The country had been at war for over a month, and the epidemic of
war-marriages had already set in.
Engaged girls bought special licences, bought their own wedding-rings,
held everything in readiness for an immediate marriage “whenever he
should get leave.”
And every day fresh engagements were announced.
“What are they all thinking about?” said Lydia half impatiently, when
they heard at Ashlew that the Bishop had taken his daughter to London
himself, at twenty-four hours’ notice, to marry her Highlander.
She said it only because it seemed to her that everything was
conspiring to the ultimate achievement of an immediate marriage between
Jennie and Roland Valentine.
It would come to that.
Lydia knew it quite well--had known it with absolute certainty ever
since old Lady Lucy--the conservative, the tradition-bound Lady
Lucy--had said to her very gently:
“I’m very sorry for you, my dear, but poor little Jennie! Let her be
happy while she can. We hear nothing against this young man--quite
the contrary--and this is a new world we’re going to live in. The old
traditions mustn’t be made binding on these young folk, who are giving
up everything. And I think he is a good young man,” said Lady Lucy
emphatically.
Valentine was at Ashlew again, with three days’ leave before departing
with his aeroplane to the front.
“He’s not a gentleman,” said Lydia, her mouth hardening.
She remembered how, once upon a time, Lady Lucy had begged her son
Clement to wait, before asking in marriage a girl who was indubitably
not of his own social standing.
“Colonial manners are never the same as ours,” declared Lady Lucy.
“My dear, I think that in all the essentials, Mr. Valentine _is_ a
gentleman. And somehow the little rule-of-thumb by which one had always
measured things up to now doesn’t seem to hold good any longer. We
must go back to essentials in these terrible times--the old, primitive
things.”
“Supposing I let Jennie marry him, and he is killed in a week--what has
she gained?”
“Supposing you _don’t_ let her marry him, and he is killed--what then?”
asked the old lady gently. “Would Jennie ever forgive you, Lydia?”
“At Jennie’s age, though it would be a brutal thing to say to her now,
one’s first love is not one’s last. She would almost certainly come to
care for someone else.”
Lydia’s mother-in-law did not point out to her that the argument
applied as much to Jennie prematurely widowed as to Jennie unwedded.
Instead she put into words an insistent intuition of Lydia’s own, that
she had tried strenuously to stifle.
“My dear, forgive me, but have you altogether taken into consideration
Jennie’s temperament? She might, as you say, come to care for someone
else--but will it ever be like this again?”
Lady Lucy’s old face flushed delicately.
“It was love at first sight on both sides, Lydia--and they are madly
in love. The change in little Jennie is one of the most extraordinary
things I have ever seen.”
Lydia winced.
To her lifelong instinct of repression, that ardour of Jennie’s,
unrestrained as unconcealed, came as something almost shocking.
It was true that Jennie was changed.
Lydia had seen traces of tempestuous tears on her face, on the very
evening of the day that Roland Valentine had gone up to London, driven
to the station by Lydia.
And Jennie had said:
“I’m crying because I’m so madly happy--I didn’t know anybody on earth
could be so happy. I can’t help crying----”
She cried, but her eyes said, as her lips had said, that it was because
she was so madly happy.
When war was declared, and Lydia, white-faced, had bidden Jennie try
to realize what it might mean for all of them--for England--for Billy
Damerel--for Nathalie’s boys--for thousands of other boys--Jennie had
said recklessly:
“I know it’s all true, and that I don’t realize it. I can’t even
realize Roland is going out there. And whatever happens, nothing can
ever--ever take away what I’ve had.”
What Jennie had had!
In those early days she had had less than half-a-dozen meetings with
Roland Valentine, one impassioned declaration of love, a brief,
imperative farewell, and then only long daily letters, of which Lydia
knew nothing but that they sent Jennie, radiant-eyed, to the inditing
of blotted, scrawled replies, to be sealed and taken to the post-office
in her own clasp.
Now, six weeks later, by degrees that seemed to Lydia in the retrospect
sometimes almost imperceptible, and sometimes tempestuously sudden,
Jennie had “had,” as she put it, a good deal more.
Roland Valentine’s claims as to his modest income, and the considerable
salary that he would be in a position to obtain when he chose to
apply for it, were triumphantly verified. Other inquiries, of which
Jennie, so far as Lydia was aware, had been told little, but which were
stringently made through Billy Damerel and Colonel Kennedy, met with
unimpeachable reassurances.
And so the young man came down to Ashlew once more, wearing the magic
uniform that still excited a display of enthusiasm all over England
whenever it appeared.
Lady Lucy capitulated.
