HERE, all in a rush of twenty-four hours, was a glut of incident for a
young woman out for adventure. Triona had only made his effect on the
romantically feminine within Olivia by his triumphant rescue. As to that
he need have no misgivings. So once did Andromeda see young Perseus,
calm and assured, deliver her from the monster. Triona’s felling of
Mavenna appealed to the lingering savage woman fiercely conscious of
wrong avenged; but his immediate and careless mastery of the situation
struck civilized chords. She could see him dominating the sheepskin-clad
tribe in the Urals (see _Through Blood and Snow_) until he established
their independence in their mountain fastness. She could see him,
masterful, resourceful, escaping from the Bolshevik prison and making
his resistless way across a hostile continent. She could also
appreciate, after this wonder-day at Richmond, the suppleness of his
simple charm which won him food and shelter where food scarcely existed
and shelter to a stranger was a matter of shooting or a bashing in of
heads.
As for Mavenna, her flesh still shuddered at the memory of those few
moments of insult. What he said she could scarcely remember. The
inextricable clutch of his great arms around her body and the detestable
kisses eclipsed mere words. Unwittingly his hug had compressed her
throat so that she could not scream. There had been nothing for it but
the slipper unhooked by the free arm, and the doughty heel. Had she won
through alone to her room, she would have collapsed—so she assured
herself—from sickening horror. But the Deliverer had been there, as in
a legend of Greece or Broceliande, and had saved her from the madness of
the nymph terror stricken by Satyrs. The two extravagances had, in a
way, counteracted each other, setting her, by the morning, in a normal
equilibrium. She had tried to explain the phenomenon by referring to her
having spent the night in striking a moral balance-sheet. And then had
come the day, the wonderful day, in which the Deliverer had proved
himself the perfect, gentle Knight. Can it be wondered that her brain
swam with him?
She went the next morning to Lydia’s hat shop, and, in the little room
which Sydney Brooke had called her cubby hole, a nine-foot-square
boudoir office, reeking with Lydia’s scent and with Heaven knows what
scandals and vulgarities and vanities of post-war London, she poured out
her tale of outrage. After listening with indulgent patience, Lydia
remarked judicially:
“I told you, my dear child, when you came to London, that the first
lesson you had to learn was to take care of yourself.”
Olivia flashed. She had taken care of herself well enough. But that
brute Mavenna—what about him?
“Everybody knows Mavenna,” replied Lydia. “No girl in her senses would
have trusted herself alone with him.”
“And, with that reputation, he’s a friend of yours and Sydney’s?”
Lydia shrugged her plump shoulders.
“Really, my dear, if one exacted certificates of lamb-like innocence,
signed by a high celestial official, before you admitted anyone into the
circle of your acquaintance, you might as well go and live on a desert
island.”
“But this man’s a beast and you’ve known it all along!” cried Olivia.
“Only in one way.”
“But—my God! Isn’t that enough?” Olivia stood, racked with disgust and
amazement, over her mild-eyed, philosophic friend. “What would you have
done if you had been in my place?”
“I could never have been in your place,” said Lydia. “I should have been
too wise.”
“How?”
“The knowledge of men, my dear, is the beginning of wisdom.”
“And I ought to have known?”
“Of course. At any rate, you’ll know in the future.”
“I shall. You may be dead certain I shall,” declared Olivia, in her
anger and excitement seizing a puckered and pleated cushion from the
divan by which she stood. “And if even I—−-”
“Don’t, darling; you’ll tear it,” said Lydia calmly.
Olivia heaved the cushion back impatiently.
“What I want to know is this. Are you and Sydney going to remain friends
with Mavenna?”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to,” replied Lydia. “Mavenna and Sydney are in
all sorts of big things together.”
“Well, when next you see him, Lydia, look well into his face and ask him
what he thinks of the heel of my slipper and Mr. Triona’s fist. He’s not
only a beast. He’s a worm. When I think of him picking himself up, after
being knocked down by a man half his size——” She laughed a bit
hysterically. “Oh—the creature is outside the pale!”
