1
Within one week of its first launching, "Khorassan" sank, leaving hardly
a ripple, into the deep pool of theatrical failures. But for weeks and
weeks thereafter, that shallow pool which is West End society rippled
furiously to the stone which Julia Cavendish had thrown into it when she
attended Patrick O'Riordan's first-night accompanied by her son and
Aliette.
Some of the consequences of that stone-throwing were explained to
Ronnie's "wife" when--overpersuaded from her decision not to visit
Hermione--she called at the little black-carpeted, Chinese-papered,
orange-curtained box of a house in Curzon Street.
Hermione, her willowy figure supine on an enormous sofa, her dark eyes
glinting with a sympathetic curiosity not entirely bereft of humor,
extended one ringless hand with a laughed "Well, my dear, you really
have put your foot into it this time. Your in-laws are perfectly
furious."
Aliette laughed in reply (no one ever took Hermione quite seriously);
possessed herself of a luxurious chair before the luxurious fire, and
admitted:
"It was rather a faux pas, wasn't it?"
"I'm not so sure of that." Hermione's smooth brows crinkled in thought.
"I'm not at all so sure of that. It's quite on the cards, _I_ think,
that it'll lead to something. Sir Simeon told me, only last night, how
perfectly impossible it was for such a state of affairs to go on."
She rose from the sofa; and, coming over to the fire, took the vast
pouffe in front of it. "Poor darling! It's rotten for you."
Aliette stiffened at the suggestion of sympathy. "I'm quite happy, thank
you."
"Are you? I'm so glad." Hermione edged the pouffe closer. "My dear, you
have surprised the clan. None of us imagined _you_ capable of a
really-truly love-affair. Why, you're the last person in the world----"
"Please, Hermione, don't let's discuss me."
"But I want to discuss you. I think you're perfectly marvelous. How on
earth you ever had the nerve. And from a husband like Hector!"
Ellerson's wife paused to warm her expressive hands at the fire. "I
never did like Hector. Strong, silent men always bore me to distraction.
But Ronnie Cavendish is a perfect dear."
It was the first time that any one except his mother had been personal
about Ronnie, and Aliette felt herself blushing at the mere mention of
his name. She wanted to shoo Hermione away from the topic; but Hermione,
like some obstinate butterfly, returned always to the forbidden flower.
Hermione wanted "to know everything." Hermione hinted herself more than
ready to be profuse in sympathy--if only the other would be profuse in
confidences. Even the presence of an exiguous Belgian butler, carrying
exiguous French tea-cups on an exiguous Russian silver tray, failed to
distract Hermione from her purpose.
Ellerson's wife had been discussing _l'affaire Aliette_ with Lady
Cynthia Barberus, with Miss Elizabeth Cattistock, with many another
mannequin of the "Ritz crowd"; and they had jointly come to the
conclusion that it was abominable, "perfectly abominable," "a return to
feminine slavery" for any man to behave as Hector Brunton was behaving.
If only "dear Alie" would tell them how they could help her!
Aliette, however--who, in her safety, had always rather despised Lady
Cynthia and Lady Cynthia's associates,--could not bring herself to seek
alliance with them in her danger. Her fastidiousness resented the "Ritz
crowd's" partizanship. Trying her best to be grateful, she could not
stifle the instinct that Hermione's "sympathy" was the sympathy of an
idle, over-sexed woman, inspired rather by sensational and illicit
novelty than by reasoned understanding.
But even oversensitive Aliette could not misjudge the real
understanding, the real sympathy of Hermione's husband.
That tall, casually-groomed, blond-haired youth came in just as the
guest was perpending departure; offered her a large hand; and said
nothing whatever to complicate a difficult situation. My Lord Arthur
merely opined that he was sorry to be late for tea, that he hoped
Aliette would come and see them again, that she must dine and do a show
with them as soon as ever they got back from the Riviera, and that she
must bring--he said this with extraordinary tact--anybody she liked to
make a fourth at the party. Lord Arthur, in fact, without mentioning
Ronnie's name, made it quite clear on which side of the social fence
both he and his wife purposed to sit.
For by now the various sections of that complicated community which is
social London had grown conscious of the Cavendish-Brunton fence. People
had begun to comprehend that _l'affaire Aliette_ was serious, and that
one would have to sit either on Aliette's side, on Hector's side, or on
the fence itself. So that if Aliette had been less old-fashioned, in the
best sense of that much-abused word; if Aliette's lover had been less
shy, less reticent, less aloof from his kind; and if Julia Cavendish had
only been a little less certain, that victory was already won--there is
little doubt that other houses besides 24 Curzon Street would have
opened their doors.
Social London, you see, was in a state of moral flux. Cadogan Square,
Belgravia, and Knightsbridge still clung rigidly to the tenets of the
Victorian past. But for Mayfair, parts of Kensington, and the more
artistic suburbs, matrimonial issues had assumed a new aspect since the
war. Actually, a tide of freer thinking on the sex question had begun to
sweep over the whole of England. Happiness had not yet come to be
acknowledged the only possible basis of monogamy, but divorce reform was
no longer only in the air--it was more or less on the table of the
House.