The Kennedys, Nathalie eagerly and her husband more cautiously,
advocated the cause of the lovers. Joyce Damerel had always,
unwaveringly, if hitherto almost silently, supported Jennie’s claims
against her mother.
“Of course they’re engaged,” said Joyce. “He’s asked her to be his
wife, and she’s promised. The only question is whether you’ll let them
marry at once, Lydia. And I don’t see how you can refuse in times like
these.”
Lydia was making her last stand. She knew herself defeated, she knew
that Jennie and Roland Valentine would marry in the course of his first
leave from the front; she even knew, clearly and inexorably, that her
opposition to the marriage was based upon no objection that could
be made valid in the eyes of the Damerels, the Kennedys, her other
friends.
She argued with them, not because she thought for a moment that
argument would convince them, but in a desperate last effort to cheat
herself into believing that her attitude was what she represented it to
be, and not the mere manifestation of an impassioned resentment that
the man to take Jennie from her should be a man who saw her, and would
encourage Jennie to see her, with the hard, defiant gaze of youth in
judgment.
She had never liked Joyce Damerel, but in the new and overwhelming
sense of loneliness that had come upon her, Lydia appealed to Joyce.
“Can’t you understand? When all the objections as to Canada, and his
not being altogether--quite--and Jennie’s youth and all the rest of
it--when _they’ve_ all been disposed of, there’s still something else,
Joyce. Roland Valentine doesn’t like me.”
“How can you expect him to, when he knows that you’re against the
marriage?”
“It was before that. A--a sort of antagonism. Don’t you remember that
very first evening of all, when we all dined at Quintmere?”
“I remember that he took Jennie’s part every time,” said Joyce bluntly.
“Surely you wouldn’t want him to do anything else, Lydia? If he loves
her and is going to marry her, how can you possibly want him to take
anybody’s part but hers--ever?”
“Why must there be ‘parts’ to take?”
Joyce shrugged her shoulders.
“Now you’re raising another issue altogether.”
“Yes, that’s quite true,” said Lydia, collecting herself. “My
point is this, though. An older man--one of more experience and
wider sympathies--would have understood my position--my whole
attitude in regard to Jennie--and would have brought her, in
time, to see it too. This boy, with his crude, Colonial ideas of
independence, and his young, arrogant, heartless verdict--‘gratitude
is a beastly feeling’--he actually said that to me, Joyce, quite
naïvely!--everything that is defiant and ungrateful in Jennie, he will
exaggerate.”
“I don’t think Jennie is ungrateful to you, exactly.”
“Do you think I want gratitude from my own child?” cried Lydia
illogically.
“Yes,” said Joyce, “you do. You want unquestioning gratitude from her
the whole time, and unquestioning acceptance of everything that you
do for her. And it’s absolutely against nature that you should get
it, Lydia. Jennie is sturdy and independent by nature. If she hadn’t
been, by this time you would have made her into a helpless, selfish,
boneless weakling. As it is, of course, she’s in a state of constant
rebellion. _She_ wants to be generous and to give, and to take care in
her turn--and so she ought. But you want to arrogate all those rights
to yourself.”
“What you are accusing me of,” said Lydia bitterly, “is of having loved
Jennie too well, and sacrificed myself too much for her sake.”
“I?” said Joyce slowly. “If you want to know, Lydia, I think you the
most monstrous egotist that I have ever known in my life.”
Not only the shock of hearing herself so described, but also the
amazement of hearing so trenchant a personality from Joyce Damerel, who
was never personal, and seldom vehement, kept Lydia absolutely silent.
She looked at her sister-in-law without a word.
Joyce faced her unflinchingly, and without any compassion or hesitation
in her gaze.
“Perhaps I’ve no right to say these things to you, but for once I’m
going to. While Clement was alive I shouldn’t have said a word--it
was for him to say it, if anyone did, only he never would have. Oh, I
know he was your husband, but I knew Clement and his brother in their
nursery days--we were all more or less brought up together--and he
never _would_ have spoken, for fear of hurting you. He’d only have kept
Jennie more and more with him. Do you remember when Clement died, how
you kept on telling me that Jennie was too young to understand--that
she wouldn’t really feel it? You didn’t want her to feel it, because
you wanted to have the sole prerogative of grief. Clement’s mother is
old, and a saint--even you couldn’t grudge her her sorrow; but you
knew very well that she wouldn’t claim any pity or sympathy--and the
very old are too near eternity to get the compassion of the multitude.
You wanted it all for yourself--you grudged Jennie her share, and you
wouldn’t admit that she had any right to suffer at all.
