THIS was life; magical, undreamed of in her wildest Medlow dreams. And
thanks to Lydia, she had plunged into it headlong, after a mere
fortnight’s probation. There had been no disillusion. She had plunged
and emerged into her kingdom. London conspired to strew her path with
roses. The Barracloughs invited her to a dinner party at their home in
Kensington. General Wigram offered her dinner and theatre and convened
to meet her an old Indian crony, General Philimore, and his young
daughter, Janet. Philimore had known her grandfather, Bagshawe of the
Guides, when he was a subaltern, infinite ages ago. The world was a
small place, after all. Olivia, caring little for grandfathers beyond
their posthumous social guarantee, found youth’s real sympathy in Janet,
who held open for her their flat in Maida Vale. Young Mauregard, after
their first lunch together at the Carlton, seemed prepared to provide
her with free meals and amusements for the rest of time. It is true he
was madly in love with a Russian dancer, whose eccentric ways and
abominable treatment of him formed the staple of the conversation which
he poured into her very interested and compassionate ear. And, last,
Bobbie Quinton gave her dancing lessons at the flat at the rate of a
guinea apiece.
Christmas caused a break in these social activities. Lydia took her off
to Brighton, where, meeting various acquaintances of her chaperone and
making others of her own, she motored and danced and danced and motored,
and in the pursuit of these delights discovered, with a fearful joy,
that she could hold her own in the immemorial conflict of sex. Sydney
Rooke, having driven down for the day, occasionally flashed through the
hotel, the eternal smile of youth on his dark, lined face and his
gestures unceasingly polite. As he passed, the heavens opened and rained
champagne and boxes of chocolate and hot-house fruits and flowers and
embroidered handbags, and once, a Pekinese dog for Lydia. Once again, an
automobile seemed about to fall, but at Lydia’s protests it melted in
the ether.
“A dog and a rose and a glass of wine,” said she, “are a woman’s due for
amusing a man. But a motor-car is profiteering. Besides, it’s bound to
drive you somewhere in the end—either to the flat of shame or the
country house of married respectability: it only depends on who is at
the wheel.”
“I see,” said Olivia. But she didn’t. Sydney Rooke was a mystery; and
Lydia’s attitude towards him was more than her inexperience could
understand.
Still, there she was in the pleasant galley and she did not question
what she was doing in it. In a dim way she regarded it as the inevitable
rescue vessel after universal shipwreck. Her eyes were blinded by its
glitter and her ears deafened by its music to the welter of the unsalved
world.
Just before New Year she received a letter from Bobby Quinton. It began:
“Dearest of Ladies.” Never before having been thus apostrophized, she
thought it peculiarly graceful and original. The writing was refined and
exquisitely clear. To his dearest of ladies the young man bewailed her
absence; life was dreary without her friendship and encouragement; all
this Christmastide he was the loneliest thing on earth; he suggested
that there was no one to love him—no mother or sisters to whom he could
apply for comfort; this terrible night life to which he, poor
demobilized soldier of fortune, was condemned in order to earn his
bread, weighed upon his spirits and affected his health; he envied his
dearest of ladies’ sojourn by the invigorating sea; he longed for the
taste of it; but such health-restoring rapture he gave her, in the most
delicate way, to understand, was for fairy princesses and not for the
impecunious demobbed; he counted the days till her return and prayed her
to bring back a whiff of ozone on her garments to revive the ever
faithful one who had the temerity to try to teach her to dance.
A most piteous epistle. Bobby Quinton, by his ingratiating ways and his
deference and his wit, had effaced her original conception of the type
of young men who danced at night clubs for their living. She liked him.
He seemed so young and she, through her long companionship with sorrow,
so old in comparison; he seemed so foolish and impossible, and she so
wise; to her, remembering the helpless dependence of her father and
brothers, he seemed (motherless and sisterless as he was) lost in a
hostile world. Besides, he was not a nameless adventurer. His father
(long since deceased) had been a Colonial Governor. He had been to one
of the great public schools. In short, he had the birth and breeding of
a gentleman. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went with the letter to
Lydia, full of maternal purpose.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. Their rooms had a communicating
door. She found Lydia daintily attired in boudoir cap and
dressing-jacket, having breakfast in bed.
“The poor boy’s dying for a breath of sea air. It would do him an
enormous amount of good. Do you think we—of course, it really would be
me—but it would be better if it appeared to be a joint affair—do you
think we could, without offending him, ask him to come down here for a
couple of days as our guest?”
