"_I_ know how he spends his time," she said. "How do you know?"
"Well, for one thing, Ethel tells me."
"How does she know?"
"She--she posts the letters."
"Does she read them?"
"She needn't. He's too transparent."
"Lena, do you use her to spy on him?" I said.
"Well," she retorted, "if he uses her--"
I asked her if it hadn't struck her that Sybil Fermor might be using
him?
"Do you mean--as a _paravent_? Or," she revised it, "a parachute?"
"For Bertie Granville," I elucidated. "A parachute, by all means."
She considered it. "It won't work," she said. "If it's her reputation
she's thinking of, wouldn't Norry be worse?"
I said that was the beauty of him, if Letty Granville's attention was
to be diverted.
"Oh, Roly," she said, "do you really think it's that?" I said I did,
and she powdered her nose and said I was a dear and I'd bucked her up
no end, and went away quite happy.
Letty Granville's divorce suit proved to her that I was right.
The next time I saw her she told me she'd been mistaken about Sybil
Fermor. It was Lady Hermione Nevin. Norry had been using Sybil as a
"_paravent_" for _her_. I said she was wrong again. Didn't she know
that Hermione was engaged to Billy Craven? They were head over ears in
love with each other. I asked her what on earth had made her think of
her? And she said Lady Hermione had paid him thirty guineas for a
picture. That looked, she said, as if she was pretty far gone on him.
(She tended to disparage Hippisley's talents. Jealousy again.)
I said it looked as if he had the iciest reasons for cultivating Lady
Hermione. And again she told me I was a dear. "You don't know, Roly,
what a comfort you are to me."
Then Barbara Vining turned up out of nowhere, and from the first minute
Lena gave herself up for lost.
"I'm done for," she said. "I'd fight her if it was any good fighting.
But what chance have I? At forty-nine against nineteen, and that face?"
The face was adorable if you adore a child's face on a woman's body.
Small and pink; a soft, innocent forehead; fawn skin hair, a fawn's
nose, a fawn's mouth, a fawn's eyes. You saw her at Lena's garden
parties, staring at Hippisley over the rim of her plate while she
browsed on Lena's cakes and ices, or bounding about Lena's tennis court
with the sash ribbons flying from her little butt end.
Oh, yes; she had her there. As much as he wanted. And there would be
Ethel Reeves, in a new blouse, looking on from a back seat, subtle and
sullen, or handing round cups and plates without speaking to anybody,
like a servant. I used to think she spied on them for Lena. They were
always mouthing about the garden together or sitting secretly in
corners; Lena even had her to stay with them, let him take her for long
drives in her car. She knew when she was beaten.
I said, "Why do you let him do it, Lena? Why don't you turn them both
neck and crop out of the house?" "Because I want him in it. I want him
at any cost. And I want him to have what he wants, too, even if it's
Barbara. I want him to be happy.... I'm making a virtue of necessity.
It can be done, Roly, if you give up beautifully."
I put it to her it wasn't giving up beautifully to fret herself into an
unbecoming illness, to carry her disaster on her face. She would come
to me looking more ruined than ruinous, haggard and ashy, her eyes all
shrunk and hot with crying, and stand before the glass, looking at
herself and dabbing on powder in an utter abandonment to misery.
"I know," she moaned. "As if losing him wasn't enough I must go and
lose my looks. I know crying's simply suicidal at my age, yet I keep on
at it. I'm doing for myself. I'm digging my own grave, Roly. A little
deeper every day."
Then she said suddenly, "Do you know, you're the only man in London I
could come to looking like this."
I said, "Isn't that a bit unkind of you? It sounds as though you
thought I didn't matter."
She broke down on that. "Can't you see it's because I know I don't any
more? Nobody cares whether my nose is red or not. But you're not a
brute. You don't let me feel I don't matter. I know I never did matter
to you, Roly, but the effect's soothing, all the same.... Ethel says if
she were me she wouldn't stand it. To have it going on under my nose.
Ethel is so high-minded. I suppose it's easy to be high-minded if
you've always looked like that. And if you've never _had_ anybody. She
doesn't know what it is. I tell you, I'd rather have Norry there with
Barbara than not have him at all."