“And it’s been like that all along. Jennie may have the nice, little,
happy, easy, trivial things--especially if she owes them all to you,
and everyone knows it--but the real experiences, the things that hurt
and teach one, and are the privilege of the people that are to be worth
anything--those she must leave to you. And you try to believe, and to
make everyone else believe, that because you make Jennie’s clothes,
and live economically and are a wonderful manager, and save money for
her, and do the tiresome things in the house yourself, so that she can
enjoy herself in the garden--because of all that, you love Jennie as no
daughter has ever been loved before, and it puzzles and pains everyone
that she doesn’t seem grateful and loving in return. Well, it isn’t
Jennie you love at all--it’s yourself. I don’t believe you’ve ever
loved anyone, Lydia.”
A very far-away echo of the past came dimly to Lydia’s stunned
perceptions. A little pale-faced, Cockney girl, Rosie Graham, the
cashier at Elena’s, had once said something to her like that.
“I know very little about your life before you married Clement,” said
Joyce ruthlessly. “Perhaps there was someone then. But you didn’t want
any friends or relations to come and stay with you, as most girls do
when they marry and have a house. Nathalie told us you had cousins, and
an aunt and uncle who brought you up, and friends in London--but we
never saw any of them. Your aunt came when we were all away--and after
you’d been married for years and years. _Clement_ wanted her to come
while he was alive--it was you who didn’t want anyone.”
“It was our home--why should I want other people?” Lydia attempted to
justify herself mechanically and without conviction.
Joyce laughed contemptuously.
“That cock won’t fight, my dear. The old Rector came to you, at your
own suggestion, before you’d been married a year. Clement’s mother
loved you for that, and thought it was a sacrifice you were making, so
that Nathalie could get married and go to India, and so that Clement
could come down here and live near her. _It wasn’t a sacrifice_,
Lydia. Nothing matters to you so much as having the _beau rôle_. You
can’t bear anyone else to be in the foreground, and no sacrifice costs
anything if it’ll get you there. You sacrificed even Clement, over and
over again.”
“How dare you speak like that?” Lydia was choking.
“I’ve watched it for nearly twenty years,” Joyce declared recklessly,
“and I’ve not spoken. Once you told us--do you remember?--that your
grandfather had given you a rule, and that you’d kept it all your
life--always to let the other people talk about themselves. And you
did. You let the people that did love you--Clement, and good, simple
Nathalie Kennedy, and little Jennie, at first--you let them all talk
about themselves, and you listened, thinking all the time how superior
you were to be able to keep your own counsel, and never give yourself
away in return. And when you were sympathetic, and said kind things
about what they’d told you, they were grateful, and that pleased you,
because it put you in the position of giving, while _they_ only took.
But that sort of thing won’t go down for ever with sensitive and
loving people. Do you suppose that Clement didn’t come to know that
there was nothing real behind all your patience, and your sympathy
and your listening? You liked to feel that he was dependent on you
for something, that was all. You didn’t really care for his little,
fiddling jobs about the garden, that Jennie loved instinctively;
you didn’t really care about the parish, and the people, although
you liked being the parson’s wife, and having them come to you for
things. Clement found out what your sympathy was worth, and that his,
in return, that he would have given you so lavishly, wasn’t what you
wanted, or ever would want. He fell in love with your pretty face
and your quick wits, and with what he thought was your courage in
going to work, as a young girl, in London. And he helped you, when I
suppose even you, for once in your life, were frightened and in want of
comfort--when you found yourself, an ignorant and helpless child, on
the verge of being mixed up in the divorce scandals of your employer.
You’d got down to bedrock that time, I imagine, and needed someone
human and warm-hearted, like Clement, to come to your help.”
“Don’t mention his name to me again,” cried out Lydia suddenly.
“No, I won’t. I’ve said my say, and if it’s hurt you, Lydia, I’m glad.
Not because I hate you--I don’t now, though I came very near it once
when I saw Clement, first bewildered, and not understanding what it
was that you lacked, and then gradually realizing what I’d realized
long ago--that you care for nothing and nobody on earth, except as it
affects yourself.”
Joyce, as she had told Lydia, had said her say.
The two women faced one another in dead silence for another moment.
Then Joyce Damerel turned and left the room.
Lydia, sitting huddled in a chair beside the window, with eyes
that conveyed hardly any message to her stunned mind, saw her
sister-in-law’s tall figure walking away swiftly across the garden.
She was left alone.
Jennie and young Valentine were out together.
The house was curiously silent.
So that was what Joyce thought of her. Did it matter? Joyce and she had
never liked one another, and Joyce’s opinion did not really count for
very much....