Lydia, who had read the letter with a smile round her lips, replied
drily:
“As far as Bobby is concerned—I really think we could.”
“And as far as we are concerned,” flashed Olivia, “why should the silly
fact of being a woman prevent us from helping a lame dog over a stile?”
“A he-dog,” said Lydia.
“What does it matter?” Olivia asked stoutly.
Lydia laughed in her half-cynical, tolerant way.
“Do as you like, dear. I don’t mind. You’re out for experience, not I.
I’d only have you remark that our he-dog friend Bobby is sitting up and
begging for the invitation——”
“Oh! Ah!” cried Olivia, with a fling of her arm, “you’re horrid!”
“Not a bit,” smiled Lydia. “I face facts, as you’ll have to do, if you
want to find comfort in this matter-of-fact world. Have your Bobby down
by all means. Only keep your eye on him.”
“He’s not my Bobby,” said Olivia indignantly.
“Our Bobby, then,” said Lydia, with good-natured indulgence.
So Olivia, with the little palpitation of the heart attendant on
consciousness of adventurous and (in Medlow eyes, preposterous)
well-doing, wrote to Bobby Quinton a letter whose gracious delicacy
would not have wounded the susceptibilities of a needy Hidalgo or an
impoverished Highland chieftain, and received in reply a telegram of
eager acceptance.
Bobby appeared immaculately vestured, his heart overflowing with
gratitude at the amazing sweetness of his two dear ladies. Never had man
been blessed with such fairy godmothers. By the fresh frankness of his
appreciation of their hospitality he disarmed criticism. A younger son
hanging on to the court of Louis XIII never received purses of gold from
his lady love with less embarrassed grace. He devoted himself to their
service. He had the art of tactful effacement, and of appearance at the
exact moment of welcome. He enlivened their meals with chatter and a
boyish brightness that passed for wit.
To Olivia, the dearest of his dear ladies, he confided the pathetic
history of his life. A sunny, sheltered corner of the Pier, both sitting
side by side well wrapped in furs, conduced to intimacy. How a young man
in such a precarious financial position could afford to wear a fur-lined
coat with a new astrachan collar it did not strike Olivia to enquire.
That he, like herself, was warm on that sun-filled morning, with the sea
dancing and sparkling away beyond them, and human types around them
exuding the prosperity of peace, seemed sufficient for the comfortable
hour. He spoke of his early years of ease, of his modest patrimony
coming to an end soon after the war broke out; of his commission in a
yeomanry regiment; of his heart-break as the months went on and the
chance of the regiment being sent to the front grew less and less; of
his exchange into a regiment of the line; of the rotten heart that gave
out after a month in France; of his grief at being invalided out of the
army and his struggles and anxieties when he returned to civil life,
branded as physically unfit. He had tried the stage, musical comedy,
male youth in the manless chorus being eagerly welcomed; then, after a
little training, he found he had the dancer’s gift. “So one thing led to
another,” said he, “and that’s my history.”
“But surely,” said Olivia, “all this dancing and these late hours must
be very bad for your heart.”
He smiled sadly. “What does it matter? I’m no use to anybody, and nobody
cares whether I’m dead or alive.”
Olivia protested warmly. “The world is crying out for young men of
three-and-twenty. You could be useful in a million ways.”
“Not a crock like me.”
“You could go into an office.”
“Yes. In at one door and out of another. Hopeless.”
He drew from a slim gold case a Turkish cigarette—Olivia, minutely
hospitable, had put a box of a hundred in his room—and tapped it
thoughtfully.
“After all, which is better—to carry on with life like a worm—which
anyhow perisheth, as the Bible tells us—or to go out like a butterfly,
with a bit of a swagger?”
“But you mustn’t talk of going out,” cried Olivia. “It’s indecent.”
Bobby lighted his cigarette. “Who would care?”
“I, for one,” she replied.
Her health and sanity revolted against morbid ideas. He stretched out
his hand, and, with the tips of his fingers, touched her coat, and he
bent his dark brown eyes upon her.
“Would you really?” he murmured.
She flushed, felt angry she scarce knew why, and put herself swiftly on
the defensive.
“I would care for the life of any young man. After a million killed it’s
precious—and every decent girl would care the same as I.”
“You’re wonderful!” he remarked.
“I’m common sense incarnate,” said Olivia.