And to divorce reformers Hector Brunton's attitude appeared almost as
indefensible as it did to those who, not yet in revolt against the old
tenets of indissoluble matrimony, found it hard to stomach a man's
permitting his wife to live unsued in open adultery.
2
Julia Cavendish tried to explain these post-war matrimonial issues to
Dot Fancourt, when he called at Bruton Street to remonstrate with her
about "the very serious blunder" she had committed. But Dot, willing
enough to open his columns in "The Contemplatory" for an intellectual
threshing out of such issues, could not face them in real life. A social
cowardliness, essentially editorial, obsessed his failing mentality.
"My dear," he argued, "it isn't as if you were a nobody. Nobodies can
afford experiments. You can't. You're a Cavendish. You have a position,
an eminent position in the scholastic world, in the world of society,
and in the world of letters. Therefore you, of all people, have least
right, especially in times like the present, to countenance matrimonial
bolshevism."
Julia Cavendish put down her embroidery-frame, and faced her quondam
friend squarely. Ever since their meeting in the foyer of the Capitol
Theater, she had been seeing him with new eyes, seeing only his
weakness, the insufficiency and the inefficiency of him. That he meant
his advice kindly and for the best, she knew. Nevertheless, he had
wrecked their friendship; failed her when she most needed him. The
disloyalty stung her to bitterness.
"The fact that I married a Cavendish," she said, "is neither here nor
there. My position, such as it is, is one which I attained for myself.
If, by siding with my own son, I jeopardize it----"
"But, my dear, why jeopardize it at all? You're being so unwise. You
won't do your son any good by quarreling with your friends."
"Apparently I have no friends." The Biblical phrase about the broken
reed crossed Julia's mind. "If I had friends, they would stand by me and
mine; not try to avoid us in public."
"You're very unfair." Dot rose irritably, and began shambling up and
down the room. "Terribly unfair. Can't you understand how I hated seeing
you--messed up in this sort of thing?"
She fired up at that. "One defends one's own, Dot."
And for an hour after Dot had gone, the words rang in Julia's mind. "One
defends one's own--at all costs--however hard the battle."
For her, battle grew harder as the days went by. One by one she argued
out the issue with her protesting friends, convincing few, antagonizing
many. Her family, however--always a little jealous of "the immaculate
Ronald"--Julia met not with argument but with shock tactics.
Clementina, calling, breasted and bustled for fray, accompanied by Sir
John, in his best Bank of England blacks, who admitted that "they had
heard things" and pressed to know if there was any truth in "the things
they had heard," received a direct "My dear Clementina, if your husband
means that you've been informed of my son's running away with Hector
Brunton's wife, and that Hector Brunton is going to divorce her, you've
been informed correctly"; while Alice, writing a dutiful letter from
Cheltenham, received a typescript reply--to the same effect--which cut
her Anglo-Indian sense of etiquette to the quick.
As for May who, relinquishing the expensive good works and still more
expensive garden of her house in Abbey Road, called unattended and found
Julia alone; _she_ returned to St. John's Wood with the firm conviction
that her "poor dear sister" must have been "got at by some of those
dreadful writing people," and bombarded her, for nearly a week, with
pamphlets on "The Sin of Divorce."
Meanwhile, regular callers at Bruton Street grew rarer and rarer; until
Paul Flower, busy rewriting some of his earlier books for American
admirers and utterly unable to discuss anything else, almost monopolized
the once-crowded drawing-room. Paul, engrossed with pre-war literature,
became in those days Julia's best refuge from post-war life. He
succeeded--sometimes for hours together--in stimulating her creative
imagination.
And since, to a literary craftswoman, the creative imagination is only
as the first nip to a confirmed toper, Paul Flower soon succeeded in
more than this--in arousing the actual creative instinct: so that the
creative instinct awoke and demanded work.
Gradually Julia grew hungry for the pen, for the long and lonely hours
when the creative mind is as God, fashioning puppets for His pleasure.
But always, when Paul Flower had left her, her imagination switched back
from literature to life.
"The man Brunton," said imagination, "is _not_ beaten. He'll bring no
action. He is working, working secretly, to ruin your boy's career."
3
And indeed, during those few days which preceded the close of the autumn
sessions, it did not require his mother's imagination to perceive that
some curious and sinister influence must be at work against Ronald
Cavendish in the quiet quadrangles and the gray-pinnacled courts either
side the Griffin.
From the unwigged Mr. Justice Mallory, sipping the port of midday
adjournment in his private room behind King's Bench Seven, to
melancholious Benjamin Bunce, perusing his "Law Times" at Groom's
coffee-shop in Fleet Street, the whole "legal world" was aware that "H.
B. meant to make trouble." Alike in Middle and in Inner Temple halls, in
robing-rooms, in chambers, in corridors, and in offices, wheresoever and
whensoever barristers or solicitors foregathered to talk "shop," one
heard the buzz of dignified curiosity, rumors of instant citation, of
citation delayed.
