one thing on top of another, as they say. And I'm sure I've passed the
remark a score of times that it never rains but what it pours."
"Good night, nurse."
"Good night, sir. I'll see that the children keep very quiet. I was
going to give Miss Muriel and Master Geoffrey both a dose of medicine
to-morrow night, and they may jee-ust as well have it to-night."
Mr. Alison dressed in a state of astonishment at himself. "I can't
think what made me so suddenly decide to dine out," he exclaimed aloud.
"Talking to myself now," he continued. "I'm thoroughly upset. That's
what I am. It's a good thing I _am_ going out."
A few minutes later he was walking briskly down Campden Hill, conscious
of the perfume of autumnal trees, vaguely excited by the sound of the
distant traffic in Kensington High Street that with every step became
more distinct. It was a mistake to coop oneself up too much. He was
falling into the habit of thinking that the day was over when he sat
back in the railway carriage and opened the _St. James's Gazette_. He
ought to be careful. What was that he was reading the other day about
keeping young by refusing to be old? How true! It was the fault of
marriage. Yes, marriage was responsible. Bachelors did not grow old.
Responsibility, that was what did it. How free, for instance, he felt
to-night just because Mary had sent word that she was not coming home.
The message had annoyed him just at first; but now he was on the whole
rather glad. The street lamps were twinkling; there must be a touch of
frost in the air. So much the better. Far more healthy than the muggy
weather they had been having. By Jove, the crispness made one feel
ten years younger. Where should he go to-night? Dinner at the Savoy?
Rather late perhaps for that. Why not a few oysters with half a pint of
champagne, and then a theater followed by supper? A theater? Perhaps it
was hardly the thing to go to a theater to-night. No, he would dine at
the Savoy.
"Hansom! Savoy!"
"Right you are, sir."
"And you can drive fairly fast. I'm in a hurry."
It was a comfortable hansom behind a good horse; and Jemmie Alison,
once again the authentic Jemmie, leaning forward over the apron gazed
out at the glittering life he had too long forsaken.
* * * * *
Mary lay awake most of the night in the strangeness of her old room.
She tried to concentrate her mind piously upon her dead grandmother,
but all her thoughts came back to herself. She now asked herself the
question to which, when her grandmother asked it, she had returned
so confident an affirmative. Would she not, if she were really happy
with Jemmie, resent being away from him even for a single night? And
was she not actually taking pleasure in being away from him? There
was about the air of this old room of hers something delightfully
fresh and invigorating. She felt much more herself. All these years
of marriage she had been letting her personality be slowly submerged
in her husband, in the cares of a household, and in her children.
She must not forget _them_, the darlings! Should she have loved them
more if their father had been somebody else? If Pierre had been their
father, for instance? But then they would not be Richard, Geoffrey, and
Muriel. And how could she love any other children better than those
three tousle-heads? Besides, what nonsense it was to be speculating
like this. She had not thought of Pierre for years, except casually
to wonder sometimes where he was and if he ever thought of her. She
could not deceive herself into imagining that she was still in love
with Pierre, still less that she was pining for him. All the same, she
wished that she had understood a little more about life before she
married Jemmie. Daisy Harland, who had been so full of good worldly
advice, had not made much of a success with her own marriage. Daisy,
who had been so confident that love was a passing malady, had thrown
over everything for love, had let herself be dragged through the
divorce court for a man who when it was all over had married another
woman. Poor Daisy, was she happier now, somewhere on the Continent,
always wondering if her friends would put up their parasols when they
passed her on some sunny promenade?
And if she had not married Jemmie, she would never have had her beloved
Richard. She thought of his coming back from one of his first days at
school and of his news of being placed in an unusually high class for
French and of his having to write out the verb _porter_.
"All the verb, darling?" she had asked.
"Well, that's what I couldn't ergzactly make out, Mum. Mr. Osbourne
just said write out _porter_: _to carry_, and I think he only meant one
of those lines of verbs like you see in the grammar book."
"It wouldn't do to make a mistake, dearest," she had said anxiously.
"No, it wouldn't, would it, Mummie? Perhaps I'd better write out
everything, though it's pages and pages!"
And she had sat with him while he laboriously wrote the French and
English of every tense and of every person in that tense. _That I
might have been carrying. That thou mightest have been carrying_....