“You are. You’re right. You’re right a thousand times,” he replied.
“I’ll always remember what you have said to me this morning.”
At his surrender she disarmed. A corpulent, opulent couple passed them
by, the lady wearing a cheap feathered hat and a rope of pearls outside
a Kolinsky coat, the gentleman displaying on an ungloved right hand,
which maintained in his mouth a gigantic cigar, an enormous ruby set in
a garden border of diamonds.
“At any rate,” said Bobby, “I’m not as some other men are.”
So they laughed and discussed the profiteers and walked back to the
hotel for lunch with the sharpened appetites of twenty.
When Bobby Quinton left them, Olivia reproached herself for lack of
sympathy. The boy had done his best. A rotten, and crocky heart, who was
she to despise? But for circumstance he might have done heroic things.
Perhaps in his defiance of physical disability he was doing a heroic
thing even now. Still. . . . To Lydia, in an ironically teasing mood,
she declared:
“When I do fall in love, it’s not going to be with any one like Bobby
Quinton. I want a man—there would be a devil of a row, of course, if he
tried—but one capable of beating me.”
“Bobby would do that, right enough, if you gave him the chance,” said
Lydia.
Olivia reflected for a while. “Why have you got your knife into him like
that?” she asked abruptly.
“I haven’t, my dear child. If I had, do you think I would have allowed
him to come down? I live and let live. By letting live, I live very
comfortably and manage, with moderate means, to have a very good time.”
Olivia, already dressed for dinner, looked down on the easy, creamy,
handsome, kimono-clad woman, curled up like a vast Angora cat on the
hotel bedroom sofa, and once more was dimly conscious of a doubt whether
the galley of Lydia Dawlish was the one for her mother’s daughter to row
in.
Still, _vogue la galère_. When she returned to London there was little
else to do. Eating and dancing filled many of her days and nights. She
tried to recapture the pleasure of books which had been all her
recreation for years; but, although her life was not a continuous whirl
of engagements—for it requires a greater vogue as a pretty and
unattached young woman than Olivia possessed to be booked for fourteen
meals and seven evenings every week of the year—she found little time
for solitary intelligent occupation. If she was at a loose end, Lydia’s
hat shop provided an agreeable pastime. Or, as a thousand little odds
and ends of dress demanded attention, there was always a sensuous hour
or two to be spent at Pacotille’s and Luquin’s or Deville’s. Tea
companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was
glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant,
and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell
of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join
the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to
watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to
wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s
impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of
young joy and thrill. She even spent a reckless and rapturous afternoon
at Madame Tussaud’s. Sometimes Janet Philimore accompanied her on these
excursions round the monuments of London. Janet, who had mild
antiquarian tastes and a proletarian knowledge of London traffic, took
her by tubes and buses to the old City churches and the Tower, and
exhibited to her wondering gaze the Bank of England and the Royal
Exchange and Guildhall up the narrow street. For sentimental interest,
there was always Bobby Quinton, who continued to maintain himself under
her maternal eye. And so the new life went on.
It was one night in April, while she was standing under the porch of a
theatre, Mouregard, her escort, having gone in search of his
dinner-and-theatre brougham—for those were days when taxis were scarce
and drivers haughty—that she found herself addressed by a long-nosed,
one-armed man, who raised his hat.
“Miss Gale—I’m sure you don’t remember me.”
For a second or two she could not place him. Then she laughed.
“Why—Major Olifant!” She shook hands. “What are you doing here? I
thought you were buried among your fossils. Do tell me—how are the
hot-water pipes? And how is the parrot? Myra has no faith in your
bachelor housekeeping and is sure you’ve eaten him out of desperation.”
He returned a light answer. Then, touching the arm of a man standing by
his side:
“Miss Gale—can I introduce Mr. Alexis Triona.”
Triona bowed, stood uncovered while he took the hand which Olivia held
out.
“This is my landlady,” said Olifant.
“He is privileged beyond the common run of mortals,” said Triona.
“That’s very pretty,” laughed Olivia, with a swift, enveloping glance at
the slight, inconspicuous youth who had done such wonderful things.
“I’ve not thought of myself as a landlady before. I hope I don’t look
like one.”
Visions of myriad Bloomsbury lodging-houses at whose doors he had
knocked after he had left the tiny room in Cherbury Mews, and of the
strange middle-aged women of faded gentility whom he had interviewed
within those doors, rose before Triona’s eyes, and he laughed too. For
under the strong electric light of the portico, unkind to most of the
other waiting women, showing up lines and hollows and artificialities of
complexion, she looked as fresh and young as a child on a May morning.
