Part 16

Her father’s three wives had been the daughters of millionaires, whose pride it was to leave them all their money. Her father, rich before, had thus become incredibly richer. England was full of him. And the war had only made him richer, because he owned coal mines. Such riches, Laura considered, were disgusting, and she had plunged into Socialism, and come up dripping Labour. But whatever she did, whatever she was, her chief job was to look after her father, and see that his last years were peaceful; and she had now only left him in Cambridgeshire, where they had been spending Easter, for a day or two, and rushed up to London because of being obliged to go to a charity ball of which she was a patroness, to the first night of a play whose author she was encouraging, to a bazaar in aid of the Black and Blue League, of which she was vice-president and whose aims were the assistance of wives, and, if possible, to look in at a concert being given by a young violinist she had helped to have trained: and she had been thinking, as she sat in the empty railway carriage between Crippenham and Cambridge--the expresses stopped at Crippenham when the Duke was in residence--that all this was a great bore.

What was the good of it, really? Oughtn’t charity to be approached quite differently? Weren’t bazaars essentially vicious? Did wives need assistance more than husbands? And there was her own stupid supper-party that night after the play, with the author coming to it, and the leading lady, and Streatley her elder brother, who thought he admired the leading lady, and Terry her sister, who thought the author admired her, and Charles her younger brother, who was sure he admired nobody, and one or two others, including a dramatic critic; and how too perfectly awful if the play was a failure, and there they all were, boxed up with the person who had written it.

‘Silly life,’ she had been thinking as the train ran into Cambridge. ‘Round and round in a cage we go, and nothing is ever different except our whiskers, which keep on getting greyer.’

‘But then,’ she said leaning forward, her eyes twinkling and dancing as she looked at Sally, who by this time had finished her tea, ‘the door opened and you got in. Too marvellous, Sally. Divinely beautiful. And not an h in your whole delicious composition.’

‘Pardon?’ said Sally, who hadn’t quite got that.

§

She hadn’t understood more than a word here and there of all the words Laura had rattled off at her, and in her heart, while she steadily ate sandwiches, she had slowly come to the conclusion that the pick of the basket was a queer fish. An affectionate and friendly fish, but queer all right, thought Sally; and in spite of the good tea--the best she had ever had, outdoing the one at Truro, and infinitely better than any at Mrs. Luke’s,--in spite of the calming and balancing effect of nourishment after not having had a bite to eat since five o’clock that morning, in spite of Laura’s kindness and cheerfulness, Sally felt uneasy.

She oughtn’t to be there. She oughtn’t to have come with Laura. It was only for two days, but two days were enough to do wrong in. What would her father say, who thought she was at that moment in a taxi, paid for by his pound, if he could see her? What would Mrs. Luke say? What was Mrs. Luke saying, anyhow? As for Mr. Luke, what he would say didn’t so much matter, because almost before he had finished saying it she would have joined him in Cambridge, and started acting as a wife should. Of course he on his side must act as a husband should, and not try and send her away from him to his mother,--that was only fair, wasn’t it? Sally anxiously asked herself.

And her uneasiness became acute when Laura, having taken her up a whole lot of stairs, every one of which looked like pure marble, and into a room she could only guess was a bedroom because there was a bed in it, but which was otherwise unidentifiable to Sally as such, sat down at a table and began telephoning to people to send round somebody at once with dresses and shoes to be tried on a young lady, who had to wear them that very evening.

Sally listened in alarm. Impossible not to guess that she was the young lady; impossible not to gather that there was to be a party, and she was to be at it. Had she after all only escaped Mrs. Luke’s party to find herself caught in another? Was Laura, who had so much sympathised with her earnest wish not to be present at the one, going to plunge her into the other?

Standing afraid and conscience-stricken in front of the blazing wood fire, while Laura telephoned--this all came of not obeying her father--Sally wondered whether anything could save her. Laura had saved her from Mrs. Luke, but who was going to save her from Laura? Laura lived in the middle of marble. She had servants at her beck and call, and could make the gentleman in black do anything she chose. And the smart young lady, who had sat on the small seat of the car and looked out of the window, presently, on Laura’s telling her to, crawled round the floor at Sally’s feet with her mouth full of pins, doing something to a petticoat of Laura’s that Sally, it seemed, was going to have to wear that evening.