What a sleepy little boy she had tucked up that night! And next day he
had come back to lunch with a woeful face to say that it was only the
single line of principal tenses which had been set and that he had not
liked to expose himself to the ridicule of his classmates by showing up
his toilsome pages.
"But how did you explain you had nothing to show your master?"
"I said I'd left it at home, Mum, and he told me to bring it this
afternoon. It won't take me hardly a minute to do."
No, no, it was unimaginable that she should not be the mother of
Richard: and, pleasant though it was to be sleeping alone in her old
room, Richard belonged to Jemmie as much as to herself.
Should she when at last she lay dying, for though the attempt to
realize the inevitableness of death caught the breath and eluded the
mind's grasp, the ultimate death of herself was a fact that must be
believed, should she in that solemn hour ask a granddaughter--Richard's
or dear fat Geoffrey's child--such questions as her own grandmother
had asked her? Should she when an old woman look back at her life with
doubt and forward to the grave with apprehension? And where now was the
spirit of that cold body downstairs?
Pleasant to be lying like this by oneself. Pleasant ... very pleasant
... the sheets cool and pleasant ... a delicious privacy. Yes, it was
wrong not to tell girls more about the actualities of existence. Would
she tell Muriel one day? That dear dumpling! But, almost before she
knew it, Muriel would be thinking about marriage. In another ten years,
only as long as she had been married, Muriel would be fifteen. Ten
years went by quickly enough, especially when three of them were spent
in having babies. And she might have another baby. Jemmie did not seem
to mind. "The more the merrier," he would say, as he had so often said
before. How insensitive men were. And gross. Men? What did she know
about men? Jemmie looked so much like other men that he was probably
representative of the sex. Pierre had been different. But would he
have been different if she had married him? When she kissed him that
afternoon, when she gave him that one swift kiss, she had not known to
what such a kiss might not be the prelude. Would not the knowledge have
destroyed all its fairy quality? Was it possible to experience romance
unless one was innocent? Oh, that sweet illusion of first love! Even
Grandmamma once upon a time must have known that. While she was lying
there in that dusky room, did she feel faintly upon her withered lips
some blushful kiss of sixty years ago? Did she, ah, did she, and was
it for that she doubted her wisdom in persuading her granddaughter to
marry Jemmie Alison? Anyway, the marriage was accomplished. There was
no use now to repent. Yet people who had enjoyed grand passions did
exist.
"Love, my dear, was invented by the poets to excuse their own
weaknesses."
Something like that Grandmamma had once observed. Were she alive now
and should she make the same remark now, Mary would reply that marriage
without love was invented by ... but she was unable to think of a
suitable mordant retort before she fell asleep in her own room.
* * * * *
It seemed as if the death of Lady Flower had acted upon husband and
wife like an Horatian maxim that would remind humanity of time's
swift flight. In the case of Alison the money they inherited made him
feel more keenly how much of his life was being wasted in the pursuit
of wealth. There was now no need for him to devote so much of his
attention to business, and by taking a partner younger than himself
he was able to spend less time in the office. Having once dined out
away from home, he began to make a habit of dining out; and Mary in
her turn began to wonder what she should do with her life. Occasional
dinner-parties and occasional visits to the opera or the theater did
not seem enough to fill existence at thirty. There were the children
of course, as Jemmie was always reminding her when she seemed inclined
to ask unanswerable questions about the end and meaning of human
existence. But children, when there were nurses and nurse-maids and
governesses and schoolmasters all easily obtainable, did not occupy
a woman's life fully. Besides, well-brought-up children went to bed
early, and was there nothing better to do with life than sit at home
reading novels that were only the least bit less dull than life itself?
Jemmie often looked at his reflection in the glass and exclaimed upon
the approach of age. But Jemmie was forty-five with a man's life behind
him, even if he had been cooped up, as sometimes now in moments of
irritation he implied that he had been cooped up by marriage. If Jemmie
was concerned about the vanishing years, it was because he looked back
with regret to the joys and freedom of his youth. But she, on what
could she look back? One kiss briefer than a shooting-star, swifter
than a swallow's flight, yet in remembrance, ah, how sweet!
