wave of
farewell to the brougham.
Night-shades touched that smile of anticipation on Eulalia’s face; and
a thought was in her, “something must be against me to-night,” as she
paced on with graver steps.
Her Teddy sprang out to her with, “I am glad! Was getting afraid—You
didn’t go to Barrington’s? He wrote to say—Never mind, here are the
old eyes that shock me afresh each time?—So what did I do?—Scott, I was
thrown on my beams’ ends—I hired a little hotel in Knightsbridge—But, I
say, what’s up? Not glad to see one?”
It suddenly struck him that those eyes that surprised him each time
were even wider this night: there was awe in them, there was also a
something of horror, and a lost distracted something, as of one who
asks himself: “In which one of God’s worlds am I now?”
For his left arm was in a sling, as had been the Prince of Wales’s when
she had seen him passing through the street northward to the battle;
across his forehead a scar hooked over the eye, precisely like the
Prince’s.
From that sight her eyes could not move themselves one moment; and as
she stood musing on it, the thought passed through her heart: “Mother
doesn’t know what I am.”
Now all was clear! now it flashed upon her why Her Majesty had said:
“Miserable little woman!” The Queen was not aware what she, Eulalia,
was.
After the shock of awe, of horrid elevation in airy spaces, and wild,
white light at the height of the sun, her next sensation was pride!
for, if she was the Princess of Wales, was not this because she was
born like that? of that quality and quintessence? the equal of Queens
by inbred heredity? and in another moment her soul was moving to an
emotion of love and motherliness, and her moan was, “My poor boy.”
“Teddy,” in his headlong way with swaying shoulders, had bustled
her into wedlock at their fourth meeting, a year before he had left
Brockweir! Lately she had begun to think that that was scarcely a fair
thing to consider a man bound by such a marriage....
When he said again, “But what’s up? The cut? The arm? that’s nothing!”
at last she found the power to utter something; but he could not
recognise her voice, those strained tones in which she spoke as to
a stranger. “I have to tell you—I cannot come to-night—I am sorry—I
have——”
He had felt certain that her first words would be a question as to the
cut! and stood amazed. “Not come?”
“No—I beg—time—you must give me—I have to go——”
“Well?”
In a secret and begging way she said, for some reason: “To Shepherd’s
Bush.”
“Shepherd’s bosh, Eu! So what is to become of poor me, meanwhile? Why
didn’t you write? _I’ll_ come to Shepherd’s Bush, too, of course.”
“I have to go alone,” she said beggingly in confidence, bending to him.
“In that case——But, Eu, ought one to be sudden and mysterious? Let me
come!”
“I beg—_you_ go to the hotel, and perhaps—I am sorry—I can’t exactly
promise, but perhaps—I may come. Please call me a cab.”
He frowned now, did her bidding, handed her into the cab, tossed in a
box of bon-bons—for she had a passion for jawing chocolates in bed,
and had taught him also to sit and nibble; and he gave her the hotel’s
name, without again begging her to come, and just touched her fingers
with his lips, and turned from her, but then again half turned to say
curtly with an offended chin: “What’s your name?”
She in a strained voice straining against tears answered: “My name’s
Eulalia.”
“Whose girl are you?”
“I am Teddy Reeks’ girl.”
“All of you?”
“Yes, all.”
“Au ’voir, then!”
“Good-night ...” the cab drove off—to Shepherd’s Bush!
She could not have believed, if told an hour before, that she would
drive that night to Shepherd’s Bush! and at Shepherd’s Bush she cried:
“_Drive on!_” and the cab drove over the Uxbridge Road to Colney Hatch,
and back to the Docks, and back to Shepherd’s Bush, during all which
she was in the throes of the question—to go to him only once more—not
to go to him even this once.
Though it wasn’t her fault that she had not known what he was! but his.
When she had asked him about the Prince at their second meeting at
Brockweir, he had said: “If you see me, you see him—many of the fellows
take me for him”—prevarication falsely true, truly false. Yet when he
had constantly evaded telling her the name of his ship, and details
about his family, she should have guessed things, she saw now—many
evidences should have opened her eyes to the truth that he was no
duke’s son or country squire: but her wits had been hypnotised by his
initial fib.