I thought and said that would just about suit Hippisley's book. He'd
rather be there than anywhere else, since he had to be somewhere. To be
sure she irritated him with her perpetual clinging, and wore him out.
I've seen him wince at the sound of her voice in the room. He'd say
things to her; not often, but just enough to see how far he could go.
He was afraid of going too far. He wasn't prepared to give up the
comfort of Lena's house, the opulence and peace. There wasn't one of
Lena's wines he could have turned his back on. After all, when she
worried him he could keep himself locked up in the studio away from
her.
There was Ethel Reeves; but Lena didn't worry about his being locked up
with _her_. She was very kind to Hippisley's secretary. Since she
wasn't dangerous, she liked to see her there, well housed, eating rich
food, and getting stronger and stronger every day.
I must say my heart bled for Lena when I thought of young Barbara. It
was still bleeding when one afternoon she walked in with her old
triumphant look; she wore her hat with an _air crâne_, and the powder
on her face was even and intact, like the first pure fall of snow. She
looked ten years younger and I judged that Hippisley's affair with
Barbara was at an end.
Well--it had never had a beginning; nor the ghost of a beginning. It
had never happened at all. She had come to tell me that: that there was
nothing in it; nothing but her jealousy; the miserable, damnable
jealousy that made her think things. She said it would be a lesson to
her to trust him in the future not to go falling in love. For, she
argued, if he hadn't done it this time with Barbara, he'd never do it.
I asked her how she knew he hadn't, this time, when appearances all
pointed that way? And she said that Barbara had come and told her.
Somebody, it seemed, had been telling Barbara it was known that she'd
taken Hippisley from Lena, and that Lena was crying herself into a
nervous break-down. And the child had gone straight to Lena and told
her it was a beastly lie. She hadn't taken Hippisley. She liked ragging
with him and all that, and being seen about with him at parties,
because he was a celebrity and it made the other women, the women he
wouldn't talk to, furious. But as for taking him, why, she wouldn't
take him from anybody as a gift. She didn't want him, a scrubby old
thing like that. She didn't _like_ that dragged look about his mouth
and the way the skin wrinkled on his eyelids. There was a sincerity
about Barbara that would have blasted Hippisley if he'd known.
Besides, she wouldn't have hurt Lena for the world. She wouldn't have
spoken to Norry if she'd dreamed that Lena minded. But Lena had seemed
so remarkably not to mind. When she came to that part of it she cried.
Lena said that was all very well, and it didn't matter whether Barbara
was in love with Norry or not; but how did she know Norry wasn't in
love with _her_? And Barbara replied amazingly that of course she knew.
They'd been alone together.
When I remarked that it was precisely _that_, Lena said, No. That was
nothing in itself; but it would prove one way or another; and it seemed
that when Norry found himself alone with Barbara, he used to yawn.
After that Lena settled down to a period of felicity. She'd come to me,
excited and exulting, bringing her poor little happiness with her like
a new toy. She'd sit there looking at it, turning it over and over, and
holding it up to me to show how beautiful it was.
She pointed out to me that I had been wrong and she right about him,
from the beginning. She knew him. "And to think what a fool, what a
damned silly fool I was, with my jealousy. When all those years there
was never anybody but me. Do you remember Sybil Fermor, and Lady
Hermione--and Barbara? To think I should have so clean forgotten what
he was like.... Don't you think, Roly, there must be something in me,
after all, to have kept him all those years?"
I said there must indeed have been, to have inspired so remarkable a
passion. For Hippisley was making love to her all over again. Their
happy relations were proclaimed, not only by her own engaging
frankness, but still more by the marvellous renaissance of her beauty.
She had given up her habit of jealousy as she had given up eating
sweets, because both were murderous to her complexion. Not that
Hippisley gave her any cause. He had ceased to cultivate the society of
young and pretty ladies, and devoted himself with almost ostentatious
fidelity to Lena. Their affair had become irreproachable with time; it
had the permanence of a successful marriage without the unflattering
element of legal obligation. And he had kept his secretary. Lena had
left off being afraid either that Ethel would leave or that Hippisley
would put some dangerous woman in her place.
There was no change in Ethel, except that she looked rather more subtle
and less sullen. Lena ignored her subtlety as she had ignored her
sulks. She had no more use for her as a confidant and spy, and Ethel
lived in a back den off Hippisley's study with her Remington, and
displayed a convenient apathy in allowing herself to be ignored.
