Part 16

On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I perfectly understood Vera’s state of mind in regard to Captain Thornton. There was no occasion for commonplace jealousy. He merely made her feel cheerful and rejuvenated. Everything she had to show and tell him was new to him. She became new to herself, poor old Vera! and gained from the quiet regard of his sane and simple eyes--handsome eyes under straight, dark brows--a sense of freshness and worth in everything. She liked him better than any of the wounded heroes she had yet had. Some of them had been merely stupid, and one or two had been gloomy, sardonic men--men of her own world, to whom nothing she had to say would seem new. Clive Thornton was neither stupid nor sardonic, and he was simple enough to accept Vera’s fancy tricks--her talk of dreaming dreams and solitude--as part of an angel’s manner, and he was just clever enough to be able to appreciate anything she had to say. I could quite see how endearing Vera must find his steady gaze and his considering silences. Even with my vigorous espousal of his wife’s side I never felt angry with him. His not seeing that she was unhappy was part of the same innocence that made him not see that Vera was a cat. Mollie, besides, took quite as much care to conceal her unhappiness as Vera to behave like an angel. It never crossed his mind that his wife was relegated; it never crossed his mind that they were separated. He did not feel separated; they were both, as far as he knew, in fairyland together. And yet I knew it might not all be so trivial and transient as it seemed. A new standard was being formed for him; a new idea of what it was to be an angel. It was possible that all unconsciously he would no longer think of Mollie as one when he left Compton Dally; and when I took this in I began to gather up my weapons.

I found Mollie one afternoon sitting on the bench under the willow-tree where we had had our first talk. She had her knitting, but her hands were still, and she was gazing before her at the water. If she were not a tragic figure, it was only because there are some things sadder than tragedy. She had faced everything, been through everything, she had gone down into the Hades where so many of us were still living, and now she found herself baulked and menaced by commonplace daylight. Tragedy is, in some ways, an easy thing to bear.

“Well, what are you doing here by yourself?” I asked her, advancing. There was a look on her face, startled and steadied, that showed me what she had been thinking about in the fancied security of her solitude. But she managed at once the vague smile that concealed so much, and said that she had been, as usual, resting. “I seem to find out every day more and more how tired I was,” she added.

“You didn’t care to go with the others, motoring?” I took my place beside her. “You’d have liked Marjorams. It’s a lovely old place. Some people think it beats Compton Dally, though, naturally, I’m not one of them.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” said Mollie, laughing a little. “That was one of the things that first struck me about you--how you loved it. I felt that you were a fiercely loyal person.”

“I think I am--narrow loyalties, but fierce ones,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“About motoring? I don’t care much about it, you know. And there really wasn’t room enough for me.”

I knew there hadn’t been; but I was deliberately eschewing tact.

“Has Captain Thornton gone?” I inquired, knowing, also, that he hadn’t.

“No; Lady Vera is reading to him in the flagged garden,” said Mollie in the voice that showed me how little she had to learn about spiritual control. “Lady Vera is going to take him out for a run in her two-seater before dinner. He enjoys that a great deal more than the big car.”

“It’s far pleasanter, certainly,” I agreed. And I went on: “They are reading, you mean, in the dream-garden. You mustn’t forget that it’s a dream-garden--where one goes to be alone.”

She looked round at me quickly, and after a moment I saw that she faintly coloured. She said nothing, leaving it to me to follow up my graceless gibe. I was quite ready to follow it up.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, knitting the loops along the side of my heel, “Vera hardly ever is alone there. It’s always, with Vera, a _solitude à deux_. She’s not at all the sort of woman for real solitude. She is the sort of woman who likes to feel, or, rather, to look lonely and not to be alone.”

To this, after a pause, Mollie said:

“She is very charming; Clive finds her very charming.” And, forced to it, apparently, by my crudity, she added, “Aren’t you fond of her, then?”

“No, I’m not; not particularly,” I said. “Especially not just now. Vera is not at her best, to my mind, when she is being angelic to young married men.”

Mollie Thornton now blushed deeply.

“I am perfectly contented that she should be angelic to Clive,” she said.