Meanwhile Ronnie, growing less and less inclined to intimacy with his
fellow-lawyers as he grew more and more conscious of their interest in
him, visited Pump Court with a regularity which held more of bravado
than of necessity. The flow of his briefs, never broad, had dwindled to
the tiniest trickle. Barring the work he still did for Wilberforce,
Wilberforce & Cartwright, he foresaw almost complete idleness at the
Hilary sessions.
The foresight, financially, frightened him. Never a spendthrift, his own
needs, small though they were, had to be met. His savings and the Jermyn
Street rent, paid six months in advance, were almost exhausted. The idea
of borrowing from his mother did not appeal; and to let Aliette bear her
part in the "family" expenses was unthinkable.
But even Ronnie failed to realize the full extent of his financial
shipwreck until that afternoon just before Christmas when James
Wilberforce, preannounced by telephone, strode into the duck's-egg-green
paneled chambers, and, having made certain that they could not be
overheard, plumped his long bulk into the dilapidated armchair with a
diffident, "Old chap, I've come on a devilish unpleasant mission."
The barrister did not answer; and after a constrained pause the
solicitor went on, picking each word as though fearful of its giving
offense: "Pater would have come and seen you himself. But he thought,
you and me being pals, that perhaps I'd better be the one. You see,
being your mother's executor, and, so to speak, a friend of the family,
pater's always tried to do everything he could for you----"
"You needn't say any more," interrupted Ronnie. "I quite understand.
You've come to tell me I'm not to expect any further briefs from
Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright."
"Hardly that," prevaricated Jimmy. "But the fact is--you know how I hate
beating about the bush--pater's afraid of offending Brunton. We've got
the big Furlmere divorce case coming on fairly soon. 'Bout the end of
January, I expect. We're pretty high up on the list. Furlmere insisted
on H. B. leading for us. We sent round the brief to him in the usual
way, and of course he had to accept it. But when he took our retainer,
his clerk, that fellow Patterson, hinted--mind you, he only hinted--that
if there were any question of 'a certain gentleman' acting as junior to
him, 'Mr. Brunton' would not appear in court when the case came on."
"But surely you had no idea----"
"Of briefing you as junior? Of course not. I shouldn't be such an
incredible ass. Still, straws show which way the wind blows. And we
simply can't afford to quarrel with H. B. Not till the Furlmere case is
over, anyway."
The friends looked at each other for one silent minute. Outside, a thin
rain had begun to patter on the flagstones. Within the room darkled.
Ronnie clicked on the table-lamp, and began to scrawl with vagrant
pencil on the blotting-paper.
"I'm not quarreling with your position, Jimmy," he said at last. "Tell
your pater I'd do the same if I were he."
Jimmy's voice softened. "Old man, I don't want to interfere. But I do
wish you'd arrange for some mutual friend to see Brunton. Take it from
me, he's going on playing dog-in-the-manger. And he can do you a hell of
a lot of harm."
"Let him!" Ronnie's jaw set. "If this is going to be a fight between us,
it may as well be a fight to a finish. I don't propose asking favors,
even by proxy. If he thinks he's going to succeed in driving me out of
the bar----"
"No one's suggested your leaving the bar. In fact"--Jimmy began to
stammer, as a man making offer of a gift which is almost certain to be
refused--"another thing I came round to see you about was----"
The sentence refused to complete itself: and Jimmy started a new one.
"As you know, our partners, the Cartwrights, do quite a lot of work that
never comes into the High Court at all; criminal stuff, county courts,
and all that sort of thing. If you'd care to accept their briefs----"
Again the sentence refused to complete itself; again the two friends
looked at one another in silence. Then the barrister said:
"A bit of a come-down, isn't it? Almost as bad as 'taking soup.'"
This allusion to the practice of young and briefless barristers, who sit
all day long in the criminal courts waiting their chance to defend any
prisoners that may be allotted to them, made Ronnie's friend squirm.
"Hang it all, it isn't as bad as that. John Cartwright's quite a good
sort. And a big criminal case brings other work. Anyway, think it over,
and let me know." Jimmy rose to go. "And by the way, will you give my
regards to the little lady? Tell her how sorry I am about the whole
thing and that I'm sure it'll all come out right in the long run."
At the door, James Wilberforce turned; and, coming back, extended a
hand. "Buck up, old boy," he mumbled rather shamefacedly.
Left alone, Ronnie sat for a long while, scrawling on the blotting-pad.
"After all," he thought, "it was pretty decent of Jimmy to send Alie
that message. I wonder why he did it. I wonder whether he's still keen
on Mollie. Jolly rough luck on him if he is. Curse that fellow Brunton!
He's stirred up a pretty kettle of fish."
And from that he fell to evil-tempered rumination--in which his
newly-aroused ambition for legal success played no small rôle--finally
deciding, _faute de mieux_, to accept the work offered.