"Really," Lena would say in the unusual moments when she thought of
her, "if it wasn't for the clicking, you wouldn't know she was there."
And as a secretary she maintained, up to the last, an admirable
efficiency.
Up to the last.
It was Hippisley's death that ended it. You know how it
happened--suddenly, of heart failure, in Paris. He'd gone there with
Furnival to get material for that book they were doing together. Lena
was literally "prostrated" with the shock; and Ethel Reeves had to go
over to Paris to bring back his papers and his body.
It was the day after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel
were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out
his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred
on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive. I can hear her
saying to Ethel that there had never been anybody but her, all those
years. Praising his faithfulness; holding out her dead happiness, and
apologizing to Ethel for talking about it when Ethel didn't understand,
never having had any.
She must have said something like that, to bring it on herself, just
then, of all moments.
And I can see Ethel Reeves, sitting at his table, stolidly sorting out
his papers, wishing that Lena'd go away and leave her to her work. And
her sullen eyes firing out questions, asking her what she wanted, what
she had to do with Norman Hippisley's papers, what she was there for,
fussing about, when it was all over?
What she wanted--what she had come for--was her letters. They were
locked up in his bureau in the secret drawer.
She told me what had happened then. Ethel lifted her sullen, subtle
eyes and said, "You think he kept them?"
She said she knew he'd kept them. They were in that drawer.
And Ethel said, "Well then, he didn't. They aren't. He burnt them. _We_
burnt them.... We could, at least, get rid of _them_!"
Then she threw it at her. She had been Hippisley's mistress for three
years.
When Lena asked for proofs of the incredible assertion she had _her_
letters to show.
Oh, it was her moment. She must have been looking out for it, saving up
for it, all those years; gloating over her exquisite secret, her return
for all the slighting and ignoring. That was what had made her
poisonous, the fact that Lena hadn't reckoned with her, hadn't thought
her dangerous, hadn't been afraid to leave Hippisley with her, the
rich, arrogant contempt in her assumption that Ethel would "do" and her
comfortable confidences. It made her amorous and malignant. It
stimulated her to the attempt.
I think she must have hated Lena more vehemently than she loved
Hippisley. She couldn't, _then_, have had much reliance on her power to
capture; but her hatred was a perpetual suggestion.
Supposing--supposing she were to try and take him?
Then she had tried.
I daresay she hadn't much difficulty. Hippisley wasn't quite so fine
and fastidious as Lena thought him. I've no doubt he liked Ethel's
unwholesomeness, just as he had liked the touch of morbidity in Lena.
And the spying? That had been all part of the game; his and Ethel's.
_They_ played for safety, if you like. They had _had_ to throw Lena off
the scent. They used Sybil Fermor and Lady Hermione and Barbara Vining,
one after the other, as their _paravents_. Finally they had used Lena.
That was their cleverest stroke. It brought them a permanent security.
For, you see, Hippisley wasn't going to give up his free quarters, his
studio, the dinners and the motor car, if he could help it. Not for
Ethel. And Ethel knew it. They insured her, too.
Can't you see her, letting herself go in an ecstasy of revenge, winding
up with a hysterical youp? "You? You thought it was you? It was
me--_me_--ME.... You thought what we meant you to think."
Lena still comes and talks to me. To hear her you would suppose that
Lawson Young and Dickey Harper never existed, that her passion for
Norman Hippisley was the unique, solitary manifestation of her soul. It
certainly burnt with the intensest flame. It certainly consumed her.
What's left of her's all shrivelled, warped, as she writhed in her
fire.
Yesterday she said to me, "Roly, I'm _glad_ he's dead. Safe from her
clutches."
She'll cling for a little while to this last illusion: that he had been
reluctant; but I doubt if she really believes it now.
For you see, Ethel flourishes. In passion, you know, nothing succeeds
like success; and her affair with Norman Hippisley advertised her, so
that very soon it ranked as the first of a series of successes. She
goes about dressed in stained-glass futurist muslins, and contrives
provocative effects out of a tilted nose, and sulky eyes, and
sallowness set off by a black velvet band on the forehead, and a black
scarf of hair dragged tight from a raking backward peak.