“You are very loyal,” I returned. “But you’ll own that he is getting more out of it than you are. It’s a place, Compton Dally, for wounded heroes rather than for a wounded hero’s wife.”

“Do you mean,” she asked after a moment, “that I oughtn’t to have come?” She had indeed owned to everything in the bewilderment of the question. I laughed at it.

“Oughtn’t to have been with your husband at a time like this! Even Vera could hardly ask that, could she? And that’s my quarrel with her; that it’s the time of all times that you should be together and that she never lets you see him, practically.”

She looked away, and after a moment I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.

“He hasn’t an idea of it,” she said at last.

“That fact doesn’t make you happier, does it?”

“He thinks I’m as happy as he is. He thinks that we are together in it all, and that she is an angel to me, too,” said Mollie. “She always is an angel to me when she sees me.”

“All men are rather stupid when it comes to knowing whether their wives are happy,” I remarked. “I think your Clive is a great dear; but I like you best because you see things he doesn’t. You, for instance, see that Vera isn’t an angel, though she may look like one.”

“He has no reason to think anything else, has he?” said Mollie, and I saw that I had brought her to the point to which I had intended to bring her. “I don’t let him guess that I’m not happy; it would be horrid of me if I did, for it would only mean that he’d feel at once that we must go away, and all this loveliness would be over for him. A stuffy little flat in Bayswater isn’t a very alluring alternative; and that’s where we’d have to go--to my aunt’s--till Clive was better.”

“How you’d love the stuffy flat! How glad you’d be to be there with him! And, to do him justice, how happy he’d be there with you! He will be in a month’s time. The only question is, the month. No, Vera isn’t an angel. If she were an angel, she’d have seen to it that you were happy here, too. But when it comes to being nice to other women,--really nice, I mean,--she can be a cat. And what I’d like very much to see now is what she’d make of it if you could show her that you could look like an angel, too. It’s so much a matter of looks.”

“Make of it? But I couldn’t look like an angel.”

“You could look like a rival; that’s another way of doing it. You could look like another woman of her own sort. You could make her see you. She simply doesn’t see you now. I suspect that if Vera saw you and saw that you were charming, she’d show her claws. I’d like Captain Thornton to see her showing her claws.”

In silent astonishment, her blue eyes fixed upon me, Mollie gazed.

“No, I don’t hate Vera, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said. “I like you, that’s all, and I don’t intend that she shall go on making you unhappy.”

“But I don’t want Clive made unhappy,” Mollie said. “I can’t imagine what you mean; but, whatever it is, I don’t want it. I couldn’t bear all this to be spoiled for him. I couldn’t bear it not to be always, for him, a paradise.”

It was my turn to gaze at her, and I gazed penetratingly.

“And what if it all came to mean that you yourself, because of it, were never to be more to him than a second-rate paradise? What if she were to spoil you for him?”

I brought out the cruel questions deliberately, and for a moment Mollie faced them and me.

“Why do you say that? How cruel to say that!” she murmured, and then suddenly she bowed her head upon her hands. “It’s been my terror. I’m ashamed of myself for thinking it. And now--you see it!”

I put my arm around her shoulders.

“I’m not cruel. I only want us to see things together. I don’t really think they’d ever come to that; and, at all events, he would never know that they had.”

“But I should,” Mollie said.

“Yes, you would. And it’s horribly true that real things can be spoiled and blighted by false things. I’ve often seen it happen. You do see the danger, and you must take up the burden, my dear, of being cleverer than your husband, and save him along with yourself. If Vera were what she looks and seems to him, he might be right in feeling that he found in her something he couldn’t find in you. You must show him that she isn’t what she looks and seems and you must show him that you can be a first-rate paradise, too.”

“In a little flat in Bayswater! On a chicken-farm! No, it can’t be done. Paradises of this sort don’t grow in such places,” poor Mollie moaned.