Only gradually was Lydia’s inner vision able to focus the real point at
issue.
Were these accusations true?
Falteringly, and very, very slowly in its deepening anguish, her mind
took a long journey back through the years.
Through a dim, childish era, when she had proudly resented her mother’s
widowhood, to which her own orphanship must be subordinated. She had
hardly regretted her mother’s death at all, partly because it had freed
her from the capricious tyranny of weakness, principally because it had
left her, undisputed, the first right to consideration and compassion.
Through the inauguration of her life in the little Regency Terrace
household.
She had known all the time, even as a little girl, that Aunt Evelyn was
silly and snobbish, Aunt Beryl limited and provincial, Uncle George
pedantic with his perpetual Mr. Barlow monologues on uninteresting
subjects, their old friend, Mr. Monteagle Almond, a pompous and
narrow-minded little bank clerk, who had never made any success of his
life.
They had been very kind to her, had admired and praised her cleverness,
without stint as without discrimination, and had trustfully displayed
their real characteristics to the little Daniel come to judgment, who
had always listened and responded so intelligently and gently.
She had taken what they offered, keeping her own counsel all the time,
and inwardly criticizing and despising them.
Grandpapa--but Grandpapa had known all the while. One could not doubt
for an instant that Grandpapa’s shrewdness had penetrated through all
the good behaviour and proper deference of the little girl Lydia, to
the acute self-interest that had actuated the good behaviour and the
deference.
Grandpapa had known.
Perhaps at first it had amused him. His teaching had not been
of tolerance or humility, but of bracing self-repression and
self-advancement: “There’s no such thing as can’t.” “Don’t give
everything a personal application--it bores other people.” But, later
on, he had been less amused and more contemptuous. Was it of Lydia’s
methods?
Slowly her thoughts took her through the long-ago school days at Miss
Glover’s.
Ambition had made her work, and the stimulus of admiration. But there
had been human relations there too, surely. Across Lydia’s memory
flittered a long, half-obliterated procession of Mollies and Doras who
had walked up and down the garden with her, arm-in-arm, pouring out the
stories of school quarrels, school adventures, school tragedies, that
filled the horizon for them.
“You won’t repeat this to a soul, Lydia, ever, will you? I can trust
you?...”
Oh, yes, Lydia could be trusted never to repeat the long, involved
histories. Repeating only meant trouble for the tale-bearer. Natural
shrewdness and fastidiousness combined had prevented her from making
any return confidences. “Always let the other people talk about
themselves.” Then they were in the weaker position at once and for ever.
Lydia had tacitly accepted the obligations of these implied
friendships, but she had felt herself all the time to be vastly
superior to them.
Through the school years still--to the arrival of Nathalie Palmer,
the girl from Devonshire. Manners--dress--accent--all slightly
different from those of the town girls at the school. Making friends
with Nathalie had been eminently worth while, and her whole-hearted
admiration pleasant. And Nathalie was so generous in her recognition
of Lydia’s infinite superiority of brain and personality that it was
possible to indulge from time to time in the occasional luxury of
self-expression with her. The friendship with Nathalie had survived
their shared school days, given fresh impetus, on Lydia’s side, by the
consciousness that the grey-headed, distinguished-looking Rector, the
devoted father of Nathalie, had approved of her clever schoolmate, and
suggested that later on she should come and stay at the Devonshire
Rectory.
The end of school--and a catastrophe that still loomed large on
the sky-line of Lydia’s memory. Illness on the very verge of the
examination that was to crown so many minor honours.
Even the pitying attention so lavishly bestowed upon her had not atoned
for that calamity, especially when so much of it, unprecedentedly, had
diverged from herself to Aunt Beryl, a sudden rival claimant to illness.
On and on through those old, past times--the visit to Wimbledon, and
the intolerable, bouncing, boisterous Senthovens. Even Lydia had only
been able to endure, garnering what profit to herself was possible from
their slangy, elliptical instruction--more than mere endurance would
have been impossible. And, after all, no need to assume sympathy or
admiration in the case of the loud and self-satisfied Senthovens. They
took tribute to their prowess for granted--wanted no demonstrations.
“No nonsense about _us_!” cried they.
Nevertheless, the Senthovens had been ready enough with shouted
congratulations and boastings, and had made ungrudging jubilee over
Lydia’s success, to them so incomprehensible and unattainable, in the
great school examination.