Lydia shook her fair head. “I’m sorry for you, my dear. But he’s inside
all right.”
“Then I’m not going to be inside with him!” cried Olivia.
And, like a little dark dust storm, she swirled out of the office and,
through the shop, into the freedom and spaciousness of the streets. And
that, for Olivia, was the end of night clubs and dancing as a serious
aim in life, and a host of other vanities.
A few mornings afterwards Lydia sailed into the flat and greeted Olivia
as though nothing had happened. She seemed to base her philosophy of
life on obliteration of the past, yesterday being as dead as a winter’s
day of sixty years ago. Would Olivia lunch with Sydney and herself at
some riverside club? Sydney, having collected Mauregard, would be
calling for them with the car. The day was fine and warm; the prospect
of the cool lawn reaching down to the plashing river allured, and she
liked Mauregard. Besides, she had begun to take a humorous view of
Lydia. She consented. Lydia began to talk of her wedding, fixed for the
middle of July, of the clothes that she had and the clothes that she
hadn’t—the ratio of the former to the latter being that of a loin-cloth
to the stock of Selfridge’s. When she was serious minded, Lydia always
expressed herself in terms of raiment.
“And you’ll have to get some things, too, as you’re going to be
bridesmaid.”
“Am I?” asked Olivia, this being the first she had heard of it. “And
who’s going to be best man—Mavenna?”
Lydia looked aghast. So might a band of primitive Christians have
received a suggestion of inviting the ghost of Pontius Pilate to a
commemorative supper.
“My dear child, you don’t suppose we’re going to ask that horror to the
wedding?”
“The other day,” Olivia remarked drily, “I understood that you and
Sydney loved him dearly.”
Lydia sighed. “I’m beginning to believe that you’ll never understand
anything.”
So the breach, if breach there were, was healed. Olivia, relating the
matter to Triona at their next meeting, qualified Lydia’s attitude as
one of callous magnanimity.
Meanwhile her intimacy with the young man began to ripen.
One evening Janet Philimore invited her to dine at the Russian circle of
a great womans’ club, which was entertaining Triona at dinner. This was
the first time she had seen him in his character of modest lion; the
first time, too, she had been in a company of women groping, however
clumsily, after ideals in unsyncopated time. The thin girl next to her,
pretty enough, thought Olivia, if only she had used a powder puff to
mitigate the over-assertiveness of a greasy skin, and had given less the
impression of having let out her hair to a bird for nesting purposes,
and had only seized the vital importance of colour—the untrue greeny
daffodil of her frock not being the best for a sallow complexion—the
girl next to her, Agnes Blenkiron, started a hectic conversation by
enquiring what she was going to do in Baby Week. The more ignorant
Olivia professed herself to be of babies and their antecedents,
especially the latter, the more indignantly explicit became Miss
Blenkiron. Olivia listened until she had creepy sensations around the
roots of her hair and put up an instinctive hand to assure herself that
it was not standing on end. Miss Blenkiron talked feminist physiology,
psychology, sociological therapeutics, until Olivia’s brain reeled. Over
and over again she tried to turn to her hostess, who fortunately had a
pleasant male and middle-aged neighbour, but the fair lady, without
mercy, had her in thrall. She learned that all the two or three thousand
members of the club were instinct with these theories and their aims.
She struggled to free herself from the spell.
“I thought we were here to talk about Russia,” she ventured.
“But we are talking about Russia.” Miss Blenkiron shed on her the
lambency of her pale blue eyes. “The future of the human race lies in
the hands of the millions of Russian babies lying in the bodies of
millions of Russian women just waiting to be born.”
A flash of the devil saved Olivia from madness.
“That’s a gigantic conception,” she said.
“It is,” Miss Blenkiron agreed, unhumorously, and continued her work of
propaganda, so that by the time the speeches began Olivia found herself
committed to the strenuous toil of a lifetime as a member of she knew
not what societies. The only clear memory she retained was that of a tea
engagement some Sunday in a North London garden city where Miss
Blenkiron and her brother frugally entertained the advanced thinkers of
the day.