“You can keep up the real paradise in them--the one he has already--when you get there. The point is that you must show him now that you can look like this one here. And the way to look it is to dress it. I’m sure you’ve realized the absolutely supreme importance of dress for women of the paradise type--the women you see here, all these sweet ministering angels to the Tommies and the young husbands. I don’t mean to say that, with the exception of Vera, they’re not as nice as you are in spite of being well dressed; but I do mean that if they dressed as you do they’d not be women of the paradise.”

Mollie’s hands had fallen, and she was gazing again with eyes childlike, astonished, and trusting.

“But, Judith, what do you mean?” she asked. “Dress? Of course you all dress beautifully. Haven’t I loved simply looking at you all, as if you’d been the most exquisite birds? But how could I do it? I haven’t the money; I never have had. If one has no money, one must be either æsthetic or dowdy, and I’ve always prefered to be dowdy.”

“Yes, I saw that; I liked you for that. There’s hope for the dowdy, but none for the æsthetic; the one is humble, and the other is complacent. Your clothes express renunciation simply--and the summer sales. But though it is a question of money, some women who have masses of money never learn how to dress. They remain mere dressmakers' formulas; and others, with very little, can’t be passed by. They count anywhere. You’ve noticed my clothes. I’ve hardly any money, yet I’m perfect. All my clothes mean just what I intend them to; just as Vera’s mean what she intends, and Mrs. Travers-Cray’s and Lady Dighton’s, and Milly’s, for Milly already is as clever as possible at knowing her thing. But you’ve abandoned the attempt to intend. You’ve sunk down, and you let the winds rake over you. You’ve always made me think of a larkspur, that blue and silver kind, all pensive grace and delicacy; but you’re a larkspur that hasn’t been staked. Your sprays don’t count; they tumble anyhow, and no one sees your shape or colour. Last night, for instance--that turquoise-blue chiffon: not turquoise, and not that sort of chiffon.”

“I know it. I hated it,” she said.

“Of course you did, and so does any one who looks at you in it.”

“But I couldn’t afford the better qualities,” she appealed. “And in the cheaper ones I couldn’t get the blue I wanted, the soft Japanese blue.”

“No, you couldn’t. And you thought it wouldn’t show if you had it made up on sateen. It always does show. No, it needs thought and time and computing, too much time, too much thought, to say nothing of too much money for many women, of course; for them it wouldn’t be worth it. There are other things to do than to live in paradise. But for you it is worth it; to show him that you can look like an angel, and to show him that Vera can look like a cat. No, _I’ll_ show him; mine is the responsibility. It’s worth it, at all events, to me. I’ll put in the stakes, and tie you and loop you and display you. You’ll see. I told you I’d a clever little dressmaker. That’s an essential. And we’ll scrape up the money. You shall be dressed for once as you intend.”

She was bewildered, aghast, tempted, and, on the top of everything, intensely amused. Her face was lighted as I’d never seen it before with pure mirth, and it looked like still, silver water that becomes suddenly glimmering, quivering, eddying, and sunlit. She was charming thus lighted. It was a sort of illumination of which Vera’s face is incapable; her gaiety is always clouded with irony.

“It is all too kind, too astonishing, too funny for words,” Mollie said. “Of course I should love to be well dressed for once, and I can’t see why I shouldn’t avail myself of your little dressmaker now,--especially now, since, as you tell me, I offend through my dowdiness. And I do really need some new clothes. I’m wearing out my trousseau ones, you know. Yes; wasn’t it a horrid little trousseau? But, don’t you see,” and the sunlight faded, “I can’t be a real, not a real angel, not a real paradise. It’s much deeper. It’s a question of roots. It’s the way they smile, the way they walk, the way they know what they want to say and what they don’t want to say.”

I nodded. “You know, too, and you’d say it, if people saw you and cared to hear what you said.”

“That would help, of course. I’ve never felt so stupid in my life as here. But, oh, it’s deeper!” said Mollie. “I don’t belong to it. How they all make me feel it! I’m an outsider; and why should I pretend not to be?”