“But he did it to get me!” she moaned with tears near the Marble Arch,
rolling west, and suddenly ordered the cab to the hotel, saying to
herself, “he is my husband”: for she liked his hand, that had in it an
electric battery, and little workshop cuts and stains on it, to hold
hot and long, feeling the bones, till it was as near to her as her
own hand, and as much her hand as his, and his fleece of curls, and
a certain fleet glance of his eye sideward, as gallant and imperial
as Cæsar, and the tissue of his skin like silk, and there was a smell
about him as of the sea and ships, mixed with benzoline, naphtha,
shellac, mastic, which ever made something in her soul faint with
emotion.
Why, though, had he _never_ told her who he was? What did that mean?
That she was a toy sharing in a royal escapade? not a wife, but a kind
of wife? She commanded the taxicab back westward. Her grandfather’s
grandfather had fought at Trafalgar in the very _Victory_, and, though
only a gunner, laying his gun with tackle, hand-spike, and quoin, if
England was grand, that was because _he_ had been grand....
She would not be a miserable little woman; if she was a Princess, she
would be Princess-like....
And yet—he loved her well: there was no doubt: _she_ knew what she
knew. How often had he worried her to surround herself with town-house
and country-house, and crowds of flunkeys, and crowns about her brows,
till he should get a “really good chance,” as he always said, to
announce her. But she had preferred to work, hardly caring to face
the inquiring eye of her dad. He was a Puritan—a Methodist local
preacher ever since his retirement—proud—Irish blood. She knew that
only Irishmen know pride—that attar-of-pride, supremely _élite_, that
is haughtier _far_ in its heart’s heart than Hanover, or Hapsburg,
or Hohenzollern, and will spurn the lightning’s eye with a superber
lightning. Her dad was like that: he called kings and kings’ dogs
“_hogwash_.” And her (English) mother had caught it from him, and she
herself, perhaps, had it: so had refused, and gone her own way—had
refused to tell him her birthday, and never had had a present from
him, save boxes of bon-bons and the wedding-ring, which she took out
from her bosom where it hung, and wet, kissing it, and thought of him
waiting for her, fretting his restive heart out, and ordered the cab
again to the hotel.
However, it entered her head on the way that that was hardly very
honest to pretend to herself that it was for him that she was going,
when perhaps it was for herself, that she might have his hand. For if
she was really going to give him up, to-night was the time, since, if
she broke down once, then it would be a case of breaking down always.
It would be best to be able to say to herself that she had never once
been, after knowing: and now was her chance to be strong.
But why give him up at all? Even that point was not properly argued
out! Was she not acting on impulse, driven on every wind? It was
something to be the Princess of Wales, since many girls would die eight
times, if they had nine lives, to be that: and she was it by right, and
he her own, after all, her flesh and blood, nearer to her than to the
Queen, and dearer; and though her intellect might not be cultivated to
a quite high degree like the Queen’s, what then? did that make her a
miserable little woman? Her soul might be as pure and golden; and she
certainly thought more highly of her own people than of the Queen’s:
so why should she stab herself so very deep to the heart, and with
her own butcher hands wrench out both her eyes? That did not seem very
reasonable to expect of one.
But, then, after all, it was no good arguing, since there was he to
be considered. She knew very well that the fact of his father having
married “a commoner” would make it monstrous for the next Queen to be
a commoner: so, if she kept him to his boy’s marriage, she would be
bringing him into infinite hot-water and embarrassment: his mother, who
was prouder than other crowned heads, would perish in hysterics. And
there was the Princess Elizabeth: everyone knew that for three years
the Queen and the Liberal Party had set their hearts on her marriage
with him, in a hope of Anglo-German _rapprochement_. She would be a
miserable little woman, in truth, if she stood in the way.
And she had been dreaded, and known, and spied upon!—she understood
that now. Once, three years previously, a man had appeared in Holmend,
the hamlet near her home, and had made secret inquiries as to her
people and her whereabouts: her dad had heard, and not liked it! She
had been dreaded, and eyed at! But she would no longer be a danger, and
a horror, and a bugbear to those above her.
She would disappear: before long he would begin to think her dead; and
then might begin to look at that outlandish Japanese popinjay in her
pageantries.
But if she stayed anywhere in England, he would surely scent her out,
and be after her again.... Where, then, to go?
There was the war: a shortage of nurses was being felt at the front
since the last big battle, and volunteers were being asked for. She had
been enrolled in Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service Reserve,
and would be eagerly received in the emergency. That night she would
apply.
Only, she would indulge her soul with one more night at his side; in
which one night she would live fifty years; and would tell him that he
would never find another wife to love him as well as Eulalia.