In spite of the sense of release from something vampiric, when the
speeches hushed general conversation, she recognized that the strange
talk had been revealing and stimulating, and she brought a quickened
intelligence to the comprehension of the gathering. To all these women
the present state of the upheaved world was of vast significance. In
Lydia’s galley no one cared a pin about it, save Sydney Rooke, who
cursed it for its interference with his income. But here, as was clearly
conveyed in the opening remarks of the chairwoman, a novelist of
distinction, every one was intellectually concerned with its infinite
complexity of aspect. To them, the guest of the evening, emerging as he
had done from the dizzying profundities of the whirlpool, was a figure
of uncanny interest.
“It’s the first-hand knowledge of men like him that is vital,” Miss
Blenkiron whispered when the chairwoman sat down. “I should so much like
to meet him.”
“Would you?” said Olivia. “That’s easily managed. He’s a great friend of
mine.”
And she was subridently conscious of having acquired vast and sudden
merit in her neighbour’s eyes.
Triona pleased her beyond expectation. The function, so ordinary to
public-dinner-going London, was new to her. She magnified the strain
that commonplace, even though sincere, adulation could put upon a guest
of honour. She felt a twinge of apprehension when he stood up, in his
loose boyish way, and brushing his brown hair from his temples, began to
speak. But in a moment or two all such feelings vanished. He spoke to
this assembly of a hundred, mostly women, much as, in moments of
enthusiasm, he would speak to her. And, indeed, often catching her eye,
he did speak to her, subtly and flatteringly bringing her to his side.
Her heart beat a bit faster when, glancing around and seeing every one
hanging on his words, she realized that she alone, of all this little
multitude, held a golden key to the mystery of the real man. There he
talked, with the familiar sway of the shoulders, and, when seeking for a
phrase, with the nervous plucking of his lips; talked in his nervous,
picturesque fashion, now and then with a touch of the poet, consistently
modest, only alluding to personal experience to illustrate a point or to
give verisimilitude to a jest. He developed his feminist theme
logically, dramatically, proving beyond argument that the future of
civilization lay in the hands of the women of the civilized world.
He had a great success. Woman, although she knows it perfectly well,
loves to be told what she wants and the way to get it: she will never
follow the way, of course, having a tortuous, thorny, and enticing way
of her own; but that doesn’t matter. The principle, the end, that is the
thing: it justifies any amazing means. He sat down amid enthusiastic
applause. Flushed, he sought Olivia’s distant gaze and smiled. Then she
felt, thrillingly, that he had been speaking for her, for her alone, and
her eyes brightened and flashed him a proud message.
She met him a while later in the thronged drawing-room of the club,
rather a shy and embarrassed young man, heading a distinct course toward
her through a swarm of kind yet predatory ladies. She admired the simple
craftsmanship of his approach.
“How are you going to get home?” he asked.
The adorable carelessness of twenty shrugged its shoulders.
“I don’t know. The Lord will provide.”
“If you can’t find a taxi, will you walk?”
The question implied a hope, so obvious that she laughed gaily.
“There are buses also and tubes.”
“In which you can’t travel alone at this time of night.”
She scoffed: “Oh, can’t I?” But his manifest fear that she should
encounter satyrs in train or omnibus pleased her greatly.
“Father’s dining at his club close by and is calling for me. He will see
that you get home safely,” said Janet Philimore.
“It’s miles out of your way, dear,” said Olivia. “I’ll put myself in the
hands of Mr. Triona.”
So, taxis being unfindable, they walked together through the warm London
night to Victoria Street. It was then that he spoke of his work, the
novel just completed. Of all opinions on earth, hers was the one he most
valued. If only he could read it to her and have the priceless benefit
of her judgment. Secretly flattered, she modestly depreciated, however,
her critical powers. He persisted, attributing to her unsuspected
qualities of artistic perception. At last, not reluctantly, she yielded.
He could begin the next evening.