So passed the winter of that year; and, when in February the white and
purple crocuses pied the lawns of Woodworth Lodge, husband and wife
both resolved that the year should pay them with what it brought forth.
"One must do something," Mary agreed with Mrs. Wryford, who considered
herself Mary's most intimate friend, because she always stayed longer
than any of the other visitors that haunted Mary's Friday afternoons.
"Of course! It's our duty. Now why don't you have a club like me? My
dear, until I started my club for waitresses I was at a loose end.
And it's so interesting. Why, I've been brought into close contact
with people I should never have seen otherwise except across a crumby
table. I assure you, it's been quite a revelation to me. You'd be
surprised to find how different my girls are, one from another. Oh yes,
indeed, quite distinguishable, I assure you; and I think I can really
claim to know each one individually. And many of them have learned to
confide in me quite a lot."
"Now that must be fascinating," said Mary.
"Yet it's hardly surprising when you think of their homes. Of course
I never go to their homes. Oh no, I make a point of never doing that.
I say to myself, 'Two nights a week, Ella, you are pledged to your
girls.' And I can assure you, Mary, that I never fail to be with them
unless I have a dinner-party or some social engagement. Do, my dear,
take my advice and start a club. You speak French well, don't you? Why
not found a club for French seamstresses in Soho? And now I simply must
run. Good-by, you dear attractive creature," Mrs. Wryford exclaimed,
kissing Mary warmly on each cheek. In the door she stopped a moment. "I
always say and I always shall say that I enjoy the few minutes we have
together every Friday more than anything in the week. Good-by, you dear
thing. It's still quite light. I always think it's a sign of spring
when the days really begin to draw out. Good-by! Good-by!"
How Grandmamma used to dislike women of the type of Mrs. Wryford, Mary
thought.
"And I expect in another thirty years I shall dislike them just as much
as she did."
At dinner that night Mary broached the subject of a club for girls to
her husband.
"French seamstresses!" he exclaimed. "What on earth next will you be
wanting to do? Aren't the children enough of a responsibility?"
"They're no responsibility at all," Mary argued. "You won't allow them
to be. Don't you remember what a fuss you made when you discovered I
was taking out Geoffrey and Muriel every afternoon?"
"I didn't make a fuss. I never do make a fuss. I don't suppose that
a less fussy man than myself exists. I merely observed that for you
to wear yourself out looking after children while a mob of nurses
and nurse-maids were eating off their heads doing nothing at home
was ridiculous. Surely there's a happy medium between dragging a
perambulator round Kensington Gardens and founding clubs for French
seamstresses?"
Mary sat silent for a while pondering her tactics, while Jemmie, with
what she felt was unnecessary gusto, ate a large slice of turbot.
"I don't think there's any need to sulk ..." he began: but at the
moment one of the parlormaids came within range of the conversation,
and, as Mary thought cynically, her husband had not yet reached such a
pitch of married boredom as would let him be rude to her in front of
the servants.
When they were left alone with the dessert, Mary returned to the attack.
"You see, lately, Jemmie, you've left me so much alone in the evening
that I suppose it's natural for me to sit here and make plans for
myself."
The husband glanced up sharply: never until now had his wife thrown
out a hint that she had noticed his increasingly frequent withdrawals
from the fire-side. Could she be jealous? Had any rumor of that phaeton
he bought last week reached Mary? Gossip sprung up no one knew how.
It might be that one of her friends, one of those confounded women
that seemed to spend their lives visiting other women, had warned her
to keep an eye on her husband. It would be awkward if Mary seriously
intended to press him on the subject of dining out, and, more than
dining out, of staying away from home for a couple of nights often
enough. Mary herself would never suspect him of infidelity. Infidelity?
Bosh! There was nothing serious to it. Maudie did not expect him
to face a scandal on her account. He should be middle-aged almost
immediately. This was his last love-affair; and dash it, the little
girl was fond of him. Who could say why? Women were strange creatures.
But it certainly was not for his money. Poor little Maudie! The walnut
he was cracking suddenly burst in fragments upon his plate. He looked
up guiltily.
"What were you saying, dear? I beg your pardon for not answering. I
couldn't crack this nut."
"I said that it was natural for me to make plans for myself," Mary
answered. She perceived that Jemmie was embarrassed and went on more
boldly. "I don't in the least expect you to stay at home because I am
in the house. But surely you can have no objection to my occupying
myself somehow, and this club would be the very thing."