But the cab was within some yards of the hotel when she said to
herself, “Oh no, really, I am not going to,” and all in a flurry, with
shivering lips, called “_turn back!_”
She drove to the hospital prostrate, her mouth stretched back in a
tension of self-pity, horrified now at the hollowness of the chasm of
loss in which she felt herself falling.
It was now past midnight: nevertheless, she sat and wrote to Pall Mall.
Her offer was accepted: and three days later a harrowing ordeal awaited
her at St James’s Palace, where she was amid twenty-seven others of
the Volunteer Corps and a committee of ladies. They were expecting the
Princess Kitty, the King’s second sister, who was said to be coming to
wish them well, when all at once, tall and formidable as a wall falling
upon one, in walks the Queen in heliotrope, followed by a throng of
satellites. Eulalia’s heart failed her.
Her Majesty had come to say “it is good of you to go,” and to pin some
red-cross ribbons on their uniforms; so they stood in a row, while the
smile moved along the line, picking out of the casket, pinning, Eulalia
waiting through a century of strain and distress, pining to fly, to
sink into the floor, to become invisible.
The Queen seems not to have seen her until they were actually face to
face; in fact, she was in the act of bringing the ribbon to the other’s
breast, when...! But her nerves were so perfectly cultured, that she
hardly started at all: only her hands leapt one inch up, and, letting
the ribbon drop, she stepped on to the next, still mightily and mildly
smiling.
The thing, of course, was seen—with no little wonder: and then Eulalia
knew confusion of face, and pain, and did not know where to look or put
herself; but one of the ladies, eyeing her askew, considered that she
looked gracefuller writhing there in the grip of her pretty distress,
like a sylph in a picture ashamed of nakedness, than Her Majesty
reigning in her high-tower.
With this gash in her, she dashed down that night to say good-bye,
climbing the long hill from Holmend just as the sunset’s flush went
utterly grey, and the moon stood full-faced over the covert up there
before her, growing every moment more glorious as the daylight died.
She had disclosed to no one yet that she was going away, and went
smiling in anticipation of the old folks’ surprise and disquiet. Here,
indeed, she could not but smile; this little circle of the earth’s
surface was so well loved, affecting her with such sensations of
intimacy, of rest, of religion, that while she smiled dews of piety
suffused her eyes: for that brook, those rough furrows, were not only
her very own, but they were Eulalia, and Eulalia they, though some
foreigner was permitted to call them “_his_.”
She pushed back a garden-gate, and passed between two old yews to a
white home buried in red-berried briony, stepping silent, to surprise
them; and quietly opened the door; and was in.
But no glad start! no fuss of welcome! and, instantly chilled, she
stood still.
Near a green-covered table, reading Deuteronomy out of a great Bible,
sat her dad, who gazed at her steadily over his glasses; and her
mother, sitting in grey silk and a cap, reading a _Sunday Companion_
serial, did not (apparently) cease to read through her magnifying glass.
Eulalia, suspended, scared, bag in hand, said: “What’s the matter, dad?”
Her father smiled, eyeing steadily at her as at a specimen of seed;
didn’t say anything for a minute; but then quietly: “You go.”
Whereupon, immediately, a scream, a horrid outcry of the drowning:
“Almighty God, John Bayley, I can’t stand this!”—from the mother, who,
casting her arms aloft, had fallen forward upon her knees.
And upon this an eruption of the most pallid and passionate rapture
transacted itself during two minutes in that room, each of the three
battling for breath as if in the passion of death, shouts of “Woman,
learn to command yourself!” mingling with “I am not going to see
mother killed by anyone!” and with “Don’t dare touch your mother with
your shameful low hand!” and with “God Almighty be her father!” like
people stricken with ranting in an atmosphere all oxygen. It ended
with Eulalia finding herself outside in a kind of ecstasy, having been
pushed by the shoulders; and it was all in a tremble from top to toe
like a motor-bus that she got down the mountain with her bag.
This was work of the Princess Elizabeth, who was considered a
distinctly “clever” young lady!—something of a blue-stocking!—a student
of Kant!—a solver of problems!—whose suggestions had weight with
friends and relatives. She it was who had suggested that, if the girl
was to be made submissive to proposals, all her props should first be
knocked away, and her improper course of conduct communicated to her
honest home. Hence an ambassadress of known tact and discretion had
come down, and had dropped in at Yew Cottage for a chat.
And the next night when Eulalia presented herself at her sister’s door
in Soho, a maid delivered her the message that it might be as well if
she kept away. She leant her head then on the door some moments before
she moved slowly thence....