THE EMERALD PENDANT
I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that
night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and
looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.
While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.
"I look dreadfully missish," she said.
When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a
school-treat!"
We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard
Hermione behind Betty's voice.
She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's
going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant."
That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only
natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too,
begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in
her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.
"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"
Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?
My mother wouldn't say....
After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.
My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I
asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as L600.
She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose
real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.
I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and
important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the
jewels be sold?
My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a
shield before the other.
She spoke my name and I started--the voice sounded odd. I went back to
the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me
to sit down.
Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth
selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against
the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt
Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and
sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that
army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high
companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London
University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful
work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might
help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering
over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud
of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all
the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!
It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!
"Not--not female doctor," I protested. "That _does_ sound----"
"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it----"
I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But
there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing
important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People
did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."
I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor"
_was_ male, and everyone understood that.
I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I
hadn't any accomplishments--no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative
one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be
people like that.
It was all no use.
* * * * *
That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my
mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be
epoch-making in our history.
That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine--to excuse her.
Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young
step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") that _any_
other person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She
idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works.
Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats
for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. She
_could_ not, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled,
she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children.
"Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her
to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly
possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not.
I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My
mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I
might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely--if
it found her so inclined--merely to open a long-closed door.
I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning,
though I knew that at any time I should find it easier to write:
"Please lend me L1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter
as my mother had dictated.
* * * * *
Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas
had motored over from Dartmoor that very day--with a man friend. They
had been at the Helmstones' to tea.
I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about
Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another
curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and
his friend were at the inn.
"What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad
enough to escape from my own thoughts.
She was smiling. "I think it is very natural."
And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough
mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of
his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house
like the Helmstones'?
Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific, but somewhat foolish
fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer
reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I
saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For
all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked
being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this
idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as
self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I
think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother
that afternoon.
Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that
Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a
dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little
tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There
was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any
sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as
happy as Betty looked.
. . . . .
The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest dejection, I dated a
sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."
I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense
unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the
impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or
trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr.
Annan."
Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face
another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my
own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to
clock--from clock to window, hour after hour.
DEAR MR. ANNAN,--I have told my mother. She feels as you do.
She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not
to think about it any more.
I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.
* * * * *