‘All you’ve got to do, Sally,’ said Laura, having finished telephoning, and coming briskly over to where her newest discovery was standing meekly without her frock and hat, while the petticoat was pinned narrower, ’is to enjoy yourself. Oh, you lovely, _lovely_ thing!’ she burst out, beating her hands together with delight; for the more one took off Sally the more exquisite she became.

Enjoy herself? She, a married woman? ‘Wonder ’ow,’ thought Sally.

‘Say what you like, do what you like,’ said Laura, her eyes bulging with admiration, ‘and don’t care about anybody or anything. Don’t you bother about h’s, or silly things like that. Just say whatever comes into your darling, delicious head, and enjoy yourself.’

In the presence of the young lady crawling on the floor, Sally was dumb. Laura, on the other hand, talked just as if she weren’t there; but when for a moment Sally found herself alone with Laura, she did make a mild protest.

‘Might ’ave gone back to that there other party after all,’ she said, ’an’ done what Father tell me, if I got to be at one any’ow.’

‘Oh, but this isn’t a party,’ Laura hastily assured her, for Sally was distinctly drooping. ‘This is a theatre. You like going to a play, don’t you, Sally? Of course you do. I simply don’t believe the girl exists who doesn’t.’

Yes; Sally liked going to a play. She hadn’t ever been to one, and the idea of a theatre did cheer her up. And Laura said nothing about the supper afterwards, because why say everything?

§

They went, then, to the first night of Mr. Gillespie’s new play. Sally was astonished when Laura, and the maid, and the head lady from Paquille’s and her two assistants, had finished with her and bade her look at herself in the glass.

‘That me?’ she asked, her lips parting and her eyes widening, for it might have been a real grand lady. And she added doubtfully, ‘I ain’t ’alf bare.’

Laura, however, was just as bare, and there was ever so much more of her to be bare with, so she supposed it must be all right; but she did wonder what her father would say if he could see her now--‘Oh, my _goodness_,’ shuddered Sally, her mind slinking away from the thought.

They had dressed her in a cloud of blue tulle over a cloud of green tulle. Her loveliness was startling. It was like nothing either Laura or the lady from Paquille’s had ever seen, and they had seen most of what there was of existing beauty. Even the maid, an expert in repression, showed excitement. And presently when the Paquille lady wrapped the cloak round her that went with that frock, and, swathed in its green and silver, she looked like a white flower in a slender sheath of green, Laura fairly danced with delight to think what Terry would say, who was used to being so much prettier than anybody else, and what Charles would say, who long had declared there was no such thing as real beauty, and Streatley, who said the women nowadays couldn’t hold a candle to the women of his youth, and everybody.

Such a find, such a haul, such a piece of luck had never yet befallen Laura. And the mischievous pleasure she took in thinking of the effect it was going to have on her relations and of the upsetting results it was going to produce, was all the more surprising because, at the bottom of her heart, she was devoted to them.

§

Among the opera-glasses that raked Sally as she followed Laura into the stage box three minutes before the curtain went up on Mr. Gillespie’s new play, were Terry’s. She was in the stalls, with the young man who just then was, as the Pinners would have said, walking out with her. He too was looking at Sally.

‘Laura’s latest,’ remarked Terry, turning to him after a prolonged incredulous stare at the astonishing contents of the box; for Laura was well known for her successive discoveries of every kind--saints, geniuses, rugged men of labour--each of which, after a brief blare of publicity, disappeared and was not heard of again.

The young man’s face, however, had the kind of expression on it as he looked at Sally that is apt to annoy the woman one is with; and Terry, who was strictly monogamous during each of her affairs, and expected the other person to be so too, didn’t like it.

‘Who is she?’ asked her young friend.

‘God knows,’ said Terry, shrugging her shoulders.