“It wouldn’t be pretending anything to dress as you’d like to dress. No one who _sees_ is an outsider now a days, if they can contrive to make themselves seen. That’s the whole point. And there’s nothing you don’t see. You see far more than Vera does. Don’t bother about the roots. Take care of the flowers, and the roots will take care of themselves; that’s another modern maxim for you. Your flowers are there, and all that we need think of now is how to show them. Wait. You’ll see. We’ll go to London to-morrow,” I said; “and this very evening we’ll have a talk about your hair.”

* * * * *

You may be sure that I was on the spot to see a week or so later my larkspur’s début as an angel. We were all assembled in the drawing-room before dinner, and she was a little late, as I, not she, had intended that she should be. It was precisely the moment for a mild sensation. The day had been hot and long. Everybody, apart from being anxious,--for everybody was anxious, Sir Francis and Mrs. Travers-Cray with sons at the front and Lady Dighton’s husband in the Dardanelles--apart from that ever-present strain, everybody to-day was a little jaded, blank, and tired of one another. There reigned, as a symptom, that silence that in the moments before dinner falls sometimes upon people who know each other too well for surmise or ceremony. They stood about looking at the evening newspapers; they picked up a book; they sat side by side, knitting without speaking. Vera, sunken in a deep chair near my sofa, yawned wearily. No one, in fact, had anything to look to before bedtime except the stimulant of the consommé or a possible surprise in the way of sweets.

I had known that I could count upon Mollie not to be self-conscious when she appeared in her new array, but I hadn’t counted upon such complete and pensive simplicity. Her eyes were on me as she entered, her husband limping behind her, and they seemed to ask me, with a half-wistful amusement, if she came up to my expectations. She far surpassed them. I never saw a woman to whom it made more difference. “It,” on this occasion, was blue--the blue of a night sky and the blue of a sky at dawn, the blue, too, of my larkspurs, lapping at the edges here and there, as delicately as filaments of cloud crossing the sky, into white. It made one think, soft, suave triumph that it was, of breezes over the sea at daybreak and of a crescent moon low on a horizon and of white shores and blue Grecian hills; at least it made me think of these things, it and Mollie together; and with it went the alteration of her hair--bands of folded gold swathed round and round her little head. No one but myself had ever seen before that Mollie had the poise and lightness of a Tanagra figure nor that the shape of her face was curious and her eyes strange and her skin like silver; but I knew, as she advanced down the long room, that Vera, sunken in her chair, saw it all at last, drank in every drop of it, with an astonishment that, though it expressed itself in no gesture, I was able to gauge from her very stillness, her concentration of stillness, as she watched the relegated becoming visible at last. It’s not pleasant for anybody to have to own that they’ve been blind and made a mistake, and Vera was specially fond of discovering oddity and charm and of claiming and displaying and discussing a discovery. And here was oddity and charm which she had not only failed to discover, but had helped to obscure. Mollie was indeed visible, and every eye was on her as she drifted quietly forward in the evening light and sat down beside me. She was mine, and no one else’s; that was quite evident, too.

That Captain Thornton had received something of a revelation was also evident, though it had not probably amounted to more than seeing, and saying, that Mollie was looking awfully well; but it expressed itself in the fact that, instead of joining Vera, as was his wont, he came and sat down next to Mollie on my sofa. We began to talk, and, though the watching pause was prolonged for yet another moment, the others then began to talk, too. It was as if, not quite knowing what had happened to them, they were all a little cheered and exhilarated; as if they’d had their consommé and as if the sweet had been altogether a surprise. A spectacle of any sort has this effect upon a group of jaded people. Only Vera kept her ominous silence.

Dinner was announced, and we all got up. Percival, with a new alacrity, approached Mollie,--he almost always had Mollie,--the others paired off as usual, and Vera rose to Captain Thornton’s arm. It was then that she said, smiling thoughtfully upon Mollie:

“Aren’t you doing your hair in a new way, dear?”

I saw from Mollie’s answering smile that she was still ingenuous enough to hope that she might win Vera’s approval with that of the others, the hope, too, that while Clive might think of herself as a first-rate angel, he should never see Vera as a cat.

“It is new,” she said. “I’ve just learned how to; Judith showed me. Do you like it?”