"I daresay you're right," said the husband. After all, it was politic
to give his wife some latitude. "Yes, I daresay you're right. I was a
little taken aback for the moment, and I didn't want you to overtire
yourself slaving for people who have no gratitude. You know, the more
you do for people, the less they give you in return. Did I tell you
about Jackson, our head clerk? We raised his salary last month, and
yesterday he calmly tells me that he has accepted another place at
a larger salary. What do you think of that? That's gratitude! In my
opinion the world's going downhill. Now my father's head clerk stayed
with him till he died and never had a rise of salary all the time.
Didn't want it. Content. But you don't get that type of man nowadays."
Husband and wife rose from their dessert. Husband and wife sat down
in the drawing-room. Wife sang "Three Roses" with an obligato of
kettle-drums from husband's manipulation of _The Times_.
_Just when the red June Roses blow
She gave me one,--a year ago,
A Rose whose crimson breath revealed
The secret that its heart concealed,
And whose half-shy, half-tender grace
Blushed back upon the giver's face.
To hope was not to know._
_Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_
"Poor little Maudie," thought an infatuated man of forty-five. "Poor
little girl, she'll miss me to-night."
_Just when the Red June Roses blow
I plucked her one a month ago.
Its half-blown crimson to eclipse,
I laid it on her smiling lips:
The balmy fragrance of the south
Drew sweetness from her sweeter mouth,
Swiftly do golden hours creep,
To hold is not to keep._
_Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_
"I mustn't neglect Maudie," thought a sentimental man of forty-five.
"Poor little lonely Maudie! It's a wonderful thing for a man to be
loved as she loves me."
_Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_
_The red June Roses now are past,
This very day I broke the last--
And now its perfumed breath is hid,
With her, with her, beneath a coffin lid:
Ah--h--h--h--h--h,_
_There will its petals fall apart,
And wither on her icy heart:--
At three red Roses' Roses' cost
My world was gained, my world was gained
And lost!_
_Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle---tinkle-tink!_
"That's a very pretty song, you know," said Jemmie. "I enjoyed that. I
wish you'd sing oftener of an evening."
Mary looked round in perplexity.
"I haven't sung after dinner for five years," she reminded him coldly.
"As long as that? Surely not as long ago as that?"
"Five years ago, Jemmie, you asked me if it was necessary every evening
to sit down immediately after dinner at the piano."
"I must have had a headache or something," he protested.
"Yet you never noticed that I no longer sang."
"I suppose I took it for granted that you didn't want to sing. But I
thoroughly enjoyed it this evening. I don't know, I suppose I was in
the mood for singing. Why don't you sing another?"
She lifted the seat of the music-stool, and after rummaging among a
pile of tattered songs she found the one she wanted:
_I had a message to send her,
To her whom my heart loved best._
When the last tinkle had died away, Jemmie, who had stopped crackling
_The Times_ because there was nothing more to read that interested
him, asked his wife if he had not heard the song before somewhere. She
smiled ironically.
"I expect I've heard you sing it," he hastened to add apologetically.
"No. Not me."
Good heavens, could it be that he had heard Maudie sing that song?
Maudie did sometimes sing sentimental songs on wet afternoons.
Nonsense! If Maudie had sung it, Mary could not know that. Gossip could
effect a good deal, but gossip could not discuss Maudie's choice of
music.
"Well, I don't know where I heard it," he declared.
"And I certainly shall never reveal where or when it was," she murmured.
While that night Mary was brushing her chestnut hair before the big
oval mirror of her dressing-table her husband came and, bending over,
kissed the tip of her ear.
"Please! please!" she exclaimed, drawing away. "I did not sing to
attract you, but to amuse myself."
"Well, really you know, dash it, Mary, you do say the most cutting
things sometimes. What have I done to deserve that?"
"Now, Jemmie, don't pretend you mind whether I say cutting things or
not. What do you care nowadays?"
Jemmie sighed to himself and, deliberately omitting his good night
kiss, turned over and buried his head ostentatiously in the pillow.
"I'm not at all sure that she isn't jealous," he confided to himself,
as he set out to keep an appointment with Maudie in dreamland.