The reading took some days. Olivia, new to creative work, marvelled
exceedingly at the magic of the artist’s invention. The personages of
the drama, imaginary he said, lived as real beings. She regarded their
creation as uncanny.
“But how do you know she felt like that?”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I can’t conceive her feeling
otherwise.”
Yet, for all her wonder, she brought her swift intelligence to the task
of criticism. Not since her mother’s illness had she taken anything so
seriously. She lived in the book, walking meanwhile through an unreal
world. Her golden words, on the other hand, the young man captured
eagerly and set down in the margin of the manuscript. Half-way through
the reading, they were on terms of Christian names. Minds so absorbed in
an artistic pursuit grew impatient of absurd formalities of address.
They slipped almost imperceptibly into the Olivia and Alexis habit. At
the end they pulled themselves up rather sharply, with blank looks at an
immediate future bereft of common interest.
“I’ll have to begin another, right away, so that you can be with me from
the very start,” he said.
“Have you an idea?”
“Not yet.”
“When will you have one?”
He didn’t know. What man spent with the creative effort of a novel has
the vitality to beget another right away? He feels that the very last
drop of all that he has known and suffered and enjoyed has been used to
the making of the book. For the making of another nothing is left.
“I suppose I’ll have to lie fallow for a week or so,” said the young
optimist.
“And as soon as things begin to sprout you’ll let me know?” asked
Olivia, forgetful that before harvest there must be seed time.
He promised; went home and cudgelled tired brains; also cudgelled, for
different reasons, an untired and restless soul.
Let him make good, not ephemerally as the picturesque narrator of
personal adventure, but definitely, with this novel as the creative
artist—the fervent passion of his life—and he would establish himself
in her eyes, in her mind, in her heart; so that treading solid ground,
he could say to her: “This is what I am, and for what I am, take me. All
that has gone before was but a crude foundation. I had to take such
rubbish and rubble as I could find to hand.” But until then, let him
regard her as a divinity beyond his reach, rendering her service and
worship, but forbearing to soil her white robe with a touch as yet
unhallowed.
Many a time, they could have read no more that day. Just one swift
movement, glance or cry on the part of the man, and the pulses of youth
would have throbbed wildly together. He knew it. The knowledge was at
once his Heaven and his Hell. A less sensitive human being would not
have appreciated the quivering and vital equipoise. Many a time he
parted from her with the farewell of comradely intimacy on his lips, and
when the lift had deposited him on the street level his heart had been
like lead and his legs as water, so that he stumbled out into the
lamp-lit dark of night like a paralytic or a drunken man.
And that which was good in him warred fiercely against temptations more
sordid. As far as he knew, she was a woman of fortune. So did her dress,
her habit of life, her old comfort-filled Medlow home, proclaim her. Of
her social standing as the daughter of Stephen Gale who bawled out bids
for yelts and rams in the Medlow market place, he knew or understood
very little. Her fortune was a fact. His own, the few hundreds which he
had gained by _Through Blood and Snow_, was rapidly disappearing. The
failure of the new book meant starvation or reversion to Cherbury Mews.
Married to a woman with money he could snap his fingers at crust or
livery. . . . For the time he conquered.
The end of the reading coincided more or less with Midsummer
quarter-day. Bills from every kind of coverer or adorner of the feminine
human frame fell upon her like a shower of autumn leaves. She sat at her
small writing desk, jotted down the amounts, and added them up with a
much sucked pencil point. The total was incredible. With fear at her
heart she rushed round to her bank for a note of her balance. It had
woefully decreased since January. Payment of all these bills would
deplete it still more woefully. The rent of “The Towers” and the
diminishing income on the deposit account were trivial items set against
her expenditure. She summoned Myra.
“We’re heading for bankruptcy.”
“Any fool could see that,” said Myra.
“What are we going to do?”
“Live like Christians instead of heathens,” replied Myra. “If you would
come to Chapel with me one Sunday night you could be taught how.”