The curtain went up and the lights went down, and Sally disappeared into the darkness. When next she was visible, Charles Moulsford and Lord Streatley had joined their sister in the box. They were talking to Sally. She was politely smiling. The house had eyes for nothing else.

‘Who _is_ she?’ asked Terry’s young friend again, with a warmer insistence.

‘You’d better go and ask her,’ said Terry, cross.

‘All right, I will,’ said her young friend; and got up and left her; for by this time she had been monogamous with him for six months, and he long had wished she would love him less.

The other three acts of the play took place in bright summer weather, and the glorious sunshine on the stage lit up Sally too in the stage box. The house had eyes only for her. Mr. Gillespie’s play accordingly fell flat. Nobody called for him at the end, what applause there was was absent-minded, and next morning the leading newspaper, after a perfunctory _résumé_ of that which it unkindly described as the alleged plot, ended by remarking languidly, ‘Mr. Gillespie must try again.’

It was a strange evening. The actors, who began well, seemed to get more and more bloodless as the play proceeded. Mr. Gillespie, crouching in the darkest corner of the box above Laura’s, a shelter out of which nothing would have dragged him except the most frenzied cries of enthusiasm, couldn’t imagine what was the matter with his players; but they had felt almost at once that no notice was being taken of them, and presently, discovering the reason, a blight settled on them, and its ravages, as the evening went on, became more marked. By the end there was practically complete anaemia, and Mr. Gillespie, fleeing from the theatre before the final curtain so as to see and hear nothing more, so as to get away, so as to meet neither managers nor actors, so as to wipe from his mind that he had ever written plays, or ever hoped, or ever believed, or ever had dreams and ambitions, went straight for comfort to his friend Lady Laura Moulsford, who had been so kind and encouraging, and who had told him to come round to her that evening, laughingly promising to have the laurels ready.

Laurels! Poor Mr. Gillespie now only wanted to hide his head in her kind lap. He winced to remember how happily he too had laughed, how sure he had been. But that was because of the great success of his first play; and this one, his second, was twenty times better, and was going to be twenty times greater a success.

And so it would have been except for Sally. When, presently, after he had waited three quarters of an hour alone in the library at Goring House because Sally was being so much crowded round coming out of the theatre that it took all that time to extricate her and get her away, she came in with Laura and Laura’s brothers, he instantly realised what had happened; and even as Mr. Soper hadn’t grudged her his stew, though feeling aggrieved, so did Mr. Gillespie, though feeling heartbroken, not grudge her the laurels that should have been his.

He turned very red; he bent low over her hand when Laura introduced him; he murmured, ‘I lay my failure at your feet and glory in it,’--this being the way Mr. Gillespie talked; and Sally, nervous and bewildered, but indomitably polite, said, ‘Pardon?’

§

She kept on saying ‘Pardon?’ that evening. She found it difficult to follow the things they all said. They were kind, and seemed to want to make her happy, but their language was obscure. So was Mr. Luke’s, if it came to that, only he, except at intervals, wasn’t kind. No, she couldn’t call Mr. Luke a kind man; but then he was her husband, and these weren’t, though they all behaved, she thought, rather as if they would like to be,--that is, there were curious and unmistakable resemblances between their way of looking at her and speaking to her and Jocelyn’s when he was courting. Lords, too, two of them. Who would have thought lords would forget themselves like this? For they knew she was married, and that it was sheer sin to look at her as though they were going to be husbands. And they so grand and good in the newspapers, making speeches, and opening hospitals! Sally was much shocked. One of them was very old; he couldn’t, she decided, be far off his dying breath. Oughtn’t he to be thinking what he was going to do about it, instead of sitting up late at a party behaving as if he would like to be a husband?