Mary lay for some time watching with a weary regard that amorphous
back, like a wayfarer who sees another hill before him and the end of
the journey not yet in sight.
Mrs. Wryford's prophecy that Mary would derive much pleasure from
getting to know individually the various girls in whom she avowed a
general interest by the act of founding for them a club was fulfilled.
Indeed it was more than fulfilled, for Mrs. Wryford certainly never
expected that her friend would find romance for herself in the lives of
French seamstresses, a vicarious romance it might be, but its effect
was to mitigate for Mary much of the dreariness that she was beginning
to think life ended in after one was thirty. Thirty! At this period the
woman of thirty was not considered a romantic subject; indeed, if any
woman of thirty had pretended to romance she would have been considered
a reader of French novels, and as such faintly tinged with impropriety.
However, it was not enough for Mary's philanthropic zeal to sit
listening to the tale of Henri and Jeanne, or of Armand and Virginie.
She must educate her girls. She must provide them with an outlook.
She must widen their horizon. She must teach them that the world was
not bounded by Oxford Street on the north and Shaftesbury Avenue on
the south. With this purpose in view she took them on one Saturday
afternoon to the Zoological Gardens, on another to the Egyptian Hall,
and once again to hear Moore and Burgess Minstrels. Then Mrs. Wryford
brought news of a series of lectures at which various distinguished
travelers with the aid of a magic-lantern would personally conduct
whosoever would fare with them to the uttermost parts of the earth.
"Last week we went to Greenland, Labrador, and Alaska. I can assure
you, my dear Mary, the tints upon the ice were exquisite. I rarely
enjoyed an evening more. Why don't you take your girls next week?
Madagascar is the subject. I hear that the lecturer, who is a
Frenchman, speaks English with quite remarkable fluency."
"What's his name?"
"Now, my dear Mary, do you expect me to remember the name of a
Frenchman?"
Thus it was that Pierre Menard, lean, tropically brown, his hair about
the temples white and everywhere streaked with gray, his mustache and
imperial still black, entered Mary's life again. Mary was glad that the
auditorium was darkened when she saw him first, not so much because she
feared that anybody would notice her agitation, but because she wanted
to stare hard at Pierre without being oppressed by the consciousness
of her surroundings. It seemed to her that he must be aware of her
regard and that presently over a hundred heads he would glance back his
recognition.
"_Dis, Madeleine, n'est-ce pas qu'il est beau?_" one of the girls
whispered to her neighbor.
It was that nice and pretty creature Yvonne who had spoken. She had
always been one of Mary's favorites.
Driving back to Campden Hill, while street-lamp after street-lamp
tossed its bouquet of golden light into the brougham, Mary pondered
the course of her behavior in the near future. It might be that Pierre
would scornfully reject the proffer of renewed friendship. If he had
remembered her at all, she might be now a bitter memory; if he had
forgotten her so completely that a letter from her would bring a
puzzled frown to his brow.... Oh, it was difficult to decide what she
ought to do. Mary did not consider the effect upon herself of bringing
Pierre back into her life. It was of nothing except her effect upon him
that she thought during that black and golden drive to Campden Hill.
At home she found Adèle, who was her maid these days, waiting up.
Madame must prepare herself for a shock; Madame must have courage;
Madame must not give way to grief at the news she must break to Madame.
"Nothing has happened to the children?" Mary exclaimed in terror.
"_Ah, mais non, grâce à Dieu._ Nothing to them. It is the poor little
Mac who is dead. He was run over, Madame, and must be shot, Monsieur
said."
"Where is Monsieur?"
"Monsieur has been called away on business and will not be here until
Monday evening. Monsieur told me to tell Madame."
"And where is Mac?"
"He is buried in the garden. I will show Madame where is his grave in
the morning."
"No, no, show me now."
Adèle looked for a moment as often in Mary's childhood she had been
wont to look when her charge had expressed a desire to do something
that Adèle considered unreasonable. However, nowadays it was she who
must obey, and by the light of a foggy London moon she led the way
across the lawn to where in the shadow of a grimy aucuba the mound was
heaped above Mac's grave.
Mary gazed at it for a minute or two in silence, and without a word
turned and walked back to the house.
"You can go to bed, Adèle. I shall not want you any more to-night."