Leaning on Captain Thornton’s arm, Vera, with gently lifted brows, rather sadly shook her head.

“I suppose I don’t care about fashions. It’s very fashionable, isn’t it? But I loved so that great, girlish knot. People’s way of doing their hair is part of their personality to me. Judith cares so much about fashion, I know. Do you care about fashion, Captain Thornton? Do you like this fashionable way? You know, I can’t help always thinking that it makes women’s heads look like cheeses; in napkins, you know--Stiltons.”

It was the first scratch. Mollie, though with a little startled glance, took it with all mildness, making no comment as Percival led her away, Percival remarking that it was, he thought, a ripping way of doing her hair; and I, as I went out manless, heard Captain Thornton, behind me, saying, in answer to Vera’s murmurs:

“Yes; I see; I see what you mean. But, do you know, all the same I think it’s most awfully becoming to Mollie. It brings out the shape of her face so.”

“What a _dear_ little face it is!” said Vera, rapidly leaving the cheese.

It all worked like a stealing spell. There was nothing marked or sudden in it. No one, I think, except Vera, was aware that his or her attitude to little Mrs. Thornton had changed. She had become visible, that was all, and they became aware that she was not only worth looking at, but worth talking to. At dinner that night old Sir Francis fixed his eye-glass to observe her more than once and after dinner he joined her in the drawing-room and talked with her till bedtime. It turned out then that he had known her father and actually possessed one of his pictures; had been a great admirer. Next morning he was walking with her on the terrace before breakfast. Mollie in a blue lawn, as sprightly as it was demure, her casque of golden hair shining in the sunlight. Lady Dighton asked her that afternoon to come motoring with her and the Tommies, and in the evening I heard Mrs. Travers-Cray, while she and Mollie wound wool together, telling her about her two boys at the front. The only person who didn’t see more of Mollie was Captain Thornton; but that, I felt sure, was because Vera was determined that he shouldn’t.

It was not for a day or two that I was able to compare notes with Mollie.

“Well,” I said, joining her on the terrace before dinner, “_ça y est_.”

“It’s extraordinary,” said Mollie. “Everything is different. I myself am different. I feel, for one thing, as if I’d become clever to match my clothes. It would be almost humiliating to have the mere clothes make so much difference and every one change so to me unless I could really feel that I’d changed, too.”

“You’re staked. I told you how it would be.”

“And I owe it all to you. It’s a wonderfully sustaining feeling to be staked; secure, peaceful. Such a funny change, Judith, is little Milly! Have you noticed? She came up to me when I was walking this afternoon and linked her arm in mine, and in ten minutes was confiding in me all about her perplexed love-affairs, as if we’d been old friends.”

“Yes, she would. She loves to tell people about her love-affairs.”

“But I couldn’t have imagined that she was really so ingenuous; for, in a sense, she is ingenuous.”

“Exceedingly ingenuous when she isn’t exceedingly sophisticated; I think one often sees the mixture. The only thing you must be prepared for with the Milly type is that in a week’s time she may forget that she ever confided in you and, almost, that she ever knew you. Her ingenuousness is a form of presumptuousness.”

“Yes, I think I saw that. I’m beginning to see so many things--far more things than I’ll ever have use for on a chicken-farm, Judith.” And Mollie laughed a little.

“And what does your husband say?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve not seen much of him, you know. But I’m sure he likes it awfully, the way I look.”

“Only Vera won’t let him get at you to tell you so.”

“Oh, he sees enough of me to tell me so,” said Mollie, smiling: “only it takes him time to come to the point of saying things, and it’s true that we haven’t much time.”

“And she hasn’t given you any more scratches before him?”

“Not before him.” Mollie flushed a little. “It _was_ a scratch, wasn’t it? I don’t think he saw that it was.”

“He will see in time. And it’s worth it, isn’t it, since it’s to make him see?”

“Yes, I can bear it. She’s rather rude to me now when he isn’t there, you know; but it’s really less blighting to have some one see you enough to be rude to you than to see you so little that they are affectionate. Yet I hope she won’t be too rude.”

“She can hardly bear it,” I said.