Here Myra failed. She belonged to a Primitive Non-Conformist Communion
whose austere creed and drab ceremonial had furnished occasion for
Olivia’s teasing wit since childhood. Heathendom, ever divorced from
Lydian pleasures, presented infinitely more reasons for existence than
Myra’s Calvinism.
“It seems funny that a dear old thing like you can revel in the idea of
Eternal Punishment.”
“I haven’t got much else to revel in, have I?” said Myra grimly.
“I suppose that’s true,” said Olivia thoughtfully. “But it isn’t my
fault, is it? If you had wanted to revel, mother and I would have been
the last people to prevent you. Why not begin now? Go and have a debauch
at the pictures.”
“You began by talking of bankruptcy,” said Myra.
“And you prescribed little Bethel. I’d sooner go broke.”
“You’ll have your own way, as usual,” said Myra.
“And if I go broke, what’ll you do?” asked Olivia, unregenerately
enjoying the conversation.
“I suppose I’ll have to put you together again,” replied Myra, with no
sign of emotion on her angular, withered face.
Olivia leaped from her chair.
“I’m a beast.”
“That can’t be,” said Myra, “seeing that it was I as brought you up.”
* * * * *
That was the end of the argument. Olivia recognized in Myra every useful
quality save that of the financier. She dismissed Myra from her
counsels. But the state of her budget cost her a sleepless night or two.
At the present rate of expenditure a couple of years would see her
penniless. For the first time since her emancipation from Medlow fetters
she had the feeling of signing her own death-warrant on every cheque.
Heroic resolves were born of these days of depression.
As a climax to her worries, came Bobby Quinton, one afternoon. What had
he done to offend his dearest of ladies? Why had she stopped the dancing
lessons? Why did Percy’s see her no more?
“I’m fed up with Percy’s and the whole gang,” said Olivia.
“Not including me, surely?” cried the young man, with a dog’s appeal in
his melting brown eyes.
She was kind. At first, she had not the heart to pack him off to the
froth and scum of social life to which he belonged. He had the charm of
unsuccessful youth so pathetic in woman’s eyes.
“If you are,” said he, “I’m done for. I’ve no one to look to but you, in
the wide world.”
Here was responsibility for the safety of a human soul. Olivia gave him
sound advice, repeating many an old argument and feeling enjoyably
maternal. But when Bobby grew hysterical, and, with mutation of sex,
quoted the Indian Love Lyrics and professed himself prepared to die
beneath her chariot wheels, and threatened to do so if she disregarded
his burning passion, she admonished him after the manner of
twentieth-century maidenhood.
“My good Bobby, don’t be an ass.”
But Bobby persisted in being an ass, with the zeal of the dement. He
became the fervent lover of the cinquecento Bandello—and, with his dark
eyes and hair, looked the part. Imploring he knelt at the feet of the
divinity.
“That’s all very well, my dear boy,” said Olivia, unmoved by his
rhapsody, “all very nice and all very beautiful. But what do you want me
to do?”
Of course he wanted her to marry him, there and then: to raise him from
the Hell he was in to the Heaven where she had her pure habitation. With
her he could do great things. He guaranteed splendid achievements.
“Before a woman marries a man,” said Olivia, “she rather wants an
achievement or two on account.”
“Then you don’t love me, you don’t trust me?” exclaimed the infatuated
young man, ruffling his sleek black hair.
“I can’t say that I do,” replied Olivia, growing weary. “If you tell me
what sort of fascination you possess, I’ll give it due consideration.”
“Then I may as well go away and blow my brains out,” he cried
tragically.
“You might better go and use such brains as you have in doing a man’s
work,” retorted Olivia.
He reproached her mournfully.
“How unkind you are.”
“If you came here as a window-cleaner or a lift porter I might be
kinder. You’re quite a nice boy,” she went on after a pause, “otherwise
I shouldn’t have anything to do with you. But you haven’t begun to learn
the elements of life. You’re utterly devoid of the sense of duty or
responsibility. Like the criminal, you know. Oh, don’t get angry. I’m
talking to you for your good. Pretending to teach idle women worthless
dancing isn’t a career for a man. It’s contemptible. Every
man—especially nowadays—ought to pull his weight in the world. The
war’s not over. The real war is only just beginning. Instead of pulling
your weight you think it’s your right to sit on a cushion, a
passenger—or a Pekie dog—and let other people pull you.”