The open theatre wrap revealed her slender girlish figure, sketchily
clad in a flame-coloured garment; and, with the light in her eyes and
her little dark head proudly poised, she stood before the man’s fancy as
the flame of youth.
She turned to Olifant.
“Are you in town?”
“For a few days. Getting rid of cobwebs.”
“I’d lend you quite a nice broom, if you could find time to come and see
me. Besides, I do want to hear about my beloved Polly.”
“I shall be delighted,” said Olifant.
They arranged that he should come to tea at the flat the following day.
“And if so famous a person as Mr. Triona would honour me, too?”
“Dare I?” he asked.
“It’s on the fifth floor, but there’s a lift.”
She saw Mauregard hurrying up. With a “Four-thirty, then,” and a smile
of adieu, she turned and joined Mauregard.
“Shall we go on to Percy’s?” asked the young Frenchman, standing at the
door of the brougham.
Olivia conceived a sudden distaste for Percy’s.
“Not unless you particularly want to.”
“I? Good Lord!” said he.
“Why do you ever go, if it bores you like that?” she asked as the
brougham started Victoria-wards.
“_Ce que femme veut, Mauregard le veut._”
“I suppose that is why you’ve never made love to me.”
“How?” he asked, surprised out of his perfect English idiom.
“I’ve wanted you not to make love to me, and you haven’t.”
“But how could I make love to you, when I have been persecuting you with
the confessions of my unhappy love affairs?”
“One can always find a means,” said Olivia. “That’s why I like you. You
are such a good friend.”
“I hope so,” said he. Then, after a short silence: “Let me be frank.
What is going on at the back of your clever English mind is perfectly
accurate. I am tempted to make love to you every time I see you. What
man, with a man’s blood in his veins, wouldn’t be tempted, no matter how
much he loved another woman? But I say to myself: ‘Lucien, you are
French to the marrow of your bones. It is the nature of that marrow not
to offend a beautiful woman by not making love to her. But, on the other
hand, the Lady Olivia whose finger-tips I am unworthy to kiss’—he
touched them with his lips, however, in the most charming manner—‘is
English to the marrow of _her_ bones, and it is the nature of that
marrow to be offended if a man makes obviously idle love to her.’ So,
not wishing to lose my Lady Olivia, whose friendship and sympathy I
value so highly, I accept with a grateful heart a position which would
be incomprehensible to the vast majority of my fellow-countrymen.”
“I’m so glad we’ve had this out,” said Olivia after a pause. “I’ve been
a bit worried. A girl on her own has got to take care of herself, you
know. And you’ve been so beautifully kind to me——”
“It’s because I am proud to call myself your humble and devoted
servant,” replied Mauregard.
Olivia went to bed contented with this frank explanation. Men had
already made love to her in a manner which had ruffled her serene
consciousness, and she found it, not like Lydia Dawlish, a cynical game
of wit, but a disagreeable business, to parry their advances. Bobby
Quinton, of course, she could put into a corner like a naughty child,
whenever he became foolish. But Mauregard, consistently respectful and
entertaining, had been rather a puzzle. Now that way was clear.
For a while she did not associate her meeting Blaise Olifant with her
distaste for the night club. In the flush of her new existence she had
almost forgotten him. There had been no reason to correspond. His rent
was paid through the Trivett and Gale office. His foraminiferous
pursuits did not appeal to a girl’s imagination. Now and then she gave a
passing thought to what was happening in her old home, and vaguely
remembered that the romantically named traveller was there as a guest.
But that was all. Now, the presence of Olifant had suddenly recalled the
little scene in her mother’s room, when she had suddenly decided to let
him have the house; he had brought with him a breath of that room; a
swift memory of the delicate water-colours and the books by the bedside,
the _Pensées de Pascal_ and _The Imitation of Christ_. . . . Besides,
she had felt a curious attraction towards the companion, the boy with
the foreign manner and the glistening eyes and the suffering-stricken
face. Both men, as she conceived them, belonged to the higher
intellectual type that had their being remote from the inanities of
dissipation. So, impelled by a muddled set of motives, she suddenly
found herself abhorring Percy’s. She read herself into a state of
chastened self-approbation, and then to sleep, with Rupert Brooke’s
poems.