The only thing that comforted her for being at a party after all was that Jocelyn wasn’t there. She felt she could manage parties much best single-handed, without him watching and being angry. None of these people were angry, or minded about how she spoke; on the contrary, they seemed to like it, and laughed,--except one, the younger lord, who sat as grave as a church. There was, when all was said and done, a certain feeling of space in being without one’s husband; and after she had drunk a little champagne,--a very little, because it was so nasty, and reminded her of fizzy lemonade gone bad--this feeling of space increased, and she was able to listen to the things the gentlemen kept on saying to her with the same mild patience, tinged with regret, with which on her one visit to the Zoo she had contemplated the behaviour of the monkeys. Laura’s relations seemed to Sally, as she sat listening to them, as difficult to account for as the monkeys. One couldn’t account for them. But even as these, she reminded herself, they belonged to God.

‘They’re God’s,’ Mr. Pinner had said that day at the Zoo, when asked by her to explain why the monkeys behaved in the way they did; and that being so there was nothing further to worry about.

As for Laura, whose heart, being a Moulsford’s, was good, though it sometimes in moments of excitement forgot to be, she had several qualms during that evening, and soon began to think that perhaps she oughtn’t to have kidnapped Sally, or, having kidnapped her, ought to have kept her hidden till she took her to Cambridge and handed her over to her husband.

Yet she was even more of an overwhelming success than Laura had expected. Streatley was idiotic about her, Charles had fallen in love at last, Mr. Gillespie worshipped and forgave, the dramatic critic was fatuous, Terry was indignant, and the leading lady had been so furious when she saw Sally in the box, and knew why she herself and the play were being failures, that she had refused to come round to supper.

‘What a success,’ thought Laura, looking round her table, the vacant place at which was filled by Lady Streatley, who had drifted in unexpectedly because she didn’t see why Streatley should make a fool of himself with that actress woman unchecked. She had come to check him, and found him needing checking at an entirely different pair of feet. ‘What a _success_,’ thought Laura, suddenly ashamed.

‘And so you ought to be,’ said her brother Charles after supper, when she--they were great friends--took him aside and told him she somehow felt ashamed. ‘You’re a little fool, Laura, and never see further than the end of your silly nose. I should get rid of a few of your good intentions if I were you.’

‘But she was so unhappy,’ said Laura, trying to justify herself.

‘You wouldn’t have cared in the very least if she had been plain,’ said Charles.

‘Am I as bad as all that?’ asked Laura.

‘Every bit,’ said Charles, who was annoyed because of the way Sally was disturbing him.

Indeed, the way Sally was disturbing everybody was most unfortunate. Here was a united and affectionate family, the three younger ones almost filially devoted to their elder brother, all four of them with the warmest hearts, which, though they led them into situations Terry’s husband and Streatley’s wife might dislike, never for an instant dimmed their fraternal affections and loyalties. Not one of them would willingly have hurt the others. All were most goodnatured, doing what they could to make everybody happy. Laura was really benevolent; Theresa was really kind; Charles was really unselfish; and Streatley so really affectionate that he could still, at sixty-five, love several women at once, including his wife.

How annoying for Charles, for instance, who was so fond of his brother, and had looked on with bland detachment at his successive infatuations, suddenly to find he was competing with him. Competing with Streatley! And not only competing, but saying to himself that he was an ancient ass. Charles was horrified to find himself thinking Streatley an ancient ass; but he was even more horrified when he quite soon afterwards discovered he was definitely desirous of strangling him. That was because of the way he looked at Sally. It made Charles’s hitherto affectionate fingers itch to strangle him.

And how annoying for Lady Streatley to see her elderly husband making yet another fool of himself. He had made so many fools of himself over women that it was to be supposed she would by now have got used to it. Not at all. She was each time as profoundly upset as ever. And this time it was really dreadful, because the girl was hardly more than a child. Oughtn’t he to be thoroughly ashamed of himself?

‘I wish you could see the expression on your face,’ she murmured acidly to him, as they got up from the supper-table and gathered round the fire.

‘Leave my face alone,’ he growled, looking at her furiously; and that she should be acid and he should growl and look at her furiously was distressing to Lady Streatley, who was the most amiable of women, and knew that he was the most naturally kind of men.