Lydia remembered quite well how the news had come, and rescued her
from her humiliating standing as the spoil-sport of the party, who had
clumsily contrived to hurt Olive Senthoven in a game of cricket. It
had also distracted all the attention from Olive and her bruised face,
and focussed it upon Lydia, rescuing her once and for all from the
ignominy of her position amongst the Senthovens.
After school days and the Senthovens, her bid for independence and
London.
Backwards still, through the days of that early, bewildering
experiment. From Elena herself, that peroxide blonde of such astute
experience, to the pallid young ladies in Millinery--Lydia’s
personality had made conquests of them all. How freely they had giggled
and gossiped before her, and eventually poured out their confidences
just as recklessly as the little school-girls at Miss Glover’s!
In those days, Lydia had really admired her own diplomacy, that had so
quickly established her as general favourite in a community with which
she really had so little in common. Shrewd, pale-faced Rosie Graham
didn’t matter. One had thought she did at first, because she had brains
and acumen, and something in her very scornfulness itself was oddly
alluring. A certain attraction about Miss Graham--until measured by the
standard of importance applied to one’s first affair with a man.
Margoliouth. His oily and uninspired pawings--there was no other word
for them, in the retrospect--had certainly roused no ardour in Lydia.
It had merely been agreeable to feel herself the centre of speculation
amongst the matrons and spinsters of Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house.
And, competent to take care of herself, in the accepted sense of the
words, Lydia had discreetly permitted the Greek’s advances, conscious
all the time of the prestige accruing to her from theatre expeditions,
hansom-cab drives, gifts of violets and boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates.
She had viewed as a safeguard her own perfectly distinct inward
determination that Margoliouth should never be allowed, in return for
these favours, to overstep the limits set by Lydia’s careful sense of
discretion.
Disaster and humiliation had threatened the termination of that
episode, the first hint of which had been Miss Nettleship’s plaintive
and nervously-spoken warning of the Greek gentleman’s inability to
meet his bills. A worse revelation, then, and a more public one,
had been that of Mrs. Margoliouth’s unexpected existence. Pain had
really threatened then--had hung like a descending cloud above Lydia’s
humiliated head.
But her secret boast had been that, after all, she had turned that
defeat into victory. The victory of a fine attitude, that had won her
a great deal of admiration and a pity that was not condescending, from
all the spectators of the little, sordid drama. It had also brought her
an odd revelation, that she remembered still: the conviction that there
was no calamity without its available compensation, in the shape of a
not at all discreditable notoriety.
Through the phases of her youth still. The writing of her story, and
the introduction that it had brought her, through voluble Miss Forster,
to the unforgettable Lady Honoret. Certainly, her wit and determination
had made the very most of that introduction, aided by the curious
success that her novel had achieved. A side-issue, Lydia envisaged
also the fact that she had ceased to write when success in writing
had ceased to have any value for enhancing her position amongst her
surroundings. The writing, like everything else, had only been a means
to an end.
Backwards, through that far-away summer holiday that she had manœuvred
to obtain at Nathalie’s home in Devonshire, gratifying at once her love
of gratitude and her desire to justify her own careful schemings by
inducing Aunt Beryl to receive Miss Nettleship in her stead at Regency
Terrace.
Then the delight of making a success in her new _milieu_--of knowing
that admiring Nathalie and the simple-minded Rector were full of praise
and thanks for the able help that she had so soon learnt to give them.
Certainly they had had the assistance that her quick brain and nimble
fingers could bestow, but the things that they had given her were
things of the spirit--affection, and trust, and loyal admiration, and
for these they had met with no return in kind.
Was it that Lydia was incapable of them?
Joyce said that Clement had come to recognize it. With the remembrance
came, shudderingly and reluctantly, but with relentless inevitability,
the linking up of the past with the present.
Clement, who had puzzled and almost angered Lydia by his gradual
transition during their married life, from eager confidences and ardent
demonstrations to strange, apathetic reticences--Clement lived on in
his daughter Jennie.
That which she had never acknowledged to herself for the sake of
Clement, for whom her love had been a tepid thing, undeserving of the
name, Lydia was coming to recognize for the sake of Clement’s child.
Jennie was the first person whom Lydia had loved, and as Rosie Graham
had predicted long, long ago, she had “not known how to set about it.”
Loving Jennie, she had yet, as Joyce Damerel said, taken all the
greater things for herself, and left Jennie only the less. For herself,
the _beau rôle_, for Jennie that of foil.
Across her ravaged perceptions tore yet another recollection, one that
this time seemed to summarize them all.
She heard again Grandpapa’s thin old voice, with its cynical intonation:
“You’re a situation-snatcher, Lydia--that’s what you are. A
situation-snatcher.”
Grandpapa had known.