“You don’t understand——”
“Oh, yes I do. One has to live, and at first we take any old means to
hand. But you’ve been going on at this for a couple of years and haven’t
tried to get out of it. You like it, Bobby——”
“I loathe it.”
“You don’t,” she went on remorselessly, with her newly acquired
knowledge of what a man’s life could be. “All you loathe is the
work—especially when it doesn’t bring you in as much money as you want.
You hate work.”
Resentment gradually growing out of amusement at his presumptuous
proposal had wrought her to a pitch of virtuous indignation. Here was
this young man, of cultivated manners, intelligent, able-bodied,
attractive, rejecting any kind of mission in existence, and——
“Look here, Bobby,” she said, rising from her chair by the tea-table and
dominating him with a little gesture, “don’t get up. You sit there.
You’ve asked me to marry you, because you think I’m rich. Hold your
tongue,” she flashed, as he was about to speak. “I’ll take all the love
and that sort of thing for granted. But if I was poor you wouldn’t have
thought of it. At the back of your mind you imagine that if I married
you, we could lead a life of Percy’s and the Savoy and Monte Carlo and
the South Sea Islands, and you needn’t do another stroke of work all
your life long.”
He leaned forward in his chair protesting eagerly that it wasn’t true.
He would marry her to-morrow were she penniless. She had his salvation
soul and body in her hands. He hungered for work; but the coils of his
present life had a strangle-hold on him. Suddenly he rose and advanced a
step towards her.
“Listen, Olivia. If you won’t marry me, will you help me in other ways?
I’m desperate. You think you know something about the world. But you
don’t. I’m up against it. It may mean prison. For the love of God lend
me a couple of hundred pounds.”
The ugly word prison sent a stab through her heart; but immediately
afterwards the common-sense of her Gale ancestry told her either that he
was lying, or, if it were true, that he deserved it. She asked coldly:
“What have you been doing?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “You must trust me.”
“But I don’t and that is why I can’t lend you two hundred pounds.”
“You refuse?”
His soft voice became a snarl and his lip curled unpleasantly back
beneath the little silky moustache.
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t know how you dare, after all the encouragement you’ve given
me.”
She stared at him aghast. “Encouragement?”
“Yes. Didn’t you make me dance attendance on you at Brighton? Haven’t
you brought me here over and over again? You’ve behaved damnably to me.
You’ve made me waste my time. I’ve turned other women who would have
only been too glad——”
In horror, she flew to the door and threw it open.
“Go,” she said.
And speeding across the hall she threw open the flat door.
“Go,” she said again.
She crossed the landing and rang the lift bell and returned to the hall,
where he met her and threw himself on his knees and looked up at her
with wild, hunted eyes.
“Forgive me, Olivia. For God’s sake forgive me. I was mad. I didn’t know
what I was saying. Shut that door and I’ll tell you everything.”
But Olivia passed him by into the sitting-room, and stood with her back
against the door until she heard the clash of the lift gates and the
retreating footsteps of Bobby Quinton.
A short while ago she had nearly quarrelled with Mauregard because, in a
wordy dissertation on the modern young men who lived on women, he
instanced Bobby as possibly coming within the category. Now she knew
that Mauregard was right. She felt sick. Also deadly ashamed of her
superior attitude of well-meant reprimand. She burned with the
consciousness of tongue in cheek while he listened. Well, that was the
end of the Lydian galley.
She did not recover till the next afternoon, when Triona called to take
her to the Blenkirons’ Sunday intellectual symposium in Fielder’s Park.
She welcomed him impulsively with both hands outstretched, as a
justification of her faith in mankind.
“You can’t tell how glad I am to see you.”
“And you,” said he, kissing first one hand and then the other, “can’t
tell how good I think God is to me.”