And then Terry, so affectionate and faithful to her young friend Robert,--for her to have to look on while he forgot her very existence and sat on the floor at somebody else’s feet, his rapt gaze fixed unswervingly on a face that wasn’t hers, was most annoying. He had insisted on coming round with her to Laura’s party, though she refused at first to bring him. So violently determined was he, however, that he assured her she would never see him again if she didn’t take him round with her; and Terry, cowed, as many a fond woman had been before her by this threat, gave in, and spent the evening in a condition of high indignation.

It was Laura, though, with whom she was indignant,--Laura, the sister she had always so much loved, who had arranged the whole thing so as to set everybody by the ears. She forgave Robert--they had got to the stage when she was continually forgiving him, and he was continually hoping she wouldn’t--for how could he help it if this artful young woman from the slums laid herself out to beguile him? It was all Laura’s fault. Terry couldn’t have believed her goodnatured sister had it in her to be so wickedly mischievous. What devil had taken possession of her? First dressing the girl up and spoiling poor Jack Gillespie’s play with her, and then getting them all there to supper, so as to make fools of them....

‘I hope you’re pleased with your detestable party,’ she said, leaning against the chimney piece, staring in wrathful disgust at the circle round Sally, who, glancing shyly and furtively every now and then at the lovely dark lady dressed like a rose, thought she must surely be the most beautiful lady in the whole world, but feeling, judged Sally, a bit on the sick side that evening,--probably eaten something.

‘I’m not at all pleased,’ snapped Laura, ‘and I wish to goodness you’d all go home.’

That, however, was exactly what they couldn’t bear to do. Hours passed, and Laura’s party still went on. The men were unable to tear themselves away from Sally, whose every utterance--she said as little as possible, but couldn’t avoid answering direct questions--filled them with fresh delight, and the two women, Terry and her aggrieved sister-in-law, were doggedly determined to stay as long as they did.

‘If she weren’t so lovely,’ murmured Lady Streatley to the indignant Terry, when a roar of laughter, in which the loudest roar was Streatley’s, succeeded something Sally, tired and bewildered, had said in answer to a question, ‘I suppose they wouldn’t see anything at all in that Cockney talk.’

‘They’d think it unendurable,’ said Terry shortly.

‘But you see,’ said Laura, who was cross with Terry, ‘she happens to be the most beautiful thing any of us have ever seen.’

‘Oh, I quite see she’s very beautiful,’ said poor Lady Streatley, who had given Streatley seven children and was no longer the woman she was.

‘If one _likes_ that sort of thing,’ said Terry, descending in her anger to primitive woman.

‘Which one evidently does,’ said Laura maliciously, glancing at the infatuated group.

‘Men are such fools,’ said Terry.

‘Babies,’ sighed Lady Streatley.

Only once did Charles, who was the greatest contrast to his brother, being lean and brown and goodlooking and not much past thirty, besides remaining grave on all the occasions that evening when his brother laughed, for Charles was fastidious as well as sympathetic, and Sally’s accent didn’t amuse him, and he hated to see her unwittingly amusing the other four infatuated fools,--only once did he get her a moment to himself, and then only for a minute or two, while there was some slight rearrangement of positions because of the bringing in of a tray of drinks.

When he did, this was the conversation:

‘I believe,’ said Charles in a low voice, ‘you’re every bit as beautiful inside as you are out.’

‘Me?’ said Sally with weary surprise--by this time she was deadly tired--for she hadn’t thought of bodies as reversible. ‘Ain’t I all pink?’

‘Pink?’ echoed Charles, not at first following. Then he said rather hastily, being queasy and without Streatley’s robust ability to enjoy anything, ‘I mean your spirit. It’s just as divinely beautiful as your face. I’m sure it is. I’m sure you never have a thought that isn’t lovely----’

And he went on to murmur--why on earth he should say these inanities he couldn’t think, and was much annoyed to hear them coming out--that he hoped her husband loved her as she deserved.

‘You never _see_ such lovin’,’ said Sally earnestly, who didn’t mind this one of the gentlemen as much as the others.

‘Oh, I can imagine it,’ said Charles, again hastily; and wanted to know whether, then, her husband wouldn’t be excessively unhappy, not having an idea where she was.